Motives and Ideology: Bischof’s Zürich Model of Social Motivation, Right-wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation

Background: The present study examines links between social motives from Bischof’s Zürich model of social motivation and right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. It covers five motives from the model’s three systems: security, arousal, power, prestige, and achievement. Their associations with four facets of authoritarian orientation are estimated: authoritarian aggression, authoritarian submission, conventionalism, and the dominance facet of social dominance orientation. Objectives and Research Questions: RQ1: Which motives are associated with each facet of authoritarian orientation, conditional on the other motives and demographics? Four separate Bayesian regressions answer this question, one per authoritarian facet. RQ2a: How do each social motive’s associations differ in strength and direction across the four authoritarian facets, conditional on the other motives and demographics? RQ2b: How are the four authoritarian facets, and the ASC total and SDO-D, associated before and after conditioning on the social motives and demographics? RQ2c: How does each social motive’s association with the ASC total differ in strength and direction from its associations with authoritarian aggression, authoritarian submission, and conventionalism? A joint Bayesian regression of the four authoritarian facets answers all three questions, retaining the predictor set of RQ1. RQ3: Which associations between sets remain after conditioning on every other variable in the network? A Bayesian network of the five motives and four facets answers RQ3a–RQ3c. RQ3a: Which associations bridge the social-motive and authoritarian-orientation sets? RQ3b: Are power, prestige, and achievement positively associated with the arousal motive and negatively associated with the security motive, when the remaining network variables are held constant? RQ3c: Which ASC facets remain associated with SDO-D, conditional on the remaining facets and social motives? SRQ1: How distinctly are the five social motives and the four facets of authoritarian orientation represented when their complete item sets are examined together? Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses provide complementary evidence for this question. These analyses describe associations in cross-sectional data and do not establish causal direction. Participants: Participants were recruited via a German Bilendi online panel. Fieldwork from 19 to 24 June 2026 yielded 700 billed participations across three political-leaning quota groups used to balance sampling. The number of analysable cases follows from the preregistered exclusions. Study Method: The study used a cross-sectional online self-report design. Authoritarian aggression, authoritarian submission, and conventionalism were measured with the Aggression–Submission–Conventionalism scale (ASC; Dunwoody & Funke, 2016), and group-based dominance with the eight dominance items (SDO-D) of Social Dominance Orientation scale version 7 (SDO7; Ho et al., 2015). The security motive and achievement were assessed with the six-item intimacy and achievement subscales of the Unified Motive Scales (UMS-6; Schönbrodt & Gerstenberg, 2012), the arousal motive with a study-specific six-item social-neophilia scale, and the power motive and prestige with the dominance and prestige subscales of the six-item Dominance, Prestige, and Leadership measure (DoPL-6; Suessenbach et al., 2019).