Abstract
Status beliefs link social distinctions, such as gender and race, to assumptions about competence and social worth. Recent modeling work in status construction theory suggests that interactions in small, task focused groups can lead to the spontaneous emergence and diffusion of such beliefs in larger populations. This earlier work has focused on dyads as the smallest possible groups in which status beliefs might emerge from face-to-face interaction. In today's societies, however, many task focused interactions take place in groups larger than dyads. In this article, we therefore develop an agent-based computational model that enables us to study the emergence of status beliefs in groups larger than dyads. With this model, we address questions such as: Do basic principles of task focused interaction systematically favor the emergence of status beliefs in groups larger than dyads? Does the time-frame over which small groups interact affect the likelihood with which status beliefs emerge? How does group size affect the emergence of status beliefs? Computational experimentation with the new model suggests that behavioral principles known to spontaneously create hierarchical differentiation between individual group members also tend to align these hierarchies with categorical differences and thereby facilitate the emergence of status beliefs. This tendency is stronger in smaller groups, and in groups that interact either for a very short or very long time.
Highlights
1.1 Men are frequently expected to be better at math than women (Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald 2002), white students are often assumed to perform better than black students (Steele & Aronson 1995), and physically attractive people are often assumed to be more competent than unattractive people (Jackson, Hunter, & Hodge 1995)
5.1 We contributed to research on the social construction of status characteristics by investigating how interaction in task focused groups larger than dyads can create the conditions necessary for the emergence of status beliefs
Earlier research suggests that the observation of consistent hierarchical differentiation between members of two different social categories can create the belief that members of one category are more competent than members of the other category, even when this objectively is not the case
Summary
1.1 Men are frequently expected to be better at math than women (Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald 2002), white students are often assumed to perform better than black students (Steele & Aronson 1995), and physically attractive people are often assumed to be more competent than unattractive people (Jackson, Hunter, & Hodge 1995). Each of these observations illustrates how status characteristics can affect the abilities and skills that others expect us to possess. A trait like gender can become a status characteristic if members of one gender are on average more resourceful in terms of income, education, and competence than members of the other gender
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