Publication Type: Paper (prepared oral presentation)
Abstract: Social dominance theory predicts that higher education would promote egalitarianism in some academic majors (hierarchy-attenuating or HA) more than in others (hierarchy-enhancing or HE). Classically, two main hypotheses have been proposed to explain students’ different egalitarian attitudes as a function of academic majors: self-selection and socialization. Past research provides support for both. Nonetheless, in more recent research, evidence for socialization was not always found. This line of work, using both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs, documented clear differences between HE and HA students at low levels of education (in line with self-selection), but these differences remained quite stable across years in college (at odds with socialization).
We present three cross-sectional studies testing, for the first time, SDT predictions in two collectivist societies: Albania (Eastern Europe) and Ivory Coast (Africa). It was expected that the collectivist background of Albanians and Ivorians would make them especially receptive to socialization influence. In contrast, individual factors (self-selection) were expected to be less important in such a cultural context. Consistently, the findings indicate that students in HA majors were more egalitarian and less prejudiced than students in HE majors, but only at high levels of education. These results are generally consistent with cross-cultural differences in individualism and collectivism: self-selection seems to prevail in individualistic societies, while socialization appears to play a more prominent role than self-selection in collectivistic societies. These findings’ implications for the political socialization of students in collectivistic societies are discussed.