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Are people quick to adopt status beliefs about a social difference that lead them to treat others unequally? In a test of status construction theory, two experiments show that men and women form equally strong status beliefs from only two encounters with others. Men act powerfully on these new beliefs in their next encounters with others but women do not, possibly because women face greater social risks for acting on ambiguous status advantages. Women are just as likely as men, however, to treat someone unequally on the basis of an established status distinction. This suggests that men are first movers in the emergence of status distinctions, but women eventually adopt the distinctions as well. Our results show that people readily transform social differences into status distinctions-distinctions that act as formidable forces of inequality.
Status distinctions based on social differences such as gender, race, or ethnicity are consequential for social inequality because they affect how people are treated and how they treat others in turn. Status distinctions implicitly bias the everyday processes through which people are evaluated, given access to rewards, and directed toward or away from positions of power and prestige in society (Berger et al. 1977; Berger and Webster 2006). The aggregate result of this unequal treatment is to transform categorical differences between people into systematic axes of inequality. A mere difference between people becomes a status difference when status beliefs develop that associate greater social esteem and competence with people in one category than with those from another and these beliefs become widely disseminated throughout a population (Berger and Webster 2006). Status beliefs become consequential for inequality at the point when they begin to shape how people treat one another.
Status distinctions likely develop as initial beliefs among some individuals, acquire a growing appearance of social validity or certainty for those individuals so that they begin to act on the beliefs, and then eventually spread until they are widely held in the population (Ridgeway 1991, 2006). Status distinctions thus have dynamic social histories. Their initial development may go smoothly or may be disrupted so that some social differences do not become widely shared status distinctions and axes of inequality (Ridgeway and Correli 2006). Established status distinctions can also fade if changing social...