From Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, chapter 8, Inner Demons, section on dominance:
The psychologists Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto have proposed that people, to varying degrees, harbor a motive they call social dominance, though a more intuitive term is tribalism: the desire that social groups be organized into a hierarchy, generally with one’s own group dominant over the others.¹ A social dominance orientation, they show, inclines people to a sweeping array of opinions and values, including patriotism, racism, fate, karma, caste, national destiny, militarism, toughness on crime, and defensiveness of existing arrangements of authority and inequality. An orientation away from social dominance, in contrast, inclines people to humanism, socialism, feminism, universal rights, progressivism, and the egalitarian and pacifist themes in the Christian Bible.
¹Social dominance: Pratto et al., 2006; Sidanius & Pratto, 2009.
It interests me what a thorough match that is for me (and, probably, most of you, or you wouldn’t be reading this blog). I dislike all the items in the first list, and favor all the items in the second (except for the Xian bible part). I do dislike social dominance and/or tribalism, and the qualities and “virtues” that apparently go with it.
I think it would be a better world if more people did.