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How and Why Are Inequities Maintained? 9 in ancient societies, and this lay the groundwork for modern societal ineq- uities between groups (Charlton, 1997). Although Charlton (1997) was primarily using this evolutionary argument to explain modern-day health disparities by class, the premise is broadly applicable to a wide array of inequalities. For example, this approach suggests that the tendencies to view certain racial, gender, or socioeconomic groups as superior to others can be traced back to the ancient ways in which humans were organized in tribes, wherein people associated and formed alliances within their own group based on shared characteristics. At the same time, other evolutionary theorists have focused on the development of counterdominance instincts. From these perspectives, the dominance behavior more clearly aligns with our primate ancestors, and one of the defining features of hunter-gatherer societies was their relatively high degree of egalitarianism (Erdal, Whiten, Bohm, & Knauft, 1994). To explain the move away from such egalitarian societies over time, the argu- ment is that humans’ original dominance instincts were countered but never completely eliminated by counterdominance instincts as a result, changes in environmental circumstances could—and did—incapacitate the counterdominance instincts that were developed later (Erdal et al., 1994). In other words, the development and growth of the human brain led to strategies that made counterdominance or egalitarianism viable, but then changing circumstances and new incentives activated old domi- nance instincts (Erdal et al., 1994). To illustrate, even though our ancestors formed tribes with divisions of labor that dictated what different groups could do, the labor itself was relatively equitable in that everyone’s job was important to the overall functionality of the group (e.g., gatherers were just as essential as hunters). As a result, humans also evolved a ten- dency to want to view and treat different groups equitably and equally. INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES: PERSONALITY-BASED AND IDEOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS FOR INEQUITY Personality trait or individual difference approaches such as that of social dominance theory make a similar argument as the aforementioned evolutionary approaches, in that they also argue for the existence of dual forces that promote or attenuate inequity in this context, they are referred to as hierarchy-enhancing (HE) or hierarchy-attenuating (HA) forces (Sidanius, Cotterill, Sheehy-Skeffington, Kteily, & Carvacho, 2016). Of these—which include institutions, myths, context, behaviors, and individ- ual differences—one of the most well studied is social dominance orienta- tion (SDO), an individual difference reflecting the desire for group-based hierarchies (Sidanius et al., 2016). People who are high in SDO believe that some groups are naturally superior to others and consider this a positive state of the world. To this end, SDO has been shown to impact inequity both directly, through processes such as collective action (e.g.,