Abstract

People working together on a task attend to one another's ascribed and achieved status attributes and other characteristics that differentiate them. On the basis of these characteristics, people form performance expectations for themselves and each other regarding the task at hand. When the evaluated states of these characteristics are consistent, the broad outlines of this process are straightforward; when these states are inconsistent, the principle by which people resolve the status inconsistency is at issue. We report a laboratory experiment designed to distinguish among four alternative principles. Our results are clearly inconsistent with three of the principles, but are consistent with the organized subsets combining principle originally set forth by Berger, Fisek, Norman, and Zelditch (1977). The conclusiveness of these results suggests reframing some long-standing questions about social information processing. A generalized organized subsets principle extends the scope of status characteristics theory to new kinds of social settings and additional kinds of personal attributes.

Keywords

Test (biology)Task (project management)PsychologyCognitive psychologyComputer scienceEngineering

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Publication Info

Year
1992
Type
article
Volume
57
Issue
6
Pages
843-843
Citations
175
Access
Closed

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Cite This

Joseph R. Berger, Robert Z. Norman, James W. Balkwell et al. (1992). Status Inconsistency in Task Situations: A Test of Four Status Processing Principles. American Sociological Review , 57 (6) , 843-843. https://doi.org/10.2307/2096127

Identifiers

DOI
10.2307/2096127