Steven Hitlin
Biographic Data
| ID | 136202 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steven Hitlin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steven |
| FAMILY NAME | Hitlin |
| SIGNATURE | HITLIN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Iowa |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4998-0137 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1286 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Life’s dignity within and beyond the workplace
While social relationships are essential to dignity, empirical research has yet to explore how the core qualities of these relations associate with a dignified life. Given widespread alienation among contemporary workers, we suspect that a life’s dignity may derive equally, if not more, from relations beyond the workplace. Drawing on 2021 Gallup survey data from the United States ( N = 551), this study captures an increased range of processes spa…
Dreams of a Lifetime
Moral disagreement in everyday life
Sociology and moral character
This article suggests three orientations within sociology toward issues of morality and character development. The first stems from Durkheim, one where sociological tools diagnose the operation of any society and its constituent parts, including typifications of the individual. This tradition holds that sociologists can help diagnose society-specific problems and failings and participate in addressing them. The second is Weberian, the notion that…
Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, Volume 2
Measuring and Explaining a College Dignity Divide in America
Prominent, multidisciplinary perspectives on inequality in America contend that receiving a four-year college degree matters not just for life chances but also for achieving a sense of dignity or respect from others. In this study, the authors assess subjective dignity, or dignity as perceived in one's own life, according to four-year college degree status and how it overlaps with different economic and psychosocial college-linked resources. Draw…
Inequality and the Development of Moral Emotions
This chapter outlines the authors’ thesis that the level of economic inequality in a society is reflected in its members’ moral emotional experiences. Those living in societies with more equality regularly experience more positive, binding emotions. Conversely, those living in unequal societies are significantly more likely to experience negative, sanctioning moral emotions. Growing up and living under these various social structures affects emot…
Subjective dignity and self-reported health
Aims: To describe disparities in depressive symptoms and self-rated health with a novel, individual-level measure of subjective dignity administered before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: National survey data were collected across the United States by the Gallup Organization in Spring (2017) (n = 1459) and again in Spring (2021) (n = 1244). Subjective dignity is measured by self-reported perceptions of dignity in one's own life. Numero…
Using Internet-Derived Data to Measure Religion
Internet and social media data provide new sources of information for examining social issues, but their potential for scholars interested in religion remains unclear. Focusing on cross-national religion data, we test the validity of measures drawn from Google and Twitter against well-known existing data. We find that Google Trend (GT) searches for the dominant religions' major holidays, along with 'Buddhism,' can be validated against traditional…
In- and out-groups across cultures
The Evolution of Moral Progress Meets Social Science
Buchanan and Powell’s ambitious work offers a wide-ranging philosophical treatment about one of social science’s active inquries: human morality and how it evolved. This review humbly offers a brief engagement with the social science of morality, both to support the book’s conclusions and occasionally to build productive interdisciplinary bridges toward an even more fuller treatment of the topic
Renewal
A Novel Measure of Moral Boundaries
The literature on group differences and social identities has long assumed that value judgments about groups constitute a basic form of social categorization. However, little research has empirically investigated how values unite or divide social groups. The authors seek to address this gap by developing a novel measure of group values: third-order beliefs about in- and out-group members, building on Schwartz value theory. The authors demonstrate…
Unequal Foundations
This book offers a novel theory and an original use of cross-cultural data to argue that the level of economic inequality in a society is reflected in the emotional experience of its members. People living in societies with greater equality experience more positive, binding emotions on a regular basis, while people living in unequal societies, like the United States, are significantly more likely to regularly experience negative, sanctioning mora…
Affect Control Theory
This chapter draws on the theoretical and methodological insights from Affect Control theory (ACT), a theory with decades of research and empirical support, to set up our cross-cultural analyses examing our theory of societal inequality. ACT is a formal mathematical theory used to examine how the various facets of social events (such as the identities and emotions) shape ongoing social action. ACT distills the representation of these various face…
A Primer on Inequality
One of sociology’s biggest contributions is an interrogation of broad social structures, including the consequences and continuation of social inequalities. We begin by setting the stage for the overall project by outlining issues of economic inequality across societies. We discuss some of the ramifications inequality has within a society, including how inequality becomes internalized and shapes beliefs about right, wrong, and possible futures fo…
Morality as a Measure of Society
This chapter theorizes what it means to say a person is a member of a particular society, thus carrying the “typical” moral worldview as a member of that society. Much sociological work explores variation within a particular society, but people also colloquially understand what it means to say that somebody is emblematically “French” or “American.” The chapter defends the proposition that a national “habitus” or “background” can be measured and i…
Adolescent Agentic Orientations
Family (Dis)Advantage and Life Course Expectations
Optimistic assessments of life chances can positively influence life outcomes, but conflicting theories suggest these assessments either reflect structural privilege or develop as a result of childhood hardship. In addition, competing hypotheses suggest that these assessments may matter differently depending on who holds them. We examine whether family socioeconomic status shapes adolescents' expectations about how successful their lives will tur…
Motivation
Agency and Mental Health
Building on calls within the health literature for a deeper engagement with the concept of agency, we utilize nationally representative survey data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health ( N = 13,592) to develop an empirical conception of the traditional treatment of health agency focused on two social psychological constructs that build upon current foci on personal control within the stress process model: (1) “subjec…
Os Contornos e o Entorno da Nova Sociologia da Moral
Neste ensaio vou expor brevemente como vejo o desenvolvimento do campo da Sociologia da Moral, com foco em seu potencial fundamentalmente interdisciplinar, destacando os estudos e tradições que merecem ser incorporados à sociologia. A moral, como tema de investigação da ciência social, perpassa os campos da psicologia (social e do desenvolvimento), sociologia, antropologia, neurociências e economia. Aqueles entre nós implicados no seu desenvolvim…
Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course
Empirical treatments of agency have not caught up with theoretical explication; empirical projects almost always focus on concurrent beliefs about one's ability to act successfully without sufficiently attending to temporality. The authors suggest that understanding the modern life course necessitates a multidimensional understanding of subjective agency involving (a) perceived capacities and (b) perceived life chances, or expectations about what…
Social Psychological Ingredients for a Sociology of Morality
Social Psychological Ingredients for a Sociology of Morality
Issues of morality and social solidarity have been at the root of sociological thought since its inception (Hodgkiss 2013), though interest in these core issues diminished in the post-World War II period. The last decade or so have seen a renewed focus on these issues (Hitlin and Vaisey 2013; Smith 2003), including a Handbook of the Sociology of Morality (Hitlin and Vaisey 2010) and a number of prominent publications (e.g., Abend 2008; Abend 2011…
Values
Over the past decades, the concept of values has gone in and out of fashion within sociology. Relatively recent advances in both the conceptualization and measurement of values offer the potential for a reincorporation of values into sociological work. Sociologists often employ cursory understandings of values, imbuing values with too much determinism or viewing them as too individually subjective. The concept is employed sporadically in sociolog…
Time, Self, and the Curiously Abstract Concept of Agency
The term 'agency' is quite slippery and is used differently depending on the epistemological roots and goals of scholars who employ it. Distressingly, the sociological literature on the concept rarely addresses relevant social psychological research. We take a social behaviorist approach to agency by suggesting that individual temporal orientations are underutilized in conceptualizing this core sociological concept. Different temporal foci-the ac…
The New Sociology of Morality
Sociology was once integral to the scientific study of morality, but its explicit focus has waned over the past half-century. This article calls for greater sociological engagement in order to speak to the resurgence of the study of morality in cognate fields. We identify important treatments of morality, some of which are not explicitly so, and identify those treatments that build a distinctly sociological focus on morality: room for culturally …
Values as the Core of Personal Identity
Personal identity is an underanalyzed level of the self often regarded erroneously as too idiosyncratic for proper social psychological analysis. The two dominant theories of self, identity theory and social identity theory, mention but rarely explicate the concept of personal identity. In this paper I address this gap by making two moves, one conceptual and one empirical. First, I argue that values are a cohesive force within personal identity. …
Handbook of the Sociology of Morality
Racial Self-Categorization in Adolescence
Research on multiracial individuals is often cross-sectional, obscuring the fluid nature of multiracial self-categorization across time. Pathways of racial self-identification are developed from a nationally representative sample of adolescents aged 14-18, measured again 5 years later. A significant proportion of multiracial adolescents change racial self-identification across time. Youth who ever report being multiracial are 4 times as likely to…
Measuring Latinos
The measurement of Hispanics in the 2000 U.S. Census significantly skews the racial identification of the Hispanic population in America. The literature on racial and ethnic identification, however, lacks serious engagement with the social psychology of self-identification. We draw on social identity theory to demonstrate how the process of individual self-categorization reinforces a society structured along racial and ethnic lines. This understa…
Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course
Empirical treatments of agency have not caught up with theoretical explication; empirical projects almost always focus on concurrent beliefs about one's ability to act successfully without sufficiently attending to temporality. The authors suggest that understanding the modern life course necessitates a multidimensional understanding of subjective agency involving (a) perceived capacities and (b) perceived life chances, or expectations about what…
The Greater Complexity of Lived Race
Objectives. Harris and Sim (2002) recently demonstrated the complexity of lived race by exploring patterns of racial self‐identification. They raised important sociological questions about the role of context in racial self‐identification, but offered an incomplete picture of ethnic fluidity by excluding Hispanics from their analyses. We address this limitation with data on Hispanics from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add …
Copresence
Copresence, the idea that the presence of other actors shapes individual behavior, links macro- and micro-theorizing about social interaction. Traditionally, scholars have focused on the physical proximity of other people, assuming copresence to be a given, objective condition. However, recent empirical evidence on technologically mediated (e.g., e-mail), imaginary (e.g., prayer), and parasocial (e.g., watching a television show) interactions cha…
The importance of being 'other
Parental Influences on Children's Values and Aspirations
The author establishes a framework for tying together two influential approaches linking family socioeconomic status (SES) to children's social psychological outcomes. Families shape children's occupational aspirations and values; however, these two phenomena have been studied in isolation. This article bridges these two literatures by suggesting that occupational aspirations stem, in part, from adolescents' value structures. The framework employ…
Agency as a Sociological Variable
This paper reviews social psychological measures that might usefully be employed within sociological treatments of human agency. Sociologists have engaged both (a) the structural constraints and opportunities that channel individual action and (b) the subjective sense individuals develop reflecting beliefs about their ability to affect those structures and their life courses. We briefly spell out the well‐trod agency vs. structure debate before e…
Adolescent Agentic Orientations
Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, Volume 2
A Novel Measure of Moral Boundaries
The literature on group differences and social identities has long assumed that value judgments about groups constitute a basic form of social categorization. However, little research has empirically investigated how values unite or divide social groups. The authors seek to address this gap by developing a novel measure of group values: third-order beliefs about in- and out-group members, building on Schwartz value theory. The authors demonstrate…
Measuring and Explaining a College Dignity Divide in America
Prominent, multidisciplinary perspectives on inequality in America contend that receiving a four-year college degree matters not just for life chances but also for achieving a sense of dignity or respect from others. In this study, the authors assess subjective dignity, or dignity as perceived in one's own life, according to four-year college degree status and how it overlaps with different economic and psychosocial college-linked resources. Draw…
Using Internet-Derived Data to Measure Religion
Internet and social media data provide new sources of information for examining social issues, but their potential for scholars interested in religion remains unclear. Focusing on cross-national religion data, we test the validity of measures drawn from Google and Twitter against well-known existing data. We find that Google Trend (GT) searches for the dominant religions' major holidays, along with 'Buddhism,' can be validated against traditional…
In- and out-groups across cultures
Os Contornos e o Entorno da Nova Sociologia da Moral
Neste ensaio vou expor brevemente como vejo o desenvolvimento do campo da Sociologia da Moral, com foco em seu potencial fundamentalmente interdisciplinar, destacando os estudos e tradições que merecem ser incorporados à sociologia. A moral, como tema de investigação da ciência social, perpassa os campos da psicologia (social e do desenvolvimento), sociologia, antropologia, neurociências e economia. Aqueles entre nós implicados no seu desenvolvim…
Neurosociology and the Difficult Art of Building Interdisciplinary Bridges
Moral disagreement in everyday life
Living life for others and/or oneself
The Plural Actor
Values as the Core of Personal Identity
Personal identity is an underanalyzed level of the self often regarded erroneously as too idiosyncratic for proper social psychological analysis. The two dominant theories of self, identity theory and social identity theory, mention but rarely explicate the concept of personal identity. In this paper I address this gap by making two moves, one conceptual and one empirical. First, I argue that values are a cohesive force within personal identity. …
Values
Over the past decades, the concept of values has gone in and out of fashion within sociology. Relatively recent advances in both the conceptualization and measurement of values offer the potential for a reincorporation of values into sociological work. Sociologists often employ cursory understandings of values, imbuing values with too much determinism or viewing them as too individually subjective. The concept is employed sporadically in sociolog…
Racial Self-Categorization in Adolescence
Research on multiracial individuals is often cross-sectional, obscuring the fluid nature of multiracial self-categorization across time. Pathways of racial self-identification are developed from a nationally representative sample of adolescents aged 14-18, measured again 5 years later. A significant proportion of multiracial adolescents change racial self-identification across time. Youth who ever report being multiracial are 4 times as likely to…
The Greater Complexity of Lived Race
Objectives. Harris and Sim (2002) recently demonstrated the complexity of lived race by exploring patterns of racial self‐identification. They raised important sociological questions about the role of context in racial self‐identification, but offered an incomplete picture of ethnic fluidity by excluding Hispanics from their analyses. We address this limitation with data on Hispanics from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add …
Parental Influences on Children's Values and Aspirations
The author establishes a framework for tying together two influential approaches linking family socioeconomic status (SES) to children's social psychological outcomes. Families shape children's occupational aspirations and values; however, these two phenomena have been studied in isolation. This article bridges these two literatures by suggesting that occupational aspirations stem, in part, from adolescents' value structures. The framework employ…
Time, Self, and the Curiously Abstract Concept of Agency
The term 'agency' is quite slippery and is used differently depending on the epistemological roots and goals of scholars who employ it. Distressingly, the sociological literature on the concept rarely addresses relevant social psychological research. We take a social behaviorist approach to agency by suggesting that individual temporal orientations are underutilized in conceptualizing this core sociological concept. Different temporal foci-the ac…
Measuring Latinos
The measurement of Hispanics in the 2000 U.S. Census significantly skews the racial identification of the Hispanic population in America. The literature on racial and ethnic identification, however, lacks serious engagement with the social psychology of self-identification. We draw on social identity theory to demonstrate how the process of individual self-categorization reinforces a society structured along racial and ethnic lines. This understa…
The importance of being 'other
Moral Selves, Evil Selves
People have strong moral beliefs about right and wrong, yet commonly act contrary to those beliefs. Most of us, at some time or another, have crossed a moral line and yet still view ourselves as moral and have a clean conscience. From intimate relationships to national politics, we define ourselves in large part by how we - and our friends, family, and members of our social groups - draw moral lines around our actions, thoughts, and intentions. W…
Agency as a Sociological Variable
This paper reviews social psychological measures that might usefully be employed within sociological treatments of human agency. Sociologists have engaged both (a) the structural constraints and opportunities that channel individual action and (b) the subjective sense individuals develop reflecting beliefs about their ability to affect those structures and their life courses. We briefly spell out the well‐trod agency vs. structure debate before e…
Back to the Future
Handbook of the Sociology of Morality
Values, Personal Identity, and the Moral Self
The Plural Actor
Neurosociology and the Difficult Art of Building Interdisciplinary Bridges
Position and Disposition
Research on the importance of values often focuses primarily on one domain of social predictors (e.g., economic) or limits its scope to a single dimension of values. We conduct a simultaneous analysis of a wide range of theoretically important social influences and a more complete range of individuals' value orientations, focusing both on value ratings and rankings. Results indicate that traditional institutions such as religion and parenthood ar…
Copresence
Copresence, the idea that the presence of other actors shapes individual behavior, links macro- and micro-theorizing about social interaction. Traditionally, scholars have focused on the physical proximity of other people, assuming copresence to be a given, objective condition. However, recent empirical evidence on technologically mediated (e.g., e-mail), imaginary (e.g., prayer), and parasocial (e.g., watching a television show) interactions cha…
The New Sociology of Morality
Sociology was once integral to the scientific study of morality, but its explicit focus has waned over the past half-century. This article calls for greater sociological engagement in order to speak to the resurgence of the study of morality in cognate fields. We identify important treatments of morality, some of which are not explicitly so, and identify those treatments that build a distinctly sociological focus on morality: room for culturally …
Living life for others and/or oneself
Social Psychological Ingredients for a Sociology of Morality
Social Psychological Ingredients for a Sociology of Morality
Issues of morality and social solidarity have been at the root of sociological thought since its inception (Hodgkiss 2013), though interest in these core issues diminished in the post-World War II period. The last decade or so have seen a renewed focus on these issues (Hitlin and Vaisey 2013; Smith 2003), including a Handbook of the Sociology of Morality (Hitlin and Vaisey 2010) and a number of prominent publications (e.g., Abend 2008; Abend 2011…
Motivation
Agency and Mental Health
Building on calls within the health literature for a deeper engagement with the concept of agency, we utilize nationally representative survey data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health ( N = 13,592) to develop an empirical conception of the traditional treatment of health agency focused on two social psychological constructs that build upon current foci on personal control within the stress process model: (1) “subjec…
Os Contornos e o Entorno da Nova Sociologia da Moral
Neste ensaio vou expor brevemente como vejo o desenvolvimento do campo da Sociologia da Moral, com foco em seu potencial fundamentalmente interdisciplinar, destacando os estudos e tradições que merecem ser incorporados à sociologia. A moral, como tema de investigação da ciência social, perpassa os campos da psicologia (social e do desenvolvimento), sociologia, antropologia, neurociências e economia. Aqueles entre nós implicados no seu desenvolvim…
Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course
Empirical treatments of agency have not caught up with theoretical explication; empirical projects almost always focus on concurrent beliefs about one's ability to act successfully without sufficiently attending to temporality. The authors suggest that understanding the modern life course necessitates a multidimensional understanding of subjective agency involving (a) perceived capacities and (b) perceived life chances, or expectations about what…
Sociology (35 works) · Psychology (31 works) · Social Psychology (27 works) · Epistemology (21 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Social science (13 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (11 works)