Ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, dominance hierarchies emerge through social competition and underlie the control of resources. Confronting the disruptive influence of socioeconomic inequalities, human populations tend to split into groups who legitimize existing dominance hierarchies and groups who condemn them. Here, we hypothesized that variations in the neural sensitivity to dominance rank...

This chapter reviews the last 15 years of research inspired by social dominance theory, a general theory of societal group-based inequality. In doing so, we sketch the broad outlines of the theory and discuss some of the controversies surrounding it, such as the ‘‘invariance hypothesis’’ regarding gender differences in social dominance orientation (SDO) and the effect of social context on the e...