Social dominance and cerebral hemisphericity: discriminating race, socioeconomic status, and sex groups by performance on two lateralized tests.
A neurosociological argument is presented which hypothesizes that persons in positions of social subdominance--black racial status, low and middle socioeconomic status (SES), and female sexual status will, in comparison to persons in positions of dominance--white, high SES, and male, be right-hemispheric, i.e., will perform best on a test lateralized to the right cerebral hemisphere and its appositional mode of thought as opposed to a test lateralized to the left hemisphere and its propositional mode of thought. Data from 1058 adults from two probability samples (excluding left-handers, housewives and unemployed persons) are analyzed. Appositional performance is measured by the Street Gestalt-Completion Test (A), propositional performance by the WAIS Similarities Subtest (P), and right-hemisphericity by (A-P)/(A+P). Multigroup discriminant function analysis and three-way analyses of variance produced the following results: (1) blacks are more right-hemispheric than are whites, with lower similarities performance and higher Street performance; (2) SES varies directly with Similarities performance, but not with Street performance; (3) there is a two way interaction between race and SES such that middle SES groups are most right-hemispheric for whites, and low SES groups, most right-hemispheric for blacks; (4) females are more right hemispheric than are males among blacks and lower SES whites, reflecting in part the superior performance of black females on the Street test.
D001741:Black or African American; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D012737:Sex Factors; D012930:Social Dominance; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D044465:White People