Framing is a commonly recommended strategy for building consensus on issues such as climate change and the pandemic response. These recommendations stem from research identifying potent messages across audiences and domains. Framing research, dominated by survey experiments, often overlooks crucial social context, however, limiting direct applicability of findings. This disconnect motivates our central question: How effective are framing strategies in socially embedded informal communication networks? We develop an agent-based model incorporating three contextual elements known to moderate strategic framing: (1) the identities of interacting parties, (2) the competitive nature of political communication, and (3) the structure of communication networks. Simulation results demonstrate that framing's effect on aggregate opinion is strongly diminished when modest levels of partisan homophily or potential for cross-partisan backlash are introduced. Under conditions of homophily, strategic framing by one group can actually widen partisan cleavages by creating echo chambers of highly persuasive individuals. Alternative interventions, such as increasing cross-partisan interaction or depoliticizing existing interactions, may be even more effective than framing efforts in informal networks. When framing campaigns appear effective, as many professional campaigns do, their success may stem less from the frame's persuasive power itself and more from how communication professionals strategically navigate the social constraints we identify.

The relationship between fear of death and religiosity remains unclear, with research offering conflicting evidence. Existing theories——including buffering theory, terror management theory, death apprehension theory, and curvilinearity theory—have struggled to reconcile findings that suggest positive, negative, or curvilinear relationships. This study introduces a novel framework to categorize identity meanings. Grounded in identity theory, I distinguish between behavioral religiosity meanings (e.g., religious attendance) and attitudinal religiosity meanings (e.g., self-perceived religiosity). Using Chapman Survey of American Fears (Waves 2–7) data sets, I find that results reveal opposing effects: behavioral religiosity meanings are negatively related to fear of death, and attitudinal religiosity meanings are positively related to fear of death. These findings clarify mixed results in the literature, suggesting that underlying identity meanings not only can be categorized but also have differential implications for an identity. This study advances identity theory by categorizing identity meanings and calls for nuanced analyses of religiosity's emotional consequences, informing theoretical discourse and practical interventions.

While mental health and suicide literatures have established a cultural turn, local group cultures are largely ignored. By examining how several groups of students in a rural high school navigate emotional distress in peer groups, this paper reveals the local emotion cultures structured by their own local interaction order. I identify morbid talk in which youth joke about suicide, trauma, and other emotional pain. Engaging in morbid talk temporarily relieves emotional tensions, generates social solidarity, and reproduces group boundaries. A local interaction order involving negative emotions emerges: Emotional pain must be expressed as humor, and one must obtain a moral license to do so. My findings thus bring forth the group variations in cultures of emotional distress, contributing to the emotion and the youth mental health and suicide literatures. I conclude by discussing future research directions.

The principles of agency and time and place are key tenets of the life course perspective. The development of educational goals, a highly impactful agentic process, is generally considered in universalistic terms, however, without consideration of the historical context of opportunity. In this article, we address two research questions. First, do psychological dimensions reflective of agency (optimism, self-esteem, and the academic self-concept) foster teenagers' educational plans? Second, has the predictive power of these agentic resources changed in recent decades? We address these questions using data from the Youth Development Study, including a cohort of teenagers followed from the late 1980s and since 2009, a panel of their adolescent children. Results from ordinal logistic regressions confirm our hypothesis that agency is more important for educational plans in times of economic stability and opportunity (second generation) than in times of instability and precarity (children of the early second-generation child bearers).

Previous research generally suggests that increased racial-ethnic intergroup contact can reduce prejudice. Most studies, however, have examined the effects of contact within one social domain, that is, the specific context in which contact occurs. Thus, the question of how the social domain shapes the strength and direction of the contact–prejudice relationship remains underexplored. Utilizing data from a self-administered online survey (N = 637), this exploratory study examines the effects of intergroup contact on neighbor acceptance across different social domains (family, friends, work, social media, school, neighborhood, community), paying particular attention to differences by respondent and hypothetical neighbor race-ethnicity. Findings reveal that not all domains of intergroup contact are significantly associated with neighbor acceptance and that the positive effects of intergroup contact vary by racial-ethnic group. We also find evidence that intergroup contact can reduce neighbor acceptance for same race-ethnic individuals among minority respondents. This study nuances conceptualizations of context in assessing the effectiveness of contact in reducing prejudice.

This address is in the form of five confessions that speak to (1) my relationship with social psychology (“For years, I did not I identify as or feel like a social psychologist), (2) others’ relationship with social psychology (“I am not alone in feeling this way”), (3) social psychology’s relationship with sociology (“I believe that social psychology is undervalued in sociology”), (4) sociology’s relationship with other academic disciplines and the public sphere (“I believe that sociology is undervalued elsewhere”), and (5) strategies from the social psychological toolbox that we can use to reenvision the portrayal of social psychology (“I believe that we can do better”). This address not only speaks to the challenges faced by social psychology but also hints at the promise of social psychology as a vibrant and fundamental area within sociology and as an exemplar for sociology.

Informational content and topics strategically curated by institutions underpin reward structures in knowledge economies. Using a historical database of 298,879 questions from popular American television trivia game show Jeopardy! , this article presents a case study revealing competitive inequalities rooted in a large, historical information corpus. Historically, women contestants comprise 45.5 percent of Jeopardy! contestants but only 32.5 percent of game winners. This raises questions about the fairness of the game and mechanisms underpinning the gender performance gap. Contestant gender and occupation are predictive of topical strengths and weaknesses. Information frequency, value, and difficulty are identified as knowledge properties that underpin competitive advantages and disadvantages. Questions with female answers on Jeopardy! are less frequent, valuable, and difficult than male and nongendered questions. This deprives women contestants of competitive advantages because contestants exhibit homophilous tendencies with gendered knowledge; women exhibit advantages with female questions, and men are advantaged by male questions. The Jeopardy! gender performance gap can be reduced—but not eliminated—by equalizing the frequency, value, and difficulty of gendered questions. As a microcosm of dominant cultural trends and powerful societal knowledge institutions, Jeopardy! is a broadly applicable case study revealing inequalities in ostensibly meritocratic knowledge evaluation systems. Results reveal specific means to identify and mitigate social inequalities in knowledge institutions and ostensibly meritocratic information-based competitions.