Social Psychology Quarterly

In this address, I consider the realized and potential contributions of sociological social psychology to research on inequality based on invisible disabilities and the challenges that invisible disabilities pose to current social psychological theories. Drawing from the social structure and personality framework, I advance the general notion of invisible disability as a dimension of inequality, consider how four basic social psychological processes (social categorization, identity, status, and stigmatization) have and can help us understand how invisible disabilities shape outcomes over the life course, and suggest new lines of research social psychologists could pursue. I close with brief comments about the benefits of such an agenda for sociological social psychology as well as how these lines of research can inform theories of stratification.

While significant scholarship has documented the prevalence of racial discrimination in hiring, less is known about the forces that exacerbate or mitigate it. In this article, we develop a theoretical argument about the ability of customers to influence racial discrimination in hiring, highlighting the role of direct customer communication and its intersection with online review systems. We deploy a novel method to test our argument. Specifically, we draw on original data from a two-part field experiment that first randomly assigned restaurants to receive one of three different email messages from customers and then audited the restaurants to test for racial discrimination in hiring. While our data collection effort was cut short and disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, making our findings more exploratory than initially anticipated, our data provide evidence that customer communication can reduce racial discrimination under certain conditions. We discuss the implications of these findings for scholarship on organizational decision-making, discrimination, and methodological approaches for studying these topics.

Informal segregation has been widely studied in various public settings but not on public playgrounds. Drawing on an 11-month ethnography among mothers of young children, we examine how informal segregation is (re)produced on public playgrounds in two ethnically diverse neighborhoods in Finland. Our findings reveal different normative practices. First, normative rhythms and parenting practices structure playground activities by limiting opportunities for contact between ethnic minority and majority groups and producing exclusive spaces. Second, group norms and the seeking of ethnic/racial ingroup members together regulate mothers’ interaction with outgroup mothers on playgrounds; mothers are inclined toward their ingroup while outgroup mothers are often ignored, resulting in only illusory contact. Based on our analysis, we argue that by better understanding the normative roots of segregation, more comprehensive and effective interventions can be designed to facilitate positive contact in this population.

While people are generally considered as having primary rights to know and describe themselves, in parent–child interaction, young children are not always treated as having primary access to and sole authority over matters within their own domain. Drawing on naturally occurring parent–child interactional data, this conversation analytic study shows how parents claim epistemic primacy over young children with respect to matters that, based on norms of adult interaction, should be unequivocally presupposed within children's primary epistemic domain. Two forms of evidence are provided: (1) parents confirm or disconfirm children's asserted claims about their own sensations, thoughts, or experiences; and (2) parents use test questions to request information within children's domain and then evaluate their answers as correct or incorrect. These practices indicate an orientation to young children's reduced rights to claim epistemic autonomy. I argue that this is one way through which childhood is constructed in social interaction.

This study compares two pay evaluations: pay justice and pay satisfaction. Conceptually, pay justice entails a moral assessment and is more specific to work, whereas pay satisfaction is a broader attitude that includes non-work-related factors. We analyzed German employee data and found overall similarity in determinants but differences in proximity to work contexts. Pay satisfaction was more strongly associated with private pay comparisons and standard of living, whereas pay justice was more strongly associated with reciprocity in the employer-employee relationship through working hours and comparisons at work. The results therefore suggest that employers can influence pay justice more easily than pay satisfaction by means of addressing imbalances in the employer-employee exchange and within organizational pay structures.