ON THE NATURE OF PREJUDICE

Personality and Prejudice 407contrast, the model proposes that SDO stems from the underlying personalitydimension of tough versus tender-mindedness. Tough-minded personalitiesview the world as a ruthlessly competitive jungle in which the strong winand the weak lose, which activates the motivational goals of group power,dominance, and superiority over others.These two worldviews should generally be relatively stable, reflectingthe influence of individuals’ personality and socialization, but they shouldalso be influenced by social situations. When the social world becomesmarkedly more dangerous and threatening, authoritarianism should bemore prevalent, while situations characterized by inequality and competitionover power and status should increase social dominance (see Glick,ch. 15 this volume). In both cases the effect ought to be mediated throughchange in individuals’ corresponding worldviews. This causal model ofpersonality, social situation, worldview, ideological attitudes, and prejudiceis summarized in figure 24.1. In it, the influence of personality, the socialsituation, and individuals’ worldviews on prejudice are indirect and mediatedthrough their impact on the two ideological attitude dimensions ofRWA and SDO.Four recent studies using structural equation modeling with latent variablesshowed excellent overall fit for the causal relationships proposed amongthe two personality, two worldview, two ideological attitude dimensions,with each other and with intergroup attitudes for large samples in NewZealand, South Africa, and the USA (Duckitt, 2001; Duckitt et al., 2002).An experiment showed that manipulating social threat (using scenarios)increased RWA, but not SDO, with the effect being entirely mediatedthrough a change in social worldview towards an increased perception ofthe social world as dangerous and threatening (Duckitt & Fisher, 2003).According to this model, RWA reflects social cohesion and securitymotivation. Thus, RWA would drive prejudice towards outgroups seen asthreatening or disrupting the stability, survival, and cohesion of the ingroupor society, and should be mediated through perceived threat from outgroups.SDO reflects competitive motivation to maintain or establish group dominanceand superiority, and would therefore cause prejudice against competingor subordinate outgroups, who are viewed as inferior to the ingroupin power and status, and should therefore be mediated through competitionfor power, status, or resources with outgroups. Thus while RWA andSDO might often predict negative attitudes to the same groups (but fordifferent reasons), they could also predict prejudice against quite differentgroups.Recent findings support these predictions. For example, the effect ofRWA on antigay prejudice is mediated by perceived threat (Esses, Haddock,