Fathers’ social dominance predicts their children’s more than mothers’ does.

Evidence

I asked the students whose parents answered the October 1996 survey to put their own “secret number” on their parents’ bubble sheets. This led to matchups for 104 students with 89 of their mothers and 95 of their fathers. Daughters’ (N=60) social dominance correlated . with their mothers’ social dominance, and . with their fathers’. For sons (N= 44) the respective coefficients came in at . and .45. Combining the offsprung, fathers’ SDO proved significantly more predictive of their children’s SDO (.40) than did the mothers’ (.13). — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1067

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why would fathers’ SDO predict children’s better than mothers’? Could be genetic, modeling, or assortative-mating artifacts worth exploring.