Explanations of error in survey self-reports have focused on social desirability: that respondents answer questions about normative behavior to appear prosocial to interviewers. However, this paradigm fails to explain why bias occurs even in self-administered modes like mail and web surveys. We offer an alternative explanation rooted in identity theory that focuses on measurement directiveness as a cause of bias. After completing questions about physical exercise on a web survey, respondents completed a text message–based reporting procedure, sending updates on their major activities for five days. Random assignment was then made to one of two conditions: instructions mentioned the focus of the study, physical exercise, or not. Survey responses, text updates, and records from recreation facilities were compared. Direct measures generated bias—overreporting in survey measures and reactivity in the directive text condition—but the nondirective text condition generated unbiased measures. Findings are discussed in terms of identity.
We present a methodological innovation for analyzing archival data that involves the framing strategies from the failed 1980 Iowa Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). First, we conducted an archival analysis that suggested that pro-ERA groups used "frame resonance," a strategy prominent in the social movement literature where activists align issues with ideologies. Meanwhile, anti-ERA groups used what we coin here as "frame dissonance" by depicting how passing the ERA clashed with ideologies. Next, we used affect control theory (ACT)’s Interact computer program to simulate how constituents likely responded to frames, given the distinct ideologies that existed during the time period. The simulations triangulated the archival analysis by (a) confirming our categorization of framing strategies as either resonance or dissonance and (b) identifying frame dissonance as potentially better for mobilizing than frame resonance. Our study demonstrates the value of Interact for triangulating archival analyses and adds a new framing strategy to the social movement literature.
This research evaluates the relative merits of two established and two newly proposed methods for modeling impressions of social events: stepwise regression, ANOVA, Bayesian model averaging, and Bayesian model sampling. Models generated with each method are compared against a ground truth model to assess performance at variable selection and coefficient estimation. We also assess the theoretical impacts of different modeling choices. Results show that the ANOVA procedure has a significantly lower false discovery rate than stepwise regression, whereas Bayesian methods exhibit higher true positive rates and comparable false discovery rates to ANOVA. Bayesian methods also generate coefficient estimates with less bias and variance than either stepwise regression or ANOVA. We recommend the use of Bayesian methods for model specification in affect control theory.
Split-ballot data are often used to study double standards. The key problem of this design is that individual double standards cannot be identified. I propose a simple two-step approach based on a matching pre-processing of the data to estimate individual double standards. Once this preliminary first step is completed, any statistical technique (e.g., regression models) can be applied on the new data. I apply the method to gender double standards on attitudes toward the age one leaves home by using data from the third round of the European Social Survey. The proposed method simplifies regression analyses of the effects of covariates on double standards and offers new opportunities for research on double standards.
We examine instances of youth cyber aggression, arguing that the close relationships of friendship and romance substantially influence the chances of being targeted. We investigate networks of friendship, dating, and aggression among a sample of 788 eighth- to twelfth-grade students in a longitudinal study of a New York school. Approximately 17 percent reported some involvement in cyber aggression within the past week. LGBTQ youth were targeted at a rate over four times that of their heterosexual peers, and females were more frequent victims than males. Rates of cyber aggression were 4.3 times higher between friends than between friends of friends. According to both an exponential random graph model and a lagged, network MRQAP regression, electronic attacks emerged far more frequently between current or former friends and dating partners, presumably due to competition, revenge, or attempts to fend off romantic rivals.
In this study, I examine how expectations affect the emotions experienced when people verify or fail to verify their identities. Identity theory points to identity verification (i.e., thinking others view us as we see ourselves) as a source of emotions. The control model of affect provides an alternative explanation, emphasizing one’s expected rate of progress toward goal accomplishment (or verification) as a source of emotions. Results from three structural equation models testing these predictions indicate both the distance one is from identity verification and one’s progress toward verification independently influence the emotions individuals experience. These findings indicate that the two theories can be used to inform one another to provide a more precise prediction of the emotions experienced as individuals’ progress toward identity verification.
We introduce conversation analysis (CA) as a methodological innovation that contributes to studies of the classic Milgram experiment, one allowing for substantive advances in the social psychological "obedience to authority" paradigm. Data are 117 audio recordings of Milgram’s original experimental sessions. We discuss methodological features of CA and then show how CA allows for methodological advances in understanding the Milgramesque situation by treating it as a three-party interactional scene, explicating an interactional dilemma for the "Teacher" subjects, and decomposing categorical outcomes (obedience vs. defiance) into their concrete interactional routes. Substantively, we analyze two kinds of resistance to directives enacted by both obedient and defiant participants, who may orient to how continuation would be troublesome primarily for themselves (self-attentive resistance) or for the person receiving shocks (other-attentive resistance). Additionally, we find that defiant participants mobilize two other-attentive practices almost never used by obedient ones: Golden Rule accounts and "letting the Learner decide."
An outstanding puzzle in the social sciences remains about the forms of perceived trustworthiness sufficient to produce trust. Survey experiments adjudicated between four models of the trustworthiness-trust link—social constraints, encapsulated interests, goodwill, and virtuous dispositions—and tested novel hypotheses about other-praising emotions (admiration and gratitude) as mediating effects. Two large convenience samples of Amazon.com Mechanical Turk workers yielded strong support for all four perspectives as well as novel predictions about the inequality of effects (goodwill = virtuous dispositions > encapsulated interests > social constraints). Two additional large random samples of public university undergraduate students replicated prior findings and provided evidence for other-praising emotions as plausible mechanisms that connect trustworthiness to trust, with larger mediating effects for goodwill and virtuous dispositions than for encapsulated interests and social constraints. Results indicate that trust can spring from multiple forms of perceived trustworthiness and that affective mechanisms play an important role in its development.
We draw on public observations conducted in a zoo to identify three instances in which adults make use of its specific spatial and symbolic resources to transmit socialization messages to children according to "naturalized" models of hegemonic gender difference. First, adults attribute gender to zoo animals by projecting onto them human characteristics associated with feminine and masculine stereotypes. Second, adults mobilize zoo exhibits as props for modeling their own normative gender displays in the presence of children. Third, adults discipline boys and girls differently in the context of the zoo’s built environment, and in doing so, they communicate socialization messages to children regarding how to behave in conventionally gendered ways. In emphasizing the context of the zoo as a site for the naturalization of gender categories, we identify how adults transmit gender socialization messages to children that promote gender stereotypes associated with the biological determinism of the natural living world.
Theorized as objective or constructed, risk is recognized as unequally distributed across social hierarchies. Yet the process by which social forces shape risk and risk emotions remains unknown. The pharmaceutical industry depends on healthy individuals to voluntarily test early-stage, investigational drugs in exchange for financial compensation. Emblematic of risk in late modernity, Phase I testing is a rich site for examining how class and race shape configurations of emotion and risk. Using interview data from 178 healthy trial participants, this article examines emotion and risk as mutually constituting processes linked to biographical context and social structure. Biographical events like economic insecurity and incarceration influence how risk is felt by providing comparative experiences of felt risk and felt benefits. Such events, in turn, are structured by class-based and racial inequalities, linking class and race positions to primary emotional experiences of risk.
This paper argues that inequalities can be more clearly understood by combining tool kit theories of culture that stress convergence between institutional expectations and individual behavior with symbolic interactionism, which emphasizes the interpretive and situational nature of behavior. I base these arguments on an ethnographic analysis of student responses to ambiguous expectations around help-seeking. Teachers’ shifting expectations created interpretive moments, to which middle-class and working-class students responded differently. Through a logic of entitlement, middle-class students saw ambiguities as opportunities for reward and tried to seek assistance. Through a logic of appeasement, working-class students saw ambiguities as opportunities for reprimand and sought to placate teachers by avoiding requests. Teacher responses to student behavior varied across situations but helped to perpetuate inequalities. Such findings suggest that the activation of tool kit resources and the stratified profits that result are more interpretive and situational than scholars typically acknowledge.
Drawing on participant ethnography and interviews of members of a knitting circle, this study examines how social psychological processes trigger changes to the meanings and practices associated with knitting. The findings detail how women in the group invoke a range of strategies to reshape the meanings and practices associated with knitting, while also defining and policing the material practices associated with knitting in such a way that the activity corresponds with the self-concept of members. The case illustrates how identity-related processes structure the adoption of new cultural practices. More broadly, the research calls attention to the role of social psychological processes in the production of culture.
One of the primary challenges in the study of culture and action is determining which cultural elements "anchor" (or influence) other elements. Notable attempts to address this problem include tool kit theory and dual-process models of culture and action. Insightful as these efforts are, they do not adequately explain action that crosscuts contexts, in part because they do not detail the specific types of cultural content that matter. This article draws on identity theory from sociological social psychology and a variety of perspectives from cultural sociology to propose an identity-based model of culture in action that begins to address these shortcomings. Past research supports the theory’s major claims, although additional work is required to fully verify the proposed sequence of situated action.
One of the most striking features of stereotypes is their extreme durability. This study focuses on the role played by cultural schemas and perceptions of low-status others’ adversities in stereotype perpetuation. Social psychological theories of legitimacy and justice point to the role of stereotypes as one means through which individuals make sense of others’ undeserved misfortunes by redefining the victim. This study connects this work with insights from cognitive cultural sociology to propose that stereotypes act as cultural schemas used to justify others’ experiences of adversity. Consistent with this hypothesis, findings from a cultural transmission experiment show that participants include more negative stereotype-consistent content when retelling narratives with undeserved negative outcomes than with positive outcomes. Cognitive cultural sociology and the cultural transmission methodology offer tools for understanding victim redefinition processes, with important implications for the reproduction of stereotype bias and social inequalities.
This study advances identity theory by testing the impact of (moral) identity activation on behavior in different social contexts. At a large southwestern university, 343 undergraduate students completed a survey that measured meanings of their moral identity. Later they completed a laboratory task in which they were awarded more points than they deserved. Participants were given the opportunity to admit (or not admit) the improper point reward. Behavior during the task was examined in varying social contexts: when a participant’s moral identity was activated (or not activated) and when participants completed the task while alone, in a group, or in a group where a numeric majority pressured them to not admit being given extra points. Results show that individuals behave in accord with identity meanings across social contexts when an identity is activated. Implications for identity theory regarding identity activation and how identities influence behavior across social contexts are discussed.