Men serve as both primary agents and targets of racial discrimination

Evidence

As a psychological manifestation of the conflict of interests among groups, prejudice is, to a large extent, motivated by the goal of social dominance, defined as the desire for hierarchically structured and dominant/subordinate relationships among salient social groups. However, because men are predisposed to aggressive status striving with other men, this goal is primarily a characteristic of the psychology of men. As such, SDT argues that men are expected to be the primary agents of arbitrary-set discrimination. Additionally, because intrasexual competition is expected to be greater among men than among women, men are also more likely to be the primary targets of arbitrary-set discrimination. From this line of reasoning, the authors have put forth a so-called subordinate male target hypothesis (SMTH; see Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), which simply states that it is men, not women, who will serve as both the primary targets and agents of prejudice and discrimination against racial minorities (Sidanius & Veniegas, 2000). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1173

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why would intrasexual male competition target out-group men specifically rather than all men? The causal chain deserves scrutiny.
• XREF: Relates to evolutionary psychology’s intrasexual competition literature and to male-on-male aggression patterns in criminology.