Abstract
Culture of Overcompensation
Damian Gadal, Flickr Creative Commons
As more middle-class people felt The Great Recession’s effects, inequality became more visible. The public increasingly realized the top 1% was not suffering in the same way as everyone else. CEOs, for instance, continued raking in cash and benefits as unemployment rates shot upward. How did CEO compensation get so untouchable?
In “Executive Compensation, Fat Cats, and Best Athletes,” their new piece in the American Sociological Review, Jerry Kim, Bruce Kogut, and Jae-Suk Yang set out to understand why some CEOs are paid more than others. They argue that social comparisons and payment norms spreading across local networks help determine CEO remuneration. They focus on three networks: boards of directors, peers, and education networks.
The report that interlocking boards of directors—that is, members serving on more than one board—play an important role in CEO compensation, since CEO compensation packages are determined through negotiations with the board of directors. Because there is such uncertainty around how they should be paid, boards of directors and potential CEOs use their own networks to estimate appropriate compensation and, because of interlocking boards, the practices spread from one corporation to another.
These effects may have been enhanced by pay-for-performance policies, allowing CEOs to receive stocks and options, and by the Internet bubble, during which Internet-related companies paid their CEOs above past norms and had interlocking boards central to the network.
One lesson is that CEO pay is a cultural outcome like many others—reflecting norms and expectations spread through social networks. So maybe we can move from talking about a culture of poverty to a culture of CEO overcompensation.
When Victims Blame the Victim
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 300,165 women were sexually assaulted in 2013. However, the Centers for Disease Control estimates that closer to 1.3 million women are raped every year. Both estimates come from surveys; the difference stems from methods. If a survey uses the word “rape” to gauge respondents’ experiences, the rate is much lower than if when it uses the phrase “unwanted sex.”
Why are so many victims of sexual violence seemingly reluctant to label their experiences “rape”?
Kaitiln Boyle and Ashleigh McKinzie explored that question in their recent study in Social Psychology Quarterly. They found that participants who did not label their unwanted sexual experiences as rape were typically protecting either their assailants or themselves. Protecting the assailant meant explaining away their partners’ sexually aggressive or coercive behavior as a miscommunication or a social pressure that the assailant could not control. In blaming themselves, victims thought they may have been teasing their assailants or they might simply not have a high enough sex drive. They defended their assailant’s presumed good intentions. Protecting themselves came in the form of disparaging their younger selves, claiming to know better now how to avoid exploitive sexual situations. Often, they would come to call their unwanted sexual experiences with ex-boyfriends “rape” after the relationship ended, but they still blamed the rape on their own naivete.
Sydney G, Flickr Creative Commons
Whether the crime was called rape or unwanted sex, the participants still described themselves and victims in simulations similar to their own as “powerless.” And even if the participants did not report feeling traumatized after the encounter, feelings of powerlessness are known to have grave ramifications for maintaining healthy intimate relationships. Boyle and McKinzie’s study exposes many of the subtle difficulties in fully recognizing and responding to sexual assault and its lasting effects.
Kids and Community Violence
Children in the U.S. report distressingly high rates of exposure to violence. In a 2009 survey, the U.S. Department of Justice found that an alarming 60% of children had encountered violence during the previous year, and in the very places they should feel most safe: at home, in school, and in their neighborhoods. In the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Dana C. McCoy, C. Cybele Raver, and Patrick Sharkey use a biopsychosocial approach to explore the impact of exposure to community violence on the cognition and attention of children living in Chicago’s low-income neighborhoods with high crime rates.
Carlos Martinez, Flickr Creative Commons
They use public police data to map the distance between children’s homes and violent crimes and to track the amount of time between a crime and each child’s cognitive assessment. Children assessed no more than a week after a violent crime took place in their neighborhood performed cognitive tasks faster, but with less accuracy, than children in the same neighborhood assessed before the crime or at least two weeks afterward.
Children’s self-reports of anxiety, a trait that could influence susceptibility to the negative effects of community violence, were related to cognition. Interestingly, less anxious children showed greater cognitive performance effects with exposure to violence; more anxious children’s performance was not noticeably affected by proximity to violence. Less anxious children showed adaptive cognitive responses to stressors (i.e., attending to negative emotional images more) than children with high levels of anxiety, who were more likely to respond in maladaptive ways (i.e., avoiding negative emotional images).
McCoy and colleagues conclude that proximity to violence seems to affect children differently based on psychological traits. Anxious children may have fewer cognitive resources to devote to mental coping strategies when they encounter community violence. Programs intended to help children, then, should differentiate treatment according to individual psychological traits to better address the negative effects of community violence on children’s mental health.
Coding for Laughter
Many qualitative researchers have been there. Your research participant was in the middle of what you thought was a serious topic of conversation when he suddenly burst out laughing. You smile politely and guide the interview back on course, thinking, Maybe I’ll figure out what was so funny during transcription.
In a recent Social Forces article Mike Reay revisits past data to try to do just that. With data from interviews he conducted with economists in 2000, Reay applies philosophical and sociological theories of laughter to try to understand how his research participants got the giggles.
Spontaneous laughter is likely connected to self-presentation.
DoD, Petty Officer 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley
These seemingly random outbursts actually revealed a social pattern. During interviews, researchers asked their participants to talk about topics in unusual settings—in this case, to talk economics with a sociologist. Participants, then, were in a scenario that philosophers and sociologists have long found to have an especially high potential for humor: a moment of incongruity that mirrors how our minds have long understood jokes. Sometimes the absurdity of talking about a particularly specialized or private subject with an outsider makes the participant laugh. Other times, Reay thinks a participant might “laugh off” a statement that doesn’t match the way she wants the researcher to see her. In either case, spontaneous laughter is likely connected to self-presentation.
Reay’s research has the potential to help qualitative researchers peer further into the minds of their participants. Instead of hurrying to the next question on an interview protocol, it may be well worth the time to question those spontaneous bouts of laughter.
Suicide’s Gender Divide
One of sociology’s earliest contributions was Emile Durkheim situating an apparently individual phenomenon—suicide—in social context. But early suicide research paid little attention to how gender inequalities at the macro-level might matter. In a recent article in Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Kathryn Nowotny, Rachel Peterson, and Jason Boardman examined how the gender system adolescents live in influences their likelihood of seriously considering suicide (suicidal ideation).
Morgan Cain’s contribution to the “To Write Love On Her Arms” campaign to support those struggling with depression.
Morgan Cain, Flickr Creative Commons
Using data gathered from adolescent boys and girls in the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, the researchers constructed a unique measure of gender context. They used variables representing sex-typical traits (e.g., frequent crying, fighting, taking risks) and measured how much these traits differed by gender in each state. The authors argue that the greater the gender differentiation on these traits, the greater the level of gender norm rigidity and regulation within that state. From there, they posited that higher levels of gender regulation by state are associated with a greater likelihood of suicidal ideation for individual adolescents—and that is what the results showed. The effect was stronger for girls, particularly girls who reported gender-typical personality traits, though high levels of gender regulation were harmful to boys’ mental health as well.
This study brings Durkheim’s model of fatalistic suicide up to date: whereas Durkheim considered fatalistic suicide caused by high levels of social regulation a marker of premodern societies, this research suggests gender regulation may be harmful to adolescents’ mental health in the present day as well.
Online Friends affect Relationship Status
Complain about your job on Facebook? Your children? What about your marriage?
Ignoring social network disapproval.
Riaz Kanani, Flickr Creative Commons
Hannah Seligson, author and New York Times contributor, contends that unhappy marriages are Facebook’s last taboo. Seligson argues that complaining about one’s spouse in public violates the marital code of silence. So, as people attempt to manage and influence how others perceive their relationships, social networks also affect couples’ views of their own relationships. Approval from friends and family can positively affect the stability and quality of romantic relationships, while social disapproval may be a negative, sometimes relationship-ending force.
In a 2010 article, Richard Slatcher found that friendships with other couples, particularly meaningful connections, increased feelings of closeness in one’s own relationship. It also turns out that perceptions of others’ opinions are more predictive of relationship stability than the actual views of network members. Thus social network approval has a positive influence on the partnership, including increased feelings of love and commitment.
As for the doubters, a new article in Social Psychology Quarterly by Colleen Sinclair and colleagues investigates how different personality types (different ways of handling emotions stemming from perceptions of limited freedom) moderate social network disapproval of romantic partners. In addition to following network pressure, people who perceive a threat to their ability to choose a romantic partner could react by doing the opposite of that encouraged by their network; others resist social influence and instead pursue self-determination. This team used survey data, a vignette design, and a laboratory-based dating game experiment to examine sensitivity to social network opinions. They report that relationship approval does have consistent positive effects on feelings of love and commitment. But when it comes to disapproval, people differ. Those with independent personalities were most able to ignore social network disapproval and continue loving their romantic partner. But contrary to expectations, defiant personalities did not magnify their commitment to their partner when confronted with network opposition. Although others’ approval of a couple’s relationship may reinforce relationship stability, reactions to social disapproval depends on one’s personality.
If Seligson is right that people don’t like to share negative marriage news on social networks, maybe that’s protective. Feelings towards a romantic partner seem to benefit from social approval, but if social networks negatively view their relationship, it doesn’t necessarily spell doom for the partnership, at least for people with independent personalities.
Foreclosing on Diversity
Race matters. It affects who our neighbors are, our interactions with law enforcement, and where we go to school. A new study by Matthew Hall, Kyle Crowder, and Amy Spring shows how race affects foreclosures, too. In their paper in American Sociological Review, they used RealtyTrac data to examine the U.S. foreclosure crisis in the late 2000s. Using national data aggregated at the block group level, Hall and colleagues reveal that minority neighborhoods were much more likely to experience foreclosures than White neighborhoods from 2005 to 2009. Furthermore, the study revealed a correlation between neighborhood demographic change and foreclosure rates: neighborhoods with declining White populations were more likely to experience foreclosures than neighborhoods with stable White populations.
Two maps of Milwaukee, one of the most segregated cities in the U.S., showing the White (left) and Black populations.
Illustration by Philip Cohen using data from Social Explorer
The authors ran simulations of what neighborhood composition would look like if foreclosure rates hadn’t changed after 2005: Neighborhoods would be more racially integrated. It appears housing foreclosures increased both Black/White segregation and Latino/White segregation.
Although the authors couldn’t speak to the causes of racially-stratified foreclosures, Hall and colleagues’ study demonstrates that racial inequality was both cause and consequence of the foreclosure crisis.