Status Cues, Status Biases, and Interaction

University Of North Carolina At Charlotte, Charlotte NC

Investigators

Abstract

This project studies how status cues--verbal and visual information that can be used to infer skill--affect interaction, perceived leadership, perceived competence, and social worth. The approach is to develop a classification of cue types and integrate them with well-established theories about status characteristics such as gender, race, and education. Nonverbal behavior has long been recognized as influencing interaction; this work provides theoretical grounding for those effects as well as for other cue types (e.g., verbal claims). Understanding these effects can be used for interventions, including to counter socially disadvantaged characteristics; such as countering disadvantages based on race or gender through displaying certain speaking styles. Status cues also can be used to determine the status structure of an unfamiliar group even when it is observed only at a distance or on video. Undergraduate and graduate students participate in most aspects of the research, with responsibilities commensurate to their experience. The project employs students of both genders and several of the ethnicities at the PIs' campus. Undergraduate students learn fundamentals of research design, conduct, and analysis. That information is useful in later study as well as practically, including for their future job interviews. Graduate students develop skills for their own research, thus contributing to the pipeline of future scientists. This work will extend formal sociological theories of status and performance expectation processes by conceptualizing types of cues and adding cues to known status characteristics (e.g., gender or education) and predicting the effects. Predictions will be tested in an experimental laboratory. The approach is to conceptualize abstractly, identifying abstract similarities among dissimilar concrete occurrences. For instance, leaning in and choosing to sit at the head of a conference table are instances of expressive task cues; a framed diploma and a college ring are indicative categorical cues. Empirical topics assessed experimentally include: whether different cue types have comparable effects under similar conditions; comparative strength of cues and status characteristics; cues' effects (if any) in augmenting or decreasing status characteristic effects; whether cues and status characteristics combine when they are consistently or inconsistently valued; and the mathematical form of cue effects, alone or with status characteristics. The goal is to develop and rigorously test an extended theory to account for all types of status cues and how they may interact with status differences to affect interaction processes. The project will develop new experimental techniques for instantiating status cues and measuring their effects and those techniques will be documented and made publicly available. The findings will have some useful applications as well; for instance, status cue production is at least partly under conscious control, so it can be used to reduce or to enhance inequalities caused by status.