To Be Honest, Darius May Be the Smartest of the Bunch, But People Feel Differently: The Color-blind and Gender-blind Storylines of Aesthetic Team Formation

• In Event: 3523 - Issues in Race/Ethnicity, Immigration, and Social Structure

Abstract

This study addresses the importance of studying how race and gender influence partner selection processes of team formation. By testing Skvoretz’s and Bailey’s (2016) formal theory of team formation choice processes derived from expectation states theory, the project aims to understand how race and gender influence a person’s choice and decision-making with respect to forming a group of problem-solving teammates. Through a quasi-experimental research design, subjects participate in simulated interactive environments in which they are able to select and personalize self-represented avatars and then choose potential team members from a pool of racially and gender diverse avatars. Moreover, through content analysis, this study qualitatively examines how participants justify their selections without knowing each avatar’s competency. The critical examination of race and gender in this study challenges and extends conventional social psychological literature that does not sufficiently consider the importance of race, along with its intersections with gender, as vital structural forces on group processes and interpersonal stratification (Hunt et al 2013). Three prominent findings emerge from the study. First, contrary to the theoretical predictions by Skvoretz and Bailey (2016), race differences in choice of teammate are common, gender differences are rare, but intersectional effects exist. Second, statistical analyses support an alternative interpretation of the status structure of the problem in which women rather than men are assigned the high state on the gender dimension when it comes to choosing teammates. Third, the qualitative findings show racial and gendered stereotypes are implicitly integrated into ideas about how appearance shapes competence and teamwork. The data show that stereotyping is not simply an attributional process of traits, but also a process of attributing narrative stories to a person based on six “perceptual devices:” demeanor, phenotype, affect. I conceptualize the devices that are used to construct color-blind racist and gender-blind sexist characterizations of avatars as “storyline accounts of aesthetic team formation.”

Author

• Jasmón Bailey, University of South Florida