The person-environment misfit in the grammar of hierarchies-attenuating culture.

The present study contributes to deal with a research gap concerning the study of how high social dominance orientation people (SDO; e.g., a personal orientation in sustaining group hierarchies) reacts negatively – in terms of endorsement of legitimizing myths of hierarchies – toward organizational environments that culturally sustain group equality. Linking Social Dominance Theory (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999) with the Person-Environment (P-E) fit theory, scholars pointed out that people high in SDO experiencing hierarchy-enhancing environments are likely to mutually attract each other (Haley & Sidanius, 2005), this way perpetrating a “spiral of oppression” (Tesi et al., 2019). However, little is known about the P-E “misfit” condition, between SDO’s levels and the hierarchy-enhancing or attenuating environments’ functioning (Sidanius et al., 2016). In the present research we deepened how high-SDO students, who perceive a P-E misfit with a hierarchy-attenuating academic institution (e.g., social workers degree course; Haley & Sidanius, 2005), react toward this P-E misfit condition exacerbating their support toward legitimizing myths of hierarchies (e.g., racism, sexism, dislike hierarchy-attenuating vocational career). Results sustain the hypothesis that high SDO people who face hierarchy-attenuating environments, are more likely to attempt to solve the uncertainty of the P-E misfit endorsing hierarchy-enhancing myths refusing the egalitarian culture consensually shared in their environment. Perspective for future studies and practical implications will be also presented and discussed.