Personality, Authoritarianism, Social Dominance, and Ambivalent Sexism: A Mediational Model.

We examined how facets of the Big Five personality factors of agreeableness and openness predicted hostile and benevolent sexism toward women and how two forms of conservative ideology, social dominance orientation (SDO) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), mediated these relationships. Participants (N = 296) were recruited from an online survey service, and completed measures of agreeableness and openness facets, SDO and RWA, and hostile and benevolent sexism. Partially supporting hypotheses, two hierarchical regressions revealed that the agreeableness facet of trust and openness facet of values were each significant predictors of both hostile and benevolent sexism. Additional analyses utilizing percentile bootstrapping indicated that, as expected, SDO mediated the predictive strengths of trust and values in hostile sexism, whereas RWA mediated the predictive strength of values in benevolent sexism. Discussion encompasses the theoretical implications of linking personality, conservative ideology, and ambivalent sexism.