Most people count on family and friends to assist them in times of need; this study asks why people think that they can count on them. We coded about 1,100 respondents’ open-ended explanations for why they could—or could not—rely on relatives and friends in a crisis, yielding about a dozen main themes. Respondents largely explained that relatives would help because of affection, secondarily because of relatives’ past support or norms of obligation. The small minority who doubted relatives’ help said that they had no kin ties, pointed to practical impediments, or claimed no need for relatives’ help. Respondents explained friends’ help in similar ways. Three master themes emerged: sentiment, exchange history, and practical impediments. Younger respondents emphasized sentiment to explain family help, women more often cited past exchanges, and the better-educated stressed exchange history with relatives but sentiment with friends. The heavy emphasis on personal affection departs from main accounts in the social support literature.
Recent research shows that Muslim youth have fewer cross-gender friends than their non-Muslim peers, a pattern attributed to norms that discourage close cross-gender interaction. This study examines whether differences in cross-gender interaction between Muslim and non-Muslim youth are also present in other relationships, including with out-of-school interaction partners and homework peers. In a sample of 15,066 adolescents ( M age = 15.0 years, 49 percent female, 18 percent Muslim) from England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, gender segregation proves stronger among Muslim than non-Muslim youth for friendships and out-of-school interactions but not for homework peers. However, it is less likely among Muslim than non-Muslim youth that cross-gender homework peers are also friends. These findings indicate that constraints to cross-gender interaction vary by relationship type, suggesting that the stronger gender segregation in Muslim youths’ friendship networks reported in previous research does not extend to all types of cross-gender interaction. At the same time, cross-gender friends, out-of-school interaction partners, and homework peers are all related to more egalitarian gender role attitudes among adolescents. Accordingly, considering different types of cross-gender ties and the different regulations they come with has implications for our understanding of both adolescents’ gender segregation and their gender-related developmental outcomes.
Conflict plays an important role in shaping social status in groups. Responding to calls for greater research on factors that shape group status hierarchies, we suggest that intergroup conflict provides opportunities for individuals to gain or lose status by demonstrating their value or commitment to the group. Using two behavioral experiments, we examine whether individuals gain status by engaging in either intergroup revenge or forgiveness in response to an act of outgroup antagonism and by presenting their behaviors as group-motivated (Study 1). We then ask whether observing group members receiving status for intergroup revenge or forgiveness encourages these behaviors (Study 2). Participants rewarded vengeful rather than forgiving behavior with status and encouraged vengeful behavior using chat messages. They did not, however, view avengers as more status-worthy in general or view claims of group motivation alone as status-worthy, independently of behavior. Observing others receiving status rewards for forgiveness was associated with increased intergroup forgiveness relative to revenge, but only when the outgroup initiated the conflict. Broadly, the results speak to research on conflict, altruism, group cohesion, and social status. Understanding how group processes encourage or discourage conflict is important because conflict spreads through networks via cycles of retaliation and counterretaliation.
This study advances intergroup contact theory by demonstrating that the effects of contact valence and its psychological mediators vary systematically by group status and context. Using multigroup regression analysis, we examined how positive and negative contact influence intergroup anxiety, perceived threat, and prejudice among black African minorities (N = 215) and Hong Kong Chinese majorities (N = 476). The findings reveal asymmetries in both the frequency and impact of contact: Minorities reported a broader range of contact experiences, while majorities expressed stronger prejudice. Positive contact reduced prejudice and anxiety among majority participants but had limited effects among minorities. Negative contact increased anxiety in both groups but heightened prejudice only among the majority. Mediation analyses further showed that anxiety, not threat, is a more pivotal mediator of contact effects on prejudice among high-status majority group members, whereas its role is weaker among low-status minorities. These findings underscore an important theoretical nuance, clarifying how the valence of contact can have asymmetric effects depending on group status and offering insights into the boundary conditions of intergroup contact theory.
I develop and test an argument that explains how status organizing processes and visibility of performance outputs affect participation rates in collective problem-solving groups. Drawing on status characteristics theory and reward expectations theory, I argue that actors expect rewards that are commensurate with the performance outputs that they make toward the group task. When group members’ performance outputs are anonymous, this disconnects performance output from reward by removing a basis on which rewards are allocated. Accordingly, failure to receive expected rewards reduces performance outputs. Findings from a laboratory experiment show that higher status actors participate more when their performance outputs are known to others. When performance outputs are invisible, higher status actors’ performance outputs are not statistically different from lower status actors in either condition. Status-based participation inequality suggests differences in motives for higher and lower status actors in task groups and supports prior findings that task success is but one motivation for which actors engage in status organizing processes.
