Advances in Group Processes: Volume 38

Purpose: We examine how one's occupational class affects emotional experience. To do this, we look at both general affective outcomes (job satisfaction, respect at work, and life happiness) and the experience of specific positive emotions (overjoyed, proud, and excited) during the week.

Methodology/Approach: Using affect control theory simulations, we find the characteristic emotions of four occupational classes, derived from Maloney's (2020) block model analysis: everyday specialists, service-to-society occupations, the disagreeably powerful, and the actively revered. Using these characteristic emotions, we make predictions about how likely it is that individuals in these occupational classes will report workplace affective experiences: job satisfaction and respect at work, and broader affective experience: general happiness in the prior year. Lastly, we generate and test predictions about everyday emotional experience of positive emotions.

Findings: We find mixed results for our hypotheses. In general, our predictions regarding the actively revered as the highest status block in Maloney (2020) are supported for general happiness, job satisfaction, and daily emotional experience. However, we find higher probabilities of happiness and job satisfaction for the disagreeably powerful, a lower evaluation but higher power block, than were expected.

Research Limitations: The current analysis uses only 268 occupations out of the 650 occupational titles in the US Census three-digit occupational codes. An analysis that includes the entire occupational structure would be more definitive. Additionally, it would be preferable to have emotion-dependent variables that were specifically tied to work, rather than broader emotional experience, to have a cleaner test of our hypotheses about occupational identities.

Practical and Social Implications: Prior research has shown how the emotional experiences associated with different identity labels can explain mental health outcomes, workplace anger, and broader patterns of inequality (Foy, Freeland, Miles, Rogers, & Smith-Lovin, 2014; Kroska & Harkness, 2008, 2016; Lively & Powell, 2016). Understanding how occupational class elicits certain types of emotions in everyday interactions may help scholars explain differences in health and overall life satisfaction across occupations that are not explained by material resource differentiation.

Purpose: Prior work has convincingly argued that social inequalities arise from the basic human tendency to place others into social categories with different cultural meanings and to allocate resources unequally across those categories. However, few studies have sought to identify the micro-level mechanisms that sustain and justify this categorical inequality. In this research, I show how affect control theory (ACT) can be used to generate novel predictions about the interaction processes that perpetuate stratification.

Methodology/Approach: I present a series of analyses based in ACT that examine (1) whether categorical inequality is reflected in cultural sentiments for social groups, (2) whether patterns of normative behavior and social treatment vary based on category membership, and (3) whether interactions produce different emotions based on category membership.

Findings: Analysis 1 identifies four distinct patterns of cultural meanings that differentiate the groups studied. Analyses 2 and 3 show how these differences in cultural meanings produce categorical inequality through interpersonal behavior and emotional experiences in normative social encounters. Unequal cultural meanings for social groups correspond with their positionality in the social order and support patterns of situated behavior and emotions that keep groups with different levels of status and power separate and unequal.

Originality/Value: This research shows how social norms constrain and enable actions and emotions by members of different social categories, how they depend on the combinations of actors who appear together in a given social encounter, and how they contribute to the reproduction of inequality in ways not well accounted for by earlier work.

Purpose: This study examines the affective dimension of racial threat. Most modern studies of threat are framed through Blumer's group position theory and measure threat as increases in levels of traditional racism or perceptions of competition. These measurements neglect to operationalize Blumer's affective conceptualizations of threat.

Methodology/Approach: Building on Blumer's theoretical framework, we outline threat's affective dimension through a presentation of new survey items designed to capture what threat feels like.

Findings: Using factor and regression analyses, we demonstrate how affect is distinct from perceived competition, and how it is positively associated with Blumer's theoretically predicted outcome of racial prejudice, in the form of increased levels of racial resentment.

Practical Implications: Future research by sociologists and other social and behavioral scientists should explicitly consider threat's affective dimension in order to provide a more robust picture of racial prejudice in the United States.

Purpose: Status characteristics theory assumes that the effects of status on performance expectations will be the same for both high and low status actors. However, this may not be true in all situations. Prior work suggests that in some situations, high status actors may ignore new information that should lower their position within a group's power and prestige order (Kalkhoff, Younts, & Troyer, 2011), making them resistant to status loss.

Methods: In a laboratory experiment, I introduced new status information to participants that contradicted their prior status position within a sequence of groups working on the same task.

Findings: Results show new status information that contradicts prior status orders is less influential on the expectations of initially high status actors, supporting the result initially reported by Kalkhoff et al. (2011). Additionally, I show this effect exists for two task-oriented behaviors, resistance to influence and response latency.

Contribution: This experiment suggests a “sticky expectations” effect exists when new status information is introduced to groups with established performance expectations. It also extends earlier research by showing the effect exists for multiple task-oriented behaviors and is not limited to situations involving the transfer of second-order expectations.

Research Implications: This research suggests that high status actors are more resistant to status loss than previously believed. I consider two possible mechanisms for this effect: self-enhancement bias as initially proposed by Kalkhoff et al. (2011) and an effect on collective orientation caused by performance expectations.

Purpose: Because past research has investigated nonverbal behaviors in clusters, it is unclear what status value is ascribed to individual nonverbal behaviors. I test status cues theory to investigate whether response latency functions as a status cue. I explore whether it affects behavioral influence or if it only signals assertiveness and does not have status value. I also explore how one's interpretation of response latency impacts behavioral influence.

Methodology: In a two-condition laboratory experiment, I isolate response latency and test its strength independently, and then I measure behavioral influence, participants' response latency, and perceptions of assertiveness. I also conduct interviews to investigate how participants interpret their partner's response latency to understand how people ascribe different meanings to the same nonverbal behavior.

Findings: I find that response latency alone does not affect behavioral influence, in part because how people interpret it varies. However, response latency does significantly impact participants' own response latency and their perceptions of their partner's assertiveness.

Practical Implications: This research demonstrates the intricacies of nonverbal behavior and status. More specifically, this work underscores important conceptual differences between assertiveness and status, and demonstrates how the interpretation of nonverbal behavior can impact behavioral influence.

Purpose: This chapter applies and integrates theories of status and stigma to better understand the mechanisms that drive the combined effects of the status of race and the stigma of criminal record in the context of the labor market. Using these social psychological theories of status and stigma, I propose and test two potential mechanisms – moral expectations and performance expectations – that might explain the compound or “double disadvantage” observed among Black job seekers with a criminal record. Within this synthetic application, I also seek to bridge and extend the literatures on status and stigma processes.

Methodology/Approach: To examine the relationship between race and criminal record and the potential mediating role of moral and performance expectations, I use a laboratory experiment consisting of a hiring scenario where participants evaluate mock, but ostensibly real job applicants who vary on the characteristics of interest. Participant evaluations consist of rankings along a series moral and performance-related scales as well as a set of workplace outcomes.

Findings: Findings suggest that race and criminal record aggregate to intensify disadvantage, with Black applicants who have a criminal record faring worse than other applicants on each workplace outcome. Results also support moral expectations, but not performance expectations, as a key mechanism driving this status-stigma intensification process.

Implications: This study has important implications for studies of race, crime, and employment as well as for theories of status and stigma. Future research should attend more closely to the role of perceived morality both in substantive work on race and criminal record and in bridging work on status and stigma processes. Pinpointing moral expectations as a mechanism of bias related to race and criminal record also opens new avenues for targeted intervention efforts.

Social comparison literature has long established that drawing comparisons facilitates competitive motivation. Yet, the literature has neglected how the actor may simultaneously become the target of comparison, which can likewise increase competitive motivation. Therefore, competitive motivation increases not only because coacting competitors draw social comparisons but also because they are simultaneously the target of other's social comparison. In this chapter, we build a dual process framework to explain how comparing and being compared each facilitate competitive motivation. We also posit that these processes – comparing and being compared, respectively – are bidirectional and reciprocal, as each process can incite the other. Finally, we discuss the circumstances under which comparing and being compared combine additively versus interactively to drive competitive motivation. Our theoretical framework brings together the disparate literatures on social comparison and evaluation apprehension under one unified theory of competitive motivation, and proposes new directions for competition research.

Purpose: This chapter aims: (a) to extend biased net models of homophily to complete networks; (b) to extend the scope of application of these models to processes of social exchange in a small-group laboratory setting; and (c) to link the theoretical model of attraction and repulsion with a standard statistical model of logistic regression as a way of estimating and evaluating the model.

Methods: We discuss the logic of biased net theory and show how it leads to formal mathematical models of tie formation and tie renewal under mechanisms of attraction and repulsion. We then estimate key theoretical parameters in the models by means of logistic regression.

Findings: The estimated effects of homophily in our models are moderate in strength, weaker than corresponding reciprocity effect, and processes of tie formation and tie renewal are driven more by considerations of direct reciprocity than group membership. Under attraction, homophily effects are stronger for tie renewal than tie formation. Under repulsion, the opposite holds.

Limitations: Participants in our study are divided into two groups based on a criterion that is likely to have been too weak to induce strong group identity. Measures that enhance the sense of group identity need to be introduced in future studies.