Trickle-Round Signals: When Low Status Is Mixed with High

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Bellezza ◽  
Jonah Berger
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Potato Chips ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
High Status ◽  
Signaling Dynamics ◽  
Costly Signal ◽  
Multiple Signaling ◽  
Mix And Match ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Middle Status

Abstract Trickle-down theories suggest that status symbols and fashion trends originate from the elites and move downward, but some high-end restaurants serve lowbrow food (e.g., potato chips, macaroni and cheese), and some high-status individuals wear downscale clothing (e.g., ripped jeans, duct-taped shoes). Why would high-status actors adopt items traditionally associated with low-status groups? Using a signaling perspective to explain this phenomenon, the authors suggest that elites sometimes adopt items associated with low-status groups as a costly signal to distinguish themselves from middle-status individuals. As a result, signals sometimes trickle round, moving directly from the lower to the upper class, before diffusing to the middle class. Furthermore, consistent with a signaling perspective, the presence of multiple signaling dimensions facilitates this effect, enabling the highs to mix and match high and low signals and differentiate themselves. These findings deepen the understanding of signaling dynamics, support a trickle-round theory of fashion, and shed light on alternative status symbols.

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE AMARNA LETTERS TOWARDS A STUDY OF SYRO-PALESTINIAN SOCIAL STRUCTURE (1). TERMINOLOGY FOR GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 788-832
Author(s):  
Lukas M. Muntingh
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
The Social ◽  
Amarna Letters ◽  
Free People ◽  
Shed Light

Egyptian domination under the 18th and 19th Dynasties deeply influenced political and social life in Syria and Palestine. The correspondence between Egypt and her vassals in Syria and Palestine in the Amarna age, first half of the fourteenth century B.C., preserved for us in the Amarna letters, written in cuneiform on clay tablets discovered in 1887, offer several terms that can shed light on the social structure during the Late Bronze Age. In the social stratification of Syria and Palestine under Egyptian rule according to the Amarna letters, three classes are discernible:1) government officials and military personnel, 2) free people, and 3) half-free people and slaves. In this study, I shall limit myself to the first, the upper class. This article deals with terminology for government officials.

Privilege Accumulation Among Upper Middle-Class Youth in Mexico

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minor Mora-Salas ◽  
Orlandina de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Economic Resources ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Mexican Families ◽  
Life Trajectories ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
Class Youth

This chapter demonstrates how upper middle-class Mexican families mobilize a vast array of social, cultural, and economic resources to expand their children’s opportunities in life and ensure the intergenerational transmission of their social position. The authors analyze salient characteristics of families’ socioeconomic and demographics in the life histories of a group of young Mexicans from an upper middle-class background. Many believe that micro-social processes, especially surrounding education, are key to understanding how upper-class families mobilize their various resources to shape their children’s life trajectories. These families accumulate social advantages over time that accrue to their progeny and benefit them upon their entrance to the labor market.

Ever-Single Heterosexual Couples in Nonmarital Cohabitation: Spirituality, Connectedness, and Adjustment

2021 ◽  
pp. 106648072110239
Author(s):  
Samta P. Pandya
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Relationship Quality ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Heterosexual Couples ◽  
Highly Qualified ◽  
Christian Couples ◽  
Work Intervention ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
Near Future

This article reports a study on the effectiveness of WhatsApp-based spiritual posts in promoting connectedness and adjustment among ever-single heterosexual couples in nonmarital cohabitation in four global cities. In comparison with trivia posts, the spiritual posts had greater impact and were more effective for Christian couples, middle class, highly qualified, and professionals-salaried cohabitants. This was in comparison with Hindu–Buddhist–Sikh dyads, upper class, with college degree, and entrepreneurs. However, cohabitation duration, initial cohabitation experience with other partners, having children/cohabitation dependents, and near future marriage plans were not significant predictors. Gender also did not significantly moderate spiritual intervention responses as proposed in the previous research. Couple intervention outcomes were mutually interdependent and intervention compliance in terms of number of posts read and do-it-yourself exercises posted were robust predictors of intervention success. With some subgroup-specific refinements, WhatsApp-based spiritual posts would be an effective spiritually sensitive social work intervention for improving relationship quality of nonmarital cohabitants.

scholarly journals Life success and social status factors in the minds of Russians

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia E. Tikhоnova
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
High Status ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Russian People ◽  
Life Success ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
The Status

This article reveals that, during the last 15 years, drastic shifts have occurred in the subjective social structure of Russian society: the people for the most part no longer consider themselves to be “social outsiders”, while Russian society itself has become a society undoubtedly dominated by a subjective middle-class, albeit predominantly a lower middle-class. However, such a positive shift does not equal Russians being completely satisfied with the situation at hand when it comes to stratification, since their actual position in the status hierarchy is currently much lower not only than desired, but also lower than those status positions which they reckon they should be occupying in this hierarchy “in all fairness”. Russian people’s dissatisfaction is mostly a result of them considering opportunities for success and prosperity to be associated with the social, economic and cultural capital of one’s parents, as well as with various unlawful practices (such as corruption, bribery), not only with one’s hard work or quality education. These views seem to be stable over time, and to some extent they are similar to the views of German people. However, in the eyes of Russians various unlawful practices (primarily bribery) play a greater role when it comes to achieving success in life. In addition to that, one’s parents’ education, as well as one’s own education, hard work and ambition play a slightly less significant role (which is decreasing year after year) in Russia. This means that, as time passes, more Russian people are becoming convinced that a person’s personal efforts and goals are not a key factor in achieving life success and high status positions in Russian society. Statistical verification indicates that these views are objectively justified, since, according to the former, upper strata of Russian society are becoming increasingly more closed, with lower strata starting to close as well. High indexes of self-reproduction of opposing status groups within mass layers of the population, together with an increasing polarization of the population (primarily young people) – these are all dangerous tendencies in terms of their socio-political and economic consequences, which lead to authorities being delegitimized, as well as Russian people losing their motivation to achieve success in life through their own efforts.

scholarly journals Universal modesty in signal-burying games

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tadeg Quillien
Keyword(s):  
Simple Model ◽  
Evolutionary Game ◽  
Costly Signaling ◽  
Positive Information ◽  
Probabilistic Information ◽  
Signaling Dynamics ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Positive Traits ◽  
Shed Light

Why would people hide positive information about themselves? Evolutionary game theorists have recently developed the signal-burying game as a simple model to shed light on this puzzle; they have shown that the game has an equilibrium where some agents are better off deliberately reducing the visibility of the signal by which they broadcast their positive traits. However, their explanation falls short of explaining all modesty norms, since this equilibrium also features individuals who openly brag. This leaves modesty norms that everyone adheres to in want of an explanation. Here we show that the signal-burying framework actually affords such an explanation: the game contains an equilibrium where all agents who send a signal voluntarily reduce its conspicuousness. Surprisingly, the stability of the two kinds of equilibria rely on very different principles. The equilibrium where some agents brag is stable because of costly signaling dynamics. By contrast, the universal modesty equilibrium exists because buried signals contain probabilistic information about a sender's type, and receivers make optimal use of this information. In the latter equilibrium, burying a signal can be understood as a handicap which makes the signal more honest, but honesty is not achieved through standard costly signaling dynamics.

Protestantism and the Latin American Middle Class

1971 ◽  
Vol os-18 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-28
Author(s):  
Charles F. Denton
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Economic Reform ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Upward Social Mobility ◽  
The Church ◽  
Positive Force

The author feels that the development of a middle class in Latin America has been fostered by the effects of Protestant evangelism among the lower classes, which has spurred upward social mobility. But instead of becoming a positive force for social and economic reform, this middle class has become as reactionary as the small traditional upper class. This, together with the inability of most Protestant pastors to minister effectively to middle class persons and intellectuals, is a serious problem for the church in Latin America.

The Lady Lisle

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Ifill
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Class Child

The Lady Lisle features two near-identical boys from different ends of the social spectrum. The possibility of altering the development of their inborn natures through upbringing and education is explored and contested when the two are swapped by the villain, Major Varney. The upper-class child is sent to a middle-class school where he is raised in such a way as to negate detrimental qualities which initially seemed innate. Contrastingly, the lower-class child, James, impersonates the true heir and proves to be selfish, violent and eventually murderous, like his father. Yet it is never entirely clear to what extent James’s behaviour is due to heredity or to his emotionally abusive upbringing. A shift in narrative tone is identified which moves from making allowances for James due to ‘nurture’ towards castigating him as bad by ‘nature’. In this way Braddon raises questions about the malleability or fixity of the personality, about how we define, recognise and value naturalness, but ultimately combines the forces of education and hereditary degeneracy in order to segregate the lower classes, and to bring the morally upright middle classes together with the affluent upper classes.

Plural StratiWcation: Colour-Class and Culture

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Colour Class ◽  
Piped Water ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
East Indians

Urbanization in Kingston since independence, as the previous chapter demonstrated, has placed a very heavy burden on the already disadvantaged lower class. This burden is expressed in their dependence on the informal sector of employment, high rates of unemployment, rental of high-density accommodation (or outright squatting), shared access to toilet facilities, and lack of piped-water connections in the tenements—all these problematic characteristics piling up in the downtown areas—quintessentially in West Kingston. There is clearly a stratification of living conditions ranging from affluence in the uptown suburbs via a modicum of comfort in the middle zone around Half Way Tree and Cross Roads to outright deprivation in the downtown neighbourhoods. It was argued in the previous chapter that this stratification of living conditions is underpinned by class-differentiated neighbourhoods; as this chapter will show, these circumstances mesh with—and reinforce—colour-class stratification and cultural pluralism, or what I have called plural stratification (to distinguish it from class stratification alone). After the Second World War, it became the conventional wisdom among Caribbean social scientists (of local birth) to depict Jamaica—and the Windward and Leeward Islands—as colour-class stratifications. This had the advantage of linking these Caribbean stratifications to occupational/class systems in the US and Europe, while pointing to a colonial history of colour differentiation, which shadowed class and reinforced it. So, the upper class was white or pass-as-white, the middle class brown and black, and the lower class black with some brown (Henriques 1953: 42). A number of racially or ethnically distinct groups originally fell outside this colour-class stratification, but had, over time, been accommodated within it: Jews were absorbed into the upper class, as were the Syrian professionals; Chinese, the remaining Syrians, and a few East Indians were middle class; the majority of East Indians were lower class. Two further aspects of colour-class need underlining. There was a tendency for its advocates to regard class as unproblematic and consensual, as in the American tradition of social analysis (Parsons 1952). In short, the whole colour-class system was dependent upon the almost complete acceptance by each group of the superiority of the white, and the inferiority of the black (Henriques 1953).

Luxury consumption as identity markers in Tallinn: A study of Russian and Estonian everyday identity construction through consumer citizenship

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-215
Author(s):  
Abel Polese ◽  
Oleksandra Seliverstova
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Consumer Behaviour ◽  
Ethnic Relations ◽  
High Status ◽  
Majority Group ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Identity Narratives ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Consumer Citizenship ◽  
Shed Light

While the importance of consumption of luxury goods as a mechanism accompanying upwards movement in a social hierarchy has been well acknowledged, attention to the role and perceptions of luxury in multicultural societies has been scarce so far. It is nonetheless intriguing that ethnic groups inhabiting the same territory, and exposed to a same culture, might develop substantially different notions of luxury, which may end up affecting the integration, or isolation, of one of the groups. Our article addresses this deficiency in the literature by exploring the case of Estonia, a multi-ethnic society where Russians make up almost one-fourth of the population. Much has been written about the integration, and lack thereof, of ethnic Russians into Estonian society. We contrast these views by looking at inter-ethnic relations in the country from a different angle and by a) looking at consumption of luxury in the country through the concept of ‘conspicuous consumption'; b) endorsing Foster's concept of consumer citizenship. This allows us to shed light on an under-explored tendency and maintain here that, in a significant number of cases, ordinary citizens challenge official identity narratives by the state through counter-narratives centred around consumption of luxury at the everyday level. The identified counter-narratives end up translating into (consumer behaviour) instructions for those Russians willing to assert their Estonianness thus allowing them to seek integration into the majority group by simply consuming luxury items that they perceive as appreciated among Estonians, or associated with Estonian high status. By doing this, we make a case for expanding the parameters for academic scrutiny of social integration to include more ‘banal' forms of consumer practices through which top- down narratives and macro studies may be challenged.

scholarly journals Influencing the physiology and decisions of groups: Physiological linkage during group decision-making

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-159
Author(s):  
Katherine R. Thorson ◽  
Oana D. Dumitru ◽  
Wendy Berry Mendes ◽  
Tessa V. West
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Group Decision Making ◽  
Physiological Response ◽  
Group Decision ◽  
Physiological Responses ◽  
High Status ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Physiological Linkage ◽  
To Come ◽  
Middle Status

Many of the most important decisions in our society are made within groups, yet we know little about how the physiological responses of group members predict the decisions that groups make. In the current work, we examine whether physiological linkage from “senders” to “receivers”—which occurs when a sender’s physiological response predicts a receiver’s physiological response—is associated with senders’ success at persuading the group to make a decision in their favor. We also examine whether experimentally manipulated status—an important predictor of social behavior—is associated with physiological linkage. In groups of 5, we randomly assigned 1 person to be high status, 1 low status, and 3 middle status. Groups completed a collaborative decision-making task that required them to come to a consensus on a decision to hire 1 of 5 firms. Unbeknownst to the 3 middle-status members, high- and low-status members surreptitiously were told to each argue for different firms. We measured cardiac interbeat intervals of all group members throughout the decision-making process to assess physiological linkage. We found that the more receivers were physiologically linked to senders, the more likely groups were to make a decision in favor of the senders. We did not find that people were physiologically linked to their group members as a function of their fellow group members’ status. This work identifies physiological linkage as a novel correlate of persuasion and highlights the need to understand the relationship between group members’ physiological responses during group decision-making.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document