The Role of Legitimizing Beliefs and Hypodescent in the Production of Stable Hierarchies.

摘要

In three papers, this dissertation explores the role of hierarchy-enhancing legitimizing myths (HE-LMs) and social categorizations in the production of stable, group-based social hierarchies. HE-LMs are ideologies and beliefs that function to maintain and legitimize systems of group-based social inequality. Paper 1 explores how a pervasive HE-LM can coordinate the behavior of both dominant and subordinate group members and lead to the evaluation of subordinate group members according to standards different from those used for evaluating dominant group members. Specifically, Paper 1 focuses on how stereotypes concerning the intelligence of African Americans can influence the evaluation of African American instructors among both African- and European-American students alike (Ho, Thomsen, & Sidanius, 2009). Paper 2 also examines the impact of HE-LMs in an academic setting, with a focus on how the intelligence stereotype can lead to behavioral asymmetry, or the tendency for dominant group members to behave in ways that are more beneficial to themselves than subordinate group members. In particular, Paper 2 explores how the intelligence stereotype can interact with group identity to influence the performance of African American college students at an elite university (Ho & Sidanius, 2010). Together, Papers 1 and 2 demonstrate that HE-LMs can dictate the behavior of dominant and subordinate group actors within academic institutions, which play a central role in social mobility and social stratification. Whereas Papers 1 and 2 focus on HE-LMs, Paper 3 attempts to establish what I have termed a hierarchy-enhancing social categorization, or a social categorization that effectively reinforces existing group boundaries. Specifically, across five studies, Paper 3 demonstrates that we categorize and perceive descendents of two racial groups (i.e., biracials) according to a rule of hypodescent, whereby biracials are associated more with their subordinate parent group than their dominant parent group (Ho, Sidanius, Levin, & Banaji, 2011). This bias in our social categorization and perception has clear implications for the maintenance of extant hierarchies. Thus, the first two papers provide additional empirical support for Social Dominance Theory by further demonstrating the effects of a pervasive legitimizing myth whereas Paper 3 advances the theory by introducing hierarchy-enhancing social categorizations as a core construct in the social dominance framework.