The new Italian Social Dominance Orientation 7 Scale.

Social Dominance Orientation captures people’s support for or opposition to group-based hierarchy (Pratto et al., 1994). Ho et al. (2015) developed the new SDO7 measure that theoretically broadens social dominance orientation, now depicted as a clear double-faceted construct composed of SDO-Dominance (SDO-D) and SDO-Egalitarianism (SDO-E). The SDO-D dimension encompasses the desire for one’s own group dominance where powerful high status groups act overtly towards lower status groups, whereas SDO-E dimensions intercepts the preference for supporting system inequalities through the framing of specific "subtle" hierarchy-enhancing ideologies. In the present study we further evaluated the psychometric proprieties of SDO7 using Item Response Theory (IRT). A confirmatory factor analysis and a series of multi-group analysis confirmed that the Italian version of SDO7 had the same structure of the original scale, and that was invariant across gender, age and political orientation (see Aiello, Morselli, Tesi, Passini, & Pratto, 2016). Also, we aimed at deepening the SDO7 concurrent and discriminant validity through regression analyses. We explored the association between SDO and several other constructs, e.g., Big Five Personality Traits, the Symbolic Racism, Epistemic motivations (i.e., the Need for Cognitive Closure), the Counter-dominance Orientation, the Sympathetic Collective Actions and Myths about "Weaker Nations.” Discussing these evidences in the broader literatures' most recent studies on Social Dominance Theory, on the whole, the present study provides a different statistical approach for item-testing, and how SDO relates to closed hearts and open minds.