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It’s the Conventional Thought That Counts: How Third-Order Inference Produces Status Advantage

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Abstract

A core claim of sociological theory is that modern institutions fall short of their meritocratic ideals, whereby rewards should be allocated based on achievement-related criteria. Instead, high-status actors often experience a “status advantage”: they are rewarded disproportionately to the quality of their performance. We develop and test a theory of status advantage in meritocratic settings. The most influential model in past research derives status advantage from decision-makers’ tendency to infer quality from status when quality is uncertain. The theory developed here integrates and extends this and other theories to explain the emergence of status advantage in the many meritocratic contexts where the decision-maker’s personal, first-order sense of quality is less important to the decision. We argue that in such contexts, decision-makers must often coordinate with others to make the “best” decision, and thus they focus on the “third-order inference” problem of discerning who or what “most people” think is higher quality, as encoded in status beliefs. Three experiments demonstrate that under such conditions, status advantages can emerge even though (1) status information does not resolve uncertainty about quality; (2) the status belief is illegitimate; and (3) no party to the decision personally prefers the higher-status option. The theory implies that status hierarchies are resilient in the face of significant dissent but may be subject to public challenge.

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... The position of the higher education presidency can also be argued to be male-typed because of the specific role of fundraising in the U.S. higher education market (Gagliardi, 2017;Nicholson, 2007). Successful fundraising is dependent on male-typed functions of negotiation and persuasion, providing a further status advantage to men relative to women when pursuing public-facing leadership positions, including the presidency (Correll et al., 2017;Hodson, 2010;Mazei et al., 2015). Examples from other industries underscore women's marginalization and lack of advancement when there is a perceived incongruity between feminine stereotypes and the masculinized ideal worker (Ridgeway et al., 2022). ...
... The organizational environment may also transform gendered norms about leadership. As previously discussed, there are dynamics of role incongruity that may specifically disadvantage women from advancing to leadership positions, including in higher education (Correll et al., 2017;Mazei et al., 2015;Rudman et al., 2012). ...
... However, changes within the broader organizational environment may precipitate changes within HEIs themselves, such that greater proportions of women leaders in other domains predict the advancement of women leaders in higher education. We previously indicated that the university presidency is a uniquely male-typed role, partly because its fundraising functions rely on male-typed skills of negotiation and persuasion (Correll et al., 2017;Hodson, 2010;Mazei et al., 2015). Therefore, changes in the demographics of other persuasive public figures, such as politicians, may precede demographic changes in university presidents. ...
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While women’s higher education enrollments and graduation rates have outpaced those of men in the United States and most countries around the world, women are less frequently included in academic leadership roles, including the higher education presidency. This paper asks what predicts whether and when a higher education institution has its first woman president, conceptualizing this event as a milestone of gender equality. We use a national probability sample of 234 four‐year U.S. universities and colleges, constructing a novel longitudinal dataset from 1980 to 2018. Employing event history analysis, we examine the potential mechanisms associated with when an institution has its first woman president over time. Our findings suggest that the demographic diversity of faculty and students, gender‐ and diversity‐supportive structures, and the broader environment in which institutions are embedded predict the likelihood that a woman will advance to the level of the presidency. In particular, the presence of gender studies programs and a higher proportion of women in state legislatures increase the likelihood that an institution will have its first woman president. At a time of growing challenges facing U.S. higher education, coupled with greater opportunities from having more diverse students and faculty, universities and colleges increasingly recognize the benefit of women leaders.
... Economists and management scholars, for example, have widely demonstrated that financial agents often imitate how peer agents would trade to herd into or out of capital markets especially when there is substantial rise-and-fall market dynamism, resulting in unconscious investment bias (Pontikes & Barnett, 2017;Welch, 2000). Likewise, the labor market literature has suggested that hiring managers would leverage gender to infer the choices preferred by upper-level managers, coworkers, or clients when those vacancies are male-typed, highly paid, or face high competition (Correll et al., 2017;Fernandez-Mateo & King, 2011;Vial et al., 2019). Less well understood, however, is under what condition, investors will anticipate that most other investors prefer to invest in male-led ventures and how they do so. ...
... In this research, we study when venture capital investors are more apt to invoke the anticipated funding preference of peer investors that may lead them to disfavor women entrepreneurs and how they develop such anticipation. Integrating insights from the literature on third-party bias 1 (Abraham, 2020; Correll et al., 2017;Vial et al., 2019) with social role theory (Eagly & Wood, 1999), we argue that when women lead novel ventures, investors lean toward making unpromising social approval forecasting-an anticipation of the extent to which a given venture will gain endorsement from other investors-and make gendered funding decisions that align well with the expected selections of key interested parties. To forecast what represents a viable option, investors often rely on the holistic evaluations of cues signaling that new ventures dovetail with the socially constructed system of logic, beliefs, practices, and prototypes of 1 Extant research has accumulated multiple terminologies describing gender bias deriving from accommodating anticipated preferences of relevant parties, such as third-order inference bias (Correll et al., 2017), third-party prejudice accommodation (Vial et al., 2019), audience-based gender bias (Abraham, 2020), anticipatory gendersorting bias (Fernandez-Mateo & King, 2011). ...
... Integrating insights from the literature on third-party bias 1 (Abraham, 2020; Correll et al., 2017;Vial et al., 2019) with social role theory (Eagly & Wood, 1999), we argue that when women lead novel ventures, investors lean toward making unpromising social approval forecasting-an anticipation of the extent to which a given venture will gain endorsement from other investors-and make gendered funding decisions that align well with the expected selections of key interested parties. To forecast what represents a viable option, investors often rely on the holistic evaluations of cues signaling that new ventures dovetail with the socially constructed system of logic, beliefs, practices, and prototypes of 1 Extant research has accumulated multiple terminologies describing gender bias deriving from accommodating anticipated preferences of relevant parties, such as third-order inference bias (Correll et al., 2017), third-party prejudice accommodation (Vial et al., 2019), audience-based gender bias (Abraham, 2020), anticipatory gendersorting bias (Fernandez-Mateo & King, 2011). In light of concision, we use "third-party bias" in this paper. ...
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To hedge unforeseen risk, investors may seek to fund male-led ventures that they anticipate most other investors will prefer, arriving at decisions biased against women. Yet, little is known about how investors infer such gendered preferences and when they are particularly likely to do so. Integrating insights from third-party bias research with social role theory, we posit that when women propose novel ventures, investors are more apt to make unpromising social approval forecasting—an anticipation of the extent to which other investors will endorse these ventures—and thus withhold funding support. This is because the intensified gender role violations due to women being entrepreneurial in tandem with being novel lead investors to impose harsher judgments that these ventures violate normative business practices. Our hypotheses received support from results of three methodologically complementary studies, including an archival study of Shark Tank (2009-2019) coupled with preregistered online and field experiments. By casting light on how venture novelty, a key determining factor of entrepreneurial success, makes third-party bias against women particularly salient, our work identifies a less overt “entrepreneurial gender dilemma” and derives new insights into policy making designed to help women entrepreneurs surmount financial and social barriers in the innovation-based economy.
... For instance, it is often hypothesized that anonymizing discussions helps alleviate biases associated with reviewer identities such as more senior or famous reviewers' opinions dominating. This is echoed by research on group discussions [1][2][3] which finds that participants sometimes use other participants' social status as a heuristic for assessing the credibility of their opinions. Another way this bias can manifest is through reduced participation of junior reviewers in discussion. ...
... Outside of peer review, prior research in sociology examines the effect of status in group discussions and decision-making, where status is based on task-irrelevant but socially valued characteristics of the discussants. In situations where participants' identities are shown [1][2][3], found that participants may choose to second or reject others' opinions based on their status or perceived credibility. Specifically addressing anonymity in social discussions, a study by [4] on student participation in online discussion boards such as Piazza reveals that students are more comfortable to engage in discussions when they are anonymous. ...
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Many peer-review processes involve reviewers submitting their independent reviews, followed by a discussion between the reviewers of each paper. A common question among policymakers is whether the reviewers of a paper should be anonymous to each other during the discussion. We shed light on this question by conducting a randomized controlled trial at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2022 conference where reviewer discussions were conducted over a typed forum. We randomly split the reviewers and papers into two conditions–one with anonymous discussions and the other with non-anonymous discussions. We also conduct an anonymous survey of all reviewers to understand their experience and opinions. We compare the two conditions in terms of the amount of discussion, influence of seniority on the final decisions, politeness, reviewers’ self-reported experiences and preferences. Overall, this experiment finds small, significant differences favoring the anonymous discussion setup based on the evaluation criteria considered in this work.
... Although personal beliefs about the competence of others are important, both theories emphasize the role of perceptions of society's dominant beliefs (sometimes referred to as ''third order'' or ''generalized second order'' beliefs; Correll et al. 2017;Mize 2019). The term ''generalized second order'' helps link this modern idea of stereotypes to classic symbolic interactionist thinking because these perceptions are what people assume the generalized other thinks (Mead 1934;Mize 2019). ...
... The term ''generalized second order'' helps link this modern idea of stereotypes to classic symbolic interactionist thinking because these perceptions are what people assume the generalized other thinks (Mead 1934;Mize 2019). These assumed beliefs of most others influence our behavior independent of our own personal beliefs (Correll et al. 2017;Doyle 2021). Both theories similarly assume widespread consensus in perceptions of competence (Fiske et al. 2002;Ridgeway 2019). ...
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Competence perceptions represent a fundamental dimension of human perception and have wide-ranging consequences for social interaction. Therefore, it is no surprise that multiple prominent social psychological theories emphasize the role of competence perceptions. We know that both a person’s gender and race-ethnicity influence assumptions about their competence, but we have only a few studies examining the intersections of these factors. Using a large survey experiment (N = 1,219), I examine competence perceptions at the intersection of 2 gender and 13 racial-ethnic categories. Results show large effects of both gender and race-ethnicity and also highly intersectional stereotypes; that is, there is no one overarching effect of gender or race-ethnicity but instead contingent effects. By oversampling racial-ethnic minorities, I also test the assumption of consensus for competence perceptions. Results show highly consensual perceptions, suggesting we all recognize society’s stereotypes even if we do not agree with them.
... Determining who gives and seeks advice is beneficial to illuminate how status is distributed in networks of relationships (Podolny, 2005). Against (Blau, 1964;Lazega et al., 2012;Podolny, 2005) Exogenous, typically imposed by Others that evaluate organizational performance and quality (Correll et al., 2017;Sauder et al., 2012 this background, we assume that those organizations that are considered to be competent in taking responsibility for socio-environmental issues are asked for advice by other organizations and gain relational status. To acquire a more precise understanding of the dynamics of relational status, one must therefore study interorganizational networks, especially advice networks (Lazega et al., 2012). ...
... However, status differences do not result solely from the dynamics of field relationships. Others also evaluate organizations in a status-relevant way (Correll et al., 2017;Sauder et al., 2012). Others typically assume their intermediary function in an expertise-based way and with references to societally legitimate principles (Meyer, 2019). ...
... needs to examine the social and cultural processes that sustain these status positions and shape perceptions of the status hierarchy (see also Accominotti, Lynn, and Sauder 2022,;Correll et al. 2017;Leicht 2022;Valentino 2022, this issue;Benjamin 2022, this issue). ...
... Too often, scholars focus on status as a social location rather than as a process bolstered by social and cultural factors, including widely shared cultural schemas. Yet evidence is ample of the power of culture in shaping men's and women's unequal participation in economic institutions (Correll et al. 2017). Research is also extensive on ways in which gender becomes the "master frame" in shaping family members' interpretations of gender and work (for an overview, see Ridgeway 2009Ridgeway , 2019. ...
... The assignment space is exactly this decision-making "arena" in which allocation and rewards can work in highly gendered and racialized ways. To this end, we turn our attention to one well-established context in which inequality thrives: ambiguity [23], [28]. Our data paint a picture that is full of ambiguity-most notably revealed in a set of inconsistencies and contradictions in interviewees' conceptions of stretch assignments, where they are seen as: random versus meritocratic processes, opportunities for innovation versus replications of old systems, and focused on growth and development for the employee versus benefiting the employer at the employee's expense. ...
... They would quickly shift from "I don't know" to being able to name processes and systems with distinct potential rewards and penalties. Rachel's words, heavy on a sense of "I don't really know but here is what I expect based on what I have heard" (an amalgamated quote from her transcript), hint at what sociologists call "third-order inference" (refer to [28]). In a context of uncertainty and not feeling sure, she relays what she thinks others think about how stretch assignments work, and in doing so, pulls from more readily available, dominant ideologies (e.g., beliefs in meritocracy) to outline who has access. ...
... Decision-makers often try to infer the macro states, trends, and generalized information about a society from indirect ties [33,34,35,36]. Moreover, they tend to rely more on the central members considered to have greater expertise and authority [37, 38, 39] to figure out "what most people think is best" (i.e., a third-order 35 inference) [40] if information uncertainties prevail. Recently, a study proposes a way to relax these two assumptions at once: giving differing weight to a node's direct neighbors according to their local centrality or number of direct ties (i.e., indirect ties from the focal node's viewpoint) to allow for the direct neighbors' heterogeneous influences [41]. ...
... Recently, a study proposes a way to relax these two assumptions at once: giving differing weight to a node's direct neighbors according to their local centrality or number of direct ties (i.e., indirect ties from the focal node's viewpoint) to allow for the direct neighbors' heterogeneous influences [41]. In this formulation, a direct neighbor's local centrality summarizes information inferred 40 from a focal node's indirect neighbors and at the same time determines the direct neighbor's status, credibility, and eventually influence. In fact, this idea has a long tradition in sociology [42,43,44] and has its theoretical roots in a family of global centrality measures [45,46,47,48]. ...
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Building on a recent study on scientific collaboration networks, we propose an induced diffusion percolation model that brings superactive nodes into focus. Defined as active nodes surrounded by at least k active or superactive neighbors, superactive nodes play a key role in innovation diffusion by inducing their neighbors to adopt an innovation. We investigate the induced diffusion percolation model using the modified Newman–Ziff algorithm on two-dimensional lattices (square and triangular lattices) and regular random networks with and without clustering. The induction by superactive nodes leads to a first-order percolation phase transition in two-dimensional lattices and a double transition—a continuous percolation transition followed by a discontinuous jump of the order parameter of the largest cluster’s strength—in regular random networks. Whereas clustering increases the percolation threshold in the classical percolation model on regular random networks, it decreases the critical initial activation probability that triggers a discontinuous jump of the induced activation.
... Others focus on perceptions of a culture's beliefs, or generalized second-order (G2O) beliefs (i.e., "what I assume most others think"); these are perceptions of what the "generalized other" thinks (Mead 1934). 1 Some argue that asking about G2O beliefs will reveal true first-order beliefs if people project their own beliefs onto most people (Fisher 1993;Ostapczuk and Musch 2011). Increasingly, however, scholars recognize that first-order and G2O beliefs are distinct, but that both can independently influence behavior, and thus both are important topics of study (Correll et al. 2017;Mize and Manago 2022;Ridgeway 2019). ...
Article
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Stereotypes are foundational to social life, with warmth and competence key to views of social groups. Some theoretical and empirical work on stereotypes focuses on personal “first-order” beliefs about social groups. Other work focuses on perceptions of a culture’s stereotypes, or “generalized second-order” beliefs. Scholars differ in which they consider to have greater impact or whether they think they are unique or represent the same underlying belief. In this visualization, I present data from a large online survey experiment ( N = 1,045) in which participants reported either first-order or generalized second-order stereotypes about 19 different social groups. For the majority of stereotypes measured, the results differ across the two methods, with perceptions of culture more pessimistic than people’s actual first-order beliefs would suggest. That is, people tend to assume that others hold more negative stereotypes than they actually do, and this is especially pronounced for negatively viewed social groups.
... Individuals tend to comply unquestionably when faced with valid objects, driven by social obligation and control rather than voluntary endorsement. For instance, research has shown that validity's coercive power diminishes negative emotions toward perceived injustices (Johnson et al., 2016), and thus helps maintaining status hierarchies (Correll et al., 2017) and structures of inequality (Haack and Sieweke, 2018;Walker et al., 1988). However, as mentioned above, in contexts of conflicting validity and propriety, evaluators may conceal their propriety beliefs due to fear of social repercussions, sometimes even actively endorsing a valid object they privately deem improper (Centola et al., 2005). ...
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Previous work on legitimacy has conceptualized its multi-level nature, encompassing individual-level propriety and collective-level validity. Recently, scholars have introduced the construct of consensus, the degree to which evaluators agree in terms of their propriety beliefs. While validity and consensus can overlap, they can also manifest distinctly, with validity masking underlying disagreement (i.e., low consensus). Further, some work has begun to theorize the effects of this validity-consensus incongruity from a multi-level perspective, but it has yet to systematically integrate micro-oriented theory to explain how evaluators assess legitimacy. We address this limitation by examining the individual-level consequences of the validity-consensus incongruity following a negative shock. Specifically, using a multi-level regression discontinuity design and data from 6,260 evaluators across 17 countries, we examine changes in evaluators’ propriety beliefs about the legitimacy of free markets following the 2008 global financial crisis. In contrast to prior research, we theorize that high validity amplifies a shock’s negative impact on evaluators’ propriety beliefs. In addition, we establish how consensus explains variation in evaluators’ responses to a shock, particularly in high-validity, low-consensus contexts. By bringing together two important strands of the legitimacy literature, we extend prior theory and pioneer an empirical test of the nuanced nature of legitimacy.
... Status is a third-order belief because it incorporates an actor's beliefs about what most others think might be of high quality or otherwise socially valued, as compared to the actor's personal beliefs about quality (i.e., a form of "first-order" belief). SeeRidgeway and Correll (2006);Correll et al. (2017);Sharkey and Kovács (2018). ...
Chapter
Organisations carefully attend to changes in their social status, since these can impact outcomes that are important to them. Thus, understanding the prevalence, causes, and consequences of status shifts is a crucial focus within status research. Existing research on this topic offers two distinct characterisations of status dynamics among organisations-one that views organisational status as a relatively stable asset that evolves only incrementally over time, and another that highlights cases of dramatic change, such as when an organisation wins a prize, declines according to formal rankings, or is implicated in a scandal. We review research in this vein, offering an explicit conceptualisation of status change as occurring when a critical mass (i.e., a substantial number of individuals or a few powerful groups) revises its evaluation of an organisation, and we highlight factors that lead to stability and those that drive change. We then discuss organizational responses to status change and conclude by offering suggestions for future research on status dynamics.
... The idea behind this approach is that widely held status beliefs associated with these characteristics (men are more competent than women; Whites are more hard working than Blacks) tend to bias the allocation of material rewards in ways that unduly advantage the members of high-status categories. This happens because status beliefs directly bias decision-makers' evaluations of the worthiness of evaluated actors, because status beliefs bias actors' performance by shaping their expectations of their own competence (Correll 2004), or because decision-makers' evaluations are biased by their anticipation of the status beliefs held by third parties whom they expect to interact with evaluated actors (Correll et al. 2017). ...
... The second builds on the insight that individuals also have a mental representation of persons in general. As prior work demonstrates, people imagine what most others expect as they determine whether and how to adjust their behavior to conform to these generic expectations 64,65 . Importantly, thinking about this generalized other is not the same as simply constructing a composite image based on a weighted average of known groups. ...
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Dehumanization of others has been attributed to institutional processes that spread dehumanizing norms and narratives, as well as to individuals’ denial of mind to others. We propose that blatant dehumanization also arises when people actively contemplate others’ minds. We introduce the construct of imagined otherness—perceiving that a prototypical member of a social group construes an important facet of the social world in ways that diverge from the way most humans understand it—and argue that such attributions catalyze blatant dehumanization beyond the effects of general perceived difference and group identification. Measuring perceived schematic difference relative to the concept of America, we examine how this measure relates to the tendency of U.S. Republicans and Democrats to blatantly dehumanize members of the other political party. We report the results of two pre-registered studies—one correlational ( N = 771) and one experimental ( N = 398)—that together lend support for our theory. We discuss implications of these findings for research on social boundaries, political polarization, and the measurement of meaning.
... Rather, implied rank is a status signal whose strength might vary across groups, contexts, and over time (we return to this issue in the final discussion). Moreover, we deliberately asked respondents about their own perceptions of the social rank of lifestyle activities, not what they think most people think (Correll et al. 2017). We did this in order not to conflate individual and social beliefs. ...
... Contemporary societies are characterised by hierarchies of status: high status individuals benefit from greater esteem, and the assumption that they are generally more competent (Ridgeway, 2019). One source of status is group membership -historically advantaged groups such as men and white people are afforded greater status and assumed to be generally more competent than historically disadvantaged groups such as women and black people, regardless of objective differences in ability (Correll et al., 2017;Neighbors, Mattingly, Johnson, & Morse, 2023;Rivera, 2020). ...
... Because men are typically perceived as higher status and/or more competent than women, this -often unconscious -reliance on gender can lead to lower evaluations for women than men (Ridgeway and Correll 2004, Correll and Benard 2006, Botelho and Abraham 2017, Snellman and Solal 2023. In addition, early evaluators often consider the preferences of others, which pushes evaluators to make more conventional choices, as encoded in status beliefs (Correll et al. 2017). 3 These gendered differences are also embedded in investors' behaviors during evaluation processes. ...
... According to expectation states theory, people rely on status characteristics-i.e., group-defining traits that are subject to status beliefs-when assessing individual competence and quality of contributions (Berger, Cohen, & Zelditch, 1972;Berger, Fisek, Norman, & Zelditch Jr, 1977). Furthermore, people may infer competence and quality from others'-rather than their own-status beliefs, explicit or perceived, in what researchers have called second-and third-order evaluations (Correll, Ridgeway, et al., 2017). Second-order evaluations rely on the status beliefs of specific others; third-order evaluations rely on prevalent beliefs in a group. ...
... In theoretical models, cumulative advantage is capable of producing persistent success differentiation between ex ante equivalent individuals, through path dependence on early random success. The prevalence of positive feedback in success accumulation in many contexts is made plausible by the existence of a number of generic mechanisms that could each generate it, such as status [4], diffusion [5], social learning [6,7], and increasing returns [8,9]. A well-known inference problem is that the distributional skew implied by models of cumulative advantage that is robustly found across contexts is also consistent with competing generative models that lack a reinforcement element, e.g. a model that assigns each individual an own propensity for success (a 'talent') [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. ...
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Inequality in human success may emerge through endogenous success-breeds-success dynamics but may also originate in pre-existing differences in talent. It is widely recognized that the skew in static frequency distributions of success implied by a cumulative advantage model is also consistent with a talent model. Studies have turned to longitudinal records of success, seeking to exploit the time dimension for adjudication. Here we show that success histories suffer from a similar identification problem as static distributional evidence. We prove that for any talent model there exists an analogous path dependent model that generates the same longitudinal predictions, and vice versa. We formally identify such twins for prominent models in the literature, in both directions. These results imply that longitudinal data previously interpreted to support a talent model equally well fits a model of cumulative advantage and vice versa.
... Racial status beliefs affect interactions or behavior through generally accepted, rather than personal, beliefs. Individuals hold both first-order (what I believe) and generalized second-order (what most people believe) status beliefs. 2 Within interactions, individuals will act on generalized second-order beliefs even if they do not personally agree with them (Correll et al. 2017;Melamed et al. 2019). Acting on these generally accepted beliefs coordinates social interactions by determining who should defer to whom. ...
Article
Double consciousness arises from a conflict between the negative appraisals of others and one’s own positive self-appraisal. In this study, we link double consciousness with racialized status beliefs, or beliefs about the competency and worth of group members. Using first-order and generalized second-order evaluations of explicit status beliefs, we examine the consistency between how individuals view their own racial group and how they perceive their group to be viewed by others. Drawing on survey data, we find high agreement in generalized second-order status beliefs among racial groups but misalignment between these evaluations and first-order status beliefs for marginalized groups. Black and Hispanic respondents exhibit double consciousness by rating their racial group as higher status than they understand most people to rate their group. The widespread existence of double consciousness in status beliefs has troubling implications for the development of racial identity among people of color and for equity.
... This amounts to their converging on conceiving, inventing and producing a 'new artificial man' so long as the attempted invention of a human type typically produces an artifice, as Scheler implies, and in that sense approximates a process of ideological fabrication or an act of simulation (as observed for America overall in Baudrillard 1999). This shared fabrication of the 'new artificial man' connects with or parallels the tendency of both systems to engage in the ideological manufacturing or political simulation of 'democracy' and 'freedom' even if defining the latter in their own respective theocratic and communist or rather socialist ways and relatedly in the "politics of dissimulation" especially during McCarthyism/Reaganism and Stalinism, respectively (Bourdieu 1998;Habermas 2001;Gross et al. 2011;Jacobs and Dirlam 2016;Pontikes et al. 2010; for broader remarks see Correll et al. 2017). The two systems claimed both to have invented the 'new man' and to have produced the 'true and only' democracy and freedom, thus having the 'best' people and being the 'most democratic' and 'freest' alike-simply, 'the best', as Reagan et al. explicitly proclaimed and their Soviet counterparts implied (Baudrillard 1999;Beck 2000;Jouet 2017). ...
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The paper argues and demonstrates that American capitalism, or conservatism, and Soviet communism show a convergence on the invention of the ‘new man’ as a novel human type. It then elaborates and specifies the main characteristics of the invented type. The paper constructs an index of the American and Soviet ‘new man’ composed of certain indicators of the latter as its components. It presents the results of an empirical analysis consisting of numerical ‘new man’ indexes for American capitalism and Soviet communism or the US and Russia, as well as other comparable societies such as countries belonging to The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It discusses the empirical results, notably the shared complete failure of American capitalism or conservatism and Soviet communism, to invent a new human type. It concludes, draws theoretical implications, and suggests directions for further research.
... One interesting path may be derived from recent research by Doyle (2021) on the role of cultural beliefs about trustworthiness in social dilemmas. Doyle argued that cultural beliefs may promote cooperation because people expect that others will cooperate, but also because they expect that others expect similar behavior from them (see for related ideas on higher order inferences e.g., Correll et al., 2017). One might wonder whether similar inferences could operate in our studies as well such that cooperative participants may A c c e p t e d have reasoned that their cooperation partner expected them to cooperate as well. ...
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Two experiments were conducted to explore whether and why procedural fairness may promote cooperation. In both experiments, participants first took part in a task in which they were connected to an allocator who then either selected a fair or an unfair procedure for allocating outcomes between them. After this manipulation of procedural fairness, participants performed a second task in which we studied their cooperation in a chicken game. In Experiment 1, participants were informed that their opponent in the chicken game was the same person who had previously selected the fair (vs. unfair) procedure. In Experiment 2, participants learned that their opponent in the chicken game had not been involved in the selection of the prior procedure. Both studies showed that having experienced a fair (vs. unfair) procedure facilitated subsequent cooperation in the chicken game. Media tion analyses suggest that this positive effect was explained by the finding that the prior experience of procedural fairness induced participants to expect higher levels of cooperation from their opponent, even when this opponent was not involved in the prior experience of procedural fairness.
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Informal status hierarchy is a ubiquitous feature of social life, and it is one that drives dynamics of dominance, influence, exclusion, and stratification. Utilizing data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, this article shows that friendship nominations among adolescents are sensitive to status distinctions and that this sensitivity can be exploited to infer status relations and the level of ambiguity those relations entail. A measure is developed to uncover latent status structures based on such relations among students, demonstrating the existence of complex hierarchical structures among communities. Differentiating between students’ rank (verticality) and embeddedness (horizontality), the analysis reveals orthogonal processes of stratification: A student’s rank is associated with their social role at the school, whereas their embeddedness is linked to traditional markers of stratification, such as race and income. The analysis demonstrates the theoretical utility of incorporating ambiguity of status relations and provides a flexible set of statistical tools to study relational status hierarchies.
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Automation’s extensive impact on the labor market and economy is well recognized, but the underlying motivations for its adoption remain understudied. To address this gap, we analyze an original dataset covering 1276 cities across 148 countries, using event history analysis to examine the adoption of automated metro systems. Our research suggests that city governments are driven by status competition in their decisions to automate subway systems. We find that high-status cities are more likely to adopt automation. However, this trend diminishes when cities are preparing to host a mega-event such as the Olympics, indicating that lower-status cities use these events as opportunities to adopt automation technologies. Our finding reveals that status-driven aspirations, manifesting in the spectacle of automation, are a significant motivator for adopting automated technologies, prompting further investigation into the socio-economic factors influencing automation and the symbolic importance of technological advancement across various economic sectors.
Article
How does competition for school resources, along with racial and socioeconomic biases, shape parental preferences for schools? In this article, I investigate how school attributes affect preferences and choice, which sheds light on the processes that maintain school segregation. To do so, I conduct a survey experiment that explores parental preferences and the tradeoffs inherent in the process of school selection using school profiles that resemble those available on widely used education data platforms. I find that parents hold the strongest positive preferences for learning opportunities and overall school achievement compared to other attributes, including school racial and socioeconomic composition. Additionally, though parents prefer schools that have higher equity rankings, highly equitable schools are less desirable to parents than schools with more status and learning opportunities. However, parents also hold independent racial and socioeconomic preferences and —on average—avoid schools with more students of color and low-income students. Furthermore, results suggest they are largely unwilling to make tradeoffs that would result in schools with higher fractions of students of color or low-income students. Taken together, this study links prior studies on the segregating effects of educational data with literatures on school segregation by illustrating the specific dimensions that drive school choice.
Article
Collective evaluation processes, which offer individuals an opportunity to assess quality, have transcended mainstream sectors (e.g., books, restaurants) to permeate professional contexts from within and across organizations to the gig economy. This paper introduces a theoretical framework to understand how evaluators’ visibility into prior evaluations influences the subsequent evaluation process: the likelihood of evaluating at all and the value of the evaluations that end up being submitted. Central to this discussion are the conditions under which evaluations converge—are more similar to prior evaluations—or diverge—are less similar—as well as the mechanisms driving observed outcomes. Using a quasinatural experiment on a platform where investment professionals submit and evaluate investment recommendations, I compare evaluations that are made with and without the possibility of prior ratings influencing the subsequent evaluation process. I find that when prior ratings are visible, convergence occurs. The visibility of prior evaluations decreases the likelihood that a subsequent evaluation occurs by about 50%, and subsequent evaluations become 54%–63% closer to the visible rating. Further analysis suggests that peer deference is a dominant mechanism driving convergence, and only professionals with specialized expertise resist peer deference. Notably, there is no evidence that initial ratings are related to long-term performance. Thus, in this context, convergence distorts the available quality signal for a recommendation. These findings underscore how the structure of evaluation processes can perpetuate initial stratification, even among professionals with baseline levels of expertise. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.11285 .
Article
When a group shares a viewpoint on a status order, their consensus imparts legitimacy to their shared understanding of that order. Conversely, a group espousing multiple viewpoints undermines the notion that one “true” hierarchy exists. To build empirical knowledge about how social groups contribute to the construction of status orders, we take the occupational hierarchy as a case study and map the structure of agreement across intersectional groups. First, we quantify the extent to which groups (1) agree internally on their occupational rankings (within-group consensus) and (2) agree with other groups (intergroup consensus). Using General Social Survey data on occupational perceptions, we find a cluster of privileged groups—namely, highly educated White men and women—who agree internally and with each other on the occupational status order. Lesser advantaged groups exhibit less internal agreement and do not cohere around an alternative conceptualization of value, leaving unchallenged the consensus of privileged groups.
Article
This paper examines how sellers use strategic downward selection to game consumer‐generated rating systems. I highlight the role of rating anticipation in sellers' selection of buyers – concerns regarding buyers' post‐hoc evaluations of a seller influence whom she chooses to transact with at the outset. To reduce evaluation anxiety, sellers strategically avoid buyers with superior market standings, preferring those with an inferior standing, who are perceived as more likely to be satisfied and provide positive evaluations. Analysing nearly half a million transactions on a major peer‐to‐peer lodging platform in which all participants list their homes, I find that hosts are more inclined to approve requests from guests with inferior homes. This tendency is stronger when hosts experience rating declines, heightening their evaluation anxiety. It is also more pronounced among experienced hosts who better understand consumer‐generated rating systems, and when hosts and guests are in the same country, facilitating social comparisons.
Article
Status and reputation both play important roles in the evaluation and choice of organizations. Status is used as a heuristic in the first stage of a two-stage process when decision-makers select a subset of status-proximate organizations, and cognitively costlier reputation-based comparisons take place in the second stage within this subset. Existing status research assumes that the relative importance of different dimensions of reputation in the second stage is not contingent on the status of the organization that is being evaluated. We argue that this assumption is not warranted. Evidence suggests that high status is associated with a focus on gains and opportunities while low status is associated with a focus on downside risks. Similarly, some dimensions of reputation are associated more with upside opportunities while other dimensions of reputation are associated more with downside risks. Consequently, we argue that the emphasis on reputation dimensions associated with upside opportunities relative to dimensions of reputation associated with downside risks is contingent on status, which provides the evaluation frame. We test our hypothesis and provide empirical evidence consistent with our predictions using a sample of 411,530 US applicants to Master of Business Administration programs.
Article
Why do first movers into a new industry sometimes gain an advantage simply because of the fact that they are perceived by audiences to be more authentic than second movers, whereas in other contexts such second movers are perceived as no less authentic than first movers? We theorize that this difference hinges on the amount of costly, risky “legitimation work” that entrants are perceived to have conducted in their efforts to establish that the new organizational form is reliable and acceptable. Whereas a first mover must expend great effort to reassure skeptical audiences that the new form coheres with their norms and that it can meet and even exceed their standards, later arrivals are often able to appropriate such legitimacy once it has been established. But such appropriation by the second mover makes its (often implicit) claim of original insight or vision seem less authentic than that of the first mover. In three complementary online experiments on audience reactions to online healthcare startups, we find support for our prediction that followers suffer from a lower consumer preference because they are perceived to have done less work in establishing the new form’s legitimacy. Our results show that when follower firms show evidence of participation in legitimation work, it may overturn the default interpretation and reduce the authenticity discount. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.17215 .
Article
Research Summary Extant research finds that status characteristics such as gender are frequently related to average quality evaluations by external audiences, but little is known about whether such characteristics are also related to consensus in quality evaluations. We examine 383 million film ratings by consumers to document that female‐lead movies elicit less consensus in quality evaluations than male‐lead movies. In split‐sample analyses, we find that male raters are more negative than female raters about female‐lead titles, and that the two audiences differ on dispersion and skew. A subsequent experiment helps distinguish between various mechanisms that might be driving these results, including actor sorting, audience sorting, and treatment effects on audience quality perceptions. Finally, we find that independent studios yield greater box office revenue from female‐lead movies. Managerial Summary Consumers often lack consensus about product quality. Does product gender‐typing influence perceived quality consensus? We examine this question in the film industry, where 28.5% of films from 1992 to 2018 had a female actor in the lead role. Using 383 million consumer ratings from a popular website, we find less consensus in ratings of female‐lead films compared to male‐lead films. Some of this effect stems from male audiences who, compared to female audiences, rate female‐lead films lower than male‐lead films and disagree more on their quality. We use an experiment with fictional AI‐generated movie plots and random lead‐actor gender to better understand what drives this effect. Finally, we find independent studios have higher box office revenue from female‐lead films.
Article
This paper explores the status-attainment process of entrepreneurial firms in emerging categories. Previous literature emphasizes that in emerging categories, being perceived as the exemplars is important to attain status. We emphasize that clear symbolic boundaries around emerging categories can increase the possibility of exemplar perception and argue that entrepreneurial firms and influential stakeholders of existing categories can affect the status-attainment process by changing such perception. Specifically, contrast and distinctiveness rhetorical claims employed by entrepreneurial firms and negative responses from influential stakeholders differently affect status by delineating symbolic boundaries around the emerging category to varying degrees. We find support for our arguments among Korean online newspapers. The utilization of contrast claims compared to print media or receiving conciliations from print media’s influential stakeholders increased the status of online newspapers, measured by news-source citations. However, distinctiveness claims compared to other online newspapers negatively affect status, albeit mitigated by negative responses from influential stakeholders.
Article
Full-text available
Peer evaluations place organizational members in a dual role: they evaluate their peers and are being evaluated by their peers. We theorize that when evaluating their peers, they anticipate how their evaluations will be perceived and adjust their evaluations strategically to be evaluated more positively themselves when their peers assess them. Building on this overarching claim of role duality resulting in strategic peer evaluations, we focus on a dilemma that evaluating members face: they want to leverage their evaluations of peers to portray themselves as engaged and having high standards, but at the same time, they must be careful not to offend anyone as doing so may cause retaliation. We suggest that organizational members about to be evaluated resolve this dilemma by participating in more peer evaluations but carefully targeting which evaluations they participate in. We test our theory by analyzing peer evaluations on Wikipedia, supplemented by in-depth semistructured interviews. Our study informs research on peer evaluation and organizational design by revealing how being an evaluator and evaluated can make evaluations more strategic. Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.15302 .
Article
How are people of Asian origin perceived in contemporary U.S. culture? While often depicted as a “model minority”—competent and hardworking but also quiet, unsociable, or cold—little work measures whether and how these stereotypes vary for Asians in different social locations. We use a large (n ≈ 4,700) quota sample of the United States, matched to key U.S. demographics, to map the content of Asian stereotypes across ethnicity, gender, income, and birthplace. We find that some stereotypes are largely consistent across subgroups—such as the perception that Asians lack sociability, but not warmth, relative to White Americans—while others vary substantially. Perceptions of dominance vary by income, while perceptions of competence are moderated by income and ethnicity in complex ways. Stereotypes have important consequences, ranging from everyday frustrations to depressive symptoms and employment discrimination. Our work provides a detailed picture of how stereotypes vary across social locations.
Article
Research Summary We examine the effect of organizational status on employment‐related corporate social responsibility (CSR). As employees derive nonpecuniary benefits from both organizational status and employment‐related CSR, lower status firms may invest in nonpecuniary employment‐related CSR to compete in a status‐segmented labor market. We identify the effect using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) in the context of the Fortune 1000 rankings, as we contend that the 500th rank position marks an artificial breakpoint in status where quality follows a smooth distribution. We find that firms just failing to make the Fortune 500 perform significantly better in nonpecuniary employment‐related CSR. Our findings provide causal evidence for the labor market advantage of organizational status and a richer window into the strategic motivations behind CSR investments. Managerial Summary We examine one strategic investment that lower status firms make to compete in a status‐segmented labor market: employment‐based corporate social responsibility (CSR). We identify the effect using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) in the context of the Fortune 1000 rankings, as we argue that the 500th rank position creates a discontinuity in status at a precise location where quality differences can be assumed to follow a smooth distribution. We find that firms just failing to make it into the Fortune 500 perform significantly better in nonpecuniary employment‐related CSR as compared to firms just in the Fortune 500. The findings demonstrate that building a reputation for being socially responsible may offset differences in status and make a lower status organization more appealing to employees.
Article
As postdoctoral training has become a requirement in many STEMM fields the influence of postdoc hiring on STEMM labor force inclusion and diversity has increased, yet postdoc hiring processes have received only limited attention from researchers. Drawing on status theory and data for 769 postdoctoral recruitments, we systematically analyze the relationship between gender, race-ethnicity, and postdoctoral hiring. The findings show: (1) differences by gender and race-ethnicity in application rates, and in whether an applicant is seriously considered, interviewed, and offered the postdoc position; (2) hiring disparities correlate with between-group differences in applicants' network connections, referrer prestige, and academic human capital; (3) between-group differences in network connections have the greatest power to account for hiring disparities; and (4) hiring processes may differ by applicant gender or race-ethnicity, the female representation in the STEMM field and the race of the search committee chair. We discuss competing interpretations of the results and highlight directions for future research.
Article
Existing theories explain how the states of nominal characteristics acquire status value and the implications of status characteristics for the distribution of rewards, honor, and esteem in groups. It is less clear how characteristics lose status value. In this article, we combine the logic of status construction theory with loss aversion from decision theory to develop novel predictions about status loss. We predict that removing the mechanism of status construction theory will result in fading consensual status beliefs and that this will occur faster for low status actors. This results in a period of conflicting or asymmetric status beliefs between groups. Results from a six-condition controlled experiment support key predictions of consensual status loss, with low status actors viewing a gain in their status faster than high status actors view a loss to theirs. We discuss ways to extend and refine the work and the implications of our theory for racial and gender status-based inequalities.
Article
This study investigates the extent to and mechanisms through which Matthew effects create persistent status hierarchies. We propose a model that highlights the role of cumulative status bias in the feedback loop that leads from initial status allocation to status confirmation. We investigate the formalized process of repeated status allocation in annual elections to the National Basketball Association (NBA) All-Star game. Using detailed records on player performances allows us to isolate the Matthew effect from actual productivity differences to show that a previous All-Star nomination improves the chances to be re-nominated. We demonstrate that this Matthew effect is partly explained by improved productivity after an All-Star nomination, but voters’ evaluations are also directly biased by a player’s prior status. Multiple previous nominations further improve a player’s chances, confirming the importance of cumulative status bias. The resulting status-biased persistence of achieved status implies ever greater decoupling of productivity and status, undermining the meritocratic allocation of status and resources even more than the existing literature acknowledges.
Article
Just as status generates inequalities between organizations and individuals, it also structures relations among states in the global field. In an effort to elevate their status vis‐à‐vis peers, states pursue a range of status‐seeking strategies. This article asks whether states that invest more heavily in these strategies are rewarded by relevant global audiences and receive tangible material benefits. To examine this question, I study two prominent status displays—bidding to host the Olympic Games and holding a temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)—and analyze their relationship with upgrades in sovereign credit ratings. I find that Olympic bidders and UNSC members are 10% more likely to receive a rating upgrade within two years. Further analyses reveal that these rewards disproportionately accrue to “overachievers” who are distinct from the typical members of these elite clubs: large, upper‐middle‐income states for Olympic bidding and small states for the UNSC. To explain these findings, I propose that in a highly uncertain market environment status displays bolster impressions of states' creditworthiness by signaling a commitment to international cooperation and obligations. The study contributes to our understanding of how status shapes global inequalities, and demonstrates that status‐seeking actions yield concrete material rewards.
Article
Full-text available
The determination of prices is a key function of markets, yet sociologists are just beginning to study it. Most theorists view prices as a consequence of economic processes. By contrast, we consider how social structure shapes prices. Building on embeddedness arguments and original fieldwork at large law firms, we propose that a firm's embedded relationships influence prices by prompting private-information flows and informal governance arrangements that add unique value to goods and services. We test our arguments with a separate longitudinal dataset on the pricing of legal services by law firms that represent corporate America. We find that embeddedness can significantly increase and decrease prices net of standard variables and in markets for both complex and routine legal services. Moreover, results show that three forms of embeddedness—embedded ties, board memberships, and status—affect prices in different directions and have different magnitudes of effects that depend on the complexity of the legal service.
Article
Full-text available
Gender disparities in wages and attainment caused by employer discrimination can come about by three very different processes: allocative discrimination, within-job wage discrimination, and valuative discrimination. For the United States, it has been established that within-job wage discrimination no longer is a major source of wage differences, while valuative discrimination potentially is. Less known is the role of allocative discrimination, especially in the hiring process, which we identify as the point where discrimination is most feasible. Our analysis uses personnel data on all entrants into a large U.S. service organization in the period 1978-86, focusing on managerial, administrative, and professional employees. We study the placement at initial hire and then follow job levels, wages, promotions, as well as departures, in years subsequent to hire.
Book
This book was originally published by Macmillan in 1936. It was voted the top Academic Book that Shaped Modern Britain by Academic Book Week (UK) in 2017, and in 2011 was placed on Time Magazine's top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923. Reissued with a fresh Introduction by the Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman and a new Afterword by Keynes’ biographer Robert Skidelsky, this important work is made available to a new generation. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money transformed economics and changed the face of modern macroeconomics. Keynes’ argument is based on the idea that the level of employment is not determined by the price of labour, but by the spending of money. It gave way to an entirely new approach where employment, inflation and the market economy are concerned. Highly provocative at its time of publication, this book and Keynes’ theories continue to remain the subject of much support and praise, criticism and debate. Economists at any stage in their career will enjoy revisiting this treatise and observing the relevance of Keynes’ work in today’s contemporary climate.
Book
We live in an era when individuals, organizations, and governments face pressing demands to be accountable. Not only do we expect actions to be transparent, we also expect them to be demonstrably transparent: the general public has the right to see disinterested evidence of performance, competence, and relative achievement. Quantitative measures seem to offer the best means to achieve these goals. They have the patina of objectivity: stripped of rhetoric and emotion, they show what is "really going on." Even more, they can reduce vast amounts of information to a figure that is easy to understand, a simplicity that intimates that there is nothing to hide, and indeed that nothing can be hidden.
Book
Americans are taught to believe that upward mobility is possible for anyone who is willing to work hard, regardless of their social status, yet it is often those from affluent backgrounds who land the best jobs. Pedigree takes readers behind the closed doors of top-tier investment banks, consulting firms, and law firms to reveal the truth about who really gets hired for the nation's highest-paying entry-level jobs, who doesn't, and why. Drawing on scores of in-depth interviews as well as firsthand observation of hiring practices at some of America's most prestigious firms, Lauren Rivera shows how, at every step of the hiring process, the ways that employers define and evaluate merit are strongly skewed to favor job applicants from economically privileged backgrounds. She reveals how decision makers draw from ideas about talent-what it is, what best signals it, and who does (and does not) have it-that are deeply rooted in social class. Displaying the "right stuff" that elite employers are looking for entails considerable amounts of economic, social, and cultural resources on the part of the applicants and their parents. Challenging our most cherished beliefs about college as a great equalizer and the job market as a level playing field, Pedigree exposes the class biases built into American notions about the best and the brightest, and shows how social status plays a significant role in determining who reaches the top of the economic ladder.
Article
How do social media affect the success of charitable campaigns? We show that, despite the promise of online platforms to generate social network effects in generosity through social contagion or peer effects, these platforms may instead stimulate costless (and less impactful) forms of involvement. Online social contagion might thus be limited when it comes to contributing real money to charities. This study relies on both individual-level longitudinal data and experimental evidence from a social media application that facilitates donations while broadcasting donors' activities to their contacts. We find that broadcasting is positively associated with donations, although some individuals appear to opportunistically broadcast a pledge and then delete it. Furthermore, broadcasting a pledge is associated with more pledges by a user's contacts, suggesting the presence of network effects or social contagion. However, results from a field experiment where broadcasting of the initial pledges was randomized suggest that the observational findings were likely due to homophily rather than genuine contagion effects. The experiment also shows that, although the campaigns reached approximately 6.4 million users and generated considerable attention in the form of clicks and "likes," only 30 donations were made. Finally, an online survey experiment indicates that both the presence of an intermediary and a fee contributed to the low donation rate.
Article
Why do Internet, financial service, and beer commercials dominate Super Bowl advertising? How do political ceremonies establish authority? Why does repetition characterize anthems and ritual speech? Why were circular forms favored for public festivals during the French Revolution? This book answers these questions using a single concept: common knowledge.Game theory shows that in order to coordinate its actions, a group of people must form "common knowledge." Each person wants to participate only if others also participate. Members must have knowledge of each other, knowledge of that knowledge, knowledge of the knowledge of that knowledge, and so on. Michael Chwe applies this insight, with striking erudition, to analyze a range of rituals across history and cultures. He shows that public ceremonies are powerful not simply because they transmit meaning from a central source to each audience member but because they let audience members know what other members know. For instance, people watching the Super Bowl know that many others are seeing precisely what they see and that those people know in turn that many others are also watching. This creates common knowledge, and advertisers selling products that depend on consensus are willing to pay large sums to gain access to it. Remarkably, a great variety of rituals and ceremonies, such as formal inaugurations, work in much the same way.By using a rational-choice argument to explain diverse cultural practices, Chwe argues for a close reciprocal relationship between the perspectives of rationality and culture. He illustrates how game theory can be applied to an unexpectedly broad spectrum of problems, while showing in an admirably clear way what game theory might hold for scholars in the social sciences and humanities who are not yet acquainted with it.
Article
How does gender inequality persist in an advanced industrial society like the United States, where legal, political, institutional, and economic processes work against it? This book draws on empirical evidence from sociology, psychology, and organizational studies to argue that people's everyday use of gender as a primary cultural tool for organizing social relations with others creates processes that rewrite gender inequality into new forms of social and economic organization as these forms emerge in society. Widely shared gender stereotypes act as a "common knowledge" cultural frame that people use to initiate the process of making sense of one another in order to coordinate their interaction. Gender stereotypes change more slowly than material arrangements between men and women. As a result of this cultural lag, at sites of social innovation, people implicitly draw on trailing stereotypes of gender difference and inequality to help organize the new activities, procedures, and forms of organization that they create, in effect reinventing gender inequality for a new era. Chapters 1 through 3 explain how gender acts as a primary frame and how gender stereotypes shape interpersonal behavior and judgments in contextually varying ways. Chapters 4 and 5 show how these effects in the workplace and the home reproduce contemporary structures of gender inequality. Chapters 6 examines the cultural lag of gender stereotypes and shows how they create gender inequality at sites of innovation in work (high-tech start-ups) and intimate relations (college hook-ups). Chapter 7 develops the implications of this persistence dynamic for progress toward gender equality.
Article
Americans are taught to believe that upward mobility is possible for anyone who is willing to work hard, regardless of their social status, yet it is often those from affluent backgrounds who land the best jobs. Pedigree takes readers behind the closed doors of top-tier investment banks, consulting firms, and law firms to reveal the truth about who really gets hired for the nation's highest-paying entry-level jobs, who doesn't, and why. Drawing on scores of in-depth interviews as well as firsthand observation of hiring practices at some of America's most prestigious firms, Lauren Rivera shows how, at every step of the hiring process, the ways that employers define and evaluate merit are strongly skewed to favor job applicants from economically privileged backgrounds. She reveals how decision makers draw from ideas about talent-what it is, what best signals it, and who does (and does not) have it-that are deeply rooted in social class. Displaying the "right stuff" that elite employers are looking for entails considerable amounts of economic, social, and cultural resources on the part of the applicants and their parents. Challenging our most cherished beliefs about college as a great equalizer and the job market as a level playing field, Pedigree exposes the class biases built into American notions about the best and the brightest, and shows how social status plays a significant role in determining who reaches the top of the economic ladder.
Article
We examine the trade-offs associated with using Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) interface for subject recruitment. We first describe MTurk and its promise as a vehicle for performing low-cost and easy-to-field experiments. We then assess the internal and external validity of experiments performed using MTurk, employing a framework that can be used to evaluate other subject pools. We first investigate the characteristics of samples drawn from the MTurk population. We show that respondents recruited in this manner are often more representative of the U.S. population than in-person convenience samples-the modal sample in published experimental political science-but less representative than subjects in Internet-based panels or national probability samples. Finally, we replicate important published experimental work using MTurk samples. © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology. All rights reserved.
Article
This paper tests the assumption that evaluators are biased to positively evaluate high-status individuals, irrespective of quality. Using unique data from Major League Baseball umpires' evaluation of pitch quality, which allow us to observe the difference in a pitch's objective quality and in its perceived quality as judged by the umpire, we show that umpires are more likely to overrecognize quality by expanding the strike zone, and less likely to underrecognize quality by missing pitches in the strike zone for high-status pitchers. Ambiguity and the pitcher's reputation as a “control pitcher” moderate the effect of status on umpire judgment. Furthermore, we show that umpire errors resulting from status bias lead to actual performance differences for the pitcher and team. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1967 . This paper was accepted by Jesper Sørensen, organizations.
Article
This paper identifies the causal symbolic effect of status on the prices organizations charge for their products. I exploit the classification of the chateaux of the Medoc, which sorted 61 wine producers into five growth classes in 1855, as a fixed hierarchical symbol of class status. The classification has defied attempts at revision for more than 150 years. This means that a chateau's rank in the classification cannot be reversely affected by the quality or price of its wine, which greatly facilitates the estimation of the causal effect of status. To determine whether status serves as a signal of quality under uncertainty or satisfies the motive of conspicuous consumption, I study a period of time during which the uncertainty about quality has arguably declined because the Internet has made wine ratings ubiquitously available. I identify a symbolic effect of status on prices that increases in a time of decreasing uncertainty, which suggests the motive of conspicuous consumption as a driver of the effect. But the results caution that we might commonly overestimate the symbolic value of status if we underestimate the disproportional value that markets place on the pinnacle of quality, the enduring nature of reputation, and the effect of endogenous quality choices on estimates of status effects.
Article
This paper is addressed to three tasks and the analysis operates at three levels. First, there is an attempt to specify an analytic approach to Marxist-Leninist sociopolitical systems that integrates regime and sociocultural units. This approach rests on a structural conception of political culture, a conception that stresses the informal adaptive quality of political culture, and that includes behavioral as well as attitudinal patterns. The second task consists of analyzing the paradoxical character of development in Soviet-type systems; development that simultaneously reinforces and undermines traditional-peasant political cultures at the community, regime, and elite levels. Finally, this pattern of development is examined in the context of a single Soviet-type regime and society, the Romanian.
Article
Social psychologists recognize that what we think others expect can affect our own expectations and behavior. To date, however, no theoretical explanation has fully integrated the effects of others' ("second-order") expectations with the much more clearly understood effects of actors' own ("first-order") expectations. We propose a theoretical extension and a corresponding mathematical model that incorporate effects of second-order expectations. We believe that these second-order expectations affect actors' expectation states and the power and prestige structure of groups, but that the magnitude of those effects depends on the status structure of the group. We outline possible variant ways in which second-order expectations function, and propose a design for a differentiating experiment to assist further theory development.
Article
This study examines whether the appointment of women into senior leadership positions has a more positive effect on share price than the appointment of men into equivalent positions. Our dependent variable is the degree of change in share price following the announcement of men and women into senior leadership positions. Although market reactions to corporate events represent a complex process, we argue that changes in stock price represent a barometer for how investors assess the decision's potential effect on a corporation's short- and long-term economic viability. We find a significant spike in stock price following the announcement of women into top leadership positions. The size and direction of change in stock price, however, is moderated by the gender composition of the industry. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Article
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.
Article
In a market context, a status effect occurs when actors are accorded differential recognition for their efforts depending on their location in a status ordering, holding constant the quality of these efforts. In practice, because it is very difficult to measure quality, this ceteris paribus proviso often precludes convincing empirical assessments of the magnitude of status effects. We address this problem by examining the impact of a major status-conferring prize that shifts actors' positions in a prestige ordering. Specifically, using a precisely constructed matched sample, we estimate the effect of a scientist becoming a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator on citations to articles the scientist published before the prize was awarded. We do find evidence of a postappointment citation boost, but the effect is small and limited to a short window of time. Consistent with theories of status, however, the effect of the prize is significantly larger when there is uncertainty about article quality, and when prize winners are of (relatively) low status at the time of election to the HHMI Investigator Program. This paper was accepted by David Hsu, entrepreneurship and innovation.
Article
Argues that the formal structure of many organizations in post-industrial society dramatically reflect the myths of their institutional environment instead of the demands of their work activities. The authors review prevailing theories of the origins of formal structures and the main problem which those theories confront -- namely, that their assumption that successful coordination and control of activity are responsible for the rise of modern formal organization is not substantiated by empirical evidence. Rather, there is a great gap between the formal structure and the informal practices that govern actual work activities. The authors present an alternative source for formal structures by suggesting that myths embedded in the institutional environment help to explain the adoption of formal structures. Earlier sources understood bureaucratization as emanating from the rationalization of the workplace. Nevertheless, the observation that some formal practices are not followed in favor of other unofficial ones indicates that not all formal structures advance efficiency as a rationalized system would require. Therefore another source of legitimacy is required. This is found in conforming the organization's structure to that of the powerful myths that institutionalized products, services, techniques, policies, and programs become. (CAR)
Article
The authors demonstrate the uses of agent-based computational models in an application to a social enigma they call the "emperor's dilemma," based on the Hans Christian Andersen fable. In this model, agents must decide whether to comply with and enforce a norm that is supported by a few fanatics and opposed by the vast majority. They find that cascades of self-reinforcing support for a highly unpopular norm cannot occur in a fully connected social network. However, if agents' horizons are limited to immediate neighbors, highly unpopular norms can emerge locally and then spread. One might expect these cascades to be more likely as the number of "true believers" increases, and bridge ties are created between otherwise distant actors. Surprisingly, the authors observed quite the opposite effects.
Article
Existing explanations of tokenism predict similar experiences for all numerically small, low-status groups. These explanations, however, cannot account for variation in the experiences of different low-status minority groups within the same setting. This article develops a theory of tokenism that explains such variation. Drawing on 117 interviews in the leveraged buyout industry (LBO) and a comparison of the differing experiences of female and African American male tokens in that setting, I argue that tokenism is contingent on the local cultural context in which it is embedded. Specifically, I identify two elements of an occupation’s culture—its hierarchy of cultural resources and its image of the ideal worker—that can specify some status characteristics as more relevant to and incompatible with the occupation’s work than others. In LBO, the industry values cultural resources that, on average, women lack but men possess, and the ideal worker is defined such that it directly conflicts with cultural beliefs about motherhood. Consequently, in this context, gender is a more relevant status characteristic for exclusion than is race, and female tokens are differentially disadvantaged. In addition to revising received wisdom about tokenism, this study integrates and advances social psychological and cultural theories of exclusion by deepening our understanding of the role of cultural resources and schemas in occupational inequality.
Article
Are people quick to adopt status beliefs about a social difference that lead them to treat others unequally? In a test of status construction theory, two experiments show that men and women form equally strong status beliefs from only two encounters with others. Men act powerfully on these new beliefs in their next encounters with others but women do not, possibly because women face greater social risks for acting on ambiguous status advantages. Women are just as likely as men, however, to treat someone unequally on the basis of an established status distinction. This suggests that men are first movers in the emergence of status distinctions, but women eventually adopt the distinctions as well. Our results show that people readily transform social differences into status distinctions-distinctions that act as formidable forces of inequality.
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In this article, we develop and empirically test the theoretical argument that when an organizational culture promotes meritocracy (compared with when it does not), managers in that organization may ironically show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women in translating employee performance evaluations into rewards and other key career outcomes; we call this the “paradox of meritocracy.” To assess this effect, we conducted three experiments with a total of 445 participants with managerial experience who were asked to make bonus, promotion, and termination recommendations for several employee profiles. We manipulated both the gender of the employees being evaluated and whether the company's core values emphasized meritocracy in evaluations and compensation. The main finding is consistent across the three studies: when an organization is explicitly presented as meritocratic, individuals in managerial positions favor a male employee over an equally qualified female employee by awarding him a larger monetary reward. This finding demonstrates that the pursuit of meritocracy at the workplace may be more difficult than it first appears and that there may be unrecognized risks behind certain organizational efforts used to reward merit. We discuss possible underlying mechanisms leading to the paradox of meritocracy effect as well as the scope conditions under which we expect the effect to occur.
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Groups often confer high prestige on individuals even when few members of the group ever interact with those individuals. To account for this phenomenon, I present a multilevel simulation model of a group's selection of its top-ranked member. In the model, the mechanism for social agreement on a top person is aggregation of group members' private acceptance of that rank due to the person's likely provision of a collective benefit. The simulation shows this process can generate group consensus on a top person, even in large groups in which there is no consensus on who has the most ability. It also generates predictions, including one that large groups will grant prestige primarily for nonrival benefits.
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Eponymy in science is the practice of affixing the names of scientists to what they have discovered or are believed to have discovered,(1) as with Boyle's Law, Halley's comet, Fourier's transform, Planck's constant, the Rorschach test, the Gini coefficient, and the Thomas theorem.
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We develop a new status construction theory argument that apparently valid social realities in which a salient social difference is consistently linked to signs of status and competence induce participants to form status beliefs. Supporting this social validity account, an experiment showed that when an influence hierarchy developed between categorically different actors and appeared to be consensually accepted in the situation and therefore valid, participants formed strongly differentiated status beliefs about the categorical distinction. Yet when slight challenges to these influence hierarchies broke the validating consensus, participants' status beliefs were significantly weaker and less clear. An implication is that acts of resistance can disrupt the emergence of new status beliefs, so that while some differences become axes of status inequality, others do not.
Article
Two types of expectations are proposed to guide social interaction: those one holds for herself (first-order expectations) and these one believes others hold for her (second-order expectations). Also, interaction is assumed to be guided by three motives: contributing to group performance, preserving status, and facilitating interaction. These points are developed by formally incorporating ideas regarding reflected self-appraisals, dramaturgical accounts of the interaction order, and expectancy-value theory into status characteristics theory. When first-and second-order expectations conflict and an actor's motives are equally weighted, it is suggested that second-order expectations guide interaction. An initial experiment provides empirical support and insight for discussion.
Article
This article offers a formal theoretical model of the emergence of hierarchy that bridges the division between individualistic and structuralist accounts of inequality. In the model, actors reproduce status hierarchies by adjusting their own status- conferring gestures according to collective attributions. These collective attributions are just the aggregate of individual gestures, leading to a self-reinforcing status ranking. Winner-take- all hierarchies are discouraged, however, when people prefer reciprocation of their status-conferring actions. The model therefore depicts a status ranking as an equilibrium resulting from individual responses to the trade- off between social influence and the distaste for making unreciprocated gestures. Analysis of the model generates several precise predictions about the patterns that social networks should exhibit at equilibrium. Data on interaction in task groups, friendship ratings in a fraternity, and play in a set of infant quintuplets is used to show that the formal theory makes unusually accurate predictions about network structure.