The Relationship between Social Dominance Orientation and Ethnocentrism: The Case of Attitudes toward Illegal Immigration

This study investigates individuals’ ethnocentric attitudes. Using the within-variation survey experiment, the extent of ethnocentrism is found by measuring the effect of responding to the phrase “illegal immigration,” as opposed to “immigrants.” The present study also measured Social Dominance Orientation attitudes in this survey, by asking a short, six-question assessment that will assess an individual’s ideology, which is divided into Group Based Dominance and Anti-Egalitarianism categories. Using this measure, conditional analysis was conducted to see whether the effect of “illegal immigration” on individuals’ support for immigration varies by their Social Dominance Orientation attitudes measures. To this end, an online survey was conducted to collect the data. The survey consisted of questions on Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), the experimental questions on “illegal” immigrants, and sociodemographic information on individual respondents. The data were collected using a convenient sampling among Winthrop University students. It is hypothesized that a respondent with a high-level SDO will tend to show more ethnocentric attitudes. In particular, It was hypothesized that the negative effect of “illegal immigrants” would be greater among individuals with high-level SDO compared to those with low-level SDO