Group-based hierarchies divide into age, gender, and arbitrary-set systems

Evidence

Pierre van den Berghe (1978) was among the first to observe that human group-based social hierarchies consist of distinctly different stratification systems. While he distinguished among four different stratification systems, for our purposes, these can be collapsed into three: (a) an age-system, in which adults and middle-age people have disproportionate social power over children and younger adults, (b) a gender-system, or patriarchy in which males have disproportionate social and political power compared to females, and (c) what we shall label an arbitrary-set system. The “arbitrary-set” system is filled with socially constructed, and highly salient groups based on characteristics such as clan, ethnicity, “estate,” nation, “race,” caste, social class, religious sect, regional grouping, or any other socially relevant group distinction which the human imagination is capable of constructing. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3163

These distinct systems of group-based social hierarchies are constructed with respect to: (a) age, in which those classified as adults dominate those classified as juveniles, (b) gender, by which we mean a patriarchal system where males dominate females, both physically and socially, and (c) an arbitrary-set system. Arbitrary-set systems consist of flexibly defined, context dependent, and hierarchically organized distinctions between social groups. Arbitrary-sets can be based on race, ethnicity, religion, caste, clan, lineage, nationality, sports teams, tribe, sect, or any other socially constructed distinction between groups that the human mind is capable of conjuring. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 56

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the trimorphic structure of group-based social hierarchy, a foundational taxonomy for social dominance theory.
• XREF: The arbitrary-set idea directly serves the reader’s constructivist-vs-primordial question: race-based hierarchy is explicitly built on conjured distinctions, supporting the constructed-enemy thesis. — connects to: Age operates as an identity axis whose value depends on field and gender — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1185
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3163; Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 56