The Divergent Mental Health Effects of Dashed Expectations and Unfulfilled Aspirations: Evidence from American Lawyers’ Careers

Considerable work has shown that optimistic future orientations can be a resource for resilience across individuals’ lives. At the same time, research has shown little downside to “shooting for the stars” and failing. Here, we bring these competing insights to the study of lawyers’ careers, investigating the relationship between mental health and failure in achieving desired career advancement. To do this, we differentiate between expectations and aspirations for the future, a conceptual distinction that has been much theorized but little tested. Using longitudinal data, we show that dashed expectations of making partner are associated with depreciated mental health outcomes, whereas a similar relationship does not exist for unfulfilled aspirations. We conclude that inasmuch as expectations are more deeply rooted in an individual’s realistic sense of their future self, failing to achieve what is expected is more psychologically damaging than failing to achieve what is simply aspired. Our findings contrast with studies of younger people that demonstrate fewer consequences for unfulfilled future orientations, and so we highlight the importance of specifying how particular future-oriented beliefs fit into distinct career and life course trajectories, for better or for worse. In the process, we contribute to the academic literatures on future orientations, work, and mental health.

Dignity in Red Envelopes: Disreputable Exchange and Cultural Reproduction of Inequality in Informal Medical Payment

Disreputable exchanges are morally disapproved and often legally prohibited exchanges that exacerbate and reproduce social inequality but remain ubiquitous. Although previous literature explains the phenomenon by material interests and structural relations, we propose a cultural approach based on three major conceptions of culture: culture in relations, culture in interactions, and culture in inequality. We illustrate this approach by a case study of China’s hongbao (the red envelope) exchange, a typical disreputable exchange through informal medical payment. Drawing on interviews with doctors and patients, we find that participants of the exchange mobilize items from their cultural repertoires, such as professional ethics, face, power, fairness, and affection, to redefine different situations of interactions and project positive self–images to render their problematic exchanges morally acceptable to each other. Moreover, as the participants’ responses to our vignettes show, they negatively evaluate the exchanges in general moral terms, such as equality and fairness, but culturally justify their own involvement. This discrepancy between saying and doing tends to legitimize the disreputable exchange amid enduring public outrage and institutional prohibition. These cultural processes contribute to the reproduction of unequal access to scarce health care resources. Findings of this research not only offer insights into understanding disreputable exchanges but also contribute to research on other cases of social problems in which deviant behaviors are morally and culturally justified.

Micro, Meso, and Macro Processes in Identity Change: The 2020 Cooley-Mead Award Address

I discuss how social psychologists can think about identity change as a nested phenomenon. Identity change occurs at the micro level, but it is embedded in meso and macro levels of social reality. I use changes in the religious identity in the United States as an example of how we can conceptualize identity change in this way. This approach enables us to broaden the scope of social psychological work to be more inclusive of the various social forces at all levels of social reality that impact the human processes we study.

When Does Status Transfer between People? A Crowdsourced Experiment on the Scope of Status by Association

It is well known in social psychology that people are judged by the company they keep, but when and how does that company affect how individuals are evaluated? This article extends expectation states theory to explain associative status. The theory predicts that the status value of former coworkers will “spill over” to positively predict a person’s status position in a new task with new coworkers. A series of crowdsourced experiments finds that status spreads to a person from a former interaction partner. The status of one’s associates predicts deference behavior only when the previous and current task contexts rely on similar abilities. Meanwhile, explicitly evaluated status and performance expectations respond to the status of associates regardless of how interaction contexts are related. The present findings highlight the importance of role relationships and task contexts as moderators that regulate whether status transfers from one person to another.

How Social Influence Processes Generate Cohesion in Task Groups

We introduce a theoretical argument linking group structure to an individual’s cohesion in collectively oriented task groups. We posit that status, the distribution of opinions, and social categories indirectly shape perceptions of cohesion by making individuals working on an uncertain task more or less susceptible to the opinions of others. Specifically, these factors influence how likely one is to succumb to the opinions of others, which in turn influences one’s likelihood of viewing one’s actions as valid or consonant with the expectations of the other members of the group. As this process repeats over time, it accumulates to affect individuals’ expressions of cohesion with group members. Results from a laboratory experiment corroborate this process.

The Intersection of Sexual and Racial/Ethnic Identity Centrality and Mental Well-Being among Black and Latinx Sexual Minority Adults

Studies document how identity related processes, including identity centrality, shape mental well being. More research, however, is needed that considers how identity centrality impacts well being for people with more than one marginalized identity. Drawing from data from 1,571 black and Latinx sexual minorities included in the Social Justice Sexuality Project, I apply an intercategorical intersectional approach to examine the association between the intersection of sexual and racial/ethnic identity centrality and mental well being. Ordinary least squares regression models show three key findings. First, I found a significant association between both racial/ethnic and sexual identity centrality and mental well being. Second, my results highlight a significant interaction effect between sexual and racial/ethnic identity centrality, indicating the relationship between centrality and well being varies across different levels of centrality. Finally, my results indicate that after adjusting for identity centrality, other predictors remain significantly associated with well being.