Search results

This study engages an understudied presupposition that values are relatively impervious to situational pressures. We do this within a key sociological context, incorporating social status as a meso-level structure, by measuring values before and after a competition situation with an experimentally controlled outcome to determine the situational robustness of values.

We incorporate measures of values into a standard competition experiment, looking at how winning or losing and the status of the perceived competition influence peoples’ values.

Drawing on the well-established expectation states literature, we demonstrate that perceptions of gaining or losing a competition influence core values. Overall, positive, related situational feedback seemed to heighten all of the values-measures, while receiving (manipulated) negative, specific feedback dampened the rating of all values.

This is an initial exploration of the received wisdom; future work should involve different manipulations, wider arrays of values-measurement, and more diverse samples.

We hope that our interpretations of these results suggest how perceived status influences core internal experiences. The processes described have implications for the experiences of groups that win or lose political competitions, and other social interactions whereby people feel more or less affirmed in terms of their core beliefs.

This suggests that individuals and groups who perceive themselves as winning competitions, elections, or challenges will feel affirmed in their core beliefs, and be more motivated to pursue those valued ends. People who perceive themselves as being situationally unsuccessful will feel a general dampening of these core beliefs.

This chapter is the first to link the internal study of values with the general expectation states tradition. It is exploratory, and results suggest this is a fertile area for future inquiry.

Purpose – The aim of this research was to test whether the motivations of self-enhancement and self-verification act independently and simultaneously, specifically in the context of the impostor phenomenon.

Design/methodology/approach – Using both self-report measures and salivary cortisol levels, I conducted a 2×2 experiment (N=106) in which status (high or low) was crossed with competition outcome (win or lose). The “low-status winner” condition served as a simulation of the impostor phenomenon.

Findings – Winners reported greater positive affect and less negative affect, indicating self-enhancement, but salivary cortisol levels were higher in participants whose status was disconsonant with the competition outcome (high-status losers and low-status winners), reflecting self-verification.

Research limitations/implications – A potential limitation was the omission of nicotine use as a control variable.

Practical implications – Results illuminate the dual public and private nature of the impostor phenomenon, in which normative expressions of happiness overlie deeper feelings of anxiety. A better understanding would benefit educators, employers, counselors, and therapists who work with high-achieving women and minorities as well as the women and minorities they serve.

Social implications – Findings suggest that efforts should be made to bolster the confidence of promising young women and minorities, with the understanding that, despite high levels of achievement, self-confidence and a sense of deservedness may be lacking.

Originality/value – Methodological advancements included the first laboratory simulation of the impostor phenomenon and the use of both self-report and physiological measures of responses to status situations. This was the first study capable of observing the motivations to self-enhance and self-verify simultaneously and independently of one another.

This volume begins with two chapters that draw on evolutionary sociology to advance our understanding of interpersonal processes and their role in social organization. In “The Biology and Neurology of Group Processes,” Jonathan H. Turner and Alexandra Maryanski draw on three areas of evolutionary sociology (cladistic analysis, comparative neuroanatomy, and ecological analysis) to show how understanding the selection pressures acting on the brain over millions of years can help us get a better grasp on the biologically based capacities and propensities that are involved in group processes such as role-taking and role-making. An improved understanding of these processes means better explanations of how humans create, sustain, and change social structures and culture – topics that lie at the core of sociological inquiry. At the same time, Turner and Maryanski's chapter will give sociologists much to think about and debate, as one of the main conclusions of their argument is that neurology explains human capacities to develop non-kin groups more than culture. The next chapter entitled “Sacrifice, Gratitude, and Obligation: Serial Reciprocity in Early Christianity,” by Richard Machalek and Michael W. Martin, may be seen as giving more equal explanatory weight to culture and biology in a theoretical analysis that combines a focus on cognitive processes (historically unique meanings and ideas) with evolutionary sociological insights about emotions in order to generate better explanations of complex socio-historical developments. Specifically, Machalek and Martin extend Rodney Stark's analysis of how ideas contributed to the rise of Christianity by showing how the evolved features of human emotionality related to “paying it forward” (or serial reciprocity in more formal terms) may have also played an important role in this historical process. Both chapters provide excellent examples of the value of combining multiple theoretical perspectives and paying attention to the interplay of social and biological forces.