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.

People are stereotyped according to multiple identities—or social categories—at once, giving rise to “intersectional stereotypes” about warmth and competence. Most work on the structural roots of stereotype content—especially intergroup inequalities and divisions of labor—focuses on whole social categories rather than intersectional identities, so it is an open question whether these theories account for intersectional stereotype content as well. I define 96 intersectional “strata” based on gender, sexuality, age, and race/ethnicity and examine the relationships between socioeconomic status (SES) and occupations of people with those identities in census data and survey experiment participants’ perceptions and stereotypes of those identities. Results support a model in which SES, roles, and perceived competitiveness of people with varying intersectional identities lead to intersectional stereotypes that rationalize existing intersectional inequalities and divisions of labor. Findings suggest that intersectional methods and theorizing can improve understanding of stereotypes without sacrificing parsimony.

Research into ethnoracial identity has highlighted the importance of linked fate among people racialized as Black. Although linked fate recently has been applied to the study of mental health disparities, skin tone has yet to be integrated with conceptualizations of linked fate. The present study utilizes data from the 2020 Collaborative Multi-racial Post-election Survey to study these two types of linked fate and their relations to mental health (n = 3,046 Black respondents). Black linked fate does not vary by visual skin color, whereas skin tone linked fate does. Both types of linked fate associate with greater psychological distress net of identity salience, individual and collective perceived discrimination, and ingroup attitudes. A separate split ballot sample querying racial closeness (n = 1,040) confirms these findings, adjusting for the same ethnoracial identity and discrimination factors. Meanwhile, racial closeness shows a counteracting, protective association with distress.

What are the consequences of affect and efficacy for protest intentions, and do these consequences stem from personal disposition and/or situational characteristics? Here, we test a dual-pathway model of collective action in which anger and efficacy operate at multiple levels of analysis. To test this model, we administer a factorial survey experiment of student protest to a random sample of undergraduate students (N = 880). We find that the effect of anger on protest intentions follows two routes—one dispositional and one situational—and that the effect of efficacy flows through a situational channel. We also find that anger and efficacy are triggered by a broad set of situational conditions (incidental grievances, selective rewards and punishments, collective action frames, and protest size) and that anger is also a function of a narrow set of dispositional factors (protest attitudes). Taken together, our findings support a multilevel, dual-pathway model of collective action.