Barry Markovsky

University of South Carolina | USC · Department of Sociology

In a social dilemma, group members have equal access to collective resources, but each must decide between acting in self-interested or collectively interested ways when considering their contribution to the group. Our research focused on how the perceived fairness of contributions and outcomes affects these decisions. We report on an experiment th...

We present an integration that bridges two longstanding theoretical traditions: status characteristics theory, developed primarily by sociologists, and self-categorization theory which is rooted in British social psychology. Status characteristics theory explains how culturally valued social characteristics lead to interaction advantages and disadv...

This research addresses fairness perceptions in the much-studied public goods experimental setting. In a typical public goods scenario, group members make a series of decisions regarding how much, if any, of their personal resources to contribute to the "collective good." Usually the collective good accrues value which then gets distributed evenly...

This study evaluated the relationship between interpersonal communication about cigarette health warning labels (HWLs), psychological responses to HWLs, and smoking cessation attempts. Data were analyzed from online consumer panels of adult smokers in Australia, Canada and Mexico, during implementation of new pictorial health warning labels (HWLs)...

Mysticism and related concepts have appeared in a variety of academic and nonacademic contexts. We begin by narrowing our focus to several general definitions that emphasize properties that have proved to be of interest to social and behavioral scientists. In such contexts, mystical knowledge typically refers to a special kind of positive, life-cha...

In this chapter, Barry Markovsky and Ali Kazemi provide a formalization of SRT. They initially state that the common focus of social science activity remains on empirical analysis and hypothesis testing, with relatively little attention paid to the internal structures of the theories motivating those hypotheses. Markovsky and Kazemi provide a compr...

The purpose stated by Barry Markovsky and Nick Berigan in this chapter is to link the social dilemmas and justice research areas and SRT. Situations in which individual and collective interests conflict are focused in social dilemma theorizing, while justice situations involve judgments of fairness and responses to perceived unfairness. Studying ju...

We offer the first comparison between “direct†and “indirect†methods for measuring perceptions of distributive justice in reward allocations. The direct method simply asks respondents what they would consider to be a fair salary for a particular person in a given set of circumstances. In contrast, the indirect method infers fair salaries fro...

We detail the evolution of open interaction coding schemes that have long been used to capture behavioral indicators of the power and prestige order in status characteristics research. Although the theoretical variables ostensibly measured with these methods are few and explicit, the implementation of open interaction coding is not standardized and...

Previous work has led to divergent conclusions about how power affects the accuracy of network perceptions in groups and organizations. This paper develops and tests an argument linking higher power to less accurate network perception. Results from the first experiment showed that, relative to participants primed with high power, those primed with...

Complementing recent work on the effects of power on network perceptions, we offer a theory specifying how knowledge of network structures and exchange processes differentially affect the use of power by advantaged and disadvantaged positions. We argue that under certain conditions, network knowledge is beneficial to occupants of low-power position...

Markovsky, B. (2010). Modularizing small group theories in sociology. Small Group Research, 41, 664-687. Original DOI: 10.1177/1046496410367437 In the article above, figure 1 was printed incorrectly.

This article asserts that it is beneficial to formulate theories using methods specifically designed to facilitate and promote integrations. Although it is written using illustrations primarily from sociology, the discussion is relevant to other fields to whatever extent their theories may be deemed informal (i.e., presented without explicitly defi...

Theories in the justice area have proliferated with little regard either to their interconnections or to the general scientific criterion of parsimony. Recently, there have been several attempts to integrate justice theories. However, there has been practically no discussion of theoretical method, that is, precisely what it means to integrate two o...

Nearly all of sociology's top graduate training programs require their students to complete one or two courses on sociological theory. The instructors for these courses have an extraordinary opportunity to affect the perspectives and practices of future generations of scholars. This study assesses the backgrounds, attitudes, beliefs, and practices...

Can people influence others solely by virtue of shared group membership? To address this and related questions, we offer a theory of group-mediated social influence and then test it in a standardized collective task setting. The theory capitalizes on uncertainty reduction principles found in two longstanding social psychological traditions: social...

For a decade or so beginning around the mid-1980s, it was relatively commonplace to encounter calls by prominent sociologists to build bridges between micro- and macro-social phenomena. Each effort typically offered a "theoretical framework" for bridging the ostensible gap – a few sensitizing concepts, perhaps a small typology or rough causal diagr...

The study of group processes has benefited from longstanding programs of theory-driven research on status and power. The present work constructs a bridge between two formal theories of status and power: Status Characteristics Theory and Network Exchange Theory. Two theoretical models, one for “status value” and one for “status influence,” illuminat...

Network exchange theory (NET) predicts differences in the resource accumulations of positions in interconnected groups of actors. The theory distinguishes between two types of networks-strong and weak power. To date only a few studies have tested the theory under weak power conditions. In the present research we investigate six line networks that c...

In spite of strong public expressions of skepticism from the scientific community, polls show that more than nine out of ten American adults profess belief in paranormal phenomena. Some scientists view this as a social problem, directing much blame (but little research) at a variety of sources including lack of critical thinking skills, fads, need...

Theoretical progress is essential to the viability of any scientific subdiscipline. Ever since a growth spurt in the 1980s, however, and despite a very active research enterprise, distributive justice theory has developed very little. Our approach is first to discuss the role that theory plays in disciplinary growth. After noting the indicators of...

nary processes, but there is a place for such work. Still another magical process, related to emergence and evolution, is feedback. It would be nice if social behavior proceeded step-by-step, actors behaving according to predetermined scripts. Knowing the scripts would be sufficient to explain and predict the ensuing patterns and structures. Fortun...

The new millennium opens the third decade of work on network exchange theory. During two decades of continuous growth, the program has been tested as intensively and extensively as any in sociology. This article summarizes existing research and describes new directions. First, we describe basic network connections and recently discovered structural...

The expected consequences of a score on an ability test can constrain individual performance. The authors predict that status processes, including status differences and the differences in rewards and costs that result, will produce differences in ability test scores between high-status and low-status individuals. In three controlled experi- ments,...

Active and heterogeneous disciplines constantly spawn new theories and theoretical variants. By definition, each such offering is heterodox to the degree that its veracity would diminish accepted theories. Most often heterodox theories are dismissed out of hand for nonrational reasons, such that they just seem too bizarre. Most of the time, too, ra...

Frequently social theorists conflate power and influence, often subsuming influence under a broad conception of power. Two contemporary theories separate them. Elementary theory has investigated power, status characteristics and expectations states theory has investigated interpersonal influence, and neither theory has considered the phenomenon of...

Markovsky et al criticize Yamaguchi's (1996) theory of power in social exchange networks, revealing internal theoretical contradictions. Yamaguchi responds to the criticisms.

Social scientists have a clear choice in how they may approach theory development. One path leads to "nebulous" theories that lack any real explanatory power. The other path capitalizes on evolutionary principles of variation and selection, vastly increasing the chances for explanatory success. I illustrate these ideas by reference to "artificial l...

Faculty and graduate students associated with the Center for the Study of Group Processes at the University of Iowa use computers for a variety of research-related purposes. This article describes the various uses of computers from the perspectives of three researchers: (a) the center's director, (b) an assistant professor just establishing his res...

Various theoretical accounts of power in social exchange networks have emerged in recent years. We use a new experimental setting to test assumptions that appear to be implicit in all network exchange theories of power: Actors in exchange networks increase their demands following social exchange and concede more resources when excluded. We also tes...

The articles by Bienenstock/Bonacich and Willer/Skvoretz claim similar goals: to explore ways that game theory and network exchange theory may inform one another. Willer and Skvoretz offer a method for conceptualizing the micro-processes of network exchange theory in game theoretic terms, and conduct empirical tests of the resulting new formulation...

Social psychology stands to benefit from multilevel theories that link it to both lower and higher levels of analysis. Making the link, however, requires a level of theoretical rigor heretofore relatively uncommon in the social sciences. After refuting several common objections to this brand of theorizing, I offer a rationale and a set of criteria...

"X-Net" is a computer simulation that I developed in conjunction with Network Exchange Theory. Users of X-Net can explore the effects of different network structures, rules of exchange, and negotiators' strategies on the dynamics and outcomes of resource exchanges in social networks. This article recounts the process of X-Net's development, in addi...

Network exchange theory predicts relative profits from negotiations among actors in social exchange networks (Markovsky et al. 1993; Markovsky, Wilier & Patton 1988). Here we extend the theory to allow exact predictions, rather than merely ordinal, for actors' exchange profits. This is accomplished by integrating two important factors. First, a res...

Networks have been discovered for which Network Exchange Theory (NET Markovsky, Willer and Patton 1988; Lovaglia, Skvoretz, Willer and Markovsky 1995) fails to provide tenable predictions. Here we elaborate NET to create a more general method. We show not only when and where exchange networks break into simpler substructures, but propose rules to d...

Sociologists have begun to explore the gains for theory and research that might be achieved by artificial intelligence technology: symbolic processors, expert systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and classifier systems. The first major accomplishments of artificial social intelligence (ASI) have been in the realm of theory, where these tec...

A unique multilevel perspective-structural social psychology-is explicated to help build theoretical bridges between micro and macro levels of analysis in sociology. The perspective portrays actors (human or corporate) as having minimal properties of purposiveness and responsiveness, encounters as interaction episodes between multiple actors, micro...

We extend network exchange theory (Markovsky, Willer, and Patton 1988) to accommodate a new class of power phenomena. Previous theory and research have shown that structural configurations in some networks promote or inhibit exchange opportunities, leading to robust power and resource differentials. The extension identifies a structural basis for s...

A new phase of research and theorizing about social exchange networks is now emerging: efforts are aimed at predicting exact exchange outcomes for different network positions. Two types of network exchange computer simulations and an analytic method were used to generate such predictions for the nine ‘common networks’. Conditions are provided under...

Central to equity and distributive justice theories is the assumption that reward inequities produce feelings of distress and that such feelings motivate efforts to reduce the perceived injustice. Physiological arousal under such conditions would provide direct evidence of injustice distress. To date, no such evidence exists. In the present study,...

This research demonstrates that contextual information plays a significant role in determining evaluations of just reward levels and degrees of injustice. Under specific conditions, assimilation effects are shown to bias justice evaluations toward a reference "anchor"; contrast effects bias judgments away from contextual anchors. Five vignette expe...

Many theories address the problem of how a social structure affects the experiences and behaviors of its members. This paper offers a network-exchange theory to solve this problem. Previous research has shown that the nature and outcomes of negotiations among individual or corporate actors can be inferred from their network positions. The impact of...

As blockmodeling methods receive wider application in the social sciences, it becomes increasingly important to understand precisely how blockmodeling informs social theory. A recent paper in this journal by Gartrell (1985) provides a case in point. That work illustrates both the untapped potential of blockmodeling for detecting patterns in social...

This theory of distributive justice integrates and refines ideas from the equity, distributive justice and relative deprivation approaches in a formal framework spanning levels of analysis. It assumes that individuals form judgments about the propriety of reward allocations based upon social comparisons across individuals, groups or standards, and...

A body of research within the status characteristics and expectation states program is concerned with eliminating status disadvantages in a single, collective group-task situation. The present work attempts to determine the extent to which such status interventions will transfer across different group tasks and partners. We argue that this problem...

It was hypothesized that increasing the sound level of the emotional expressions of a crowd would heighten arousal in observers and enhance their performance of dominant mimetic responses. Observers viewed a videotaped arm wrestling match under two levels of crowd noise (high and low). The results show that the observers' arm activity was greater u...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 1983. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-78). Typescript (photocopy).