Social Psychology Quarterly

This article develops a microsociological framework of cognition, interaction, and creativity to identify group processes that alternatively facilitate automatic and deliberate cognitive processes in ways that drive the creative process forward. Analyzing interactions and cognitive processes by drawing on ethnographic observations and video recordings of 46 songwriting sessions, I find individuals sustain awareness of their collaborators’ cognitive processes and interact with others to, alternatively, sustain the automatic cognitive processes of their collaborators and compel them to be more deliberate. When new musical ideas provoke enthusiastic reactions among multiple members in a collaborative group, this moment of resonance can lead to “resonance in motion” if it is punctuated by a subsequent moment of resonance. The microsociological framework advanced in this article synthesizes sociological dual-process models with the distributed cognition framework to enhance future analysis and theorizing in sociology and social psychology on cognition, interaction, creativity, and cultural production.

American media coverage of the “Great Resignation” may have contributed to a belief that job dissatisfaction is widespread in the United States, even though surveys show relatively high and stable levels of job satisfaction among American workers. Using data from the 2023 Quality of Employment Survey, we investigate whether individuals’ beliefs about job dissatisfaction mirror empirical evidence or align more with media portrayals of widespread discontent. While most study participants expressed personal job satisfaction, over half believed that the majority of Americans were not at all satisfied, indicative of pluralistic ignorance—a phenomenon involving a collective misperception about a group’s norms or beliefs. Dissatisfaction beliefs were more common among remote workers and those with fewer work friendships. Moreover, believing in widespread job dissatisfaction was associated with lower organizational commitment, controlling for personal job satisfaction. We discuss the role of pluralistic ignorance in reconciling personal experiences with contrasting media representations of work and the economy.

This article considers interactional trouble that arises when the social distribution of knowledge and interpersonal relationships come together in the delivery and reception of good news in pediatric neurology visits for video-electroencephalography testing. Contrary to common perceptions of good news as easy to deliver and receive, I find that it is occasionally fraught with hesitancy in this context. Using conversation analysis, I explore what drives this trouble and argue that some of the difficulty associated with good news in this context arises from its structure: Physicians prioritize conveying “the facts” of the news over characterizing its valence. However, parents treat physicians’ assessments of the news as critical for the news delivery. When physicians fail to evaluate the information they present, parents tend to treat news deliveries as incomplete, which not only causes difficulties in their reception of the news but also leads to protracted news deliveries.

Expressions of politeness such as please are prominent elements of interactional conduct that are explicitly targeted in early socialization and are subject to cultural expectations around socially desirable behavior. Yet their specific interactional functions remain poorly understood. Using conversation analysis supplemented with systematic coding, this study investigates when and where interactants use please in everyday requests. We find that please is rare, occurring in only 7 percent of request attempts. Interactants use please to manage face-threats when a request is ill fitted to its immediate interactional context. Within this, we identify two environments in which please prototypically occurs. First, please is used when the requestee has demonstrated unwillingness to comply. Second, please is used when the request is intrusive due to its incompatibility with the requestee’s engagement in a competing action trajectory. Our findings advance research on politeness and extend Goffman’s theory of face-work, with particular salience for scholarship on request behavior.

Major environmental jolts can prompt individuals to critically evaluate their personal view of the legitimacy (i.e., propriety) of established authorities, especially when jolts amplify conflicts between the authority and individuals’ value priorities. The COVID-19 pandemic constituted a major jolt that highlighted both clashes and alignment between the values of public health officials (enhancement of health and disease prevention) and other basic values. Using data from a survey of 1,356 U.S. adults collected in spring 2022, I descriptively assess whether the pandemic jolt prompted individuals to critically evaluate the legitimacy of public health officials. I then investigate how basic values that aligned and clashed with public health values during the pandemic shaped assessments of public health officials’ propriety two years into the pandemic as well as intentions to comply with them in a future health crisis. Descriptive findings reveal that individuals actively assessed public health legitimacy during the pandemic. Other analyses demonstrate how value (mis)alignment affects evaluations of the propriety of public health officials. Values also operate through propriety assessments to influence future compliance intentions, providing insight into social psychological processes undergirding institutional endurance and change.

I develop and test a theory to address instances of “visibly unpopular” norms—norms that are widely seen as neither collectively optimal nor enjoyable to conform with. Based on 76 interviews with Korean professionals engaging with a norm pertaining to excessive drinking at after-hours business gatherings (hoesik)—widely recognized as undesirable and disapproved of by both individuals and groups—I find that conformity serves as an effective signal of commitment to exchange partners not despite of but precisely because of the conformist’s visible aversion. Insofar as typical conformity with visibly unpopular norms appears “insincere” as such, conformity may continue. Vignette experiments further validate such insincere conformity’s signaling value. The implication is that despite the prevailing notion that norms persist because they promote collectively optimal solutions or are perceived as such, norms widely acknowledged as individually and collectively suboptimal may still endure.

When a group shares a viewpoint on a status order, their consensus imparts legitimacy to their shared understanding of that order. Conversely, a group espousing multiple viewpoints undermines the notion that one “true” hierarchy exists. To build empirical knowledge about how social groups contribute to the construction of status orders, we take the occupational hierarchy as a case study and map the structure of agreement across intersectional groups. First, we quantify the extent to which groups (1) agree internally on their occupational rankings (within-group consensus) and (2) agree with other groups (intergroup consensus). Using General Social Survey data on occupational perceptions, we find a cluster of privileged groups—namely, highly educated White men and women—who agree internally and with each other on the occupational status order. Lesser advantaged groups exhibit less internal agreement and do not cohere around an alternative conceptualization of value, leaving unchallenged the consensus of privileged groups.

A long-standing sociological puzzle deals with how societies shape individuals and their identities. Sociologists have theorized that identities are organized around core elements, termed “master identities,” that influence the adoption and expression of other identities. In this study, I examine the position of values as master identities within identity frameworks. I investigate the link between conservation and self-transcendence values and holding a diverse set of voluntary memberships. Additionally, I explore whether values mediate the relationship between age, gender, and memberships in voluntary organizations. Using multilevel structural equation models and data from the European Social Survey 2002, I find that conservation and self-transcendence are both directly associated with holding memberships across domains and mediate the relationship between both age and gender and voluntary memberships.