Dominants prefer affection and reasoning over hostility because compliance is cheaper

Evidence

Sustenance of the dominant group’s privileged standing in an unequal social relationship depends critically on the continued presence of subordinates and their compliance with the institutionalized transfer of resources to dominants. Recalcitrant subordinates who must have resources dragged from them through clenched fingers are more costly to control and must be guarded more vigilantly. Subordinates, for their part, are cognizant of their weaker resource base and their subsequent vulnerability. In a world in which uncertainty hovers menacingly, these realities make compliance less risky than resistance, but at the same time subordinates bear the everyday costs of compliance in their foreshortened opportunities and quality of life. The task for dominants is to tip these delicately posed alternatives in the direction of ready compliance. In this context, incendiary hostility is counterproductive. Dominants prefer to befriend, love, or reason with the subordinates on whose cooperation they depend. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 668

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that dominants ‘prefer to befriend, love, or reason with’ the subordinates they exploit — affection as rational expropriation tool — inverts the folk model that prejudice equals hatred and is worth long reflection.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s hegemony, and to the trust materials where procedural norms substitute for substantive control. — connects to: Both dominant and subordinate castes prefer to seek authority from the male master. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1939; Dominance psychology is older than prestige and runs on fear-based coercion — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 396
• SEED: Article angle: the ‘paternalistic’ registers of oppression (love and reason as control) versus overt hostility — when dominants switch between them strategically.