Alienation and empathy as mediators of the relation between Social Dominance Orientation, Right-Wing Authoritarianism and expressions of racism and sexism

• Both empathy and alienation predicted unique variance in racism and sexism.
• Empathy functioned as a mediator for Social Dominance Orientation, but only for sexism, not racism.
• Alienation was a mediator between Social Dominance Orientation and both racism and sexism.
• Right-Wing Authoritarianism and racism and sexism relations were not mediated by alienation.

Prior research has established a link between Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), empathy, and generalized measures of prejudice. Whether empathy functions as a mediator for more specific forms of prejudice has not been studied. Furthermore, alienation and its role in predicting prejudice have been given little attention in the literature. Our results found that empathy functioned as a mediator for SDO, but only for sexism, not racism. Alienation was found to act as a mediator between SDO and both racism and sexism. The relation between Right-Wing Authoritarianism and racism and sexism was not mediated by alienation.