Social and environmental campaigning is fragmented across different ‘causes’ – poverty, biodiversity loss, racism or climate change, for example. Yet a single driver lies beneath multiple forms of social and environmental injustice. Unfortunately, the fragmented nature of most campaigning means that this driver – the strengthening, at a cultural level, of “extrinsic” values of wealth, social status, power and public image – goes almost entirely ignored. 

Common Cause has long argued that this oversight helps to explain why, despite huge civil society effort, things aren’t improving: why it is that working on social or environmental campaigns is like squeezing a balloon – successfully containing a challenge in one area simply shifts the pressure somewhere else.

Working together at a more systemic level

To work at the more systemic level that we advocate requires diverse networks and organisations to come together and establish common cause – for example, to resist the corrosive impacts of commercial advertising, the headlong rush to place a financial value on everything (including those things that we say we are striving to protect), or the drive to incentivise environmentally- and socially-friendly behaviours by appealing to people’s material self-interest. 

More recently, though, we have worked to highlight a related area of research in social psychology. Social dominance theory points to a range of aspects of identity which confer entitlement to dominate others. This feeling of entitlement can be measured using a social psychological construct called social dominance orientation (SDO). (See here for an example of the SDO scale).

Understanding Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)

SDO tends to be highest among people who are white, male, heterosexual and cis-gendered, though it can of course manifest across all identities. High SDO, or a general sense of entitlement to dominate, is strongly associated with various forms of prejudice: sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and speciesism. It is also linked to indifference to environmental crises, favouring nature’s exploitation and resisting climate action.Some studies have explored the relationship between SDO and human values. The figure below (redrawn from Cohrs et al., 2005) shows that SDO correlates with extrinsic values such as Achievement and Power, but also Security values. It is strongly negatively correlated with values that predict durable commitment to pro-social or pro-environmental concern – that is, values in the Benevolence and, especially, Universalism groups in the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values, upon which we often draw in our work.

The ripple effect of prejudice

The finding that one form of prejudice is likely associated with multiple other forms of prejudice is a well-known phenomenon termed “generalised prejudice”.  

Interventions that reduce prejudice towards one group can have the effect of reducing prejudice towards other groups. For instance, contact with immigrants can improve attitudes not only toward immigrants but also toward other marginalized groups like LGBTQ+ people and people experiencing homelessness.

It seems that this process also works in reverse: working to deepen prejudice toward one group is likely to have the effect of deepening prejudice toward other groups. 

Generalised prejudice has been found to extend beyond human groups to include non-human animals.  Bastian Jaeger at Tilburg University recently examined data from the European Values Survey on participant’s prejudice toward different groups of humans and “human supremacy” beliefs – specifically, their agreement that “humans were meant to rule over nature.”

Jaeger found an association between human supremacy beliefs and prejudice towards “people from another race…, generalized prejudice towards various social groups that are typically marginalized (e.g., immigrants, homosexuals, drug addicts), and generalized prejudice against all groups, including groups that are typically not marginalized (e.g., Christians, large families, left-wing extremists).”

Linking Social Oppression and Environmental Exploitation

Understanding multiple forms of oppression as rooted in a generalised sense of entitlement to dominate provides a new lens for addressing interconnected issues. As just one example, consider the intersection between the oppression of women and the biodiversity crisis. 

Current approaches that work at this intersection often focus on:

• Increasing women’s representation in programmes, networks and organisations campaigning on biodiversity loss (e.g. ensuring more women participate at board level and in senior management roles);
• Mitigating conservation programmes’ negative impacts on gender equality (e.g. ensuring that restrictions on harvesting natural resources do not impact disproportionately on women’s financial independence)
• Highlighting how biodiversity loss disproportionately affects women (e.g. women’s domestic work burdens often increase as they have to walk further to find scarce natural resources)

These are essential approaches, but they fail to incorporate an understanding of generalised prejudice. If we recognise that both gender oppression and biodiversity loss stem from high SDO, a deeper connection emerges: biodiversity conservation cannot succeed without addressing broader social justice issues, including women’s oppression.

This shift redirects attention from specific consequences of SDO (here, widespread indifference to biodiversity loss) to the systems that sustain and exacerbate it – such as the normalisation of patriarchal dominance.

Of course, awareness of such interconnections cannot imply that every organisation has to do everything! For example, in the case of the example explored above, biodiversity conservation organisations cannot be expected to launch campaigns to reduce prejudice toward immigrants. But an understanding of generalised prejudice has important implications. 

Sticking with the example of biodiversity conservation organisations, here are two immediate consequences:

First, it is not viable for biodiversity conservation organisations to insist that they must remain silent on other forms of oppression. Far from it: we can now see that the dehumanisation of people in any context is likely to prove corrosive to the conservation outcomes that these organisations pursue.

Second, biodiversity conservation organisations could do more to directly challenge the perception that “humans were meant to rule over nature”. The notion that nature is a resource to be managed [sustainably] for human benefit, or the understanding that humans were put on earth to exercise stewardship over the natural world are both likely to erode systemic concern about biodiversity loss: and yet these are frameworks that are often promoted by conservation organisations.

Toward systemic, durable change

Deeper appreciation of the underlying psychological drivers of different facets of the environmental and social crises that we confront will be essential if we are to respond to these challenges in a way which secures systemic and durable change. Our emerging understanding of generalised prejudice and the ways in which this shows up in different domains will be crucial in this effort.

Photo by Matteo Grando on Unsplash