STATUS-INCONSISTENCY IN TASK SITUATIONS - A TEST OF 4 STATUS PROCESSING PRINCIPLES

People working together on a task attend to one another's ascribed and achieved status attributes and other characteristics that differentiate them. On the basis of these characteristics, people form performance expectations for themselves and each other regarding the task at hand. When the evaluated states of these characteristics are consistent, the broad outlines of this process are straight forward; when these states are inconsistent, the principle by which people resolve the status inconsistency is al issue. We report a laboratory experiment designed to distinguish among four alternative principles. Our results are clearly inconsistent with three of the principles, but are consistent with the organized subsets combining principle originally set forth by Berger, Fisek, Norman, and Zelditch (1977). The conclusiveness of these results suggests reframing some long-standing questions about social information processing. A generalized organized subsets principle extends the scope of status characteristics theory to new kinds of social settings and additional kinds of personal attributes.