L Smith-Lovin
Biographic Data
| ID | 969 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Smith-Lovin |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Smith-Lovin |
| SIGNATURE | SMITH-LOVIN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8211-4719 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6066 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Affective connotations according to LLMs
The affective connotations of words are central to meaning and important predictors of many social processes. As such, understanding the degree to which commercially-available generative language models (LLMs) replicate human judgements of affective connotations may help better understand human-model interactions. LLMs may also serve as useful tools for researchers seeking affective meaning estimates. We test the ability of three LLMs - GPT-4o, M…
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…
Meaning Change in U.S. Occupational Identities during the Covid-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic altered social and economic life in the United States, displacing many people from their typical relationship to the institution of work. Our research uses affect control theory’s measurement structure to examine how cultural meanings for occupational identities shifted during the pandemic on the dimensions of evaluation (good-bad), potency (powerful-powerless), and activity (lively-inactive). Quinn et al. found that most oc…
Are Victims Virtuous or Vilified? The Stories We Tell Ourselves (and Each Other)
Derogation of the victim refers to the tendency of an observer to negatively evaluate someone hurt by the action of another. Victim derogation has been a core feature of social psychology for decades, but evidence suggests this phenomenon is weakening. It may even be reversing into a valorization of victims. Is this empirical pattern due to methodological changes and shifts in theoretical framing of victim studies, or have there been large-scale …
How Cultural Meanings of Occupations in the U.S. Changed During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Social research highlights the stability of cultural beliefs, broadly arguing that population-level changes are uncommon and mostly explained by cohort replacement rather than individual-level change. We find evidence suggesting that cultural change may also occur rapidly in response to an economically and socially transformative period. Using data collected just before and after the outbreak of Covid-19 in the U.S., we explore whether cultural b…
Affect Control Theories
We introduce this two-part special issue that celebrates David Heise and his pathbreaking theories: affect control theory (ACT), affect control theory of the self (ACTS), and affect control theory of institutions (ACTI). These interlocking, multi-level, mathematically based theories explain a range of social processes, including impression formation, social interaction, trait and mood attributions, emotional experiences, emotion management, and i…
Status as Deference
Status is an independent basis of inequality. Cultural meanings create the voluntary esteem and deference that distinguish status inequities from inequalities in power and material resources, as Cecilia Ridgeway and Hazel Markus explain in the introduction to this issue. Here, we use affect control theory (ACT)—a formal theory of culture, identity, and social action—to explore how cultural meanings of occupational identities shape status behavior…
Introduction of Neil J. MacKinnon, 2021 Cooley-Mead Award Recipient
Do We Need a Public Sociology
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…
Theory in Sociology of Emotions
Analyzing Social Interaction
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 …
Social Distance in the United States
Homophily, the tendency for similar actors to be connected at a higher rate than dissimilar actors, is a pervasive social fact. In this article, we examine changes over a 20-year period in two types of homophily-the actual level of contact between people in different social categories and the level of contact relative to chance. We use data from the 1985 and 2004 General Social Surveys to ask whether the strengths of five social distinctions-sex,…
Action, Interaction, and Groups
This chapter contains sections titled: Meaning and Emotion in Social Interaction Social Structural Influences on Meaning Group Processes and the Development of Meaning Future Potential for Linkage References
The Social Psychologies of Emotion
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54:733–40. Fiske, Susan T. and Steven L. Neuberg. 1990. ‘‘A Continuum of Impression Formation, from Category-Based to Individuating Processes: Influences of Information and Motivation on Attention and Interpretation.’’ Pp. 1-74 in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, edited by M. Zanna. New York: Academic Press. Miller, Joan G. 1984. ‘‘Culture and the Development of Everyday Social Explanation.’…
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…
Models and Marginals
Fischer (2009) argues that our estimates of confidant network size in the 2004 General Social Survey (GSS), and therefore the trend in confidant network size from 1985 to 2004, are implausible because they are (1) inconsistent with other data and (2) contain internal anomalies that call the data into question. In this note, we assess the evidence for a decrease in confidant network size from 1985 to 2004 in the GSS data. We conclude that any plau…
Why Do Nominal Characteristics Acquire Status Value? A Minimal Explanation for Status Construction
Why do beliefs that attach different amounts of status to different categories of people become consensually held by the members of a society? We show that two microlevel mechanisms, in combination, imply a system-level tendency toward consensual status beliefs about a nominal characteristic. (1) Status belief diffusion: a person who has no status belief about a characteristic can acquire a status belief about that characteristic from interacting…
The Strength of Weak Identities
Modern societies are highly differentiated, with relatively uncorrelated socially salient dimensions and a preponderance of weak, unidimensional (as opposed to strong, multiplex) ties. What are the implications of a society with fewer strong ties and more weak ties for the self? What do these changes mean for our emotional experience in everyday life? I outline a structural view of self, situated identity, and emotion. It is an ecological theory …
Social Isolation in America
Have the core discussion networks of Americans changed in the past two decades? In 1985, the General Social Survey (GSS) collected the first nationally representative data on the confidants with whom Americans discuss important matters. In the 2004 GSS the authors replicated those questions to assess social change in core network structures. Discussion networks are smaller in 2004 than in 1985. The number of people saying there is no one with who…
Introduction of Karen S. Cook
Measuring Interruption
Dina G. Okamoto, Lisa Slattery Rashotte, Lynn Smith-Lovin, Measuring Interruption: Syntactic and Contextual Methods of Coding Conversation, Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Mar., 2002), pp. 38-55
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…
Birds of a Feather
Similarity breeds connection. This principle-the homophily principle-structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has pow…
Social Isolation in America
Have the core discussion networks of Americans changed in the past two decades? In 1985, the General Social Survey (GSS) collected the first nationally representative data on the confidants with whom Americans discuss important matters. In the 2004 GSS the authors replicated those questions to assess social change in core network structures. Discussion networks are smaller in 2004 than in 1985. The number of people saying there is no one with who…
Homophily in Voluntary Organizations
Recent work on the organized sources of network ties and on the social structural determinants of association are synthesized to produce several hypotheses about homophily. These hypotheses are tested with data on 304 face-to-face groups from 10 communities. We find that friends are more similar on status dimensions than chance and that this homophily is produced both by the restricted opportunity structure offered by the group and by homophilous…
The Gender System and Interaction
The gender system includes processes that both define males and females as different in socially significant ways and justify inequality on the basis of that difference. Gender is different from other forms of social inequality in that men and women interact extensively within families and households and in other role relations. This high rate of contact between men and women raises important questions about how interaction creates experiences th…
Social Distance in the United States
Homophily, the tendency for similar actors to be connected at a higher rate than dissimilar actors, is a pervasive social fact. In this article, we examine changes over a 20-year period in two types of homophily-the actual level of contact between people in different social categories and the level of contact relative to chance. We use data from the 1985 and 2004 General Social Surveys to ask whether the strengths of five social distinctions-sex,…
Gender, Children, and Social Contact
The authors investigate the impact of childrearing on men's and women's social networks, using a probability sample of residents of 10 Great Plains towns. Data support the hypotheses that social network size, contact volume and composition vary with the age of the youngest child in a family. Childrearing reduces women's network size and contact volume, while it alters the composition of men's networks. Effects are most pronounced when the younges…
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…
Sex Segregation in Voluntary Associations
Strodtbeck, Fred L., and Richard D. Mann. 1956. Role Differentiation in Jury Deliberations. Sociometry 19:3-11. Ward, D., and J. Balswick. 1978. Strong Men and Virtuous Women: A Content Analysis of Sex Role Stereotypes. Pacific Sociological Review 21:45-53. Whittaker, J. 0. 1965. Diffrences and Susceptibility in Interpersonal Persuasion. Journal of Social Psychology 66:91-2. Zelditch, Morris, Jr. 1980. Can You Really Study an Army in the Laborato…
Interruptions in Group Discussions
Conversations both reflect and maintain social inequalities. They import hierarchical structures from larger society and help perpetuate them by creating inequalities in the ability to accomplish interactional goals. In this study of speaker transitions in six-person, task-oriented experimental groups, we explore the well-known finding that men interrupt women more frequently than women interrupt men. We ask three questions about the structure of…
Women and Weak Ties
This paper explores some network consequences of dramatic differences between men and women in the typical size of the voluntary organizations they belong to.These size differences are greatest in organizations that are most economically oriented. Furthermore, the differences are remarkably consistent across social categories; men tend to belong to larger organizations when compared with women in similar categories, whether of work status, age, 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…
Nonrecursive Models of Labor Force Participation, Fertility Behavior and Sex Role Attitudes
A negative relationship has been established between female labor force participation and fertility but there has been considerable controversy over the direction and causes of this relationship. 2 causal models of the actual fertility and work behavior of a national sample of married women aged 30 in 1970 are examined using the 2-stage least-squares technique to disentangle reciprocal effects. A 2-variable feedback loop incorporating only fertil…
Models and Marginals
Fischer (2009) argues that our estimates of confidant network size in the 2004 General Social Survey (GSS), and therefore the trend in confidant network size from 1985 to 2004, are implausible because they are (1) inconsistent with other data and (2) contain internal anomalies that call the data into question. In this note, we assess the evidence for a decrease in confidant network size from 1985 to 2004 in the GSS data. We conclude that any plau…
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…
Sex and Race Homogeneity in Naturally Occurring Groups
Journal Article Sex and Race Homogeneity in Naturally Occurring Groups Get access Bruce H. Mayhew, Bruce H. Mayhew University of South Carolina Direct correspondence to J. Miller McPherson, Department of Sociology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar J. Miller McPherson, J. Miller McPherson University of Arizona Search for other …
The Strength of Weak Identities
Modern societies are highly differentiated, with relatively uncorrelated socially salient dimensions and a preponderance of weak, unidimensional (as opposed to strong, multiplex) ties. What are the implications of a society with fewer strong ties and more weak ties for the self? What do these changes mean for our emotional experience in everyday life? I outline a structural view of self, situated identity, and emotion. It is an ecological theory …
Impressions from events
A large study of event stimuli developed new equations for describing how people react to events. Exploratory work found several new interaction terms affecting the impression formation process. To demonstrate the generality of the impression formation process across subject populations and study procedures, the results from the current study were compared to four others: two earlier studies on U.S. college undergraduates, a study of Belfast, Nor…
Changing the Subject
Social scientists have devoted a great deal of attention to how much people talk, but have paid little attention to what they talk about. Research in the tradition of conversation analysis suggests that transitions between topics of conversation are accomplished in a systematic, structured way, and that social status can affect whose topics are developed and whose are lost. The authors use insights from conversation analysis to develop a systemat…
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…
The affective control of events within settings
This paper develops an affect control model of how behavior changes as actors move from setting to setting. After a review of other theoretical approaches to the problem, the affective meanings of settings are examined. Then, impression change equations are developed to assess how sentiments toward actors, behaviors and object‐persons are affected by the setting in which interaction occurs. The tempo or characteristic activity level of a behavior…
How Bad Was It? The Effects of Victim and Perpetrator Emotion on Responses to Criminal Court Vignettes
Why Do Nominal Characteristics Acquire Status Value? A Minimal Explanation for Status Construction
Why do beliefs that attach different amounts of status to different categories of people become consensually held by the members of a society? We show that two microlevel mechanisms, in combination, imply a system-level tendency toward consensual status beliefs about a nominal characteristic. (1) Status belief diffusion: a person who has no status belief about a characteristic can acquire a status belief about that characteristic from interacting…
Affect control theory
This paper reviews affect control theory's major strengths, the contributions of recent work to its growth, and the most promising avenues for future work. Affect control theory's strengths include (1) the precision of its mathematical statement and empirical base (especially when compared with earlier interpretive sociologies), (2) its ability to link the internal processing that generates social action to the socio‐cultural system upon which th…
Status and Participation in Six-Person Groups
Journal Article Status and Participation in Six-Person Groups: A Test of Skvoretz's Comparative Status Model Get access Lynn Smith-Lovin, Lynn Smith-Lovin University of South Carolina Address correspondence to Lynn Smith-Lovin, Department of Sociology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar John V. Skvoretz, John V. Skvoretz University of South Carolina Search for…
Behavior Settings and Impressions Formed from Social Scenarios
A large body of literature supports the general hypothesis that social definitions of environments influence where people choose to interact, the behaviors in which they are most likely to engage, and the actions considered appropriate by others. This study explores the process by which people integrate complex information about settings and social interaction. First, the universal dimensions of affective meaning (evaluation, potency, and activit…
Nonrecursive Models of Labor Force Participation, Fertility Behavior and Sex Role Attitudes
A negative relationship has been established between female labor force participation and fertility but there has been considerable controversy over the direction and causes of this relationship. 2 causal models of the actual fertility and work behavior of a national sample of married women aged 30 in 1970 are examined using the 2-stage least-squares technique to disentangle reciprocal effects. A 2-variable feedback loop incorporating only fertil…
Behavior Settings and Impressions Formed from Social Scenarios
A large body of literature supports the general hypothesis that social definitions of environments influence where people choose to interact, the behaviors in which they are most likely to engage, and the actions considered appropriate by others. This study explores the process by which people integrate complex information about settings and social interaction. First, the universal dimensions of affective meaning (evaluation, potency, and activit…
Individual Political Participation
Although researchers attempting to quantify theories of individual political participation have assumed that mass media use is a recursive cause of such participation, an argument could be made for a return effect of political activity on media use. The “uses and gratifications” tradition in communication research, for example, views media use as purposive behavior that is influenced by the users' social situation. In this paper the possibilty of…
Sex Role, Life Styles and Childbearing
Impressions of Goodness, Powerfulness, and Liveliness from Discerned Social Events
This study focuses on how events change impressions of goodness, powerfulness, and liveliness. Empirical equations for predicting such changes are derived by analyzing data on 70 event descriptions. Some findings of earlier studies are replicated. Additionally, a structural model is presented showing how the goodness, powerfulness, and liveliness of participants and of behaviors interrelate during the process of impression formation. The new equa…
Fertility and patterns of labor force participation among married women
Past research has shown that the labor market behavior of wives is discontinuous and affected by family events. Specifically, both cross‐sectional and panel data indicate that fertility decreases the period that a married woman spends working. Each birth appears to decrease labor force participation by one year or more. The present study attempts to specify these effects more completely. The variation in work patterns for each parity progression …
Understanding Human Values
Models of Fertility and Women's Work
Comments on an article by Cramer in an earlier issue of the Journal (1980). The most basic question raised is the appropriateness of using nonrecursive models to study the work-fertility relationship. The authors argue that such models are appropriate under equilibrium conditions and that the assumption that these conditions were met in the authors 1978 data was not unreasonable. Other issues concern the inadequacy of the instruments in the autho…
Women and Weak Ties
This paper explores some network consequences of dramatic differences between men and women in the typical size of the voluntary organizations they belong to.These size differences are greatest in organizations that are most economically oriented. Furthermore, the differences are remarkably consistent across social categories; men tend to belong to larger organizations when compared with women in similar categories, whether of work status, age, e…
Scaling the prestige, authority, and income potential of college curricula
The Employment Revolution
Sex Segregation in Voluntary Associations
Strodtbeck, Fred L., and Richard D. Mann. 1956. Role Differentiation in Jury Deliberations. Sociometry 19:3-11. Ward, D., and J. Balswick. 1978. Strong Men and Virtuous Women: A Content Analysis of Sex Role Stereotypes. Pacific Sociological Review 21:45-53. Whittaker, J. 0. 1965. Diffrences and Susceptibility in Interpersonal Persuasion. Journal of Social Psychology 66:91-2. Zelditch, Morris, Jr. 1980. Can You Really Study an Army in the Laborato…
Status and Participation in Six-Person Groups
Journal Article Status and Participation in Six-Person Groups: A Test of Skvoretz's Comparative Status Model Get access Lynn Smith-Lovin, Lynn Smith-Lovin University of South Carolina Address correspondence to Lynn Smith-Lovin, Department of Sociology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar John V. Skvoretz, John V. Skvoretz University of South Carolina Search for…
Editors' preface
The affective control of events within settings
This paper develops an affect control model of how behavior changes as actors move from setting to setting. After a review of other theoretical approaches to the problem, the affective meanings of settings are examined. Then, impression change equations are developed to assess how sentiments toward actors, behaviors and object‐persons are affected by the setting in which interaction occurs. The tempo or characteristic activity level of a behavior…
Impressions from events
A large study of event stimuli developed new equations for describing how people react to events. Exploratory work found several new interaction terms affecting the impression formation process. To demonstrate the generality of the impression formation process across subject populations and study procedures, the results from the current study were compared to four others: two earlier studies on U.S. college undergraduates, a study of Belfast, Nor…
Affect control theory
This paper reviews affect control theory's major strengths, the contributions of recent work to its growth, and the most promising avenues for future work. Affect control theory's strengths include (1) the precision of its mathematical statement and empirical base (especially when compared with earlier interpretive sociologies), (2) its ability to link the internal processing that generates social action to the socio‐cultural system upon which th…
Homophily in Voluntary Organizations
Recent work on the organized sources of network ties and on the social structural determinants of association are synthesized to produce several hypotheses about homophily. These hypotheses are tested with data on 304 face-to-face groups from 10 communities. We find that friends are more similar on status dimensions than chance and that this homophily is produced both by the restricted opportunity structure offered by the group and by homophilous…
Interruptions in Group Discussions
Conversations both reflect and maintain social inequalities. They import hierarchical structures from larger society and help perpetuate them by creating inequalities in the ability to accomplish interactional goals. In this study of speaker transitions in six-person, task-oriented experimental groups, we explore the well-known finding that men interrupt women more frequently than women interrupt men. We ask three questions about the structure of…
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…
Can Emotionality and Rationality be Reconciled
Economists invoke emotions narrowly to solve commitment problems; sociologists view emotions as a more pervasive basic feature of social life. A complete approach to integrating emotionality and choice requires attention to the interactional sources of emotions and examination of the role that emotions play in directing attention to different domains of comparison and choice. Systematic analysis of the situational determinants of emotional respon…
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…
Handbook of Emotions
Sex and Race Homogeneity in Naturally Occurring Groups
Journal Article Sex and Race Homogeneity in Naturally Occurring Groups Get access Bruce H. Mayhew, Bruce H. Mayhew University of South Carolina Direct correspondence to J. Miller McPherson, Department of Sociology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar J. Miller McPherson, J. Miller McPherson University of Arizona Search for other …
Gender, Children, and Social Contact
The authors investigate the impact of childrearing on men's and women's social networks, using a probability sample of residents of 10 Great Plains towns. Data support the hypotheses that social network size, contact volume and composition vary with the age of the youngest child in a family. Childrearing reduces women's network size and contact volume, while it alters the composition of men's networks. Effects are most pronounced when the younges…
Psychology (48 works) · Social Psychology (37 works) · Sociology (36 works) · Social Psychology (29 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Social Power and Status Dynamics (19 works) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (16 works) · Economics (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (12 works)