Browsing by Subject "Affect control theory"
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Item Open Access Cultural Meaning, Stigma, and Polarization(2022) Jacobs, Susan WellerThis dissertation aims to investigate the ways in which culture shape how people perceive, remember, and transmit information to one another and how that information can be shaped by culture. I specifically study: (1) how stigma and stereotypes affect how individuals discern and recall information about an individual with schizophrenia; and (2) how political partisanship may alter one’s perceptions of an ambiguous social interaction that is politically salient. To answer these questions, I conduct two experiments and collect data from online participants. In the first study, I recruit participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk to read a story about an individual with schizophrenia and retell it from memory. In my second study, I recruit participants from Prolific, and I ask them to watch a video and label the characters involved in the interaction they watched. I find that biases about individuals with schizophrenia shape the content participants remember and transmit, leading to narratives that become more stereotype-consistent over time. I also find that political partisanship has a strong relationship with how participants label the characters involved in the video of my second study. These findings contribute to the fields of cultural sociology, medical sociology, and political polarization. While varied in approach, both experiments show that culture, in a variety of forms, shapes not only how individuals interpret the world, but also how they interact with it.
Item Open Access Explaining Variance in Affect Control Theory: Cultural Consensus, Deflection, and Redefinition(2018) Curdy, Brent HarrisonAffect Control Theory (ACT) conceives of affective sentiments as shared
meanings among individuals within a single culture. Recognizing the theory's potential
to explain cultural differences and behavior patterns, many researchers aim to test and
apply ACT's insights to within- and across-culture analysis. The growth of the theory's
popularity necessitates a review and exposition of the theory's fundamental
methodological assumptions and its causal mechanism, deflection. Using data from the
2003 Indiana EPA dictionary, I map the distribution of fundamental U.S. sentiments in
EPA space, define two new conceptions of deflection, map the universe of event
currently measureable deflections, and discuss the ramifications of these findings for
past and future research.
I critique ACT's operationalization of "shared meaning" as mean point estimates
calculated from individuals' numeric ratings on semantic differential scales. Past
research attributes variation in concept ratings to two sources: unsystematic error in the
measurement tool and imperfect cultural inculcation among respondents. By taking a
concept-focused approach, I show that variation between respondents is structured by
the institutional affiliation of identity concepts and concept labels' word difficulty. This
pattern exists even when controlling for individual-level characteristics, the traditionally
ascribed reason for variation in concept ratings.
I replicate a well-known ACT study that found support for the dynamic behavior
redefinition hypothesis and did not find support for ACT's redefinition hypothesis. I
make the design more robust and test both the original findings and my claims about
the role of institutions in ACT. I find support for the dynamic behavior hypothesis,
partial support for the ACT hypothesis, and support for the claim that individuals
depend on institutional information inherent in identity meanings.
Item Open Access Mapping the Social Ecology of Culture: Social Position, Connectedness, and Influence as Predictors of Systematic Variation in Affective Meaning(2013) Rogers, Kimberly BA strong model of culture should capture both the structured and negotiated elements of cultural meaning, allowing for the fluidity of social action and the agency of social actors. Although cultural meanings often reproduce societal structures, supporting stability and consensus, culture is constitutive of and not merely produced by structural arrangements. It is therefore essential to establish clear mechanisms which guide how individuals interpret social events and apply cultural meanings in making sense of the social world. As such, this dissertation focuses on the model of culture forwarded by affect control theory, a sociological theory linking culturally shared meaning with identity, behavior, and emotion in interpersonal interaction (for reviews, see Heise 2007; Robinson and Smith-Lovin 2006).
While many theories have attempted to deal with components of the cultural model separately, affect control theory provides a unifying multi-level framework, which rectifies many shortcomings of earlier models by simultaneously accounting for individual cognition and emotion, situational and institutional context, and cultural meaning. The dissertation begins by introducing affect control theory, which considers cultural meanings to be societally bound, based on consensual and widely shared sentiments, and stable over long periods of time. We advocate several refinements to the theory's assumptions about culture, proposing that cultural sentiments are dynamic and structurally contingent, and that mechanisms operating within social networks serve as important sources of meaning consensus and change.
The remainder of the dissertation presents empirical evidence in support of our propositions. First, we draw upon primary survey data to show how social position and patterns of social connectedness relate to inculcation into the dominant culture and commonality with the affective meanings of others. Respondents' demographics, social position, social connectedness, network composition, and experiences in close relationships are explored as predictors of inculcation and commonality in meaning. Second, through an experimental study, we explore social influence processes as a mechanism of cultural consensus and change. Analyses examine both conditionally manipulated features of the group structure and respondents' emergent assessments of social influence as predictors of change in task-related attitudes and affective meanings.
Our results identify structural sources of normative differentiation and consensus, and introduce social networks methodologies as a means of elaborating affect control theory's explanatory model. More broadly, the findings generated by this project contribute to an ongoing academic discussion on the origins of cultural content, exploring the complex and dynamic relationship between patterns of social interaction and cultural affective meaning. We close by introducing research in progress, which examines predictors of clustering in affective meaning and explores how values, self, and identity condition the effects of social influence on decision-making.
Item Open Access Occupational Stratification and the Multidimensional Structure of Symbolic Meaning(2014) Freeland, Robert ESubjective cultural meanings were once central to occupational stratification research. However, attempts to operationalize cultural meanings associated with occupations have been widely criticized, leading contemporary stratification scholars to largely abandon subjective measures in favor of objective characteristics. This leaves a gap in our understanding of how inequality is generated and maintained because Weber ([1958]) theorized that status, a form of social symbolic power based on cultural beliefs, represents one of the fundamental bases of inequality. Without an adequate method of operationalizing occupational symbolic meanings, the extent to which cultural beliefs influence stratified life outcomes remains largely unknown.
To address this, I used affect control theory, a quantitative general theory of
social action, and its measurement model, the semantic differential scale, to examine three issues regarding the relationship between cultural beliefs and stratified outcomes. Symbolic meaning was quantified into EPA ratings that measure three universal, affective dimensions: evaluation (good versus bad), potency (powerful versus weak), and activity (lively versus quiescent). Despite extensive support within structural social psychology, this approach has not been widely used in the field of stratification. In addition to providing a quantitative framework, because symbolic meanings are comprised of multiple dimensions, affect control theory's multidimensional construction allows for novel approaches not possible using unidimensional measures. The three chapters that follow use affect control theory and ratings of occupational meanings from a newly collected dictionary of affective meaning to address the occupational gender wage gap, the effect of occupational status on life chance outcomes, and the development and testing of a new measure of occupational status.
Item Open Access The Duality of Identities and Groups: The Effects of Status Homophily on Social Interactions and Relations(2018) Morgan, Jonathan HowardGender and racial stereotypes are a pervasive aspect of social life arising from the consolidation of resources, statuses, and social roles and identities at the population level. They are widely shared group-level associations that influence how we perceive ourselves and others. Understanding how stereotypes influence the impressions we form about others, however, requires understanding how the association between statuses such as gender or race and the other identities we occupy influences impressions. This dissertation examines this process in three studies. In Studies 1 and 2, I model how people react to events using affect control theory’s impression change methodology. I estimate models using event stimuli collected in 1978 and 2010. I find that stereotypically female and male identities have affective profiles that influence how we form impressions. Affect control theory is best able to explain events involving identities that respondents perceived as associated with both genders. Study 3 analyzes perceptions of aggression among adolescents using longitudinal network data. I find (1) that the association between aggression and race grew as Black friend groups grew more homogeneous, (2) that both Black and White students held racialized status meanings, (3) that within-group similarities and between-group differences with respect to perceptions and behaviors grew over time, and (4) that Blacks were more likely to be identified as aggressive after controlling for self-perceptions of aggressiveness, violent behaviors, and peer perceptions of relational and social aggression. Combined, these studies suggest that the association between cultural meanings of goodness, potency, and aggression and statuses such as gender and race are mediated by identities.