About this Event
640 Oval Dr, West Lafayette, In 47907
#colloquiumListen to Dr. Cecilia Ridgeway speak on "Status: Why is it everywhere? Why does it matter?" on October 18th, 2024 at 3:30 pm in Stanley Coulter Hall. he will be giving a talk on "Status is a form of inequality based on esteem, respect, and honor. It is ancient and universal yet nevertheless pervades modern institutions, organizations, and everyday life. Although we see it all around us in the workplace, the classroom, the neighborhoods we live in, the groups we socialize in, we barely understand status as a social process, what it is and why it matters both to individuals and for inequality in society. Status is often dismissed as vanity at the individual level and, at the societal level, as a simple gloss on the better understood inequality processes of wealth and power. This is a major mistake that underestimates both the power of status as an individual motive and its central role in perpetuating durable patterns of inequality based on social differences such as gender, race, and class. I argue that status hierarchies are best understood as a cultural invention to organize and manage social relations in a fundamental human condition: cooperative interdependence to achieve valued goals that cannot be achieved alone but that create nested competitive interdependence to maximize individual outcomes from the shared effort. This invention is a two-fold cultural schema, consisting of a deeply learned basic norm of status allocation and changing common knowledge status beliefs that people draw on to coordinate judgments about who or what is more deserving of status. Because status beliefs become attached to social differences such as gender, race, and class, status perpetuates inequalities based on those differences as people spread status everywhere through their cooperative endeavors. Thus status is inherently a two-edged sword, part useful social technology for organizing cooperative achievements and part agent of injustice based on social difference."