Social Psychology Quarterly

This paper reports three subtantive findings from national survey data concerning the relationship between legal approval and moral concern in the abortion dispute. First, the moral beliefs of opponents of abortion reinforce their legal stance, whereas many people favor legal abortion despite personal moral reservations. Second, although there is little difference between men's and women's attitudes towards the legality of abortion, women are far more likely to feel that abortion is morally wrong. This gender difference holds even when education, religious preference, and church attendance are controlled. Third, a content analysis of open-ended responses illustrates the variety of moral concerns. There are no discernible gender differences in concerns mentioned, but opponents of abortion are much more absolute and rule-bound in their moral stance than are those who support legal abortion.

Although at first relatively disinterested in race, modern genomic research has increasingly turned attention to racial variations. We examine a prominent example of this focus-direct-to-consumer racial admixture tests-and ask how information about the methods and results of these tests in news media may affect beliefs in racial differences. The reification hypothesis proposes that by emphasizing a genetic basis for race, thereby reifying race as a biological reality, the tests increase beliefs that whites and blacks are essentially different. The challenge hypothesis suggests that by describing differences between racial groups as continua rather than sharp demarcations, the results produced by admixture tests break down racial categories and reduce beliefs in racial differences. A nationally representative survey experiment (N = 526) provided clear support for the reification hypothesis. The results suggest that an unintended consequence of the genomic revolution may be to reinvigorate age-old beliefs in essential racial differences.

We examine whether hardship while growing up shapes subjective age identity, as well as three types of experiences through which it may occur. Drawing on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find that hardship in several domains during childhood and adolescence is associated with feeling relatively older and self-identifying as an adult in the late teens and twenties. Specifically, young people who as adolescents felt unsafe in their schools or neighborhoods, witnessed or were victims of violence, had fewer economic resources in the household, and lived in certain family structures, reported older subjective ages (by one or both measures). We find no evidence that hardship's association with subjective age is mediated by work responsibilities in adolescence or by anticipating a very curtailed life span, but entering adult roles earlier mediates or partially mediates many of these relationships.

A structural equation model of the causes of adolescent cigarette smoking is presented. This model is derived from a general paradigm or "meta-theory" which proposes that the social environment influences behavior directly and through the mediation of beliefs about the consequences of behavior; these two factors are predicted to interact with personality in causing behavior. Five social environmental variables, four belief factors, and three personality characteristics were analyzed in several large surveys of young adolescents. Siblings' smoking. friend's smoking, and enjoyment beliefs were found to affect cigarette smoking; a portion of the friends' smoking effect was mediated by enjoyment beliefs. The influence of friends upon belief and behavior was found to be partially dependent upon the adolescent's tendencies toward rebelliousness and disobedience. Implications are drawn for social psychological theory and public health action.

Previous research has suggested that deviant social labeling does not always result in lowered self-esteem. In fact, the conditions under which self-esteem is lowered are not well understood. The current study investigated three hypothesized determinants of self-esteem in a sample of labeled deviant adolescents. The self-esteem of the deviant group was not significantly different from a sample of their normal peers. However, within the deviant group, subjects who believed that the societal view of their group was similar to the self, and who had a negative evaluation of the deviant label, had lower self-esteem. The findings suggest that low self-esteem is not inevitable among labeled deviants. However, when the individual sees his or her label as similar to the self and also has a evaluation of that label, self-esteem is more likely to be lowered.

The recent publication of David Heise's Expressive Order (2007) provides an occasion for discussing some of the key ideas in Affect Control Theory. The theory proposes that a few dimensions of affective meaning provide a common basis for interrelating personal identities and social actions. It holds that during interpersonal interactions, social behavior is continually regulated to maintain an affective tone compatible with whatever social roles or identities define the situation. We outline the intellectual history of the proposed dimensions and of the idea that each social action invites an action from the other that has a particular location along these dimensions. We also relate these ideas to the Affect-as-Information hypothesis, an approach that often guides research in psychology on the role of affect in regulating judgment and thought.

Very few studies have examined predictors of suicidal ideation among African American women. Consequently, we have a poor understanding of the combinations of culturally-specific experiences and psychosocial processes that may constitute risk and protective factors for suicide in this population. Drawing on theories of social inequality, medical sociology, and the stress process, we explore the adverse impact of gendered racism experiences and potential moderating factors in a sample of 204 predominantly low-SES African American women. We find that African American women's risk for suicidal ideation is linked to stressors occurring as a function of their distinct social location at the intersection of gender and race. In addition, we find that gendered racism has no effect on suicidal ideation among women with moderate levels of well-being, self-esteem, and active coping, but has a strong adverse influence in those with high and low levels of psychosocial resources.

Using evidence gathered during 18 months of participant-observation in 2 nursing homes and 65 interviews with staff, this article examines how nursing-home staff use agency as a rhetorical resource to construct a dignified workplace. Staff attribute agency to dying residents, saying they choose the timing and conditions of their death. Staff equally insist that aggressive residents do not have agency. These two sets of attributions are used as counterpoints. Both go well beyond the available facts of the situation and reflect unspoken assumptions and interests of nursing-care workers. Through these attributions, the staff achieves a situated moral order in which compassionate care is provided to deserving residents in caring nursing homes. Staff attributions of agency are collectively shaped by professional philosophies, training and education, and regulatory guidelines. Finally, this article shows how it is analytically and theoretically productive to recast agency as a cultural object, whose use is subject to empirical investigation, rather than as a theoretical construct.

Impression management theory is used to derive hypotheses about the escalation of incidents involving aggression and violence among samples of the general population, ex-mental patients, and ex-criminal offenders. Respondents were interviewed about incidents they had been involved in at four levels of severity: incidents in which they were angry but did nothing about it; verbal disputes; incidents involving physical violence but no weapon; and incidents in which a weapon was used. The findings generally support impression management theory: (1) respondents were more likely to express their anger when they had been insulted, particularly when they were males; (2) the probability of physical violence was lower when participants gave accounts for their actions; (3) conflicts involving same-sex participants were generally more severe when an audience was present; and (4) instigation from third parties resulted in more severe incidents while third party mediation resulted in less subsequent aggression.

Two theoretical models are discussed as explanations of why verbal and physical aggression between youthful siblings is so frequent. The sibling rivalry model suggests that aggression between siblings reflects jealousy and nonrealistic conflict. A realistic conflict model, on the other hand, suggests that sibling conflicts arise over tangible goods and the performance of disvalued tasks because proprietary right and the division of labor within the household are often unclear. These conflicts are likely to become overt if intervention from parents is anticipated because then younger siblings are willing to fight their more powerful older siblings. This suggests that siblings fight less when parents take a laissez-faire approach because the younger sibling is forced to submit. Recall data collected from college students provide support for the realistic conflict model but not the sibling rivalry model.

The effects on spectator hostility of viewing aggressive athletic contests were investigated using three diverse measures of hostility in a replication of the widely cited Goldstein and Arms (1971) Army-Navy football study. Male and female subjects were exposed to either stylized aggression (professional wrestling), realistic aggression (ice hockey), or a competitive but nonaggressive control event (swimming) in a before-after design. While the three measures of hostility yielded somewhat different results for the three events, general support was found for the earlier finding of increased spectator hostility as a result of observing aggression. Whereas hostility was shown to increase at wrestling and hockey, such increases did not occur at the swimming competition. Other aspects of mood change among spectators were also investigated. There was a blunting of the quality of interpersonal relations at the three events.

This paper considers the process by which individuals estimate the risk of adverse events, with particular attention to the social context in which risk estimates are formed. We compare subjective probability estimates of crime victimization to actual victimization experiences among respondents from the 1994 to 2002 waves of the Survey of Economic Expectations (Dominitz and Manski 2002). Using zip code identifiers, we then match these survey data to local area characteristics from the census. The results show that: (1) the risk of criminal victimization is significantly overestimated relative to actual rates of victimization or other negative events; (2) neighborhood racial composition is strongly associated with perceived risk of victimization, whereas actual victimization risk is driven by nonracial neighborhood characteristics; and (3) white respondents appear more strongly affected by racial composition than nonwhites in forming their estimates of risk. We argue these results support a model of stereotype amplification in the formation of risk estimates. Implications for persistent racial inequality are considered.

Individuals influence each others' decisions about cultural products such as songs, books, and movies; but to what extent can the perception of success become a "self-fulfilling prophecy"? We have explored this question experimentally by artificially inverting the true popularity of songs in an online "music market," in which 12,207 participants listened to and downloaded songs by unknown bands. We found that most songs experienced self-fulfilling prophecies, in which perceived-but initially false-popularity became real over time. We also found, however, that the inversion was not self-fulfilling for the market as a whole, in part because the very best songs recovered their popularity in the long run. Moreover, the distortion of market information reduced the correlation between appeal and popularity, and led to fewer overall downloads. These results, although partial and speculative, suggest a new approach to the study of cultural markets, and indicate the potential of web-based experiments to explore the social psychological origin of other macro-sociological phenomena.

In the first experiment forty male Japanese university students competed with male opponents for reaction time. Then they were electrically attacked by their opponents in either increasing, decreasing, medium, or high shock delivery patterns. In the first three patterns the average shock levels were the same, but the range of intensity in the increasing and decreasing conditions was greater than in the medium condition. The high attack pattern had a higher average shock level than the other patterns. Given an opportunity to retaliate, the subjects were observed to deliver the most intense shocks to their opponents in the high condition, next in the increasing and decreasing conditions, and the least intense in the medium condition. This suggests that retaliation is determined by a negatively biased weighted averaging of attack through which subjects infer aggressive intent of their attackers. This hypothesis was strengthened by the results of the second experiment in which, though the actual shock intensities were totally scaled down, the differences in retaliation among the four attack conditions were identical with those found in the first experiment.

The "looking-glass self" has been the dominant metaphor within sociology for the development of self-conception and has contributed to an overly passive and oversocialized view of human beings. The major theme in this paper is that our self-conceptions are also based upon our actions in the world, especially efficacious actions. The notions of human agency and self-creativity, which have been a hallmark of the symbolic interactionist tradition at the philosophical level, can be brought into our studies of self-concept through the concept of self-efficacy. Efficacy-based self-esteem not only places greater emphasis upon "self-determination" in the process of self-concept formation, but also underscores the reciprocity between self and social structure. Several aspects of social structure are examined as they affect the development of efficacy-based self-conception.

The practice of revealing the past sexual conduct of rape victims in court trials was the issue which prompted this study. The primary objective was to model the effects of juror sex, victim stigma, and contributory fault on rape convictions using simulation data from 358 undergraduates. Contrary to certain previous studies, loglinear analysis indicates that information about a rape victim's past sexual conduct does affect perceptions of her moral character and judgments of guilt. But the explanation for those effects may be far more complicated than previously supposed. Attribution theory confounds three distinct questions in the decision-making process and is unrealistically mute with respect to the potential influence of culturally patterned expectations.

Restrictions on visual capacities were originally thought to influence individuals' spacing preferences either through the internalization of spatial avoidances, displayed toward the socially stigmatized, or through the perpetual disruption of spacing information. Investigation of the spatial preferences of institutionalized and non-institutionalized blind persons, however, demonstrates that despite individual differences in the size and shape of preferred spaces, these groups generally require spaces virtually identical in size, shape, and permeability to those required by sighted persons. Furthermore, the degree of visual incapacitation is not related to spacing preferences. Sex, age, income, occupational prestige, and education are also unrelated to spacing preferences. The absence of effects arising from purely physiological restrictions may be attributed to the fact that visual restrictions disrupt the information available for spacing, without altering one's desired or preferred space. Failure of the blind to show stigmatized spatial avoidance is discussed from the perspective of Goffman's notion of the management of spoiled identity.

We examine how work difficulties in the early career, and the generally deteriorating work conditions associated with the recent U.S. economic recession, shape individuals' work values. Drawing on panel data from the Youth Development Study, we test whether individuals change their work values in response to concerns about satisfying material needs or the features of jobs that they are able to attain. Results indicate that extrinsic values are weakened in the face of unemployment, as well as reduced job security, income, and advancement. These patterns support a reinforcement and accentuation model in which workers adjust their values to emphasize what they actually obtain from the job. Intrinsic values are weakened by working in a job unrelated to one's career plans; they are reinforced by the experience of greater intrinsic rewards and advancement opportunities.

The purpose of the present research is to investigate variables involved in deciding that rape has occurred and to test a model of the decision process of rape attribution in a dating situation. Male and female subjects were presented with a detailed description of a date in which the male used low or moderate force to obtain sex, after the female began to protest either early, moderately, or late during foreplay. Her protest consisted of just pleading or pleading plus physically struggling. The "true" experiment was analyzed by means of AOV and path analysis. Subjects were more likely to blame the woman and to perceive her as desiring sex with low force and late onset of protest. The man was viewed as more violent and the incident more likely to be viewed as rape when there was more force, more protest and earlier onset. Attitudes toward women was a significant predictor of all dependent variables and no overall sex differences were found. We concluded that the attributions of the male's violence and the female's desire for sex are difinitional components of rape and/or intervening variables, caused by the manipulated variables and in turn causing the perception of rape. Because experimental manipulations were shown to affect more than one cognition an argument was made for developing causal models including situational and cognitive intervening variables in predicting final attributions. The benefits of using "weak" manipulations were discussed.

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we estimate the determinants and direction of change in individual racial identification among multiracial and monoracial adolescents as they transition to young adulthood. We find that while many multiracials subsequently identify as monoracials, sizable numbers of monoracials also subsequently become multiracials. Native American-whites appear to have the least stable identification. We find strong support that socioeconomic status, gender, and physical appearance shape the direction of change for multiracials, and that black biracials are especially compelled to identify as monoracial blacks.

Are cohabiting couples more likely than married couples to break up in response to perceptions that their relationship is not fair? Based on social psychological perspectives on intimate relationship stability, in addition to empirical research contrasting cohabitation with marriage, I hypothesize that cohabiting couples will be more likely than married couples to separate in response to perceived breaches of justice. To test this hypothesis and others, I examine the influence of both male and female partners'perceptions of fairness on the stability of married and cohabiting couples using two waves of couple-level data from the National Survey of Families and Households. The results of Cox proportional hazards models suggest that cohabiting couples, but not married couples, are increasingly likely to separate as levels of male or female underbenefiting increase. The conclusion discusses the implications of these findings for social psychological perspectives and future studies on the role of distributive justice in the stability of intimate relationships.

Social events in the sixties prompted some sociologists to anticipate substantial increases in the sexual activity of young people, especially college youth. Not until the seventies, however, could such marked changes be found. We propose that the need for the development of sexual scripts accounts for this lag. In general, women had had no sexual script for premarital coitus, and time was needed to develop one in response to the changed conditions. To see if evidence of script development could be found, we developed a proposition about the role of peers in script development. This was contrasted with a proposition about the role of peers in script evelopment. This was contrasted with a proposition about the role of peers in supporting an existing script. The propositions were tested using a 1967 national sample of college students. The expected pattersn were found.

The effects of health threat communications have generated considerable empirical and theoretical attention. Inconsistent findings in the "fear appeal" literature suggest that the effects of these types of meassages are not completely understood. Previous theoretical approaches have tended to focus upon the emotional (fear) reaction produced by exposure to threatening health information. However, the weight to the experimental evidence indicates that certain cognitions about the threat are more directly related to acceptance of the recommendations than emotional arousal. An integration of the existing theoretical approaches is offered, which views acceptance of health threat recommendations to be mediated by perceptions of threat control. Two fundamental beliefs are seen as comprising perceived threat control: response efficacy, which is the perceived ability of the recommended coping action(s) to reduce or control the threat; and personal efficacy, which is the person's expectations of being able to perform the recommended threat-coping action(s) successfully. These two threat control factors are consistent with existing theories of health behavior (Health Belief Model) and fear appeals (Rogers, 1975) and may help to clarify Leventhal's (1970) parallel response model. Empirical support for these factors is presented and indicates that beyond some adequate level of utility, personal efficacy is a more important of protective health behavior than response efficacy. The implication for health practitioners is that communications can be very effective in producing acceptance of protective health behavior if a real, but controllable threat is depicted. Therefore, future research should focus upon the ways by which response efficacy efficacy and personal efficacy can be enhanced in a health threat communication.

Previous research on sanze-sex interaction has documented competitive patterns for males, but not for females. By contrast, some studies characterize cross-sex interaction as competitive; other studies, as noncotnpetitive. To extend research on the processes of competition and dominance in same- and cross-sex interaction, the present study examines verbal interaction sequences that occurred during two brief psychotherapy groups conducted for the same set oj five married couples. All interaction sequences have been classified according to the Ericson-Rogers Relational Coding System, and patterns analyzed by means of a log-linear statistical procedure. For same-sex interaction, findings document more indiscriminant competition between males than between females. These results extend previous findings. For cross-sex interaction, a complex pattern of competition and dominance is observed. Although females compete with males under certain conditions, males do not compete with females. However, males apparently interrupt females freely, thus suggesting that males assume a dominant position. Females tend to "interrupt back," an indication that male dominance is not acceptable. However, females are also more submissive toward husbands than toward other males. The question remains whether these patterns are applicable to a more general popula- tion.

Self-reported data from a national panel survey are examined to determine whether self-esteem is a mediating event between evaluative social experiences (school, family and social support) and delinquency. Path analytic procedures are employed to test the most explicit causal paradigm of the self-concept-delinquency relation: the delinquency-as-self-enhancement model. Despite: (1) variations in the types of delinquency analyzed, (2) restrictions placed on the sample in testing for possible contingent relations, and (3) variations in the time lags used to compute the regression coefficients, no substantial effect of self-esteem on subsequent delinquency was found when the effects of prior causal variables were partialled out. Additionally, no evidence of a self-enhancement effect (i.e., a positive effect of delinquency on subsequent self-concept) was discovered. These results are discussed in relation to prior research and social policy assumptions which focus on self-images as a key variable for reducing delinquency.

Grounded in social structure and personality, life course, and status attainment perspectives of social psychology, the Youth Development Study has followed a cohort of teenagers from the beginning of high school through their mid-thirties. Evidence for the effective exercise of agency derives from diverse adolescent work patterns leading to outcomes that are consistent with youth's earlier goals, motivations, and resources. Thus, the socioeconomic career begins well before the completion of formal education. The YDS has revealed multiple pathways of contemporary transition to adulthood, the circumstances surrounding parental residential and financial support to their transitioning children, and the cessation of deviant behavior as adult roles are acquired. Agentic pathways during this period are significant precursors of success during subsequent economic downturn. The new YDS Second Generation Study is well poised to address the impacts of parental trajectories on the adjustment and well-being of children.

This study examines the relationship between equity/inequity and depression among married partners. The respondents are 333 married couples (666 respondents) from a midwestern state who were selected in a random sample based on population concentration. Equity/inequity is examined as it occurred in the performance of five family roles-cooking, housekeeping, provider, companion, and parent. It is predicted that (1) marriage partners who feel inequity in the performance of marital roles will feel more distress than partners who perceive equity, and (2) marriage partners who perceive that inequity is in their favor will feel less distress than those who perceive that inequity is not in their favor. The findings support the first hypothesis and provide directional but not statistically significant support for the second hypothesis. Explanations for the findings are drawn from equity theory and cognitive theories of depression.

This study investigated the effect of victims' level of anger and type of bystander advice on theft victims' decision to call the police. Subjects were led to believe that they were victims of an $11 theft which occurred on the premises of an "industrial research organization." Two independent variables were manipulated in a 3 x 3 factorial design: (a) bystander advice (advised action, advised no action, no advice) and (b) victim anger (high anger, low anger, no anger). Since a manipulation check revealed that victim anger was not successfully manipualted, victims' level of self-reported anger was used in the analyses. Two main effects were found. In comparison with the no-advice condition, the advice to take no action decreased subjects' willingness to report the incident whereas the advice to take action did not significantly increase reporting. Victims' level of self-reported anger was positively related to their willingness to report the theft. Separate analyses by sex showed that anger affected reporting by females but not by males. It was suggested that victim reporting may be governed more by a "hot" decision process than by a "cold" process involving rational calculation of costs and benefits.

Transient depersonalization refers to the momentary loss of identity: the individual feels detached from the and does not know who he or she is. Using a sample of children and adolescents, this paper investigates aspects of the self-concept that might increase the experience of transient depersonalization. Self-esteem, self-concept stability, self-consciousness, false self-presentation, and the tendency to fantasize are hypothesized to affect transient depersonalization. A structural equations model with unobserved variables is employed to test these hypotheses. Implications for our understanding of the self-concept are discussed.

This research was concerned with the question of whether masculinity-femininity is related to postoperative changes in desire for intercourse among men who underwent vasectomy. Sexual desire was assumed at the outset to be a positive characteristic associated with masculinity among males with its expression being a means of reaffirming a sense of masculinity. The hypothesis was that masculinity would have a positive effect on changes in the desire for intercourse following vasectomy. Of the initial 176 couples who filled out questionnaires, 75 actively participated in follow-up and furnished data for this analysis. This group was compared to the group who did not furnish follow-up data and the 2 groups were found not to differ significantly with respect to masculinity, femininity, age or education. Masculinity was positively and significantly related to the postsurgical expression of increase in desire for sexual intercourse among vasectomized men. There is support then for the notion that response to vasectomy may sometimes involve compensation in those men who would likely perceive vasectomy as demasculinizing. 1 negative finding was that androgynous males do not alter their desire following vasectomy.

Social scientists often maintain that women, because of their lower status relative to men, pretend to be less intelligent and knowledgeable than they really are. This generalization is examined in the light of data from a national probalility sample of adults in the United States which found that approximately a quarter of the respondents reported ever "playing dumb." The data suggest that men are more likely overall to play dumb than are women. Furthermore, it is found that regardless of the sex of the respondent, playing dumb is related to poor mental health, alienation, low self-esteem, and unhappiness. A tentative theoretical formulation is sketched that relates this form of impression management to (1) the perception that one is intelligent and knowledgeable, (2) the salience of intelligence and knowledge to the interaction, (3) the perception that one is being taken seriously, and (4) the expectation of gain.

Theorizing by Bakan (1966), Bales (1955; 1958), Block (1973), and others suggests that interactional involvement may require the application and synthesis of both traditionally "masculine" (i.e., instrumental) and traditionally "feminine" (i.e., expressive) capacities. This view is supported not only by a previous study of sex role influences in mixed-sex dyads (Ickes and Barnes, 1978) but also by the present study of sex-role influences in same-sex dyads. The degree of interactional involvement (e. g., talking, looking, gesturing) was found to be high for dyad types in which both instrumental and expressive capacities could be integratively applied, but was found to be low for dyad types in which only one set of capacities (instrumental or expressive) could be represented. The degree of satisfaction that dyad members expressed regarding their interactions appeared to vary according to the degree to which the level of interactional involvement they experienced was consistent or inconsistent with their own predisposition to be expressive. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for current conceptualizations of sex-role identification.

This study extends previous research on the social psychological implications of pubertal timing to education by applying a life course framework to data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and from the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study. Early pubertal timing, which has previously been associated with major social psychological changes in girls' lives during middle school, predicted girls' grade point average and probability of course failure at the start of high school. Because of this initial failure during the high school transition, it also predicted their probability of dropping out of high school, and, among those who graduated, their grade point average at the end of high school. Such research demonstrates one way in which the immediate social psychological risk of early pubertal timing, measured as the age at menarche, translates into long-term disadvantage for girls, thereby opening up new avenues of research for social psychologists interested in youth development, health, and education.

We examine how the timing of trust violations affects cooperation and solidarity, including trust and relational cohesion. Past studies that used repeated Prisoner’s Dilemmas suggest that trust violations are more harmful when they occur in early rather than later interactions. We argue that this effect of early trust violations depends on cultural and individual differences in generalized trust. A laboratory study from high- and low-trust cultures (the United States vs. Japan) supported our claim. First, early trust violations were more harmful than late trust violations, but only for Americans; the pattern reversed for Japanese. Second, these patterns were mediated by individual differences in generalized trust. Finally, generalized trust also moderated the effect of trust violations in the United States but not Japan. By demonstrating that generalized trust is not only lower but also less important in low-trust cultures, our research advances our understanding of how culture affects the development of solidarity in exchange relations.

We examined the relationship between Individualism/Collectivism and generalized social trust across 31 European nations participating in the European Social Survey. Using multilevel regression analyses, the current study provides the first empirical investigation of the effects of cultural norms of Individualism/Collectivism on generalized social trust while accounting for individuals' own cultural orientations within the same analysis. The results provide clear support for Yamagishi and Yamagishi's (1994) emancipation theory of trust, showing a significant and positive relationship between Individualism/Collectivism and generalized social trust, over and above the effect of a country's political history of communism and ethnic heterogeneity. Having controlled for individual effects of Individualism/Collectivism it is clear that the results of the current analysis cannot be reduced to an individual-level explanation, but must be interpreted within the context of macrosocial processes. We conclude by discussing potential mechanisms that could explain why national individualism is more likely to foster trust among people than collectivism.

The belief that women and men are held to different standards of sexual conduct is pervasive in contemporary American society. According to the sexual double standard, boys and men are rewarded and praised for heterosexual sexual contacts, whereas girls and women are derogated and stigmatized for similar behaviors. Although widely held by the general public, research findings on the sexual double standard remain equivocal, with qualitative studies and early attitudinal surveys generally finding evidence of the double standard and more recent experimental vignette designs often failing to find similar results. In this study, we extend prior research by directly measuring the social status of sexually permissive youth. We use data collected from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to relate adolescents' self-reported numbers of sexual partners to a network measure of peer acceptance. Results suggest that the association between lifetime sexual partnerships and peer status varies significantly by gender, such that greater numbers of sexual partners are positively correlated with boys' peer acceptance, but negatively correlated with girls' peer acceptance. Moreover, the relationship between boys'sexual behaviors and peer acceptance is moderated by socioeconomic origins; sexually permissive boys from disadvantaged backgrounds are predicted to have more friendships than permissive boys from more advantaged backgrounds. Our results thus support the existence of an adolescent sexual double standard and suggest that sexual norms vary by both gender and socioeconomic origins.

The expression of surprise-at something unexpected-is a key form of emotional display. Focusing on displays of surprise performed by means of reaction tokens (akin to Goffman's "response cries"), such as wow, gosh, oh my god, ooh!, phew, we use an ethnomethodological, conversation-analytic approach to analyze surprise in talk-in-interaction. Our key contribution is to detach the psychology of surprise from its social expression by showing how co-conversationalists collaborate to bring off an interactionally achieved performance of surprise. Far from being a visceral eruption of emotion, the production of a surprise token is often prepared for several turns in advance. We also show how surprise can be recycled on an occasion subsequent to its initial production, and how surprise displays may be delayed by silence, ritualized disbelief and other repair initiations. Finally, we consider some of the uses of surprise as an interactional resource, including its role in the reflection and reproduction of culture.

Based on an interactionist framework, this article examines how followers of a contemporary Chinese religious movement, Falun Gong, deal with a crisis situation and sustain their conviction in the absence of their charismatic leader. Data were collected during a yearlong ethnography of the Falun Gong in Chicago and Hong Kong. The findings reveal that followers experienced cognitive dissonance as a result of the Chinese authorities’ suppression and their leader’s disappearance. To cope with the external and internal threats, they engaged in frequent collective actions and discourses. These collective exercises allowed them to act out their shared ideology, reaffirm their ideological mentality, and activate their ideological passion. Through interaction and collective interpretation, followers not only reconstructed meanings out of the confusion, they also romanticized the charisma of their missing leader. This article asserts the critical role of doing ideology in sustaining a movement and integrates an interactionist, social psychological approach into the literature of social movements.

This study advances identity theory by testing the impact of (moral) identity activation on behavior in different social contexts. At a large southwestern university, 343 undergraduate students completed a survey that measured meanings of their moral identity. Later they completed a laboratory task in which they were awarded more points than they deserved. Participants were given the opportunity to admit (or not admit) the improper point reward. Behavior during the task was examined in varying social contexts: when a participant’s moral identity was activated (or not activated) and when participants completed the task while alone, in a group, or in a group where a numeric majority pressured them to not admit being given extra points. Results show that individuals behave in accord with identity meanings across social contexts when an identity is activated. Implications for identity theory regarding identity activation and how identities influence behavior across social contexts are discussed.

Social Psychology Quarterly retracts the article “The Norm-activating Power of Celebrity: The Dynamics of Success and Influence,” by Siegwart Lindenberg, Janneke F. Joly, and Diederik A. Stapel, which appeared in the March 2011 issue (74(1):98–120; DOI: 10.1177/0190272511398208). This retraction stems from the results of an investigation into the work of Diederik A. Stapel ( https://www.commissielevelt.nl/noort-committee/publications-examined/ ), which finds strong evidence of fraud in the dataset supplied by Stapel. His coauthors had no knowledge of his actions and were not involved in the production of the fraudulent data. On the basis of previous evidence, we reasoned that even if people do not identify with celebrities, these celebrities can influence their behavior by activating bundles of social norms. Activating a norm means making both content and “oughtness” of the norm more directly relevant for behavior. We further reasoned that in order to have this norm-activating effect, celebrities have to have prestige. The question is whether they need to be seen as successful in order to have this effect. In four experimental studies, we examined the effects of a normative message presented by a celebrity on the activation of a target norm and of related and unrelated norms. As predicted, the normative message activated both target and related norms and did not activate unrelated norms. Also as expected, this ability to activate norms vanished entirely when the celebrities were tarnished by waning success. This result also shows that “success” and “lack of success” of a celebrity can be the result of relatively minor differences in media reporting. As expected, the norm-activating effect of celebrities was not mediated by self-reported measures of seeing celebrities as role models or of identifying with them. Implications for the impact of someone’s environment on norm conformity beyond positive and negative sanctions are discussed.

The stigma of childhood obesity has the potential to affect psychological development during the early life course, but few studies examine whether experiencing stigma in childhood and adolescence has lasting ramifications for mental health during the transition to adulthood. Integrating modified labeling theory with a life course perspective, this study examined how obesity at different ages affects psychological distress in late adolescence using longitudinal data on black and white girls. We tested whether parent or friend labeling mediates this relationship and whether distal effects on psychological distress are further mediated through proximal distress using data from the National Growth and Health Study (n = 2,379). Findings showed significant proximal and distal effects of obesity on psychological distress through both parent and friend labeling among white girls. Distal effects on psychological distress were also mediated by proximal psychological distress. Among black girls, there were no distal effects, suggesting weight-based stigma is more consequential for white girls compared to black girls.

Theories of susceptibility to peer influence have centered on the idea that lower status adolescents are likely to adopt the behaviors of high status adolescents. While status is important, social exchange theorists have shown the value of analyzing exchange relations between actors to understand differences in power. To build on status-based theories of peer influence, this study analyzes power dependence relations in three adolescent friendship groups. Analyzing adolescent interaction as social exchange showed how being in a group with balanced power relations insulated adolescents from peer influence, even when some peers were delinquent or low academic achievers. In contrast, adolescents in groups with unbalanced power relations were particularly susceptible to peer influence. This study presents an additional way to analyze the peer influence process and illustrates the importance of applying social psychological theory to cases of micro inequality, particularly in the context of small groups.

The objectives of this study are to understand the association between high school religious context in adolescence and the reporting of same-sex attraction and sexual identity in young adulthood and how these associations vary by gender. Previous studies have considered how high school contexts shape the well-being of sexual minority youth, yet few have examined the extent to which these contexts shape sexual desire and identity. We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and find that among women, school religious context is negatively associated with the likelihood of reporting same-sex attraction in young adulthood. We also find a negative association between school religious context and reporting a bisexual or flexible sexual identity among men and women. Finally, we find a positive association between mean school religious attendance and reporting a homosexual identity among men and women.

Interactional research on advice giving has described advice as normative and asymmetric. In this paper we examine how these dimensions of advice are softened by counselors on a helpline for children and young people through the use of questions. Through what we term advice-implicative interrogatives, counselors ask clients about the relevance or applicability of a possible future course of action. The allusion to this possible action by the counselor identifies it as normatively relevant, and displays the counselors epistemic authority in relation to dealing with a clients problems. However, the interrogative format mitigates the normative and asymmetric dimensions typical of advice sequences by orienting to the clients epistemic authority in relation to their own lives, and delivering advice in a way that is contingent upon the clients accounts of their experiences, capacities, and understandings. The demonstration of the use of questions in advice sequences offers an interactional specification of the client-centered support that is characteristic of prevailing counseling practice. More specifically, it shows how the values of empowerment and child-centered practice, which underpin services such as Kids Helpline, are embodied in specific interactional devices. Detailed descriptions of this interactional practice offer fresh insights into the use of interrogatives in counseling contexts, and provide practitioners with new ways of thinking about, and discussing, their current practices.

In this paper we consider a collection of conversational practices that arise when a professional is faced with extended resistance to their offered advice. Our data is comprised of telephone calls to a UK child protection helpline. The practices we identify occur repeatedly across our corpus of advice resistance sequences and involve (1) the repackaging of resisted advice in more idiomatic form; (2) the combination of that advice with a tag question that treats the client as able to confirm the reformulated version despite their prior resistance to it; and (3) the dampening of the response requirement by continuing past the tag question, which would normally constitute a transition place for the advice recipient. We also discuss the tension between the contrasting projects of callers and call takers, which can lead to both delivery of advice and the resistance of that advice. In doing this we highlight the way in which advice may function as an element of broader institutional practices. In specifying these practices we draw upon analytic tools employed by conversation analysts, including various features of sequence organization (Schegloff 2007) and turn design (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974). The analysis is intended to contribute to three main areas of research: to the applied topic of managing advice resistance, to the growing literature on understanding institutional practices, and to broader concerns in conversation analytic and discursive psychological literature. These concerns include the status of the “psychological” in interaction and the specification of actions across turns and sequences of talk.

Obesity is widely recognized as a health risk, but it also represents a disadvantaged social position. Viewing body weight within the framework of stigma and its effects on life chances, we examine how perceived weight-based discrimination influences identity and physical health. Using national survey data with a 10-year longitudinal follow-up, we consider whether perceptions of weight discrimination shape weight perceptions, whether perceived weight discrimination exacerbates the health risks of obesity, and whether weight perceptions are the mechanism explaining why perceived weight discrimination is damaging to health. Perceived weight discrimination is found to be harmful, increasing the health risks of obesity associated with functional disability and, to a lesser degree, self-rated health. Findings also reveal that weight-based stigma shapes weight perceptions, which mediate the relationship between perceived discrimination and health.

Although race is one of the most salient status characteristics in American society, many observers cannot distinguish the racial ancestries of multiracial youth. This paper examines how people perceive multiracial adolescents: specifically, I investigate whether observers perceive the adolescents as multiracial and whether these racial perceptions are congruent with the multiracial adolescents’ self-identifications. Results show that 1) observers perceived close to half of multiracial targets as monoracial, 2) multiracial targets who identified themselves as black were nearly always perceived as black but not always as multiracial, and 3) the demographic and environmental characteristics of observers had no bearing on the congruence of their racial perceptions. That is, regardless of their own demographic characteristics or exposure to people of other races, observers were more congruent when examining targets who self-identified as black or white and less congruent when identifying targets from Asian, Hispanic, American Indian, or Middle Eastern backgrounds. Despite the demographic trend toward multiracialism in the United States, observers’ perceptions may maintain the status quo in race relations: a black-white dichotomy where part-blacks remain in the collective black category.

We propose that macro-level ideal types of leadership, as described in the classic work of Max Weber and reflected in the contemporary management literature, are mirrored in micro-level affective meanings. Within Osgood’s three-dimensional affective space, we identify specific patterns corresponding to leadership styles: people evaluate authoritative/transactional leadership as positive, powerful, and neither passive nor active. Charismatic/transformational leadership is perceived as equally positive and powerful but involves a much higher degree of activity-arousal. Finally, coercive leadership is negative, powerful, and active. Based on Heise’s cybernetic symbolic-interactionist affect control theory, we compare cultural representations of business managers in the United States and Germany at different points in time. We demonstrate a shift from transactional to charismatic leadership in the U.S. manager stereotype and a contrasting consolidation of coercive leadership expectations in Germany. We discuss implications for (1) cross-cultural communication and (2) affective meaning as indicator of social change.