Social dominance orientation predicts belief in justice-system fairness independent of racial affect

Evidence

Early SDT work by Mitchell and Sidanius (1993) presented findings that are congruent with the Sixth Law-of-Law. In this work, the authors examined which individuals support the notion that African Americans receive fair trials in the United States. Use of least-squares multiple regression analysis showed that even after controlling for the effects of anti-Black affect, classical racism (e.g., “Blacks are less capable”), and self-rated political conservatism, the data revealed a relatively strong positive association between endorsement of group-based social hierarchy (as measured by SDO) and the belief that Blacks were treated fairly by the American justice system. … The relationship between SDO and support for harsh criminal sanctions has been further confirmed by the relatively recent work on scale validation of the SDO7 instrument within seven large American samples conducted by Ho, Sidanius, and colleagues (2015). Across the seven samples, the data showed consistently positive relationships between support for group-based social inequality (i.e., SDO) and support for the death penalty and torture. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 93

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s conviction-vs-measured-bias research: those high in SDO most strongly believe Blacks get fair trials — professed belief in fairness coexisting with hierarchy support, echoing the sincere-conviction divergence gap from the legal bias thread.
• QUESTION: How does belief in fairness of the system coexist with support for harsh sanctions like torture and the death penalty — or does the same SDO drive both?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 93