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Direct and Indirect Effects of Grandparent Education on Grandchildren's Cognitive Development: The Role of Parental Cognitive Ability

By on July 26, 2021 in Articles

Markus Klein, Michael Kühhirt

Sociological Science July 26, 2021
10.15195/v8.a13

Abstract

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The social stratification literature is inconclusive about whether there is a direct effect of grandparent resources on grandchildren’s educational outcomes net of parental characteristics. Some of this heterogeneity may be due to differences in omitted variable bias at the parental level. Our article accounts for a more extensive set of parent characteristics and explores the mediating role of parental cognitive ability in more detail. It further tackles methodological challenges (treatmentinduced mediator–outcome confounders, treatment–mediator interaction) in assessing any direct influences of grandparents by using a regression-with-residuals approach. Using the 1970 British Cohort Study, our results show that the direct effect of grandparent education on grandchildren’s verbal and numerical ability is small and statistically nonsignificant. Parental cognitive ability alone can account for more than two-thirds (numerical ability) or half (verbal ability) of the overall grandparent effect. These findings stress the importance of cognitive ability for intergenerational social mobility processes.
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Genres, Objects, and the Contemporary Expression of Higher-Status Tastes

By on July 14, 2021 in Articles

Clayton Childress, Shyon Baumann, Craig M. Rawlings, Jean-François Nault

Sociological Science July 14, 2021
10.15195/v8.a12

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Are contemporary higher-status tastes inclusive, exclusive, or both? Recent work suggests that the answer likely is both. And yet, little is known concerning how configurations of such tastes are learned, upheld, and expressed without contradiction. We resolve this puzzle by showing the affordances of different levels of culture (i.e., genres and objects) in the expression of tastes. We rely on original survey data to show that people of higher status taste differently at different levels of culture: more inclusively for genres and more exclusively for objects. Inclusivity at the level of genres is fostered through familial socialization, and exclusivity at the level of objects is fostered through formal schooling. Individuals’ taste configurations are mirrored in and presumably reinforce their adult social-structural positions. The results have important implications for understanding the subtle maintenance of status in an increasingly diverse and putatively meritocratic society.
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Competitive Exclusion versus Mimetic Isomorphism: An Identified Empirical Test

By on June 21, 2021 in Articles

William P. Barnett, Xiao Xiao, Yi Zhou

Sociological Science June 21, 2021
10.15195/v8.a11

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Why are organizations sometimes so similar, and in other cases so different? For decades this question has been central to research on organizations, and two leading theories have answered the question very differently. Neo-institutional theory points to the importance of mimetic isomorphism, where organizations imitate one another as they navigate decisions in the context of uncertainty over what is regarded as legitimate action. By contrast, ecological theory argues that competitive exclusion explains the differences we see around us, as organizations repel one another when they vie for the same resources. Decades of empirical work have tended to confirm one or the other prediction, with little acknowledgement of their opposition. Furthermore, much of the existing empirical work is limited to descriptive studies that make little or no attempt to empirically identify their findings, leaving the empirical record open to concerns over endogeneity. This article conducts an identified empirical test in a context where the two arguments make opposing predictions. In an analysis of auditor selection after the collapse of Arthur Andersen, we find evidence of competitive exclusion but no evidence of mimetic isomorphism. Implications for the continued progress of organization theory are discussed.
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Neighborhood Isolation during the COVID-19 Pandemic

By on June 14, 2021 in Articles

Thomas Marlow, Kinga Makovi, Bruno Abrahao

Sociological Science June 14, 2021
10.15195/v8.a9

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The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted Americans’ daily mobility, which could contribute to greater social stratification. Relying on SafeGraph cell phone movement data from 2019 and 2020, we use two indices proposed by Phillips and colleagues (2019) to measure mobility inequality between census tracts in the 25 largest U.S. cities. These measures capture the importance of hubs and neighborhood isolation in a network. In the earliest phases of the pandemic, neighborhood isolation rapidly increased, and the importance of downtown central business districts declined. Mobility hubs generally regained their importance, whereas neighborhood isolation remained elevated and increased again during the latter half of 2020. Linear regression models with city and week fixed effects find that new COVID-19 cases are positively associated with neighborhood isolation changes a week later. Additionally, places with larger populations, more public transportation use, and greater racial and ethnic segregation had larger increases in neighborhood isolation during 2020.
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Racial Differences in Women’s Role-Taking Accuracy: How Status Matters

By on June 7, 2021 in Articles

Tony P. Love, Jenny L. Davis

Sociological Science June 7, 2021
10.15195/v8.a8

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Role-taking is the process of mentally and affectively placing the self in the position of another, understanding the world from the other’s perspective. Role-taking serves an expressive function within interpersonal interaction, supporting others to pursue instrumental tasks that are recognized, valued, and rewarded. In the present work, we compare role-taking accuracy between white women and black women across status-varying interactional arrangements. Data for this study come from a series of two laboratory experiments. Experiment 1 establishes racial differences in white and black women’s role-taking accuracy, showing that women of color are significantly more attuned to others within social encounters. Experiment 2 implements an intervention to undermine racial disparities in role-taking accuracy, showing that expressive labors equalize when black women are empowered within the social structure. Findings highlight the entwinement of status structures with interpersonal processes while demonstrating the efficacy and value of structural reforms.
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Better in the Shadows? Public Attention, Media Coverage, and Market Reactions to Female CEO Announcements

By on May 17, 2021 in Articles

Edward Bishop Smith, Jillian Chown, and Kevin Gaughan

Sociological Science May 17, 2021
10.15195/v8.a7

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Combining media coverage data from approximately 17,000 unique media outlets with the full population of CEO appointments for U.S. publicly traded firms between 2000 and 2016, we investigate whether female CEO appointments garner more public attention compared with male appointments, and if so, whether this increased attention can help make sense of the previously reported negative market reaction to these events. Contrary to prior reports, our data do not indicate that the appointments of female CEOs elicit overly negative market reactions, on average. Our results do highlight an important moderating role of public attention, however. We demonstrate that greater attention—even when exogenously determined—contributes to negative market reactions for female CEO appointments but positive market reactions for male CEOs, all else held constant. Additionally, female CEO appointments that attract little attention garner significant positive responses in the market, compared with both male CEOs drawing similarly limited levels of attention and female CEOs drawing high levels of attention. Our results help to reconcile contrasting empirical findings on the effects of gender in executive leadership and parallel recent work on anticipatory bias and second-order discrimination in alternative empirical contexts. Implications for research on attention, gender bias, and executive succession are discussed.
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Who Thinks How? Social Patterns in Reliance on Automatic and Deliberate Cognition

By on May 10, 2021 in Articles

Gordon Brett, Andrew Miles

Sociological Science May 10, 2021
10.15195/v8.a6

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Sociologists increasingly use insights from dual-process models to explain how people think and act. These discussions generally emphasize the influence of cultural knowledge mobilized through automatic cognition, or else show how the use of automatic and deliberate processes vary according to the task at hand or the context. Drawing on insights from sociological theory and suggestive research from social and cognitive psychology, we argue that socially structured experiences also shape general, individual-level preferences (or propensities) for automatic and deliberate thinking. Using a meta-analysis of 63 psychological studies (N = 25,074) and a new multivariate analysis of nationally representative data, we test the hypothesis that the use of automatic and deliberate cognitive processes is socially patterned. We find that education consistently predicts preferences for deliberate processing and that gender predicts preferences for both automatic and deliberate processing. We find that age is a significant but likely nonlinear predictor of preferences for automatic and deliberate cognition, and we find weaker evidence for differences by income, marital status, and religion. These results underscore the need to consider group differences in cognitive processing in sociological explanations of culture, action, and inequality.
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Still a Small World? University Course Enrollment Networks before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic

By on January 21, 2021 in Articles

Kim A. Weeden, Benjamin Cornwell, Barum Park

Sociological Science January 21, 2021
10.15195/v8.a4

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In normal times, the network ties that connect students on a college campus are an asset; during a pandemic, they can become a liability. Using prepandemic data from Cornell University, Weeden and Cornwell (2020) showed how co-enrollment in classes creates a “small world” network with high clustering, short path lengths, and multiple independent pathways connecting students. Using data from the fall of 2020, we assess how the structure of the co-enrollment network changed as Cornell, like many other institutions of higher education, adapted to the pandemic by adopting a hybrid instructional model. We find that under hybrid instruction, not only is a much smaller share of students in the face-to-face network, but the paths connecting student pairs in the network lengthened, the share of student pairs connected by three or fewer degrees of separation declined, clustering increased, and a greater share of co-enrollment ties occurred between students in the same field of study. The small world became both less connected and more fragmented.
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