Full Citation

Title: Reward interventions: A strategy to Erode social inequality?

Citation Type: Journal Article

Publication Year: 2020

ISBN:

ISSN: 0049089X

DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2020.102442

NSFID:

PMCID:

PMID: 32825922

Abstract: Decades of research illuminates how status beliefs about socially significant characteristics, like gender, fundamentally alter expectations about individual's competence and worth. This process biases opportunity structures and resource distributions, thereby recreating social inequalities in a self-fulfilling fashion. Many social and organizational policies attempt to reduce inequality by increasing disadvantaged groups' access to valued rewards, such as prestigious alma maters, awards, and valued positions. In addition to meaningfully increasing resources, the status these rewards convey should also theoretically increase the status of the particular people who come to possess them. To know whether inversions to reward structures reduce social inequality, however, we must first demonstrate that the status value of rewards alone is an effective intervention. In an experimental test of interventions to gender status inequality, reward markers with relatively higher or lower status value were consistently or inconsistently associated with the gender of the participants' task partners. Results indicate that rewards intervened in the groups' gendered status hierarchy as participants were more likely to be influenced by their partners' rewards than their gender.

Url: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X20300405

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Harkness, Sarah K.

Periodical (Full): Social Science Research

Issue:

Volume: 90

Pages: 1-13

Data Collections: IPUMS CPS

Topics: Gender, Poverty and Welfare

Countries: