Why is the Pack Persuasive? The Effect of Choice Status on Perceptions of Quality

Lynn, Freda B.; Simpson, Brent; Walker, Mark; Peterson, Colin

doi:10.15195/v3.a12

Cited by 12 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 55 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…To distinguish the effects of third-order inference, it is useful to examine them after a decision-maker has made a first-order choice about quality and the distinction is especially clear where post-decision first-order judgments are found to conflict with the socially high-status choice. Status advantage is expressly not predicted under such cases by the SEI model (see Lynn et al 2016). Yet although the SEI model is not relevant to post-decision status advantages, we do not suggest that third-order inference processes are necessarily irrelevant to the emergence of status advantage ex ante in interdependent contexts.…”

Section: Comparing the Two Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The most influential approach to this question is the Socially Endogenous Inferences (SEI) model. This theory, which was extended and elaborated by Lynn and colleagues (2009; see also Gould 2002; Podolny 1993, 2005; Salganik, Dodds, and Watts 2006) and received strong empirical validation in several recent studies (Azoulay, Stuart, and Wang 2014; Kim and King 2014; Lynn et al 2016; Simcoe and Waguespack 2010), sees status advantages as emerging when performances are difficult to assess ex ante. In these settings, decision-makers infer the quality of a performance from the choices of prior decision-makers, as encoded in a publicly observable status hierarchy.…”

mentioning

confidence: 92%

See 1 more Smart Citation

It’s the Conventional Thought That Counts

Correll

Ridgeway

Zuckerman³

et al. 2017

Am Sociol Rev

150

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Comparing the Two Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 92%

It’s the Conventional Thought That Counts

Correll

Ridgeway

Zuckerman³

et al. 2017

Am Sociol Rev

150

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Lastly, affect is the fourth mechanism of team formation. Studies on affect illustrates that supportive and unsupportive sentiments about potential teammates strongly influence team member selection patterns (Casciaro & Lobo, ; Lynn et al, ). In sum, all four mechanisms attend to both the individual attributes (e.g.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With a sample size of 200, Lynn et al () find that high choice status level (i.e. popularity) produces a halo effect to the degree that high choice status candidate (e.g.…”

Section: The Mechanisms Of Team Formationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In brief, Lynn, Simpson, Walker, and Peterson () experimentally illustrate how popularity creates positive affect towards potential teammates and selection of those teammates can be biased toward the more popular rather than the qualified candidates because of the positive affect generated by popularity. Informed by Status Characteristic Theory (SCT), the authors argue that nominations are a sociometric measure of choice status, that is, one's relative position or rank in terms of popularity.…”

Section: The Mechanisms Of Team Formationmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Social‐psychological Aspects of Team Formation: New Avenues for Research

Bailey

Skvoretz

2017

Sociology Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The ubiquity of teams in the modern workplace cannot be denied, as Curseu, Kenis, and Raab (2009, p. 30) note, “team formation is a challenge in modern organizations as most of them use teams to perform a variety of organizational tasks.” How teams form is, therefore, a question of much practical interest. Research illustrates that stratified social systems influence the choice and decision‐making behaviors that shape group and team formation (Hechter, 1978). From a structural social psychological perspective (Sell & Kuipers, 2009; Lawler, Ridgeway, and Markovsky, 1993), teams are like microcosmic societies. They represent a process of social cohesion through interaction. Additionally, they can be organic, mechanical, homogeneous, and heterogeneous. In other words, teams are structural and cultural artifacts of societies. Members of society through interaction create these “social artifacts,” which may consist of hierarchically organizing sets of individuals into a group, or multiple groups, relative to power and status dimensions. In this paper, we aim to show how contributions from social psychology have informed research on team formation. Thus, two research questions guide this paper: What are the mechanisms of team formation via partner selection for self‐organizing teams? In what ways, can these studies advance scholarship focusing on the social psychology of inequality? To establish a foundation for understanding the various studies on team formation, we begin with a general overview on how team and team formation has been conceptualized. Next, we examine the social psychological research on team formation via partner selection. In doing so, we note the importance given to the 4 major mechanisms of team formation emerging from the literature: competence, homophily, familiarity, and affect. Lastly, we conclude the paper with a discussion addressing the research questions guiding this paper and suggest opportunities for social psychologists to consider for future team formation studies.

show abstract