Advances in Group Processes

Shane R. Thye, Edward J. Lawler

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781838675042
• eBook ISBN: 9781838675059
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

Advances in Group Processes publishes theoretical analyses, reviews, and theory-based empirical chapters on group phenomena. The series adopts a broad conception of "group processes." This includes work on groups ranging from the very small to the very large, and on classic and contemporary topics such as status, power, trust, justice, social influence, identity, decision-making, intergroup relations and social networks. Previous contributors have included scholars from diverse fields including sociology, psychology, political science, economics, business, philosophy, computer science, mathematics and organizational behavior.  

Volume 36 brings together papers related to a variety of topics in small groups and organizational research. The volume includes papers that address theoretical and empirical issues related to the ubiquitous nature of status, double standards of competence, and controlling the status effects of gender. Other contributions examine reverse identity processes, self-stigma, synchrony and cooperation and the effects of authority leniency. Overall, the volume includes papers that reflect a wide range of theoretical approaches from leading scholars who work in the general area of group processes.

ASSESSING AND BLOCKING DOUBLE STANDARDS FOR COMPETENCE

Martha Foschi, André Ndobo and Alice Faure

ABSTRACT

Many everyday situations involve the performance of a task and the inference of competence from the results. Here, we focus on situations in which two or more persons who differ on status (e.g., sex category, skin tone) perform a valued task with equivalent, objectively judged results, and yet are not granted equal competence. We examine the conditions under which such a conclusion derives from the use of different standards for each status level.

We review and assess the findings of all the 17 social psychological experiments completed to date and designed to investigate the hypothesis that the lower a person’s social status is perceived to be, the stricter the competence standard applied to him or her.

We find substantial support for this hypothesis, but there are also factors that either moderate (e.g., qualifications level) or even reverse (e.g., participant’s sex category) such link. Of particular interest among those factors is whether competence is measured directly or indirectly. For example, we found overall that the specific question about competence often restrains the use of double standards, whereas the wider questions (e.g., about suitability) are more likely to allow that practice to emerge.

We also identify and expand interventions from three different research traditions designed to deter bias, and propose ways of applying them to block double standards in the assessment of equivalent performances. The interventions involve (1) increasing assessor’s accountability, (2) increasing similarity across the performers, and (3) disrupting the often taken-for-granted association between higher status and good performance – as well as the corresponding link between lower status and poor performance.

Keywords: Social status; double standards; competence assessment; performance expectations; experimental research; intervention strategies

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES

In this chapter, we consider contexts in which two or more persons who differ on a status factor (e.g., sex category, skin tone, ethnic background, nationality, socioeconomic class, and formal education) perform a valued task at equivalent levels and yet, are not granted the same degree of competence at that task and/or related ones. These are common occurrences in a wide variety of settings – for example, competing for a job or a scholarship, deciding whose ideas to accept in a group that has a shared objective, and awarding a salary increase in an annual review of employees’ output.

Foschi (1989) proposed that a key interpersonal mechanism through which those performers are often treated differently is the use of double standards for competence that are stricter for the individuals who are seen as of lower social status.¹ Standards are performance requirements, expressed in either quantitative or qualitative terms, for the inference of task ability. Strictness may refer to requiring, for example, a higher score on a test, or consistent results over a longer span. Applying status-based different standards is an unfair practice that devalues the output of some persons while overvaluing that of their higher-status counterparts. At its core, it is an attempt to restore consistency to what is perceived to be an inconsistent situation. In this text, we review and assess experimental work on this practice, and propose and discuss three ways of deterring it.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Status and Competence

Expectation-states theory (Berger, Wagner, & Webster, 2014) is a long-standing research program that focuses on the dynamics of small, task-oriented groups. The program is, in fact, a set of theories or branches, the largest of which is status characteristics theory. A wide variety of status attributes have been investigated, both experimentally and non-experimentally, within this branch. In turn, Foschi’s (1989) ideas on double standards and the empirical tests that followed constitute a subset of status characteristics theory and, by implication, of the expectation-states program (Berger & Webster, 2018, pp. 281–314).²

A “status characteristic” is defined as a social attribute with at least two levels or states, one implying more respect (or prestige) than the other and, as a result, more competence for the task at hand and often also more ability overall. The assumed levels of competence are translated into expectation states or predictions about the future quality of the group members’ performances. In this program, such expectations are conceptualized as not necessarily conscious, but as nevertheless affecting goup interaction – for example, influencing who is given the floor in a group discussion and who is not, who actually accepts the opportunity and who does not, and whose ideas for the task’s solution are adopted and whose are dismissed.

Depending on the particular social system in question (e.g., country, political party affiliation, level of education, and historical period), the extent of agreement with the status value of a characteristic may vary from a large majority in that system to a few of its members. Two examples would be: (1) the widespread, strong discrimination against Chinese immigrants in Canada at the early 20th century vs their current general acceptance, and (2) the limited support for the suffraggettes in England during that same time, as opposed to the endorsement of their position following the enactment of women’s vote legislation (see also Ridgeway (2011) on status beliefs, particularly pp. 67–68).

A standard may be multiple rather than double if the characteristic under consideration involves three or more levels, such as various classifications of skin tone, or four groupings of socioeconomic class. For example, the standard could vary in increasing order of strictnesss depending on what is perceived to be the performers’ skin tone: “white,” “brown,” or “black.” However, we use “double standards” as the generic term because it is more widely understood and conveys our ideas more directly.

Status and Rewards

The status-and-double-standards branch of the expectation-states program is closely associated with that on status and rewards. The latter branch centers on how status-based judgments of competence could result in different chances of receiving rewards (e.g, appointments, pay, and promotions) and in the unjust decisions that could be rooted in that process. Such decisions could depend on, for example, whether status is based on (1) certified, relevant qualifications or (2) biased ssociations between competence and attributes such as sex category or skin tone. In (2), double standards violate the distributive-justice principle that a person’s rewards should be proportional to his or her contributions. The pioneer theoretical statement and experimental test in this area appear in Cook (1975). For subsequent work on this topic, refer to Berger and Webster (2018, pp. 289–292), Berger et al. (2014, p. 24), and Fisek and Hysom (2008).

Jasso and Webster (1997) present a theoretical analysis that explicitly combines ideas from multiple standards with those from distributive-justice formulations. The core of these authors’ argument ties differences in status to contrasting ability requirements which, in turn, lead to divergent conclusions of what should be just rewards. On reward expectations, see also the studies carried out by Auspurg, Hinz, and Sauer (2017) and Stewart and Moore (1992) on the related subject of social justice and categorization (see, e.g., Vala and Correia (2008)).

As to status, expectations, and rewards, the present chapter is closely associated with distributive-justice issues. Here, we focus on double standards for competence at the interactional level. We note in particular that their use is often a secretive practice – that is, typically, performers are not informed on how decisions about them have been made. Experimental evidence of this point is presented by Foschi (1996, Study 2) and Doerer, Wesbter, and Walker (2017), both of which we discuss later in this work. In those studies, participants were assigned at random to either a condition where they expected anonimity of their responses (low accountability) or the possibility that these would be made public (medium accountability). The former condition resulted in the use of a double standard, while the latter stopped it. Low accountability is thus a factor that contributes to a violation of procedural justice, namely the fairness and transparency of the processes through which decisions are made (see, e.g., Clay-Warner, 2001; Tyler & van der Toorn, 2013). As well, it contravenes the related informational justice principle that performers should know the rules under which their outcomes are judged.

It is also the case that, particularly when there is no other relevant (or perceived to be relevant) information, rewards are seen as reflectting a valid assignment of competence and, to that extent, become a status factor. In other words, a reverse process occurs (see, e.g., Berger & Webster, 2018, p. 291; Harkness, 2014; Stewart & Moore, 1992).

Setting and Scope Conditions

For our present discussion of different competence standards, we assume a setting with three types of members: those who perform a task, those who evaluate the results, and those who assess ability from those results (in some situations, a person may occupy more than one of these three roles). The proposed key scope conditions for a double standard to emerge are that: (a) the performers differ on one or more factors considered by the assessors to carry social status, (b) both assesors and performers value the task in question, (c) task outcomes have been objectively evaluated as equivalent by a “source” who is not a task performer in that setting, and (d) the assessors are free to use any information to infer task competence from that evaluation – in particular, there are no established requirements for that inference (for a fuller statement of these conditions, see, e.g., Foschi & Valenzuela, 2015, p. 197).

It is also important to note the following: (i) these conditions may be extended to the case of two persons who are equated on the gap in their results. For example, a man with an average academic mark of 77% and a woman with a 72% record, relative on to the situation in which their marks are interchanged. A double standard would occur if the 5% gap is interpreted differently depending on the sex category of the person with the better average. (ii) Outside double standards and their conditions as specified here, other forms of bias and resulting social-group discrimination (either intentional or not), do occur. They often consist of changes to one or more of the scope conditions, such as devaluing the task, ignoring the objectively assessed performance results, questioning their objectivity, and forgetting details about them.

Average performances often lead to a perception of ambiguity in the results and uncertainty about them which, in turn, tends to maximize the occurrence of a double standard (see, e.g., Botelho & Abraham, 2017; Dovidio & Gaertner, 2000; Faure & Ndobo, 2012; Foschi, Lai, & Sigerson, 1994, p. 332; Heilman & Haynes, 2015). Uncertainty in the interpretat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Editorial Advisory Board
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Understanding the Nature of Status Inequality: Why is it Everywhere? Why Does it Matter?☆
• Assessing and Blocking Double Standards for Competence
• Controlling Status Effects of Gender
• Social Categorization and Identity Processes in Uncertainty Management: The Role of Intragroup Communication
• Self-stigma and the Social Interactions of Mental Health Patients
• Rituals and Solidarity: The Effects of Synchrony and Complementarity on Cooperation
• Give Them an Inch, and They’ll Expect a Mile: The Effects of Authority Leniency on Subordinate Entitlement
• Index