It’s the Conventional Thought That Counts

Abstract

A core claim of sociological theory is that modern institutions fall short of their meritocratic ideals, whereby rewards should be allocated based on achievement-related criteria. Instead, high-status actors often experience a "status advantage": they are rewarded disproportionately to the quality of their performance. We develop and test a theory of status advantage in meritocratic settings. The most influential model in past research derives status advantage from decision-makers' tendency to infer quality from status when quality is uncertain. The theory developed here integrates and extends this and other theories to explain the emergence of status advantage in the many meritocratic contexts where the decision-maker's personal, first-order sense of quality is less important to the decision. We argue that in such contexts, decision-makers must often coordinate with others to make the "best" decision, and thus they focus on the "third-order inference" problem of discerning who or what "most people" think is higher quality, as encoded in status beliefs. Three experiments demonstrate that under such conditions, status advantages can emerge even though (1) status information does not resolve uncertainty about quality; (2) the status belief is illegitimate; and (3) no party to the decision personally prefers the higher-status option. The theory implies that status hierarchies are resilient in the face of significant dissent but may be subject to public challenge.

Continuity, Change, and New Product Performance: The Role of Stream Concentration*

“…Significantly departing from previous generations of products requires specific investments in building new competencies and capabilities and in managing the resistance to change generated by existing norms and practices (Calantone and Rubera, 2012; Zahra and George, 2002). On the demand side, modifying product attributes influences consumer evaluations and inferences about a product (e.g., Correll et al, 2017; Hauser and Simmie, 1981; Negro, Koçak, and Hsu, 2010; Newman, Gorlin, and Dhar, 2014). For high levels of novelty, customers sometimes either refrain from purchasing at all or else resort to simple selection heuristics based on familiarity (Henard and Szymanski, 2001).…”

Reflecting glory or deflecting stigma? The interplay between status and social proximity in peer evaluations

“…We believe that our paper takes an important step towards a more precise articulation, in both theoretical and empirical terms, of the role of evaluating audiences in explaining statusbased recognition mechanisms. A better understanding of how audiences shape status dynamics is important to mitigate the tension between achievement and ascription that is at the core of meritocratic evaluative settings-whereby audiences are supposed to justify their deliberations based on standards that can be articulated independently of available options [11]. In addition, understanding how audience evaluations may change with the degree of scrutiny to which they are amenable seems crucial in light of ever-increasing calls for transparency and fairness in public life [19].…”

“…Ridgeway and Correll [85] consider a social-relational context any situation in which an actor has to take into account the expected reactions of others in determining how to act, because such reactions will have consequences for her interests. Other lines of scholarship point to how personal preferences often seem to fade in salience relative to what is publicly endorsed in a status hierarchy [11,12]. This phenomenon is especially apparent in research on "politics of dissimulation"-e.g., Norbert Elias' [86] scholarship on authoritarian systems-whereby public displays of allegiance to the official credo may mask a great deal of private disagreement.…”

Death of the Salesman but Not the Sales Force: How Interested Promotion Skews Scientific Valuation

“…However, recent research (Catalini et al 2015) on a subfield (immunology) within the larger domain studied here finds that only 2.4% of the total have a negative valence. A more subtle issue is that citations may not reflect the citer's personal assessment of quality, but rather the assessment of quality she thinks will coordinates well with journal referees and readers (see Correll et al 2017). We will return to this issue in the discussion.…”

“…Common to research on this type of social cue are three insights. First, given the widespread challenge of distinguishing higher quality products and producers as well as the common need to coordinate on the basis of quality (Correll et al 2017), third-parties naturally emerge in meritocratic domains to aggregate and publicize informed assessments of quality (Zuckerman 1999;Espeland and Sauder 2007).…”