bias. Low-SDO individuals may also support hierarchy-enhancing beliefs (such as gender essentialism and meritocracy) if they believe this will support diversity. SDO has also been found to relate to attitudes towards social class. Self-perceived attractiveness can also interact with a person's SDO levels (due to perceived effects on social class); changing a person's self-perceived level of attractiveness affected their self-perceived social class and thus their SDO levels. A study report published by Nature in 2017 indicates there may be a correlation between FMRI scanned brain response to social ranks and the SDO scale. Subjects who tended to prefer hierarchical social structures and to promote socially dominant behaviors as measured by SDO exhibited stronger responses in the right anterior dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (right aDLPFC) when facing superior players. The French National Agency for Research funded study involved 28 male subjects and used FMRI measurements to demonstrate that response in the right aDLPFC to social ranks was strongly correlated with participant SDO scores measuring response to social ranks. Correlation with conservative political views Felicia Pratto and her colleagues have found evidence that a high social dominance orientation is strongly correlated with conservative political views, and opposition to programs and policies that aim to promote equality (such as affirmative action, laws advocating equal rights for homosexuals, women in combat, etc.). There has been some debate within the psychology community on what the relation is between SDO and racism/sexism. One explanation suggests that opposition to programs that promote equality need not be based on racism or sexism but on a "principled conservatism", that is, a "concern for equality of opportunity, color-blindness, and genuine conservative values". Some principled-conservatism theorists have suggested that racism and conservatism are independent, and only very weakly correlated among the highly educated, who truly understand the concepts of conservative values and attitudes. In an effort to examine the relationship between education, SDO, and racism, Sidanius and his colleagues asked approximately 4,600 Euro-Americans to complete a survey in which they were asked about their political and social attitudes, and their social dominance orientation was assessed. "These findings contradict much of the case for the principled conservatism hypothesis, which maintains that political values that are largely devoid of racism, especially among highly educated people." Contrary to what these theorists would predict, correlations among SDO, political conservatism, and racism were strongest among the most educated, and weakest among the least educated. Sidanius and his