Multiple facets of compassion: The impact of social dominance orientation and economic systems justification

Martin, D., Seppala, E., Heineberg, Y., Rossomando, T., Doty, J., Zimbardo, P., Shiue, T.-T., Berger, R., & Zhou, Y. Y. (2015). Multiple facets of compassion: The impact of social dominance orientation and economic systems justification. Journal of Business Ethics, 129(1), 237-249. doi:10.1007/s10551-014-2157-0

Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) is a hierarchical worldview that ascribes people to social rankings and is often found in high levels among business school students. To establish the relationship between individual differences in compassion, SDO, and free ESJ (Economic Systems Justification), partial correlations were run controlling for social desirability to response bias. As anticipated, a significant correlation between ESJ and SDO was established. Significant correlations between SDO and low levels of Self-Compassion supported the hypotheses that those with higher levels of SDO have lower levels of self-compassion.