D T Robinson
Biographic Data
| ID | 23281 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D T Robinson |
| GIVEN NAMES | D T |
| FAMILY NAME | Robinson |
| SIGNATURE | ROBINSON D T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Georgia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6809-0474 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 422 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Computer vision versus human vision
Computer vision is the automated analysis of visual imagery by computer algorithms that includes, but not limited to object detection and identification, three-dimensional shape estimation, material recognition, and segmentation. The intervention consisted of two to three weeks of professional development that emphasized computer vision technologies with middle school teachers from Title I schools/districts in the states of Arizona and Georgia. E…
Deviations from cultural consensus about occupations
We examine ratings of 642 occupations by a national online sample of U.S respondents in 2019 (Freeland et al., 2020). We analyze the respondents’ ratings of occupations on three dimensions of cultural meaning—evaluation (good versus bad), potency (powerful versus powerless), and activity (lively versus quiet). We take deviations of respondents’ individual ratings from population evaluation, potency and activity estimates, focusing on deviations f…
Contextual Embeddings in Sociological Research
The authors introduce BERTNN (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers Neural Network), a novel methodology designed to expand affective lexicons, a critical component in sociological research. BERTNN estimates the affective meanings and their distribution for new concepts, bypassing the need for extensive surveys by leveraging their contextual usage in language. The cornerstone of BERTNN is the use of nuanced word embeddings from …
The Impact of Teachable Machine on Middle School Teachers’ Perceptions of Science Lessons after Professional Development
Technological advances in computer vision and machine learning image and audio classification will continue to improve and evolve. Despite their prevalence, teachers feel ill-prepared to use these technologies to support their students’ learning. To address this, in-service middle school teachers participated in professional development, and middle school students participated in summer camp experiences that included the use of Google’s Teachable…
A simplest mathematics of turn-taking
David Gibson’s (2008) examination of research on conversational interaction highlighted methodological and theoretical gaps in current understanding – particularly around the localized construction of interaction and the reproduction of social structures. This paper extends extant formal models used by group process researchers to explain how exogenous status structures shape local interaction by incorporating insights from qualitative work exami…
Individual difference in perceptions of social structure
This study examined the extent to which social standing based on reputation (i.e., popularity), affective regard (i.e., peer acceptance and peer rejection), and affiliation‐network centrality (i.e., degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality), in addition to gender and grade in school, predicted children's accuracy in detecting affiliation patterns within peer networks. Third through fifth‐grade students ( n = 400) were from three semi‐rural e…
Isolation but Diffusion? A Structural Account of Depression Clustering among Adolescents
Depression can cause people to withdraw from friendships or be avoided by others, protecting others from exposure to that depression. Yet, researchers observe depression contagion, particularly among adolescents. We address this empirical puzzle by examining the role of gender in structuring friendship networks and the implications for isolation and the spreading of depression. Using stochastic actor-based models of friendships among 421 adolesce…
How Do We 'Do Gender'? Permeation as Over-Talking and Talking Over
Gendered expectations are imported from the larger culture to permeate small-group discussions, creating conversational inequalities. Conversational roles also emerge from the negotiated order of group interactions to reflect, reinforce, and occasionally challenge these cultural patterns. The authors provide a new examination of conversational overlaps and interruptions. They show how negotiated conversational roles lead a status distinction (gen…
A Multilevel Investigation of Arabic-Language Impression Change
This research investigates how impressions are formed from simple social events described in the Arabic language. Multilevel data enable us to investigate the degree of cultural consensus in how native Arabic-speakers currently living in North Carolina view social events. These data allow us to investigate a core assumption of affect control theory—that affective responses to social events are shared within a language culture. The results of hier…
Affect Control Theory
Affect control theory offers a rigorous and generative model of how individuals interpret and respond to social events through cultural lenses. Developed by David R. Heise, this theory is stated as a set of mathematical equations and enables researchers to use computer simulations to explore the predicted behaviors, emotions, and identity impressions of individuals interacting within and between cultures. These equations model affective meanings …
Justice Standard Determines Emotional Responses to Over-Reward
How do people feel when they benefit from an unfair reward distribution? Equity theory predicts negative emotion in response to over-reward, but sociological research using referential standards of justice drawn from status-value theory repeatedly finds positive emotional responses to over-reward. Researchers have proposed methodological explanations for these different findings, but we propose a theoretical explanation—that over-reward based on …
Three Faces of Identity
We review three traditions in research on identity. The first two traditions, which stress (a) the internalization of social positions and their meanings as part of the self structure and (b) the impact of cultural meanings and social situations on actors' identities, are closely intertwined. The third, the burgeoning literature on collective identity, has developed quite independently of the first two and focuses more on group-level processes. U…
Identity maintenance and cognitive test performance
Introduction of Lynn Smith-Lovin
Affect Control Theory
Affect control theory (ACT) is an empirically grounded, mathematical theory of social interaction. David R. Heise developed the theory in the early 1970s based on symbolic interactionist insights about the primary importance of language and of the symbolic labeling of situations. Inspired by the pragmatist philosophy of early symbolic interactionists, the theory begins with the premise that people reduce existential uncertainty by developing “wor…
Control Theories in Sociology
Sociologists use negative feedback loop systems to explain identity processes, interpersonal behavior, crowd behavior, organizational behavior, social relationships, and the behavior of political systems. Control system models help us to understand how actors enact social roles with enough stability to preserve institutional arrangements, while still demonstrating remarkable creativity in unusual circumstances. These theories take us away from an…
Deputy Editors' Note
In a departure from the norm, the outgoing deputy editors (Owens, Robinson, Sell), offer this deputy editors' note for the final issue of 2006, some two months after the untimely death of Editor Spencer E. Cahill. Dr. Cahill and his editorial team's tenure on the journal ends on December 31, 2006
Getting A Laugh
Humor is a quintessentially social phenomenon, since every joke requires both a teller and an audience. Here we ask how humor operates in task-oriented group discussions. We use theories about the functions of humor to generate hypotheses about who jokes, when and in what situations. Then we use event history techniques to analyze humor attempts and successes in six-person groups. Our results combine to suggest an image of joking as a status-rela…
How Do Status Beliefs Develop? The Role of Resources and Interactional Experience
Status construction theory argues that interaction between people with unequal structural advantages is crucial in the development and spread of status value beliefs about people's distinguishing attributes. A central claim is that goal-oriented encounters between those who differ in material resources as well as in an easily observed nominal attribute create status beliefs about that attribute which favor the richer actors' attribute category. T…
Secondary Bystander Effects on Intimate Violence
Research on bystander effects indicates that bystanders encourage individuals to behave in conformity with norms. In modern Western society, there are norms against stronger actors using violence against weaker actors. To the extent that the presence of a bystander reduces the likelihood that stronger actors use violence toward weaker actors, we suggest that weaker actors may become more likely to use violence toward stronger actors because of th…
Density, Transitivity, and Diffuse Status in Task-Oriented Groups
Small-group researchers recently have been concerned with how diffuse status characteristics such as race and gender combine with verbal and nonverbal cues to structure relations in task groups. In this paper we investigate the structure of precedence relations in such groups, including whether these relations are dense, whether they are transitive, and whether they are structured in any obvious way by diffuse status characteristics. Using transc…
Heinous Crime or Unfortunate Accident? The Effects of Remorse on Responses to Mock Criminal Confessions
Affect control theory provides a rigorous, testable model of emotion. We use simulations based on this theory to develop predictions about the impact of emotion displays on identity attributions and subsequent sentencing recommendations in the context of criminal confessions. We then test these predictions with an experimental study using vignettes of criminal confessions. Students responded to mock criminal confessions by drivers responsible for…
Selective Interaction as a Strategy for Identity Maintenance
In this paper we answer the question : Do people select interaction partners to enhance their self-image, or do they strive to maintain a stable view of self ? Affect control theory, a quantified version of symbolic interactionism, predicts that individuals adopt strategies which maintain their identities in order to secure a stable definition of the situation. When individuals have low self-esteem, they select interactions that maintain this low…
How Do Status Beliefs Develop? The Role of Resources and Interactional Experience
Status construction theory argues that interaction between people with unequal structural advantages is crucial in the development and spread of status value beliefs about people's distinguishing attributes. A central claim is that goal-oriented encounters between those who differ in material resources as well as in an easily observed nominal attribute create status beliefs about that attribute which favor the richer actors' attribute category. T…
Three Faces of Identity
We review three traditions in research on identity. The first two traditions, which stress (a) the internalization of social positions and their meanings as part of the self structure and (b) the impact of cultural meanings and social situations on actors' identities, are closely intertwined. The third, the burgeoning literature on collective identity, has developed quite independently of the first two and focuses more on group-level processes. U…
Selective Interaction as a Strategy for Identity Maintenance
In this paper we answer the question : Do people select interaction partners to enhance their self-image, or do they strive to maintain a stable view of self ? Affect control theory, a quantified version of symbolic interactionism, predicts that individuals adopt strategies which maintain their identities in order to secure a stable definition of the situation. When individuals have low self-esteem, they select interactions that maintain this low…
Getting A Laugh
Humor is a quintessentially social phenomenon, since every joke requires both a teller and an audience. Here we ask how humor operates in task-oriented group discussions. We use theories about the functions of humor to generate hypotheses about who jokes, when and in what situations. Then we use event history techniques to analyze humor attempts and successes in six-person groups. Our results combine to suggest an image of joking as a status-rela…
Control Theories in Sociology
Sociologists use negative feedback loop systems to explain identity processes, interpersonal behavior, crowd behavior, organizational behavior, social relationships, and the behavior of political systems. Control system models help us to understand how actors enact social roles with enough stability to preserve institutional arrangements, while still demonstrating remarkable creativity in unusual circumstances. These theories take us away from an…
Heinous Crime or Unfortunate Accident? The Effects of Remorse on Responses to Mock Criminal Confessions
Affect control theory provides a rigorous, testable model of emotion. We use simulations based on this theory to develop predictions about the impact of emotion displays on identity attributions and subsequent sentencing recommendations in the context of criminal confessions. We then test these predictions with an experimental study using vignettes of criminal confessions. Students responded to mock criminal confessions by drivers responsible for…
Density, Transitivity, and Diffuse Status in Task-Oriented Groups
Small-group researchers recently have been concerned with how diffuse status characteristics such as race and gender combine with verbal and nonverbal cues to structure relations in task groups. In this paper we investigate the structure of precedence relations in such groups, including whether these relations are dense, whether they are transitive, and whether they are structured in any obvious way by diffuse status characteristics. Using transc…
Secondary Bystander Effects on Intimate Violence
Research on bystander effects indicates that bystanders encourage individuals to behave in conformity with norms. In modern Western society, there are norms against stronger actors using violence against weaker actors. To the extent that the presence of a bystander reduces the likelihood that stronger actors use violence toward weaker actors, we suggest that weaker actors may become more likely to use violence toward stronger actors because of th…
How Do We 'Do Gender'? Permeation as Over-Talking and Talking Over
Gendered expectations are imported from the larger culture to permeate small-group discussions, creating conversational inequalities. Conversational roles also emerge from the negotiated order of group interactions to reflect, reinforce, and occasionally challenge these cultural patterns. The authors provide a new examination of conversational overlaps and interruptions. They show how negotiated conversational roles lead a status distinction (gen…
Justice Standard Determines Emotional Responses to Over-Reward
How do people feel when they benefit from an unfair reward distribution? Equity theory predicts negative emotion in response to over-reward, but sociological research using referential standards of justice drawn from status-value theory repeatedly finds positive emotional responses to over-reward. Researchers have proposed methodological explanations for these different findings, but we propose a theoretical explanation—that over-reward based on …
A Multilevel Investigation of Arabic-Language Impression Change
This research investigates how impressions are formed from simple social events described in the Arabic language. Multilevel data enable us to investigate the degree of cultural consensus in how native Arabic-speakers currently living in North Carolina view social events. These data allow us to investigate a core assumption of affect control theory—that affective responses to social events are shared within a language culture. The results of hier…
Isolation but Diffusion? A Structural Account of Depression Clustering among Adolescents
Depression can cause people to withdraw from friendships or be avoided by others, protecting others from exposure to that depression. Yet, researchers observe depression contagion, particularly among adolescents. We address this empirical puzzle by examining the role of gender in structuring friendship networks and the implications for isolation and the spreading of depression. Using stochastic actor-based models of friendships among 421 adolesce…
Identity maintenance and cognitive test performance
Contextual Embeddings in Sociological Research
The authors introduce BERTNN (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers Neural Network), a novel methodology designed to expand affective lexicons, a critical component in sociological research. BERTNN estimates the affective meanings and their distribution for new concepts, bypassing the need for extensive surveys by leveraging their contextual usage in language. The cornerstone of BERTNN is the use of nuanced word embeddings from …
Individual difference in perceptions of social structure
This study examined the extent to which social standing based on reputation (i.e., popularity), affective regard (i.e., peer acceptance and peer rejection), and affiliation‐network centrality (i.e., degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality), in addition to gender and grade in school, predicted children's accuracy in detecting affiliation patterns within peer networks. Third through fifth‐grade students ( n = 400) were from three semi‐rural e…
Selective Interaction as a Strategy for Identity Maintenance
In this paper we answer the question : Do people select interaction partners to enhance their self-image, or do they strive to maintain a stable view of self ? Affect control theory, a quantified version of symbolic interactionism, predicts that individuals adopt strategies which maintain their identities in order to secure a stable definition of the situation. When individuals have low self-esteem, they select interactions that maintain this low…
Heinous Crime or Unfortunate Accident? The Effects of Remorse on Responses to Mock Criminal Confessions
Affect control theory provides a rigorous, testable model of emotion. We use simulations based on this theory to develop predictions about the impact of emotion displays on identity attributions and subsequent sentencing recommendations in the context of criminal confessions. We then test these predictions with an experimental study using vignettes of criminal confessions. Students responded to mock criminal confessions by drivers responsible for…
Density, Transitivity, and Diffuse Status in Task-Oriented Groups
Small-group researchers recently have been concerned with how diffuse status characteristics such as race and gender combine with verbal and nonverbal cues to structure relations in task groups. In this paper we investigate the structure of precedence relations in such groups, including whether these relations are dense, whether they are transitive, and whether they are structured in any obvious way by diffuse status characteristics. Using transc…
How Do Status Beliefs Develop? The Role of Resources and Interactional Experience
Status construction theory argues that interaction between people with unequal structural advantages is crucial in the development and spread of status value beliefs about people's distinguishing attributes. A central claim is that goal-oriented encounters between those who differ in material resources as well as in an easily observed nominal attribute create status beliefs about that attribute which favor the richer actors' attribute category. T…
Secondary Bystander Effects on Intimate Violence
Research on bystander effects indicates that bystanders encourage individuals to behave in conformity with norms. In modern Western society, there are norms against stronger actors using violence against weaker actors. To the extent that the presence of a bystander reduces the likelihood that stronger actors use violence toward weaker actors, we suggest that weaker actors may become more likely to use violence toward stronger actors because of th…
Getting A Laugh
Humor is a quintessentially social phenomenon, since every joke requires both a teller and an audience. Here we ask how humor operates in task-oriented group discussions. We use theories about the functions of humor to generate hypotheses about who jokes, when and in what situations. Then we use event history techniques to analyze humor attempts and successes in six-person groups. Our results combine to suggest an image of joking as a status-rela…
Deputy Editors' Note
In a departure from the norm, the outgoing deputy editors (Owens, Robinson, Sell), offer this deputy editors' note for the final issue of 2006, some two months after the untimely death of Editor Spencer E. Cahill. Dr. Cahill and his editorial team's tenure on the journal ends on December 31, 2006
Introduction of Lynn Smith-Lovin
Affect Control Theory
Affect control theory (ACT) is an empirically grounded, mathematical theory of social interaction. David R. Heise developed the theory in the early 1970s based on symbolic interactionist insights about the primary importance of language and of the symbolic labeling of situations. Inspired by the pragmatist philosophy of early symbolic interactionists, the theory begins with the premise that people reduce existential uncertainty by developing “wor…
Control Theories in Sociology
Sociologists use negative feedback loop systems to explain identity processes, interpersonal behavior, crowd behavior, organizational behavior, social relationships, and the behavior of political systems. Control system models help us to understand how actors enact social roles with enough stability to preserve institutional arrangements, while still demonstrating remarkable creativity in unusual circumstances. These theories take us away from an…
Identity maintenance and cognitive test performance
Three Faces of Identity
We review three traditions in research on identity. The first two traditions, which stress (a) the internalization of social positions and their meanings as part of the self structure and (b) the impact of cultural meanings and social situations on actors' identities, are closely intertwined. The third, the burgeoning literature on collective identity, has developed quite independently of the first two and focuses more on group-level processes. U…
Justice Standard Determines Emotional Responses to Over-Reward
How do people feel when they benefit from an unfair reward distribution? Equity theory predicts negative emotion in response to over-reward, but sociological research using referential standards of justice drawn from status-value theory repeatedly finds positive emotional responses to over-reward. Researchers have proposed methodological explanations for these different findings, but we propose a theoretical explanation—that over-reward based on …
A Multilevel Investigation of Arabic-Language Impression Change
This research investigates how impressions are formed from simple social events described in the Arabic language. Multilevel data enable us to investigate the degree of cultural consensus in how native Arabic-speakers currently living in North Carolina view social events. These data allow us to investigate a core assumption of affect control theory—that affective responses to social events are shared within a language culture. The results of hier…
Affect Control Theory
Affect control theory offers a rigorous and generative model of how individuals interpret and respond to social events through cultural lenses. Developed by David R. Heise, this theory is stated as a set of mathematical equations and enables researchers to use computer simulations to explore the predicted behaviors, emotions, and identity impressions of individuals interacting within and between cultures. These equations model affective meanings …
How Do We 'Do Gender'? Permeation as Over-Talking and Talking Over
Gendered expectations are imported from the larger culture to permeate small-group discussions, creating conversational inequalities. Conversational roles also emerge from the negotiated order of group interactions to reflect, reinforce, and occasionally challenge these cultural patterns. The authors provide a new examination of conversational overlaps and interruptions. They show how negotiated conversational roles lead a status distinction (gen…
Isolation but Diffusion? A Structural Account of Depression Clustering among Adolescents
Depression can cause people to withdraw from friendships or be avoided by others, protecting others from exposure to that depression. Yet, researchers observe depression contagion, particularly among adolescents. We address this empirical puzzle by examining the role of gender in structuring friendship networks and the implications for isolation and the spreading of depression. Using stochastic actor-based models of friendships among 421 adolesce…
Individual difference in perceptions of social structure
This study examined the extent to which social standing based on reputation (i.e., popularity), affective regard (i.e., peer acceptance and peer rejection), and affiliation‐network centrality (i.e., degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality), in addition to gender and grade in school, predicted children's accuracy in detecting affiliation patterns within peer networks. Third through fifth‐grade students ( n = 400) were from three semi‐rural e…
A simplest mathematics of turn-taking
David Gibson’s (2008) examination of research on conversational interaction highlighted methodological and theoretical gaps in current understanding – particularly around the localized construction of interaction and the reproduction of social structures. This paper extends extant formal models used by group process researchers to explain how exogenous status structures shape local interaction by incorporating insights from qualitative work exami…
The Impact of Teachable Machine on Middle School Teachers’ Perceptions of Science Lessons after Professional Development
Technological advances in computer vision and machine learning image and audio classification will continue to improve and evolve. Despite their prevalence, teachers feel ill-prepared to use these technologies to support their students’ learning. To address this, in-service middle school teachers participated in professional development, and middle school students participated in summer camp experiences that included the use of Google’s Teachable…
Deviations from cultural consensus about occupations
We examine ratings of 642 occupations by a national online sample of U.S respondents in 2019 (Freeland et al., 2020). We analyze the respondents’ ratings of occupations on three dimensions of cultural meaning—evaluation (good versus bad), potency (powerful versus powerless), and activity (lively versus quiet). We take deviations of respondents’ individual ratings from population evaluation, potency and activity estimates, focusing on deviations f…
Contextual Embeddings in Sociological Research
The authors introduce BERTNN (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers Neural Network), a novel methodology designed to expand affective lexicons, a critical component in sociological research. BERTNN estimates the affective meanings and their distribution for new concepts, bypassing the need for extensive surveys by leveraging their contextual usage in language. The cornerstone of BERTNN is the use of nuanced word embeddings from …
Computer vision versus human vision
Computer vision is the automated analysis of visual imagery by computer algorithms that includes, but not limited to object detection and identification, three-dimensional shape estimation, material recognition, and segmentation. The intervention consisted of two to three weeks of professional development that emphasized computer vision technologies with middle school teachers from Title I schools/districts in the states of Arizona and Georgia. E…
Psychology (21 works) · Social Psychology (17 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Social Power and Status Dynamics (12 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Artificial Intelligence (5 works) · Cognitive psychology (4 works)