Abstract
How boys learn to believe they are smarter than girls, gray divorce, and why money can’t buy happiness: new research from the journals.
Bad Boys or Exceptional Interrupters?
What is the process by which boys learn to believe that they are smarter than girls? How does this unravel in schools? In the American Journal of Sociology, Michela Musto examines this process. She finds that the different ways educators handle student behavior, especially by breaking the rules, shapes boys’ perceptions of intelligence.
Musto spent more than two years at a high performing, racially and economically diverse, suburban middle school in the Los Angeles area. Observation-based and interview data for the study was collected over a two-year period. While Asian-American, Latinx, and White students each represented at least 25% of the school population, Black and multiracial students represented well less than 10% each. In terms of class, Asian-American and White students tended to come from more affluent families, while Latinx students were more likely to be from working-class or poor families. White and Asian-American students were found to be overrepresented in higher-level or honors classes.
When looking at how often students raised their hands or if they waited to be called on, Musto found that White boys monopolized conversations and interrupted their female classmates more than other groups. She also found that educators were more tolerant of the behavior of White boys in higher-level classes. Conversely, students in lower-level classes, which disproportionately included poor Latino boys, were more likely to be reprimanded. This differential level of punishment caused Latino boys to disassociate and disengage from the classroom. Thus, Latino boys were characterized as “bad,” while their White peers were seen as brilliant. By 8th grade, White boys were perceived as more exceptional than girls in higher-level classes. Meanwhile, in the lower-level classes, students saw girls as smarter than boys, but not exceptional. This study has major implications on the perception of intelligence over the life course as it relates to race and gender.
Summer vacation has come to a close and Humphreys American School (HAS) welcomed children back
USAG-Humphreys, Flickr CC
Building Broader Social Movements
Anti-Trump protests have united movements, bringing organizations who are focused on a range of different issues together for protests. This unity sets today’s resistance apart from other social movements that, in general, were often organized around one issue—however, throughout history, we have seen this trend before. For example, in the 1980s, the women’s movement became increasingly aligned with the peace movement. Looking at these patterns, Wang and colleagues ask: when do social movement organizations cross their boundaries to adopt the message of other movements? Using data from over 23,000 U.S. protest events between 1960 and 1995, the authors seek to understand why movement organizations diversify their claims and issues.
Wang and colleagues find the diverse claims of social movements can be explained through the cohesion and focus of the movement. Cohesion is demonstrated by the connection between a movement’s message and its issues. When the meaning and the messaging align, the more cohesive the movement appears. Movements are more focused when they concentrate on one claim or a few clearly related claims. By tracking year to year changes in the focus and cohesion of movement organizations, they find that movements having high levels of cohesion and focus are less likely to diversify. Cohesion and focus signal legitimacy in the public sphere. Movements risk losing legitimacy if they diversify their claims outside of their existing focus.
When movements do diversify their claims, they are likely to adopt issues from other movements that have higher levels of cohesion and focus. For example, as the women’s movement lost cohesion in the 1980s, women’s organizations became increasingly aligned with the peace movement. They realized that diversifying towards a more cohesive movement would attract more resources and attention to their base. It may be beneficial for today’s movements to reevaluate their cohesion and focus in an attempt to build a stronger base.
Protest in front of the White House on the 17th anniversary of Guantanamo Bay, 1/11/19.
Victoria Pickering, Flickr CC
All the Single Oldies?
A cute couple takes a walk across a bridge in Mountain View, CA.
Vee, Flickr CC
Looking for love later in life is stressful and can lead to negative mental health outcomes. The divorce rate among people over fifty has doubled over the past twenty years. However, this phenomenon deemed “gray divorce” has not been well studied. In the Journal of Health and Behavior, I-Fen Lin and colleagues offer insight into the pathway for those who suddenly find themselves single in the second half of their lives. They compare mental health levels of those experiencing gray divorce to those who have been widowed, and those who are still married. Further, they analyze the effect of remarrying on mental health outcomes and the general rate of recovery from the loss of a partner, whether through death or divorce.
Using a longitudinal dataset of individuals born before 1960 in the United States, they found those who got divorced reported experiencing the highest levels of depression symptoms, even more than those who were widowed. However, the authors found that gray divorce was less detrimental to mental health than losing a spouse. Recovery from depressive symptoms took half as long for gray divorcees as it did for widows. This could be because those who got divorced were three times more likely to get remarried than those who were widowed. Remarrying, in general, offsets negative mental health impacts for both the widowed and gray divorcees. This research offers a clearer picture of the psychological impacts of late-in-life singleness, particularly for those who are navigating divorce as it becomes more common.
Love of Money Can’t Buy Happiness
The relationship between happiness and income is complicated. Many believe that more money will lead to happier lives, while others believe that more money translates to more problems. In Socius, Naoki Sudo explores how attitudes about money are the driving force behind individual happiness. He works to uncover why individual happiness seems to be tied to income, while a wealthy society like Japan tends to be less happy overall.
The author used a Japanese national survey to analyze the relationship between individual happiness and income. He then developed a computer simulation which uncovered two dominant and opposing attitudes about money. One attitude could be classified as materialistic and the other as anti-materialistic. He found that those who were materialistic were much more likely to tie ideas of happiness to income. Among this group of people, there was a high correlation between income and level of happiness. Among those who were anti-materialistic, there was a much weaker association between income and happiness. He determined there were many more materialistic-minded people within Japanese society than anti-materialistic.
Sudo then applied computer simulations to look at overall happiness in Japan. He found if anti-materialism was reduced, happiness on average goes down. These findings are puzzling, considering that decreasing the high association between income and happiness among those who are materialistic should increase overall happiness. Sudo says people dominated by materialistic values are more likely to incorporate income as a primary criterion of happiness and will seek increased income. Therefore, average incomes in the society will rise, and the association between income and happiness will become stronger. However, he argues it will then become difficult for people to meet their criteria for happiness because materialistic values raise the level of income the group expects. For this reason, Sudo concludes that materialistic values explain the paradox between income and happiness.
Kevin Dooley, Flickr CC
Roles, Status, or Cooperation?
Stereotypes can have real world consequences, such as affecting members of a marginalized group’s chances of getting hired for a job. Stopping stereotypes at their source may be a way to prevent these real-world consequences, but how do we identify their source? Through four experiments, Koenig and Eagly examine emerging stereotypes in fictional groups by manipulating roles (positions in society) and intergroup relations (interactions between groups). The roles among the fictional groups were usually contrasting, such as warriors and caretakers or hunters and healers. Intergroup relations were measured by high or low group status and group cooperativeness.
The first three experiments included U.S. undergraduate students and adults who read about the fictional groups and rated them on typical attributes. Koenig and Eagly first assessed what stereotypes emerged by providing only role information or only intergroup information. Then, they assessed emerging stereotypes from both types of information. Roles still had an influence on stereotypes when intergroup information was present and vice-versa when showing how they work together to create similar stereotype content.
The fourth experiment was conducted to examine how the roles and groups are intertwined. This study included adult volunteers who were asked to generate a list of occupational roles where a group is overrepresented (e.g., women are typically teachers, secretaries, or nurses). Afterward, they rated these roles and intergroup relations. They found a strong and positive correlation between ratings of roles and intergroup relations, showing they produce similar attribute ratings. Koenig and Eagly conclude that stereotypical content is linked to groups’ social position in society and can emerge from both social roles and group relationships. This study has implications for bridging psychological and sociological theories on stereotype formation.
Corrections
In What Happens When the United States Stops Taking in Refugees? from the spring 2019 issue of Contexts, 9% of the U.S. population should be .9%.
Also, in Freedom and the Iranian Women’s Movement from the summer 2019 issue of Contexts, Viva Movahed should read Vida Movahed.
Whose Time is it? Whites’ Time
Do we all have the same twenty-four hours in a day? In Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Rahsaan Mahadeo enters uncharted new territory in critical whiteness studies by arguing that “time is not race neutral.” Instead, people of color suffer from disadvantages and inequality as it relates to time. He argues that social structure and the advantages of whiteness, rather than individual behavior, create time inequality. Through fifteen months of ethnographic observation at a multiservice center for youth in crisis in Minnesota, and thirty in-depth interviews with teenagers who frequent the center, Mahadeo studies the ways youth of color in urban spaces view issues of time as racialized. “Racialization” refers to the ways that race influences how people experience social life and phenomena—in this case, time.
Mahadeo found that participants of color viewed White youth as having a more advantageous relationship to time than themselves. They viewed White youth as benefitting from the luxury of time as a result of psychological and emotional resources, resources not bestowed to themselves. Participants not only viewed themselves as having less time, but as having to work twice as hard (physically, mentally, and emotionally) within that time deficit. Despite this extra work, they still saw themselves achieving results that are only half as good as their White counterparts. He found that some youth at the center resisted the racializa-tion of time by interrogating ideas associated with whiteness, including White employees of the center. Lastly, Mahadeo found that participants tried to flip the relationship between time and whiteness by characterizing White youth as behind the times and engaging in cultural appropriation to keep up.
The gift of time
Laurence Johnson, Flickr CC
These youth’s perspectives and Mahadeo’s interpretation stem from recognizing that non-Whites need to understand White culture to survive in a world that values and centers around whiteness. Whites do not have to expend psychological or emotional energy to do this, reducing their racialized temporal burden compared to people of color. Overall, Mahadeo and his participants describe a reality in which time and whiteness are intertwined, perpetuating disparities in time across groups despite efforts by youth of color to resist that inequality.