Contemporary Uses of Anomie

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ANOMIE 164 techniques, although in certain circumstances the analysis of covariance can be used to statistically control for possible extraneous sources of inﬂuence. Where analysis of variance and covariance are more appropriate in sociological studies is: (1) where the independent variable can be manipulat- ed (e.g., ﬁeld experiments investigating natural reactions to staged incidences, or studies of the effectiveness of different modes of intervention or teaching styles); (2) analyses of typologies or global variables that capture a set of unspeciﬁed, interre- lated causes or stimuli (e.g., comparisons of indus- trialized vs. nonindustrialized countries, or differ- ences between white collar vs. blue collar workers); or (3) where independent (or predictor) variables are used that have a limited number of discrete categories (e.g., race, gender, religion, country, etc.). REFERENCES Blalock, Hubert M. 1972 Social Statistics , 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. Bornstedt, G. W., and D. Knoke 1995 Statistics for Social Data Analysis . Itasca, Ill.: F. E. Peacock Publishers, Inc. McClendon, M. J. 1994 Multiple Regression and Causal Analysis . Itasca, Ill.: F. E. Peacock Publishers, Inc. Nie, Norman H., C. Hadlai Hull, Jean G. Jenkins, Karin Steinbrenner, and Dale H. Bent 1975 SPSS: Statistical Package for the Social Sciences , 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. Scheffe, H. A. 1959 The Analysis of Variance . New York: Wiley. Simmons, Roberta G., and Dale A. Blyth 1987 Moving Into Adolescence: The Impact of Pubertal Change and School Context. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Tabachnick, Barbara G., and Linda S. Fidell 1996 Using Multivariate Statistics , 3rd ed. New York: Harper- Collins. R ICHARD B ULCROFT ANDROGYNY See Femininity/Masculinity. ANOMIE The concept anomie was used by early sociologists to describe changes in society produced by the Industrial Revolution. The demise of traditional communities and the disruption of norms, values, and a familiar way of life were major concerns of nineteenth-century philosophers and sociologists. For sociologists, anomie is most frequently associ- ated with Emile Durkheim, although others used it differently even during his lifetime (Wolff 1988). Durkheim ([1893] 1956) used the French word anomie , meaning ‘‘without norms,’’ to describe the disruption that societies experienced in the shift from agrarian, village economies to those based on industry. Anomie is used to describe a state of society, referring to characteristics of the social system, not of individuals, although individuals were affected by this force. Increasingly, this term has taken on a more social psychological meaning. This is not to say that it no longer has uses consis- tent with the initial deﬁnition, but its meaning has been broadened considerably, at times consistent with Durkheim’s usage, at times at substantial variance with it. There are, no doubt, sociologists who cringe at any expanded usage of this and other concepts, but the fact of the matter is that we have no more control over its usage than Thomas Kuhn (1970) has over abominable uses of the concept ‘‘para- digm,’’ or than computer engineers have over those who say ‘‘interface’’ when they mean ‘‘meet with.’’ Although we cannot completely stop the misappropriation of such terms as anomie we can be careful that sociological extensions of anomie are logically derived from their early uses. DURKHEIM ON ANOMIE According to Durkheim, village life based on agri- culture had consistent, well-established norms that governed the day-to-day lives of individuals. Norms prescribed patterns of behavior, obligation, and expectations. Durkheim called this pattern of so- cial life mechanical solidarity. Communities char- acterized by ‘‘mechanical solidarity’’ were self-con- tained units in which the family and the village provided for all of the needs of their members. With the emergence of industrial capitalism and the beginnings of population shifts from the hin- terland to cities, mechanical solidarity could not successfully structure social life. Durkheim be- lieved that a new, ‘‘organic solidarity’’ based on a division of labor would emerge, with a regulating normative structure that would be as functional as mechanical solidarity. The emergence of organic ANOMIE 165 solidarity would take time, however. The transi- tional period, characterized by normative disor- ganization, Durkheim described as anomic. By this he did not mean to imply literal normlessness but, rather, a state of relative normative disorder (Coser 1977). Compared with communities characterized by mechanical solidarity, developing larger towns and cities would have a less regulated, less struc- tured, less ordered pattern of social life. Release from the restraining inﬂuence of norms was not a liberating circumstance, according to Durkheim. In this state, without adequate norma- tive direction, people did not know what to expect or how to behave. Many of the social problems that Durkheim witnessed in rapidly changing industri- alizing Europe, he blamed on inadequate norma- tive regulation. In his classic Suicide , Durkheim ([1897] 1951) identiﬁes ‘‘anomic suicide’’ as occur- ring when the values and norms of the group cease to have meaning or serve as anchors for the indi- vidual, leading to feelings of isolation, confusion, and personal disorganization. CONTEMPORARY USES OF ‘‘ANOMIE’’ Anomie continues to be used as deﬁned by Durkheim, but it has also been extended during the twentieth century. In addition to extensions similar to past uses of this concept, social psychological concep- tions of anomie have become widespread. Robert Merton’s use of ‘‘anomie’’ is very similar to that described by Durkheim. His application (1949) has been the core theoretical statement in one of the twentieth century’s major criminological tradi- tions. ‘‘Anomia’’ is a social psychological deriva- tive used to represent a state of disaffection or disconnectedness. Merton on Anomie. Merton (1949) used the concept anomie to describe how social structure produced individual deviance. According to Merton, when there existed within a society a disjuncture between the legitimate goals that members of a society were aspiring to and the legitimate means of achieving these goals, then that society was in a state of anomie. For both Durkheim and Merton, frustrated aspirations were an important cause of norm violations, or deviance. They differed in what they saw as the source of aspirations. For Durkheim, it was human nature to have limitless desires, growing from a natural ‘‘wellspring’’ with- in. Merton argued that desires did not come from within us, but were advanced by a widely held conception of what constitutes ‘‘the good life.’’ Durkheim believed that when a society was characterized by anomie, there were inadequate normative constraints on the desires and expecta- tions of people. Peasants could come to believe, even expect, that they could rise to live like the aristocracy, or become captains of newly develop- ing industry. Part of mechanical solidarity was the norms that constrained these expectations, that ordered the intercourse between social classes, that checked the natural wellsprings of desires and encouraged peasants to be happy with their lot in life. Without these checks, desires exceeded rea- sonable hope of attainment, producing frustration and potentially deviance. Merton’s conception of anomie placed the society itself in the position of determining both the legitimate goals that people should aspire to and the legitimate means of pursuing these goals. While this goal has often been expressed by re- searchers as wealth attainment, Merton (1997) believed that wealth attainment was only one ex- ample of many societal goals. Unfortunately, so- ciety frequently caused people to have grandiose expectations without providing all of its members with reasonable opportunities to pursue them le- gitimately. This circumstance, where the goals and the means were not both universally available to the members of a society, Merton called anomie. When individuals were faced with anomie, they had to choose whether to forgo the socially advanced goals, their society’s shared vision of the good life, or to seek these objectives by means not deﬁned as legitimate. Merton described ﬁve choices available to these individuals. With ‘‘conformity,’’ the individual uses the socially prescribed means to obtain the goals advanced by that society. ‘‘In- novation’’ is the choice to use illegitimate means to achieve the legitimate goals; much criminal behav- ior is an example of innovation. When a person goes through the motions of using the legitimate means, fully aware that the socially advanced goals are beyond his reach, this is ‘‘ritualism.’’ ‘‘Retreatism’’ is the choice neither to use the legitimate means nor to strive for the legitimate goals of a society. Finally, ‘‘rebellion’’ is rejecting the society’s means and goals and replacing them with ones deﬁned by the individual as superior. ANOMIE 166 A common mistake is interpreting Merton as arguing that an individual chooses to live his or her life as a conformist, or innovator, or retreatist. To the contrary, Merton’s position is that we all are constantly making choices when faced with behav- ioral alternatives. At one point during the day one might choose to act as a conformist, but later, when confronted with another choice, one may choose to innovate. For example, a person who engages in robbery, innovation, is not always an innovator; he or she may also have a job, which indicates conformity. While one of these choices may predominate with some people, they should be seen as alternatives that people choose from in deciding how to act in a particular instance, not identities that they assume. In applying Merton’s perspective to Western nations, sociologists have argued that most of these societies are characterized by some degree of anomie, which manifests itself as a lack of equal opportunity. The extent of anomie, the degree of disjuncture between goals and means in a society, can be used to predict the level of crime and deviance that society will experience. The high crime rates of the United States can be linked to great inequalities in income, education, and job opportunities (Loftin and Hill 1974). To explain individual propensity to deviate from norms, one must consider the extent to which individuals have accepted the society’s conception of ‘‘the good life,’’ and the legitimate means individuals can use to attain it (Cloward and Ohlin 1960). As an expla- nation of crime, this theory has given way to different approaches, but anomie has been ab- sorbed into larger perspectives to explain the rela- tionship between poverty and crime (Messner 1983). New Approaches to Anomie. Anomie saw a theoretical resurgence in the late 1980s and 1990s (Agnew and Passas 1997), especially in criminological research. This resurgence ﬁrst occurred with Agnew’s (1985) general strain theory and later, with macro-variations such as institutional anomie (Messner and Rosenfeld 1994). Strain Theory. While many have been critical of anomie and strain theories of the past (Hirschi 1969; Kornhauser 1978), Agnew (1985, 1992) ar- gues that research in the areas of medical sociolo- gy, social psychology, and psychology can help create new directions for this theory. Agnew (1992) has proposed a micro-level theory; that ‘‘Adoles- cents are pressured into delinquency by the nega- tive affective states—most notably anger and relat- ed emotions—that often result from negative relationships’’ (p. 48). His extension of traditional strain theories focuses on more than one form of strain or anomie. Agnew (1992) suggests there are three major types of strain that can be experienced by individuals: strain (1) ‘‘as the failure to achieve positively valued goals,’’ (2) ‘‘as the removal of positively valued stimuli,’’ and (3) ‘‘as the presenta- tion of negative stimuli.’’ This extension of anomie or strain theories allows our understanding of the creation of anomie to move even farther away from that ﬁrst misconception that it must be con- nected to wealth attainment. Institutional Anomie Theory. Most research on anomie has been at the micro-level (Agnew and Passas 1997). For example, variations such as Agnew’s general strain theory have ignored the theoretical implications at the macro-level (Agnew and Passas 1997; see also Bernard 1987; Messner 1988; Messner and Rosenfeld 1994; Rosenfeld 1989). Institutional anomie theory posits that in order to understand any social phenomena we must understand the basics of social organization. These basics are culture and social structure and are best understood by their linking mechanism, social institutions (Messner and Rosenfeld 1994; Rosenfeld and Messner 1997). Rosenfeld and Messner (1994, 1997) suggest that social institu- tions are both interdependent and in conﬂict with one another, which leads to a constant, necessary balancing of institutional demands. According to Rosenfeld and Messner (1997) the economy is at the center of this balancing act. Institutional ano- mie theory helps explain the effect of the domina- tion of the economy over other institutions by suggesting that ‘‘economic dominance stimulates the emergence of anomie at the cultural level, and. . . erodes the structural restraints against crime associated with the performance of institutional roles’’ (Rosenfeld and Messner 1997, p. 213). Insti- tutional anomie theory which, up until this stage, has been used to explain trends in crime, could successfully be extended to other social phenomena. Social Psychological Conceptions of Anomia. Items designed to measure individual feelings of anomia are now frequently included in surveys such as the General Social Survey, an annual na- tional survey conducted by the National Opinion ANOMIE 167 Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. Examples of these items illustrate the current uses of the concept, as in the following anomia items from the 1988 NORC survey (re- spondents were instructed to indicate the extent of their agreement with each statement): ‘‘Most public ofﬁcials (people in public ofﬁce) are not really interested in the problems of the average man,’’ and ‘‘It’s hardly fair to bring a child into the world with the way things look for the future’’ (NORC 1988, pp. 215–216). (Nearly 40 percent of the respondents to the second question agreed, and 68 percent agreed with the ﬁrst.) IN SUMMARY Anomie has been and will continue to be a main- stay concept in sociology. Papers discussing the meanings and uses of this concept continue to be written (see, for example, Adler and Laufer 1995; Bjarnason 1998; Deﬂem 1989; de Man and Labreche- Gauthier 1993; Hackett 1994; Hilbert 1989; Menard 1995; Passas and Agnew 1997; Wolff 1988). The basic meaning of the term anomie, though—both in its initial usage as a description of society and in its modern extensions—is well established and widely understood within the discipline. Students new to sociology should take care to understand that the deﬁnitions of the word may not be as broad for sociologists as for the general public. The utility of the concept for the study of society is best maintained by extending it in ways that are consistent with its original deﬁnition. REFERENCES Adler, Freda, and William S. Laufer 1995 Advances in Criminological Theory , vol. 6: The Legacy of Anomie . New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction. Agnew, Robert 1992 ‘‘Foundations For a General Strain Theory of Crime and Delinquency.’’ Criminology 30:47–87. ——— 1985 ‘‘A Revised Strain Theory of Delinquency.’’ Social Forces 64:151–167. ———, and Nikos Passas 1997 Introduction. In Nikos Passas and Robert Agnew, eds., The Future of Anomie Theory , Boston: Northeastern University Press. Bernard, Thomas J. 1987 ‘‘Testing Structural Strain Theories.’’ Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquen- cy 24:262–280. Bjarnason, Thoroddur 1998 ‘‘Parents, Religion and Per- ceived Social Coherence: A Durkheimian Frame- work of Adolescent Anomie.’’ Journal for the Scientiﬁc Study of Religion 37:742–755. Cloward, Richard A., and Lloyd E. Ohlin 1960 Delin- quency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs . New York: Free Press. Coser, Lewis A. 1977 Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context , 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Deﬂem, Mathiew 1989 ‘‘From Anomie to Anomia and Anomic Depression: A Sociological Critique on the Use of Anomie in Psychiatric Research.’’ Social Sci- ence and Medicine 29:627–634. de Man, A.F., and L. Labreche-Gauthier 1993 ‘‘Corre- lates of Anomie in French-Canadian Adolescents.’’ Journal of Social Psychology 133:141–146. Durkheim, Emile (1897) 1951 Suicide . New York: Free Press. ——— (1893) 1956 The Division of Labor in Society . New York: Free Press. Hackett, Edward J. 1994 ‘‘A Social Control Perspective on Scientiﬁc Misconduct.’’ Journal of Higher Educa- tion 65:242–261. Hilbert, Richard A. 1989 ‘‘Durkheim and Merton on Anomie: An Unexplored Contrast and Its Deriva- tives.’’ Social Problems 36:242–250. Hirschi, Travis 1969 Causes of Delinquency . Berkeley: University of California Press. Kornhauser, Ruth 1978 Social Sources of Delinquency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, Thomas 1970 The Structure of Scientiﬁc Revolu- tions , 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Loftin, Colin, and Robert H. Hill 1974 ‘‘Regional Sub- culture and Homicide.’’ American Sociological Review 39:714–724. Menard, Scott 1995 ‘‘A Developmental Test of Mertonian Anomie Theory.’’ Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 32:136–175. Merton, Robert K. 1997 Forward. In Nikos Passas and Robert Agnew, eds., The Future of Anomie Theory. Boston: Northeastern University Press. ——— 1949 Social Theory and Social Structure: Toward the Codiﬁcation of Theory and Research . New York: Free Press. Messner, Steven F. 1988 ‘‘Merton’s ‘Social Structure and Anomie’: The Road Not Taken.’’ Deviant Behav- ior 9:33–53. ——— 1983 ‘‘Regional and Racial Effects on the Urban Homicide Rate: The Subculture of Violence Revisit- ed.’’ American Journal of Sociology 88:997–1007. APPLIED SOCIOLOGY 168 ———, and Richard Rosenfeld 1994 Crime and the Ameri- can Dream . Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth. National Opinion Research Center 1988 General Social Surveys, 1972–1988: Cumulative Codebook . Chicago: National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago. Passas, Nikos, and Robert Agnew 1997 The Future of Anomie . Boston: Northeastern University Press. Rosenfeld, Richard 1989 ‘‘Robert Merton’s Contribu- tion to the Sociology of Deviance.’’ Sociological In- quiry 59:453–466. ———, and Steven F. Messner 1997 ‘‘Markets, Morality, and an Institutional-Anomie Theory of Crime.’’ In Nikos Passas and Robert Agnew, eds., The Future of Anomie Theory . Boston: Northeastern University Press. Wolff, Kurt H. 1988 ‘‘Anomie and the Sociology of Knowledge, in Durkheim and Today.’’ Philosophy and Social Criticism 14:53–67. R OBERT C RUTCHFIELD K RISTIN A. B ATES ANTI-SEMITISM See Discrimination; Prejudice; Race. APARTHEID See African Studies; Discrimination; Race; Segre- gation and Desegregation. APPLIED SOCIOLOGY Applied sociology is sociology in use. It is policy- oriented, action-directed, and intends to assist people and groups to think reﬂectively about what it is they do, or how it is they can create more viable social forms capable of adapting to changing ex- ternal and internal conditions. The roots of ap- plied sociology in the United States go back to the publication in 1883 of Lester Ward’s Dynamic Sociology: or Applied Social Science , a text in which he laid the groundwork for distinguishing between an understanding of causal processes and how to intervene in them to foster social progress. Today applied sociology has blossomed in every arena of sociological endeavor (Olsen and Micklin 1981). The nature of applied sociology can more easily be grasped by examining those characteris- tics that distinguish it from basic sociology. Differ- ent audiences are involved (Coleman 1972). Basic sociology is oriented toward those who have a concern for the advancement of sociological knowl- edge. The quality of such work (quantitative or qualitative,) is evaluated in accordance with agreed- upon standards of scientiﬁc merit. Applied soci- ology is oriented more toward those who are making decisions, developing or monitoring pro- grams, or concerned about the accountability of those who are making decisions and developing programs. The quality of applied work is evaluated in accordance with a dual set of criteria: (1) how useful it is in informing decisions, revealing pat- terns, improving programs, and increasing ac- countability; and (2) whether its assumptions and methods are appropriately rigorous for the prob- lems under investigation. If we were to imagine a continuum between pure research and pure practice, applied sociology would occupy a space in the middle of this continu- um. This space is enlarged along one boundary when practitioners and applied sociologists col- laborate to explain patterns of behavior or devel- op causal models for predicting the likely impact of different courses of action. It is enlarged on the other boundary when applied and basic sociolo- gists collaborate in the elaboration of abstract theory so as to make it more useful (Lazersfeld and Reitz 1975). There is always tension between the two, however. In part, the tension is attributable to the analytic distance that should characterize so- ciological analysis more generally (Loﬂand 1997). In part, it is attributable to the infusion of an ethical position in applied analysis, a posture which, if nothing else, is sensitive to the operation of power. The boundaries of applied sociology may also be speciﬁed by enumerating the activities that play a central role in what it is that applied sociologists do. Freeman and Rossi (1984) have suggested three activities: (1) mapping and social indicator research, (2) modeling social phenomena, and (3) evaluating purposive action. To this could be add- ed at least one more activity: (4) conceptualizing, studying, and facilitating the adaptability of alter- native social forms. Examining these activities also permits considering some of the presumed trade- offs that are commonly thought to distinguish basic from applied sociology. APPLIED SOCIOLOGY 169 Mapping and social indicator research. Such studies are primarily descriptive, and designed to provide estimates of the incidence and prevalence of phenomena that are social in nature. There may be interest in how these phenomena are distribut- ed in different social categories (e.g., by ethnic group afﬁliation, lifestyles, or social classes) or are changing over time. For example, corporations may wish to know how consumption patterns for various goods are changing over time for different groups to facilitate the development of marketing strategies. Federal and state agencies may wish to understand how the incidence and prevalence of diseases for different social groups is changing over time to develop more effective prevention and treatment strategies. Neighborhood groups may wish to know how citizen complaints regard- ing the police, high school graduation, or cervical cancer rates are distributed in relation to income characteristics of neighborhoods. It is often assumed that applied sociology is less rigorous than basic sociology. Freeman and Rossi (1984) suggest that it is more appropriate to argue that the norms governing the conduct of basic sociological research are universally rigor- ous, while the norms governing the conduct of applied sociological research, of which mapping and social indicator research are but two exam- ples, have a sliding scale of rigor. For critical decisions, complex phenomena that are either difﬁcult to measure or disentangle, or where pre- cise projections are needed, sophisticated quanti- tative or qualitative measures, or both, may be required and sophisticated analytic techniques may be needed, or may need to be developed. But as time and budget constraints increase, and the need for precision decreases, ‘‘quick and dirty’’ measures might be more appropriate. The level of rigor in applied sociology, in short, is driven by the needs of the client and the situation as well as the nature of the problem under investigation. Modeling social phenomena. The modeling of social phenomena is an activity common to both basic and applied sociology. Sociologists of both persuasions might be interested in modeling the paths by which adolescents develop adaptive or maladaptive coping strategies, or the mechanisms by which social order is maintained in illicit drug networks. The applied sociologist would need to go beyond the development of these causal mod- els. For the adolescents, applied sociologists would need to understand how various interventions might increase the development and maintenance of adaptive strategies. In the case of drug net- works, they might need to understand the relative effectiveness of different crime-control strategies in reducing the capacity of drug networks to pro- tect themselves. Just as with mapping and social indicator re- search, while there are norms supporting rigor to which basic researchers should adhere in the de- velopment of causal models, there is usually a sliding scale of rigor in applied research. There is not a necessary trade-off between doing applied work and levels of rigor. It usually happens, howev- er, that applied problems are relatively more com- plex and tap into concepts that are less easy to quantify. In trying to capture more of the com- plexity, precision in the speciﬁcation of concepts and elegance of form of the overall model may be traded off against an understanding of dynamics that is sufﬁcient to inform decisions. For both basic and applied work it is impera- tive that the mechanisms by which controllable and uncontrollable concepts have an impact on the phenomenon of interest are properly speci- ﬁed. Speciﬁcation decisions must be made with respect to three aspects of the dynamics of situa- tions (Britt 1997). First, the nature of what con- cepts are (and what they are not) must be speciﬁed with regard to the contextually speciﬁc indicators that give them meaning. Second, the concepts that are considered sufﬁciently important to be includ- ed in a model (as well as those that are deemed sufﬁciently unimportant to be left out) must be speciﬁed. Finally, the nature of relationships that exist (and do not exist) among the included con- cepts must be speciﬁed. Since these speciﬁcation decisions interpenetrate one another (i.e., have implications for one another) over time, it may be prudent to think of models as vehicles for summa- rizing what we think we know about the dynamics of situations (Britt 1997). The clients of applied researchers, however, are not interested in how elegant models are, but in how well the implications of these models assist them in reducing the uncertainty associated with decisions that must be made. As time and budget constraints increase, or researchers become more conﬁdent in their ability to understand which controllable concepts are having the biggest (or APPLIED SOCIOLOGY 170 most unanticipated) impact, less formal techniques may be used to develop and evaluate the models under consideration. Elegance must be balanced against usability. Complexity must be balanced against communicability. Theoretical sophistica- tion must be balanced against the capacity of a model to interpret the lives of individuals and groups living through situations. Evaluating purposive action. Evaluation re- search is an applied activity in which theories and methods of the social sciences are used to ascer- tain the extent to which programs are being imple- mented, services are being delivered, goals are being accomplished, and these efforts are being conducted in a cost-effective manner. These may be relatively small-scale efforts with ﬁnite and speciﬁc research questions. A manufacturing com- pany may be interested in evaluating the impact of a new marketing program. A drug rehabilitation center may be interested in evaluating the cost- effectiveness of a new treatment modality. A move- ment organization may be interested in the situa- tional effectiveness of particular strategies for fos- tering policies that are conducive to the reduction in infant-mortality differentials or the production of higher graduation rates in high-risk areas, or to a more equitable allocation of tax revenues (Maines and McCallion 2000). These programs may or may not be of national importance, may or may not have large sums of money contingent on the outcomes, and may or may not require an understanding of anything but gross effects. It may be necessary to perform such analyses with limited personnel, time, and money. Under such circumstances, relatively unsophisti- cated methods are going to be used to conduct the evaluations and reanalysis will not be likely. On the other hand, programs may involve the lives of many people, and deal with critical and complex social issues. The Coleman report on the equality of educational opportunity was presum- ably intended to establish once and for all that gross differences in school facilities did exist for black and white children in the United States (Coleman et al. 1966). The report, carried out by a team of sophisticated social scientists in a relative- ly short time, unleashed a storm of reanalyses and critiques (e.g., Mosteller and Moynihan 1972). These reanalyses attempted to apply the most sophisticated theoretical and methodological weap- ons in the sociological arsenal to the task of evalu- ating the implications of the Coleman report. Similarly, econometric analyses initially conduct- ed to evaluate the impact of capital punishment on the homicide rate spawned very painstaking and sophisticated applied research (e.g., Bowers and Pierce 1975) in an attempt to evaluate the robust- ness of the conclusions. In these latter two cases, a high level of rigor by any standard was maintained. Conceptualizing, studying, and facilitating the adaptability of alternative social forms. A legitimate test of applied sociology is whether it can be used as a basis for designing and imple- menting better social institutions (Street and Weinstein 1975). An element of critical theory is involved here that complicates the distinction be- tween basic and applied sociology, for it chal- lenges applied sociologists and their clients to imagine: (1) alternative social forms that might be more adaptive in the face of changing social, envi- ronmental, and technological trends; and (2) alter- native environments that must be sought if equita- ble social forms are to exist. At the level of families, this may mean asking what new role relationships could create more adaptive family structures. Al- ternatively, it might mean asking in what norma- tive environments egalitarian family roles might exist. Or perhaps, asking what the impact of pres- sure for reproductive rights might be on the inﬂu- ence of women in families and communities. At the level of work groups faced with changing technologies and dynamic environments, it is ap- propriate to ask whether ﬂatter organizational structures and more autonomous work groups might better serve both organizational goals and those of its members (e.g., Myers 1985). At the community level, exploring the viability of alterna- tive interorganizational relationships, or how com- munities respond to the threat of drug dealing are among a host of legitimate questions. Whatever the speciﬁc focus of such questions and the role of applied sociologists in working with clients to answer them, questions of power and ethics should never be far away. In applied sociology, problems drive the de- velopment of both theory and method. When problems and their dynamics cannot be explained by existing theories, new assumptions are added (Lazerefeld and Reitz 1975), new ways of thinking about concepts like adaptability are developed ART AND SOCIETY 171 (e.g., Britt 1989), or more fundamental theoretical shifts take place in a manner described by Kuhn (1961). When problems cannot be studied using existing methodological and statistical techniques, new techniques are developed. For example, the computer was developed under a contract from the Census Bureau so that the 1950 census could be conducted, and advances in area sampling theo- ry were stimulated by the Department of Com- merce needing to get better unemployment esti- mates (Rossi 1986). Ragin (1987) developed qualitative comparative analysis to permit the rig- orous analysis of relatively rare events such as revolutions. Yet the applied implications of being able to study the alternative combinations of con- ditions that might give rise to particular outcomes has immense applied value (Britt 1998). The continuing pressure on applied sociology to adapt to the needs of clients has had two impor- tant second-order effects beyond the development of theory and method. The nature of graduate training for applied sociologists is changing by virtue of the wider repertoire of skills needed by applied sociologists, and the dilemmas faced by sociologists vis-à-vis their clients are being con- fronted, and norms regarding the appropriate- ness of various courses of action are being developed. A universal component of graduate applied education is the internship. Learning by doing, and experiencing the array of problems associated with designing and conducting research under time and budget constraints, while still having supportive ties with the academic program, are very important. The range and depth of coursework in qualitative and quantitative methods and statis- tics is increasing in applied programs to prepare students for the prospect of needing to employ techniques as varied as structural equations, focus groups, archival analysis, and participant observa- tion in order to deal with the complexity of the problems requiring analysis. There have been corresponding changes in the area of theory, with more emphasis given to moving back and forth from theory to applied problem. And there have been increases in courses designed to train students in the other skills re- quired for successful applied work: networking, problem decomposition, and dealing with client- sociologist dilemmas. REFERENCES Bowers, W., and G. Pierce 1975 ‘‘The Illusion of Deter- rence in Isaac Erlich’s Research on Capital Punish- ment.’’ Yale Law Journal 85: 187–208. Coleman, J. G. 1972 Policy Research in the Social Sciences. Morristown, N.J.: General Learning Press. Coleman, J. S., E. Q. Campbell, C. J. Hobson, J. McPartland, A. M. Mood, F. D. Weinﬁeld, R. L. York 1966 Equality of Educational Opportunity , 2 vols. Wash- ington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce. Freeman, H. E., and P. H. Rossi 1984 ‘‘Furthering the Applied Side of Sociology.’’ American Sociological Re- view 49:571–580. Lazersfeld, P. F., and J. G. Reitz 1975 An Introduction to Applied Sociology . New York: Elsevier. Mosteller, F., and D. P. Moynihan 1972 On Equality of Educational Opportunity . New York: Random House. Myers, J. B. ‘‘Making Organizations Adaptive to Change: Eliminating Bureaucracy at Shenandoah Life.’’ Na- tional Productivity Review , (Spring) 131–138. Olsen, M.E., and M. Micklin 1981 Handbook of Applied Sociology . New York: Praeger. Rossi, P.H. 1986 ‘‘How Applied Sociology can Save Basic Sociology.’’ Journal of Applied Sociology 3:1–6. Street, D., and E. Weinstein 1975 ‘‘Prologue: Problems and Prospects of Applied Sociology.’’ The American Sociologist 10:65–72. Maives, D. R. and M. J. McCallion (2000) Urban Ine- quality and the Possibilities of Church–based Inter- vention. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 23, (forthcoming). D AVID B RITT ART AND SOCIETY There is no consensus as to what art is nor, until the 1970s, had sociologists expended much energy on its study or on the development of a sociology of the arts. While in Europe art had longer been of interest to sociologists than in the United States, even there it had not developed into an identiﬁ- able ﬁeld with clear and internationally accepted parameters. As recently as 1968 the term sociology of art was not indexed in the International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences , which sought to sum and assess the thinking and accomplishments in the rapidly expanding social sciences of the post-World War II period. Yet by the end of the century the study of art had moved into the mainstream of sociological theory and was rapidly becoming a ART AND SOCIETY 172 favored subject for empirical investigation not only in the countries of Central and Western Europe but also in the United States. Why should art, as a subject for sociological study, have been so neglected as to have virtually disappeared from mention in American textbooks for half a century after World War I? In large part this reﬂected the inherent tension between soci- ology and art, which, as noted by Pierre Bourdieu, make an ‘‘odd couple.’’ Artists, believing in the uniqueness of the original creator, resented the social scientist’s attempt to demystify their achieve- ments by dissecting the role of the artist in society, by questioning to what extent artists are ‘‘born’’ rather than ‘‘made,’’ by conceptualizing artistic works as the products of collective rather than individual action, by anthropologically approach- ing art institutions, by studying the importance of networks in artistic success, and by investigating the economic correlates of artistic productivity. Many scholars in the humanities were also skepti- cal. For them the appeal of art is something of a mystery and best left that way; they could hardly relate to the attempts of social scientists who, in their quest for objectivity, sought to eliminate any evaluative component from their own research. This practice of disregarding one’s own personal preferences and tastes hardly seemed legitimate to aestheticians. Moreover, in pursuing a rigorous methodology, many sociologists chose to study only those problems that could yield readily to statistical analysis, and art did not seem to be one of those. They also preferred to focus on subjects that were important in the solution of social prob- lems, and, in the United States, the arts were not generally regarded as high on this list. Nonetheless, there has been—especially since the late 1960s—a slow but steady movement to- ward the development of a sociology of the arts. This is due, in part, to a narrowing of the intellec- tual gulf between the humanistic and sociological approaches. On the one hand, art historians have legitimated the study of art within its social con- text, and, on the other, mainstream sociology has become more hospitable to the use of other than purely ‘‘scientistic’’ methodology. In part this prog- ress resulted from the expanded contacts of Ameri- can sociologists after World War II with their counterparts in other countries where art is re- garded as a vital social institution and a public good. And just as art must be understood and studied within its social context, so too the grow- ing sociological interest in the arts reﬂects the growing importance of the arts within American society and the recognition of this importance by the government. Despite the concerted opposi- tion of those who believe there is no role for government in funding the arts, at every level of government—federal, state, and local—arrange- ments for the support of grassroots arts have become institutionalized. A small but dedicated number of scholars can be credited with sparking this postwar advance- ment of theory and research in the sociology of culture and, more speciﬁcally, in the sociology of the arts. The latter term, though not unknown before then, began to surface with some frequency in the 1950s; thus, in 1954 a session on the sociolo- gy of art was listed in the program of the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. In 1957 a symposium on the arts and human behavior at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences served as a catalyst for the production of a book, based partially on papers presented there. In its preface, the editor, Robert N. Wilson, concluded that a sociology of art, though in the early stages of its development, was not yet ripe for formalization. Nonetheless, Wilson’s book included a number of articles based on empirical research that attracted attention. In one, Cynthia White, an art historian, and Harrison White, a Harvard sociologist, reported on their investiga- tion into institutional change in the French paint- ing world and how this affected artistic careers. Later expanded and published in book form as Canvases and Careers (1965), this research provides a working example of how a changing art form might best be studied and understood within its historical and social context. Perhaps the most important step toward the development of the ﬁeld in these postwar years came with the publication of a collection of read- ings edited by Milton Albrecht, James Barnett, and Mason Griff (1970). Clearly titled as to subject matter— The Sociology of Art and Literature —it was intended to serve a classroom purpose but also to advance an institutional approach to its study. In one article, originally published in 1968, Albrecht oriented the reader to art as an institution, using art as a collective term for a wide variety of aesthet- ic products, including literature, the visual arts, and music. In another (‘‘The Sociology of Art’’), ART AND SOCIETY 173 Barnett reprinted his state-of-the-ﬁeld synthesis as it stood in 1959, and, in yet another, Griff pub- lished a seminal article on the recruitment and socialization of artists, drawing in some part on his earlier empirical studies of art students in Chica- go. Though here, too, the editors spoke of the sociology of art as being still in its infancy, they helped it to take its ﬁrst steps by including in their reader a large number of empirically grounded articles—by scholars in the humanities as well as the social sciences. Divided into six subjects— forms and styles, artists, distribution and reward systems, tastemakers and publics, methodology, history and theory—it served for many years as an exemplary resource both for those attempting to set up courses on the arts and society and those embarking on research. Beginning in the 1970s the sociology of art moved toward formalization and started to come into its own. Speeding this development in the new age of television dominance was a growing sociological interest in the mass media, in visual communications, and in the popular arts. The debate about mass versus popular culture was revitalized by new fears about the effects of com- mercialization, but some scholars began to won- der about the terms in which the debate was being cast. The assumption that art forms could be categorized as ‘‘high’’ or ‘‘low’’ or, put another way, as ‘‘mass’’ or ‘‘elite’’—an assumption that had fueled the critiques of Theodor Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School—came into ques- tion as reputable researchers looked more closely at the empirical evidence (Gans 1974). Howard S. Becker’s conceptualization of art as collective ac- tion (1982) did not so much mute the debate as turn attention away from the circumstances sur- rounding the production of any particular work— that is, what kind of an artist produced work for what kind of audience under what system of re- wards—toward the collective (cooperative) nature of the activity whereby works regarded as art are produced as well as to that collective process itself. As attention turned to the production of culture, the arts came to be widely regarded by sociologists as socially constructed entities whose symbolic meanings reside not in the objects themselves but change as circumstances change. Recent American studies in the sociology of art have taken varied approaches, both as to sub- ject matter and methodology. Some have focused on genres that are considered marginal to estab- lished categories of ﬁne art, including such ‘‘out- sider art’’ as that produced by asylum inmates, ‘‘naive artists,’’ African primitives, and Australian aborigines. Others have researched the process whereby ‘‘outsider artists’’ may make the transi- tion to being ‘‘insiders’’ while still others, extend- ing their interests to the politics of art, have con- sidered what happens to ‘‘insiders’’ (and the art they have produced) when shifts in the political culture recast them as ‘‘outsiders.’’ Sociologists have also extended their inquiries to the econo- mics of art as they have considered the inﬂuence of funding and the structure of museums on the creation, production, preservation, and dissemi- nation of art works; case studies of ‘‘arts manage- ment’’ abound. Some inquiries involving genres marginal to established categories of ﬁne art have adopted methodologically unusual approaches. These in- clude Wendy Griswold’s studies of the social fac- tors inﬂuencing the revival of Renaissance plays (1986); Robert Crane’s study of the transforma- tion of art styles in post-World War II New York (1987); Liah Greenfeld’s study of taste, choice, and success in the Israeli art worlds (1989); Vera Zolberg’s studies of art patronage and new art forms (1990); and Gladys Lang and Kurt Lang’s study of the building and survival of artistic reputa- tions (1990). These and other empirical studies that have already appeared in print or are under way are helping to clarify what is meant by a sociology of art. While there still may be no consensus as to what art is—nor need there be—some consensus is shaping up as to the direction in which the ﬁeld should be moving. Leading theoreticians—Vera Zolberg, Janet Wolff, Paul DiMaggio, Richard Peterson, and Anne Bowler among them—agree on the need to keep the art itself at the center of theoretical concern but continue to disagree on the proper methodological approach to that ‘‘cen- tering.’’ Essentially, this pits the case for focusing on the institutions in which aesthetic objects are produced and received—an analytical approach— against one that emphasizes criticism and textual interpretation of the objects themselves. Zolberg has voiced the need to avoid the narrowness of both social science and aesthetic disciplines, ac- cepting the premise that art should be contextual- ized in terms of time and place in a general sense as ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDIES 174 well as in a speciﬁc sense, that is, in terms of institutional norms, professional training, reward, and patronage or other support. To approach art as a part of society’s culture, Zolberg argues, is no more potentially reductionist than to treat it, as aestheticians do, as an activity that only restricted groups with special interests and knowledge can hope to comprehend. Literature in the ﬁeld is growing at a rapid rate as intellectual barriers between humanistic and social science approaches to the study of art begin to crumble. REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor (1962) 1976 Introduction to the Sociolo- gy of Music . New York: Seabury Press. Albrecht, M. C., J. H. Barnett, and M. Griff (eds.) 1970 The Sociology of Art and Literature: A Reader . New York: Praeger. Alexander, Victoria D. 1996 Museums and Money: The Impact of Funding on Exhibitions, Scholarship, and Man- agement . Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Balfe, Judith Huggins (ed.) 1993 Paying the Piper: Causes and Consequences of Art Patronage . Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Becker, Howard S. 1982 Art Worlds . Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1979) 1984 Distinction: A Social Cri- tique of the Judgment of Taste . Cambridge, Mass.: Har- vard University Press. Bowler, Anne 1994 ‘‘Methodological Dilemmas in the Sociology of Art.’’ In Diana Crane, ed., Sociology of Culture . Oxford: Blackwell. Crane, Diana 1987 The Transformation of the AvantGarde: The New York Art World 1940—85 . Chicago: Universi- ty of Chicago Press. Foster, Arnold W., and Judith R. Blau (eds.) 1989 Art and Society: Readings in the Sociology of the Arts . Albany: State University of New York Press. Gans, Herbert J. 1974 Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste . New York: Ba- sic Books. Greenfeld, Liah 1989 Different Worlds: A Sociological Study of Taste, Choice and Success in Art . Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Griswold, Wendy 1986 Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theater, 1576– 1980 . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lang, Gladys Engel, and Kurt Lang 1990 Etched in Memory: The Building and Survival of Artistic Reputa- tion . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ——— 1996 ‘‘Banishing the Past: The German Avant- Garde.’’ Qualitative Sociology 19:323–343. Peterson, Richard A. (ed.) 1976 The Production of Cul- ture. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications. Rueschemeyer, Marilyn 1993 ‘‘State Patronage in the German Democratic Republic.’’ In Judith Higgins Balfe, ed., Paying the Piper . Urbana: University of Illinois Press. White, Harrison C., and Cynthia A. White 1965 Canvasses and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World . New York: Wiley. Wilson, Robert N. (ed.) 1964 The Arts in Society . Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Wolff, Janet 1992 ‘‘Excess and Inhibition: Interdisciplinarity in the Study of Art.’’ In Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Wilson, and Paula A. Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge Press. Zolberg, Vera L. 1990 Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———, and Charbo, Joni M. (eds.) 1997 Outsider Art. New York: Cambridge University Press. GLADYS ENGEL LANG ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDIES The term Asian American is used in the United States by federal, state, and local governments to designate people of Asian descent, including Pa- ciﬁc Islanders (residents from the Paciﬁc islands that are under U. S. jurisdiction, such as Guam, American Somoa, and the Marshall Islands). Al- though historically relevant and geographically appropriate, inclusion of the Paciﬁc islands in the generic term Asian American stemmed from ad- ministrative convenience for the federal govern- ment rather than from race or ethnic identiﬁcations. Reﬂecting deep-seated prejudices against peo- ple of color, in 1917 the Congress of the United States created the Asiatic Barred Zone, which stretched from Japan in the east to India in the west. People from within the zone were banned from immigration. The geographic concept was incorporated into the Immigration Act of 1924 (Oriental Exclusion Act), a law that had a pro- found impact on the demographic structure of Asian-American communities as well as on U.S. foreign policy. Although it is generally assumed that the term Asian American has a racial basis, ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDIES 175 particularly from the perspective of U.S. immigra- tion history, the racial overtone is muted by the inclusion in the 1980 census of people from India in the ‘‘Asian and Paciﬁc Islander’’ category; they had been classiﬁed as ‘‘white’’ prior to 1980. IMMIGRATION AND RESTRICTIONS OF ASIAN AMERICANS Asian immigration can be divided into two peri- ods: the old and the new. The old immigration period was marked by nonoverlapping waves of distinct Asian populations who came largely in response to the sociopolitical conditions in their homelands and to the shortage of unskilled labor experienced by special-interest groups in the Unit- ed States. The new immigration was characterized by the simultaneous arrival of people from the Asia-Paciﬁc Triangle, spurred principally by the 1965 legislative reforms in U.S. immigration poli- cy, shortages of certain skilled and professional labor, the involvement of United States in Asia, and the sociopolitical situations in Asia in the context of the Cold War. In between these two waves, there was another wave of Asian immi- grants, who came between the end of World War II and the mid 1960s, though the number was small and involved principally Filipinos and their families because of their services in the US mili- tary. This group came outside the ﬁfty-person quota allowed for Filipinos as a result of the Tydings- McDufﬁe Act of 1935 when the Republic of the Philippines was granted independence. The year 1848 marked the beginning of Asian immigration to the United States when the coastal Chinese—mostly from Guangdong—responded to the California gold rush and failures in the rural economy of China. Within fewer than thirty-ﬁve years, the Chinese became the ﬁrst group in U.S. history to be legally barred from becoming citizens because of race. The 1882 Anti-Chinese Exclusion Act was followed by an inﬂux of immigrants from the southern prefectures of Japan during the last decade of the nineteenth century—until that ﬂow ended abruptly with the so-called ‘‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’’ of 1907–1908. Unlike the termina- tion of Chinese immigration, and reﬂecting Ja- pan’s position as a world power, cessation of entry by Japanese was accomplished through a diplo- matic compromise between the two governments rather than through an act of Congress. Without a continuous ﬂow of Japanese farm workers to ease the labor shortage on the Hawaiian plantations, contractors turned to the Philippine Islands— which had been a U.S. possession since 1898—for cheap labor. From 1906 to the independence of the Republic of the Philippines in 1946, over 125,000 (predominantly single) Filipino males, the majority of them from the Ilocos region, labored on Hawaiian sugar plantations. The exclusions of Asians enacted into the National Origins Act of 1924 essentially remained in effect until 1965. By Act of Congress in 1943, however, 105 Chinese were permitted to immi- grate annually, and in 1952, under the McCarran- Walter Act, a token one hundred persons from each Asian country were allowed entry. The sym- bolic opening of immigration doors to Asians was attributed to Walter Judd, a congressman from Minnesota who had spent many years in China as a medical missionary. The provision of a quota of one hundred persons seemed to be an important moral victory for those who wanted the elimina- tion of the exclusion act, but it was in fact a restatement of the 1924 national origin quota basis for immigration. The new stream of Asian immigrants to the United States reﬂected the 1965 legislative reform that allowed an equal number of persons (20,000) from each country outside the Western Hemi- sphere to immigrate. Furthermore, family uniﬁca- tion and needed skills became the major admis- sion criteria, replacing national origin. Besides China and the Philippines, Korea and the Indian sub-continent became, and continue to be, the major countries of origin of many newly arrived Asian immigrants. Refugees from Vietnam, Cam- bodia, and Laos began to enter the United States in 1975, and by 1990, peoples from the former Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) had become the third-largest Asian group, following Chinese and Filipinos. In contrast, Japan’s immi- gration to the United States practically ceased from 1945 to 1965, when it resumed at a much lower rate than those reported for other Asian countries. SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONS Several distinct demographic characteristics illus- trate most graphically past restrictions and the ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDIES 176 1965 revision of the immigration laws. Earlier immigrants from China and the Philippines were predominantly single males. As a result of racial prejudice that culminated in the passage of antimiscegenation laws directed primarily against people of color in many western and southwestern states, the majority of these earlier Asian immi- grants remained unmarried. The lack of family life caused unattached immigrants to depend on one another, creating an apparent great solidarity among people of the same ethnic group. Many of the earlier studies of Chinese and Filipino commu- nities depicted themes of social isolation and lone- liness, which did not apply to the Japanese com- munity. Paul Siu (1952) portrayed the extreme social isolation of Chinese laundrymen in Chicago in his doctoral dissertation, that was published at the time only as a paper in the American Journal of Sociology , with the title ‘‘The Sojourner.’’ Although Siu’s work was written under the direction of Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, it was not included in the Chicago School sociological series published by the University of Chicago Press that focused on urban and ethnic social structure of the time allegedly because Siu argued that the Chinese immigrants did not ﬁt the Park-Burgess assimila- tion model because of the ‘‘race factor.’’ Thus a major piece of Asian-American research, The Chi- nese Laundryman: A Study in Social Isolation (Siu 1987) remained unpublished until after the au- thor’s death in the mid-1980s. The existence of single-gender communities of Filipinos and Chinese is clearly demonstrated in the U.S. censuses between 1860 and 1970. In 1860, the sex ratio for Chinese was 1,858 men for every 100 women. By 1890, following the peak of Chi- nese immigration during the previous decade, the ratio was 2,678 males for every 100 females—the highest recorded. Skewed sex ratios for the Chi- nese population later declined steadily as the re- sult of legislative revisions in 1930 (46 U.S. Stat. 581) and 1931 (46 U.S. Stat. 1511) that enabled women from China to enter the United States. A second factor that helped to balance the sex ratio in the Chinese community, particularly among the younger age cohorts, was the presence of an American-born generation. In 1900, U.S.-born per- sons constituted only 10 percent of the Chinese- American population. By 1970, the ﬁgure was 52 percent. Nevertheless, in the 1980 census, the sex ratio remained high for some age groups within certain Asian-American subpopulations: among Filipinos, for example, the highest sex ratio was found in those sixty-ﬁve and older. The demographic characteristics of Japanese Americans present yet another unusual feature. Under the ‘‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’’ between Japan and the United States, Japanese women were allowed to land on the West Coast to join their men though the immigration of male labor- ers was curtailed. The majority of the women came as picture brides (Glenn 1986, pp. 31–35) within a narrow span of time. Thus, the years following 1910 were the decade of family building for the ﬁrst (issei) generation of Japanese Americans. Since almost all issei were young and their brides were chosen from a cohort of marriageable applicants of about the same age, it was not surprising that issei began their families at about the same time after marriage. The historical accident of con- trolled migration of brides resulted in a uniform age cohort of the second-generation Japanese Americans (nisei). The relatively homogeneous age group of the nisei generation meant that their children, the third generation (known as sansei ), were also of about the same age. The fourth gen- eration followed the same pattern. The amazingly nonoverlapping age and generational cohorts among Japanese Americans is not known to have had parallels in other population groups. Fourth, while Asian Americans in general con- tinue to grow in number as a result of new immi- gration, the size of the Japanese American popula- tion increases primarily by the addition of new generations of U.S.-born babies. It is generally believed that the offspring of Japanese women who marry Caucasians have lost their Japanese identity, even though there are no estimates of the impact of intermarriages upon the shrinkage of the Japanese-American community. An educated guess would be that about two-thirds of Japanese Americans marry non-Japanese partners. Given the fact that Japanese immigrants had lower fertili- ty rates than women in Japan during the period prior to and shortly after World War II, and that the number of new immigrants since the war has remained small, Japanese communities have larg- er percentages of older people than do other ethnic minority populations, including other Asian Americans. In short, Japanese Americans will be a much smaller ethnic minority in the future. The ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDIES 177 plurality ranking for all Asian groups placed the Japanese at the top of the list in 1970; they dropped to the third place in 1980, are expected to place fourth in 1990, and to be ranked last by the year 2000. One more demographic fact is worthy of note. Hawaii and the West Coast states continue to draw large numbers of new immigrants from Asia. Through a process known as ‘‘chain migration,’’ relatives are likely to follow the immigr

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ants soon after their arrival. This leads to sudden increases in population within the ethnic enclaves. The post- 1965 pattern of population growth in many Chinatowns, for instance, is an example of the renewal and revitalization of ethnic communities— which prior to 1965 were experiencing a decline— as are the formation and expansion of Koreantowns, Filipinotowns, and Little Saigons. Moreover, the settlement of post-1965 immigrants from Asia is more dispersed than that of the earlier groups, owing to the fact that the need for professional and skilled manpower is widely distributed through- out the United States. The emergence of Thai, Malaysian, and Vietnamese communities in major metropolitan areas has added a new dimension to the ethnic composition of Asian Americans. Two separate chains of immigration resulted from the new immigration legislation of 1965. One chain, largely found in Chinese and Filipino communities, is kin-selective in that the process of settlement follows the family ties of earlier immi- grants. The other process is occupation-selective, based on skills and professional qualiﬁcations. These two processes created signiﬁcantly different immigrant populations, with clearly discerned bimodal distributions of status characteristics. It is therefore common to ﬁnd recent immigrants from Asia among the high-income groups as well as among the families living below the poverty level; some ﬁnd their homes in the ethnic enclaves of central cities while others live in high-income sub- urban communities. Any attempt to describe Asian Americans by using average measures of social status characteristics, such as income, education, and occupation, can produce a distorted and mis- leading proﬁle that ﬁts no particular group, which can be misused by researchers and planners. A more useful description would be the use of stand- ard errors to show the polarities or deviations of the immigrant group from the norm of the majority. In short, the sociodemographic and socioeco- nomic characteristics of all Asian American com- munities since 1850 have been greatly inﬂuenced by federal immigration legislation. A clear grasp of the structure and change of Asian-American com- munities must begin with an understanding of the history of immigration legislation. ASIAN-AMERICAN RESEARCH Asian-American research may be divided into six periods: (1) the early period before World War II, which was inﬂuenced by, and was a part of, the Chicago School of Sociology that focused on the emergence of a multiethnic urban America. (2) the World War II period, which saw a preponder- ance of Japanese-American studies that also cen- tered around the University of Chicago; (3) the postwar era, with a strong emphasis on culture and personality studies related to Japanese and Japa- nese Americans; (4) a shift toward ‘‘ethnic’’ experi- ence as a result of the civil rights movement; and the emergence of a new academic course of Asian- American studies and ﬁnally (5) the integration of social science theories and concepts of ethnic inequalities and the changing Asian-American vis- ta in the 1980s and 1990s. The Early Period. The pioneer sociological studies on the assimilation of immigrants in Ameri- can urban communities may be attributed to the work of Robert E. Park. Although Park had done little empirical investigation, he had supervised a large number of graduate students and had formu- lated what was known as the theory of race cycle, which stressed the unidirectional process of com- petition, accommodation, and assimilation as the basis of race relations in urban America. Park later led a group of researchers to study Chinese and Japanese communities on the Paciﬁc Coast. The results failed to prove the race-cycle theory. In defending his views, according to Lyman (1977, p.4), Park employed the Aristotelian doctrine of ‘‘obstacles,’’ which suggests that among Chinese and Japanese the assimilation progress in the hy- pothesized direction was only delayed. Early published sociological research on Asian Americans included the works of Bogardus (1928, 1930), who attempted to delineate degrees of preju- dice against minorities through an operational concept of ‘‘social distance.’’ Other topics were ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDIES 178 chosen randomly such as ‘‘Oriental crime’’ in Cali- fornia (Beach 1932); school achievement of Japa- nese-American children (Bell 1935); and anti-Asian sentiments (Sandmeyer 1939; Ichihashi 1932). A noted pioneer community study of Japanese Ameri- cans conducted by Frank Miyamoto (1939) in Seattle in the late 1930s paved the way for the long and signiﬁcant bibliography on Japanese-American stud- ies that followed. Perhaps the most signiﬁcant and ambitious piece of work during the prewar era was the study of social isolation of Chinese immigrants, which took more than a decade to complete. The author, Paul Siu, working under a condition of extreme poverty for a decade, observed the life of Chinese laundrymen. The product of his research endeav- ors offers a classic text in the study of ‘‘unmeltable’’ immigrants, from which the concept of ‘‘sojourn- er’’ independently complemented the earlier work of G. Simmel (Siu 1952, 1987). World War II and Japanese-American Stud- ies. Large-scale systematic studies on Asian Ameri- cans began shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when the United States declared war on Japan. The U.S. government stripped Japa- nese Americans of their property, relocated them, and housed them in internment camps for several years. Alexander Leighton, a psychiatrist, recruit- ed nisei social science graduates to assist in his work in the camps, monitoring the morale and loyalty of internees; this perhaps was the pioneer work in assessing their group cohesion and struc- ture. A few of Leighton’s nisei assistants complet- ed their doctoral studies after the war, maintaining a close and affectionate relationship with him. All had made their own contributions as social scien- tists and as Asian-American specialists. Leighton’s work on the internment of these civilians (both citizens and non citizens) resulted in the publica- tion of a classic text on loyalty (Leighton 1945). Thomas and Nishimoto (1946), Thomas (1952), and Broom and Kitsuse (1955) also carefully docu- mented the situation and the people of Japanese- American communities. The focus of these studies was the question of loyalty on the part of Japanese- American citizens and their offspring in spite of their brilliant wartime combat duties on behalf of their adopted country in Europe. It was the Ameri- can home front conditions had sparked an area of development in social science research that paral- leled some of the classic work on the study of the Polish peasant (Thomas and Znanieki 1946). As a result it increased the general knowledge base on Japanese Americans, including their families and communities, and their sacriﬁces and contribu- tions to America’s wartime efforts. Culture and Personality Studies in the Post- war Era. During World War II, the U.S. govern- ment had reason and the opportunity to question the suitability of Asians as American citizens in regard to loyalty and civic responsibilities. It was also a time to test the myth that Asian immigrants could not assimilate into American society. Social scientists were intrigued by the way culture shapes the personality. Ruth Benedict’s classic work on the Japanese personality and society (Benedict 1946) opened a new vista for research. A cohort of young scholars at the University of Chicago, which included Japanese-American graduate students, became known for their pioneer work in studying Japanese behavioral patterns. It had a profound effect on a generation of interested social scien- tists and resulted in the publication of many classic works on culture and personality (Caudill 1952; Jacobson and Rainwater 1953; Caudill and DeVos 1956; DeVos 1955; Kitano 1961, 1962, 1964; Caudill and Scarr 1961; Babcock and Caudill 1958; Mere- dith 1966; and Vogel 1961). Similar studies on other Asian-American groups are conspicuous- ly absent. Ethnic Studies and the Civil Rights Move- ment. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement, sparked by the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., contributed to the passage of an unprecedented immigration-legislation reform. At the time there existed among Asian Americans on the Paciﬁc Coast, principally in California, a collective search for identity that shared many of the goals and rhetoric of the black movement. Research into the ethnic (Asian) U.S. communities had added two dimensions. The ﬁrst was the need to raise ethnic consciousness as a part of the social movement. Personal testimonials of experiences as members of an oppressed minority provided insight into the psychology of ethnic minorities. The emphasis on the cathartic, as well as the cathectic quality in much of the writings of the civil-rights era reﬂect- ed the mood of the period: that there is a need for alternative theories against the early assimilation ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDIES 179 model in standard texts on racial and ethnic stud- ies. Second, consistent with the radical theme, was the apparent inﬂuence of Marxian views on race and ethnic relations, which posited that African- American and other minorities are victims of op- pression in a capitalist society. Expectedly, the civil rights movement began a renewed interest in research on the experiences of the earliest Asian Americans. With time the titles ranged from well-documented academic publica- tion to insightful popular readings for the lay public (Chen 1980; Daniels 1988; Choy 1979; Ichioka 1988; Miller 1969; Nee and de Bary 1973; Saxton 1971; Sung 1971; Takaki 1989; Wilson and Hosokawa 1980). Asian-American studies was established in the 1970s as an academic discipline in a number of institutions of higher learning, particularly in Cali- fornia, at a time when there were only a few major publications as sources of information for under- graduates (e.g., Kitano 1961–1976; Lyman 1974; Petersen 1971). The birth of an academic specialty was marked by the conspicuous absence of avail- able materials, particularly on Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese, and the peoples of the Indian sub continent (Min 1989). In response to this void, the Asian-American Studies Center at the University of California at Los Angeles published two collec- tions of papers (Roots and Counterpoint) and a quarterly journal, The Amerasia . On the Atlantic Coast, a group of U.S.-born professionals pub- lished an intellectual nonacademic monthly, The Bridge , for nearly a decade. In the 1970s and 1980s, these publications were recommended as collater- al readings for college students interested in Asian- American studies. Amerasia has since become more academic in the 1980s and 1990s while Bridge , for the lack of funds, quietly folded after nearly one decade. In its place, two new academic publica- tions appeared in the 1990s: the Journal of Asian American Studies, which is a U.S. East Coast com- plement (at Cornell University) to Amerasia ; and the Journal of Asian American Health , that serves health research readers as well as the general public. In addition, funded research on health and mental health by the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services has greatly enhanced the research productivities on Asian Americans as well as cumulative bibliographies. The New Age of Asian-American Research: Emerging Theories and Concepts. Stanley Lyman at the University of California at Berkeley, and S. Frank Miyamoto at the University of Washington, are generally acknowledged as pioneers in Asian- American research. Through his numerous pa- pers and books, Lyman has maintained a theoreti- cal relevance and has demonstrated an historical insight into the origin and growth of Asian-Ameri- can communities, especially those of the Chinese and Japanese. As a social historian, he based his research, by and large, on archival documents (see Lyman 1970b). Miyamoto, on the other hand, belongs to a founding generation of Japanese- American researchers whose long-time associa- tion with the University of Washington and his training under Professor Herbert Blumer at the University of Chicago gave him a mix of symbolic interactionist bend and logical positivist approach to the establishment of sound theoretical proposi- tions in the study of Japanese Americans. In the 1980s and 1990s, a few well-trained sociologists began to emerge, many of them for- eign born and foreign educated, with American postgraduate training—the ‘‘ﬁrst-generation new immigrants’’—scholars who arrived at a time when America had become sensitive to diverse cultures. The new breed of Asian-American researchers are increasingly more vocal, questioning traditional sociological theories and concepts based on stud- ies of European immigrants in the early 1920s and 1930s. There is also a reﬂection of the postmodern and world community perspectives that have be- come inﬂuential intellectual trends of the time. These new studies of Asian-American communi- ties have added much to a ﬁeld that had been underserved by the social sciences. In addition, as Asian-American studies became a new academic discipline in line with the African-American and other ethnic minority and gender studies, the need grew for more social science information. The lack of usable and more accurate estimates on many attributes of Asian Americans based on adequate sample design and culturally appropri- ate survey instruments employed in federal sur- veys has frustrated many Asian-American research- ers, in spite of the special publication of information on Asian Americans and Paciﬁc Islanders in the 1980 and 1990 censuses. Asian-American research- ers constructively point out how such statistics can ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDIES 180 be improved to the advantage of both legislators and research academicians (see Yu and Liu 1992). Much information on Asian Americans, par- ticularly new immigrants, still depends on small sample backyard research by individual investiga- tors. In the post–civil rights movement decades, studies on ethnic identities and race and ethnic relations continue to ﬂourish, adding new Asian immigrants into the sample of observations and analyses. The newly arrived Korean businessmen and professionals gave birth to fresh topics in the research literature. Publications on Korean pro- fessionals and small businesses provided opportu- nities to support the old ‘‘middleman’’ theory that argued Asians succeded in ﬁnding business oppor- tunities by being middleman between white and black supplier and customer relations; (see Light and Bonacich 1988) and also advanced an argu- ment that newly emerged Asian-American eth- nic business communities can best be understood in the context of a global business community (Min 1987, and 1988; Yu, E.Y. 1983, Light and Sanchaz 1987). Newer research also includes a collection of refugee studies that involved Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotian Hmongs. Publications on the Vietnamese community centered largely on the initial movement of refugees after the with- drawal of American troops from Vietnam on April 25, 1975. Liu and his associates made a survey of the ﬁrst wave of refugees who were brought in directly from Vietnam to Camp Pendelton in Cali- fornia (Liu, Lamanna, and Murata 1979). He di- rected the reader’s attention to the special status of refugees vis-à-vis immigrants, and the pathway to becoming refugees from previously nonrefugee status as a result of both political and military decisions. The distinction between refugees and immigrants was later further elaborated by Haines (1989a, 1989b). Gold (1992) compared Vietnam- ese with Jewish refugees’ adaptive experience, and showed commonalities of refugee experience in general. Freeman (1984) on the other hand, col- lected life histories and reported refugees’ own accounts of ﬂight and adjustment. Taken togeth- er, studies on Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Lao- tians focused more on their cohort experience as refugees, rather than their transition to an emerg- ing new ethnic community. The smaller number of Cambodian and Lao- tian Hmong people, relative to the Vietnamese, is a major reason why they remained as a part of the underserved Asian-American population in the Asian-American literature. Much of the writings on the Hmong people were based on clinical interviews by practicing health providers and aca- demic psychiatrists (Beiser 1987, 1988; Boehnlein 1987; Mollicca et al. 1987). There is also the reﬂec- tion of a time when the concern was on wartime trauma, refugee experience, and cultural adjust- ment (see Chan 1994). These publications tend to leave an impression that Hmong people had the most difﬁcult time in America, and are psychologically maladjusted. A popular book that portrayed the experience between American physicians and a Hmong child revealed how culture interfered in clinical judgment, no matter how well intentioned (Fadiman 1997) There remained a scarcity of systematic stud- ies, except for Agarwal’s (1991) work on Indian immigrants. Agarwal’s survey on immigrant Asian Indians in America was based on a rather small sample of professionals. Available studies on im- migrant Americans from the Indian subcontinent, however, remained inadequate and woefully few. The arrival of voluminous publications on new immigrants from Asia did not slow down studies of prior to 1965 immigrants. A cumulative bibliography began to focus on the aftermath of Japanese nisei resettlement (Ichioka 1989a; Miyamoto 1989; Warren 1989), and sensei scholars began to search for the Japanese identity of their parents’ generation (Ichioka 1989b ). A well-publicized book by Ronald Tataki (1989), Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans , contained ver- batim recorded life histories. The book was well received by the public but was poorly reviewed in the social science literature because it lacks a new conceptual framework for an old topic. However, it did arouse renewed interest in Asian Americans and their American experience, particularly at a time of race consciousness. While the third-generation Japanese Ameri- cans were busy ﬁnding their identities, nisei con- tinued to search for the meaning of ‘‘being Ameri- can.’’ In September of 1987, on the campus at the University of California at Berkeley, a group of scholars who belonged to the original Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDIES 181 (JERS) at the Berkeley campus convened, and reminisced about lost valuable information of that period (see JERS 1989). Among those who attend- ed include Ichioka, Miyamoto, L.R and J.H. Hirabayashi, Suzuki, Spencer, Kikuchi, Takagi, and Sakoda. Later researchers learned from discussion notes that there was a diary kept by Charles Kikuchi, known as the Kikuchi Diary , but it was destroyed. A manuscript entitled American Betrayed by Profes- sor Morton Grodzin was suppressed from being published. Furthermore, another manuscript re- portedly written by Violet de Christoforo described internees’ refusal to leave camps as camps were closed. The book also exposed the harshness of expulsion. The existence of this manuscript, if true, shed additional light on similar experiences reported in Camp Pendelton as the Vietnamese camps were closed, when refugees were labeled as suffering from campetitis by the federal administra- tor in charge of closing all camps that housed refugees from Indochina (see Liu et al. 1979). Clearly Asian-American research could not be separated from the general ﬁeld of race and ethnic studies. In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers con- tinued to be fascinated by Asians who had mutual ill feelings in their home countries because of neighboring dominations and the World War II experience, but appeared to be united behind a cause of advancing the status of Asian-Americans as a group. Whether there is a single identity of all Asian-Americans, or multiple subidentities of sepa- rate entities depends, of course, on issues. But the persistence of a multiple subidentities seem to be present not only among the ﬁrst-generation immi- grants, which is understandable, it also appears to be real among second- or third-generation ethnics. Fugita and O’Brien’s (1991) volume on Japanese Americans is a good illustration; they seemed to have suggested that a single identity of Asian Americans is but an abstract rather than a reality. Among the Asian-American professionals, perhaps this issue is more complex and deep than is com- monly expected (see Espirita 1992). There also had begun some long-awaited new social science contributions to the literature on Filipino immigrants in the 1980s that were absent in the earlier generation. These studies includ- ed Filipino-American income levels (Cabezas, Shinagawa, and Kawaguchi 1986–1987), Filipino assimilation (Pido 1986), and Filipino health prac- tices (Montepio 1989). As more practicing professionals took part in studying Asian immigrants, there appeared in the 1970s and 1980s a bifurcation of writings on Asian Americans: those that catered to an academic audience and those that served as ‘‘voices’’ of the grassroots community (see Radhakrishnan 1996). It is understandable that, when more and more publications contained a whole spectrum of top- ics, the quality of writings would also vary widely. At the conceptual level, there remained in these writings a contrast between neo-Marxian and neo- classical economic approaches to status attain- ment, income, and employment opportunities for Asian Americans. For example, the censuses of 1980 and 1990 conﬁrmed the fact that U.S.-born Japanese and Chinese men came closest to parity with white men with respect to individual income. Japanese and Chinese women have signiﬁcantly lower in- come than white women. The rest of those Asian men and women continued to have lower incomes than those of whites, Japanese, and Chinese. One explanation seemed to have suggested that Asians as a group valued education and scholastic achieve- ment or individual effort, known as the human capital theory (Becker 1975). But within various Asian subgroups, the disturbing question is why some Asian immigrants attained higher income than others in the same ethnic group. Here both Becker’s human capital and the labor market segmen- tation explanations are applicable. The Lahei sug- gests a two tier wage system prevail (see Cabezas, Shinagawa, and Kawaguchi 1986–1987; Bonacich 1975, 1988, 1992). Perhaps a third explanation of the differential pace of status attainment came from some writ- ings about the Filipino immigrant-labor market structure that related to the manner in which newcomers came to join their kin-relatives. The so- called ‘‘network recruitment’’ tended to form clus- ters in the same occupation area, resembling the earlier immigration patterns of Chinese in Califor- nia (who came from four or ﬁve villages in Guangdong Province) and Japanese farm workers (who were recruited from southern prefectures of Japan). Unlike blacks and Native Americans, Asian Americans varied signiﬁcantly in terms of lan- guage proﬁciency, which had an enormous impact on income and the kinds of occupations in which they tended to cluster together. Barry Chiswick ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDIES 182 (1974) has demonstrated that English proﬁciency is a major factor in income parity. P.G. Min (1986) showed that Filipino and Korean immigrants, an even match for income, engage in quite different occupations. Koreans engage in business but Fili- pinos do not. Min pointed out that the language barrier forces Koreans to be self-employed, no matter how hazardous their business turns out to be. Furthermore, it was Korean immigrants’ link- age to industrial development in Korea that led to the development of some of the Korean communi- ties in the United States. Filipino communities, on the other hand, did not develop similar enter- prises to form a visible ethnic enclave in America. Instead, they depended more on ethnic profes- sional societies and trade associations as basis of ethnic cohesion. The same rationale was also applied in the case of ‘‘new’’ Chinatown studies. The earlier de- scriptive studies of Chinatown either over-roman- ticized the exotic quality of an ethnic enclave, or highlighted the worst side of humanity. To see Chinatown as a unique economic system is per- haps a new approach that is not without controver- sy. Zhou (1992), herself a new immigrant scholar from China, took the conceptual framework of her major advisor A. Portes, and wrote and published her dissertation on New York’s Chinatown. She ably showed how a separate economic system had developed and embedded in urban America. Zhou’s book on Chinatown is refreshingly different from several other volumes on the same topic published between the latter part of the 1970s to the early part of the 1990s that continued to portray pat- terns of conﬂict and cleavage (Wong 1977; Kuo 1977; Kwon 1987; Kinkead 1992). The rise of Asian-American Studies programs, either as a part of multicultural or ethnic studies, or as an independent program, certainly has been instrumental in the increasing research and num- ber of publications that deal with Asian-American communities. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the ﬁeld, the multitudes of topics to be covered, and the unusual personal experiences of writers, the uneven quality of these publications is expect- ed and sometimes unavoidable. Among studies on new communities, on income and status attain- ment, and on racial and ethnic relations, there appeared to be a genuine effort to formulate theoretically applicable concepts, and to use exist- ing theories and models, which compared to fairly good and important descriptive studies of an earli- er era, both before and after World War II. A good example is the analysis of the Korean rotating credit associations in Los Angeles (Light, Kwuon, and Zhong 1990), in which the authors examined the functions of ﬁnancing and savings groups based on informal trust in Korean business communities. The most noticeable achievement of the Asian- American Studies programs in the 1970s through the 1990s is the abundant effort to compile impor- tant bibliographies, by searching for research ma- terials that are normally scattered through scientif- ic journals, unpublished ﬁles, doctoral and masters’ dissertations, working papers, diaries, and confer- ence proceedings. The federal government is credit- ed with making bibliographies on Indochinese refugees, either through the U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce, or at the University of Minnesota Southeast Asian Refugee Studies Project (see ref- erences at the end of this section). Finally, the rise of Asian-American Studies programs increased efforts to establish libraries and documentation centers in a number of universities throughout the country. REFERENCES Agarwal, Priya 1991 Passage from India: Post 1965 Indian Immigrants and Their Children . Palos Verdes, Calif.: Yavati Publishers. Becker, G. S. 1975 Human Capital . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beiser, Morton 1987, ‘‘Changing Time Perspective and Mental Health among Southeast Asian Refugees.’’ Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry 11(4):437–464. ——— 1988 ‘‘Inﬂuence of Time, Ethnicity, and Attach- ment on Depression in Southeast Asian Refugees.’’ American Journal of Psychiatry 145(1):46–51. Boehnlein, J. K. 1987 ‘‘Clinical Relevance of Grief and Mourning Among Cambodian Refugees.’’ Social Sci- ence and Medicine 25:765–772. Cabezas, A. L., H. Shinagawa, and G. Kawaguchi 1986– 1987 ‘‘New Inquiries into the Socioeconomic Status of Filipino Americans in California. Amerasia 12(1):21. Caces, Fe Immigrant Recruitment into the Labor Force: Social Networks Among Filipinos in Hawaii, AA 12:23–38. Chan, Sucheng (ed.) 1994 Hmong Means Free: Life in Laos and America . Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDIES 183 Chiswick, Barry 1974 Income Inequality . Chuong, Chung Hoang 1987 The Vietnam Conﬂict and the Vietnamese in the U.S.: A Bibliography . Berkeley Calif: University of California Press. ERIC Clearinghouse on Urban Education 1988 ‘‘Asian/ Paciﬁc American Education. Brief Bibliographies ,’’ March, 1988. Espirita, Yen Le 1922 Asian American Panethnicity: Bridg- ing Institutions and Identities . Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Fadiman, Anne The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York: The Noonday Press. Freeman, James M. 1984 Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese American Lives . Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Universi- ty Press. Fugita, S., and J. O’Brien Japanese American Ethnicity: The Persistence of a Community . Seattle: The University of Washington Press. Gold, Steven J. 1992 Refugee Communities: A Comparative Study . Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications. Haines, D.W. 1989 ‘‘Southeast Asian Refugee Resettle- ment in the United States and Canada.’’ Amerasia Journal 15(2):141–156. ——— (ed) 1989b Refugees as Immigrants: Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese in America . Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littleﬁeld. Hammond, R. E., and G. L. Hendricks 1988 Southeast Refugee Youth: An Annotated Bibliography . Minneapo- lis University of Minnesota Center for Urban and Regional Affairs. Ichioka, Juji ‘‘Coming of Age: From Rural 30s to Cities.’’ Amerasia Journal . ——— ‘‘A Study in Dualism: Japanese American Couri- er: 1928–1942’’ Amerasia Journal . Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study 1989 Views from Within . Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center. Kim, Hyung-chan 1989 Asian American Studies: An Anno- tated Bibliography and Research Guide . Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Kinkead, Gwen 1992 Chinatown: A Portrait of a Closed Society . Kuo, Chia-liong 1977 Social and Political Change in New York’s Chinatown . New York: New York Universi- ty Press. Kwong, Peter 1987 New Chinatown . Light, Ivan, and Edna Bonacich 1988 Immigrant Entre- preneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles, 1965–1982 . Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. Light, I. M., J. Kwuon, and D. Zhong ‘‘Korean Rotat- ing Credit Association in Los Angeles.’’ Amerasia 16(2):35–54. Light, I., and A. A. Sanchez 1987 ‘‘Immigrant Entre- preneurs in 272 SMSAs.’’ Sociological Perspectives 30(4):373–399. Liu, William T., Maryanne Lamanna, and Alice Murata 1979 Transitions to Nowhere: Vietnamese Refugees in America . Nashville, Tenn: The Charter House Publishers. Marston, J. 1987 An Annotated Bibliography of Cambodia and Cambodian Refugees . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Center for Urban and Regional Affairs. Min, Pyong Gap 1989 ‘‘Textbooks for Asian American Studies: A Review Essay.’’ Amerasia 15(1):259–266. ——— 1988 Ethnic Business Enterprise: Korean Small Business in Atlanta . New York: Center for Migration Studies. ——— 1986–1987 ‘‘Filipino and Korean Immigrants in Small Business: A Comparative Analysis.’’ Amerasia 12:53–71. Miyamoto, A. S. 1988 ‘‘Problems of Interpersonal Style Among Nisei: From Self Restraint to Self Expres- sion.’’ Amerasia 13:29–45. Mollicca, R. F., G. Wyshak, and J. Lavelle 1987 ‘‘The Psychosocial Impact of War Trauma and Torture on Southeast Asian Refugees.’’ American Journal of Psy- chiatry 144(12):1567–1572. Montepio, S. N. 1989 ‘‘Folk Medicine in the Filipino American Experience.’’ Amerasia 13(1):151–162. ——— 1987–1988 ‘‘Magical Medicine and the Filipino Healer: Floklore and Mythology Studies. 11, 12:36–46. National/Paciﬁc Asian Resources Center 1988 On Ag- ing: Annotated Bibliography . Seattle: National Paciﬁc Asian Resources Center. Pido, Antonio J. A. 1986 Center for Migration Studies: New York. The Filipinos in America: Macro/Micro Di- mensions of Immigration and Integration . Radhakrishnan R. 1996 Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location . St. Paul: University of Minneso- ta Press. Sawada, Mitziko ‘‘After the Camps: Seabrook Farms, N.J. and the Resettlement of Japanese Americans, 1944–1947. Amerasia . Shin, H. E., and K. S. Chang 1988 ‘‘Peripherization of Immigrant Professionals: The Case of Korean Physi- cians in the United States.’’ International Migration Review 22:4 609–626. Smith, J. C. 1988 The Hmong, An Annotated Bibliography, 1983–1987 . Minneapolis University of Minnesota Southeast Asian Refugee Studies Project. ATTITUDES 184 Southeast Asian Asian Refugee Studies Project 1983 Bibliography of Hmongs . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce 1989 An Annotated Bibliography on Refugee Mental Health . Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce. Warren, W. H. 1989 ‘‘Maps: A spacial Approach to Japanese American Communities in Los Angeles.’’ Amerasia 13:137–151. Wong, Bernard 1987 ‘‘The Role of Ethnicity in Enclave Enterprises: A Study of the Chinese Garment Fac- tories in New York City.’’ Human Organization 46(2):120–130. ——— 1988 Patronage, Brokerage, Entrepreneurship and the Chinese Community of New York . New York: AMS Press. ——— 1977 Chinese American Community . Wong, Paul, Meora Manvi, and Takeo Hirota Wong 1998 ‘‘Asiacentrism and Asian American Studies?’’ Amerasia . 21 (1, 2):137–147. Yochum, G., and V. Agarwal 1988 ‘‘Permanent Labor Certiﬁcations for Alien Professionals, 1975–1982’’. International Migration Review 22(2):365–381. ——— 1983 ‘‘Korean Communities in America: Past, Present, and Future.’’ Amerasia 10(2):23–51. Yu, Elena, and William T. Liu 1992 ‘‘U.S. National Health Data on Asian/Paciﬁc Islanders: A Research Agenda for the 1990s.’’ American Journal of Public Health 82:12. Zhou, M. 1992 Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potentials of An Urban Enclave . Philadelphia: Temple Universi- ty Press. W ILLIAM T. L IU E LENA S. H. YU ASSIMILATION See Ethnicity. ATHEISM See Religious Orientations. ATTITUDES Attitude ‘‘is probably the most distinctive and indis- pensable concept in contemporary American so- cial psychology’’ (Allport 1985, p. 35). Hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been published on the topic. A review of this literature may be found in Eagly and Chaiken (1998). De- spite this popularity, there is considerable disa- greement about such basics as terminology. Sever- al terms are frequently used as synonyms for attitude, including opinion and belief . Contempo- rary writers often distinguish attitudes from cognitions , which is broader and includes attitudes as well as perceptions of one’s environment. Most analysts distinguish attitude from value , the latter referring to a person’s ultimate concerns or preferred modes of conduct. An attitude is a learned predisposition to re- spond to a particular object in a generally favor- able or unfavorable way. Every attitude is about an object, and the object may be a person, product, idea, or event. Each attitude has three compo- nents: (1) a belief, (2) a favorable or unfavorable evaluation, and (3) a behavioral disposition. This deﬁnition is used by most contemporary writers. However, a small minority deﬁne attitude as con- sisting only of the positive or negative evaluation of an object. A stereotype is one type of attitude. Originally, the term referred to a rigid and simplistic ‘‘picture in the head.’’ In current usage, a stereotype is a belief about the characteristics of members of some speciﬁed social group. A stereotype may be positive (Asian Americans are good at math) or negative (women are bad at math). Most stereo- types are resistant to change. Attitudes link the person to other individuals, groups, and social organizations and institutions. Each person has literally hundreds of attitudes, one for each signiﬁcant object in the person’s physical and social environment. By implication, the individual’s attitudes should reﬂect his or her location in society. Thus, attitudes are inﬂuenced by gender, race, religion, education, and social class. Considerable research on the relationship between social position and attitudes has been carried out; this literature is reviewed by Kiecolt (1988). ATTITUDE FORMATION Many attitudes are learned through direct experi- ence with the object. Attitudes toward one’s school, job, church, and the groups to which one belongs ATTITUDES 185 are examples. Attitudes toward the signiﬁcant per- sons in one’s life are also learned in this way. More often, attitudes are learned through interactions with others. Socialization by parents, explicit teach- ing in educational and religious settings, and inter- actions with friends are important sources of atti- tudes. Research shows that children’s attitudes toward a variety of objects, including gender roles and political issues, are similar to those held by their parents. Another source of attitudes is the person’s observations of the world. A topic of continuing interest is the impact of mass media on the atti- tudes (and behavior) of users. A thorough review of the literature on this topic (Roberts and Maccoby 1985) concludes that television viewing affects both children’s and adolescents’ attitudes about gender roles. Further, the viewing of programs intentionally designed to teach positive attitudes toward racial or ethnic minorities does increase children’s acceptance of such persons. With re- gard to adults, evidence supports the ‘‘agenda setting’’ hypothesis; the amount and quality of coverage by the media (press, radio, and televi- sion) of an issue inﬂuences the public’s perception of the importance of that issue. The effects of mass media exposure on aggression are discussed by Felson (1996) and Geen (1998). Stereotypes are also learned. A stereotype may arise out of direct experience with a member of the stereotyped group, for example, a person who encounters a musically talented black person may create a stereotype by overgeneralizing, infer- ring that all African Americans are gifted musical- ly. More often, however, stereotypes are learned from those with whom we interact such as parents. Other stereotypes may be acquired from books, television, or ﬁlm. Research indicates that televi- sion programming portrays women, the elderly, and members of some ethnic minorities in nega- tive ways and that these portrayals create (or rein- force) misperceptions and negative stereotypes in viewers (McGuire 1985). Social institutions inﬂuence the attitudes one learns in several ways. Adults’ ties to particular ethnic, religious, and other institutions inﬂuence the attitudes they teach their children. The instruc- tion given in schools reﬂects the perspectives of the dominant political and economic institutions in society. The amount and quality of media cover- age of people and events reﬂects the interests of particular groups in society. Through these mecha- nisms, the individual’s attitudes reﬂect the society, institutions, and groups of which she or he is a member. Each attitude fulﬁlls one or more of four functions for the individual. First, some attitudes serve an instrumental function: An individual de- velops favorable attitudes toward objects that aid or reward the individual and unfavorable attitudes toward objects that thwart or punish the individu- al. For example, a person who earns a large salary will have a positive attitude toward the job. Sec- ond, attitudes often serve a knowledge function. They provide the person with a meaningful and structured environment. Third, some attitudes ex- press the individual’s basic values and reinforce self-image. Whites’ attitudes toward black Ameri- cans reﬂect the importance that whites place on the values of freedom and equality. Fourth, some attitudes protect the person from recognizing cer- tain thoughts or feelings that threaten his or her self-image or adjustment. Stereotypes also serve several functions. The act of classifying oneself as a member of a group (males, Republicans, whites) elicits the image of a contrasting group (females, Democrats, Latinos). Thus, stereotypes contribute to social identity. They also reduce the demands on the perceiver to process information about individual members of a stereotyped group; instead, one can rely on a stereotype. Finally, stereotypes may be used to justify the political and economic status quo. ATTITUDE MEASUREMENT Because attitudes are mental states, they cannot be directly observed. Social scientists have developed a variety of methods for measuring attitudes, some direct and some indirect. Direct Methods. These methods involve ask- ing the person questions and recording the an- swers. Direct methods include various rating scales and several sophisticated scaling techniques. The three most frequently used rating scales are single item, Likert scales, and the semantic differential. The single-item scale usually consists of ATTITUDES 186 a direct positive or negative statement about the object, and the respondent indicates whether he or she agrees, disagrees, or is unsure. Such a measure is easy to score, but is not precise. A Likert scale typically involves several statements, and the respondent is asked to indicate the degree to which she or he agrees or disagrees with each. By analyzing differences in the pattern of responses across respondents, the investigator can order individuals from greatest agreement to greatest disagreement. Whereas Likert scales assess the denotative (literal) meaning of an object to a re- spondent, the semantic differential technique as- sesses the connotative (personal) meaning of the object. Here, an investigator presents the respon- dent with a series of bipolar adjective scales. Each of these is a scale whose poles are two adjectives having opposite meanings, for example, good– bad, exciting–boring. The respondent rates the attitude object, such as ‘‘my job,’’ on each scale. After the data are collected, the researcher can analyze them by various statistical techniques. A variety of more sophisticated scaling tech- niques have been developed. These typically in- volve asking a series of questions about a class of objects, for example, occupations, crimes, or po- litical ﬁgures, and then applying various statistical techniques to arrive at a summary measure. These include magnitude techniques (e.g., the Thurstone scale), interlocking techniques (e.g., the Guttman scale), proximity techniques (e.g., smallest space analysis), and the unfolding technique developed by Coombs. None of these has been widely used. Indirect Methods. Direct methods assume that people will report honestly their attitudes toward the object of interest. But when questions deal with sensitive issues, such as attitudes toward mem- bers of minority groups or abortion, respondents may not report accurately. In an attempt to avoid such reactivity, investigators have developed vari- ous indirect methods. Some methods involve keeping respondents unaware of what is being measured. The ‘‘lost letter’’ technique involves dropping letters in pub- lic areas and observing the behavior of the person who ﬁnds it. The researcher can measure attitudes toward abortion by addressing one-half of the letters to a prochoice group and the other half to a prolife group. If a greater percentage of letters to the latter group are returned, it suggests people have prolife attitudes. Another indirect measure of attitude is pupil dilation, which increases when the person observes an object she or he likes and decreases when the object is disliked. Some indirect measures involve deceiving re- spondents. A person may be asked to sort a large number of statements into groups, and the indi- vidual’s attitude may be inferred from the number or type of categories used. Similarly, a respondent may be asked to write statements characterizing other people’s beliefs on an issue, and the content and extremity of the respondent’s statements are used to measure his or her own attitude. A third technique is the ‘‘bogus pipeline.’’ This involves attaching the person with electrodes to a device and telling the person that the device measures his or her true attitudes. The respondent is told that some signal, such as a blinking light, pointer, or buzzer, will indicate the person’s real attitude, then the person is asked direct questions. While these techniques may reduce inaccu- rate reporting, some of them yield measures whose meaning is not obvious or is of questionable validi- ty. Does mailing a letter reﬂect one’s attitude toward the addressee or the desire to help? There is also evidence that measures based on these techniques are not reliable. Finally, some research- ers believe it is unethical to use techniques that involve deception. Because of the importance of obtaining reliable and valid measures, research has been carried out on how to ask questions. This research is reviewed by Schuman and Presser (1996). For a comprehensive discussion of attitude measurement techniques and issues, see Dawes and Smith (1985). ATTITUDE ORGANIZATION An individual’s attitude toward some object usual- ly is not an isolated psychological unit. It is embed- ded in a cognitive structure and linked with a variety of other attitudes. Several theories of atti- tude organization are based on the assumption that individuals prefer consistency among the ele- ments of cognitive structure, that is, among atti- tudes and perceptions. Two of these are balance theory and dissonance theory. ATTITUDES 187 Balance Theory. Balance theory, developed by Heider, is concerned with cognitive systems composed of two or three elements. The elements can be either persons or objects. Consider the statement ‘‘I will vote for Mary Sweeney; she sup- ports parental leave legislation.’’ This system con- tains three elements—the speaker, P; another per- son (candidate Mary Sweeney), O; and an impersonal object (parental leave legislation), X. According to balance theory, two types of relationships may exist between elements. Sentiment relations refer to sentiments or evaluations directed toward objects and people; a sentiment may be either positive (liking, endorsing) or negative (disliking, oppos- ing). Unit relations refer to the extent of perceived association between elements. For example, a posi- tive unit relation may result from ownership, a relationship (such as friendship or marriage), or causality. A negative relation indicates dissocia- tion, like that between ex-spouses or members of groups with opposing interests. A null relation exists when there is no association between elements. Balance theory is concerned with the elements and their interrelations from P’s viewpoint. In the example, the speaker favors parental leave legisla- tion, perceives Mary Sweeney as favoring it, and intends to vote for her. This system is balanced. By deﬁnition, a balanced state is one in which all three relations are positive or in which one is positive and the other two are negative. An imbalanced state is one in which two of the relationships between elements are positive and one is negative or in which all three are negative. For example, ‘‘I love (+) Jane; Jane loves (+) opera; I hate (-) opera’’ is imbalanced. The theory assumes that an imbalanced state is unpleasant and that when one occurs, the per- son will try to restore balance. There is consider- able empirical evidence that people do prefer balanced states and that attitude change often occurs in response to imbalance. Furthermore, people maintain consistency by responding selec- tively to new information. There is evidence that people accept information consistent with their existing attitudes and reject information inconsis- tent with their cognitions. This is the major mecha- nism by which stereotypes are maintained. Dissonance Theory. Dissonance theory as- sumes that there are three possible relationships between any two cognitions. Cognitions are con- sistent, or consonant , if one naturally or logically follows from the other; they are dissonant when one implies the opposite of the other. The logic involved is psycho logic—logic as it appears to the individual, not logic in a formal sense. Two cogni- tive elements may also be irrelevant; one may have nothing to do with the other. Cognitive dissonance is a state of psychological tension induced by dissonant relationships be- tween cognitive elements. There are three situa- tions in which dissonance commonly occurs. First, dissonance occurs following a decision whenever the decision is dissonant with some cognitive ele- ments. Thus, choice between two (or more) attrac- tive alternatives creates dissonance because knowl- edge that one chose A is dissonant with the positive features of B. The magnitude of the dissonance experienced is a function of the proportion of elements consonant and dissonant with the choice. Second, if a person engages in a behavior that is dissonant with his or her attitudes, dissonance will be created. Third, when events disconﬁrm an im- portant belief, dissonance will be created if the person had taken action based on that belief. For example, a person who buys an expensive car in anticipation of a large salary increase will experi- ence dissonance if she or he does not receive the expected raise. Since dissonance is an unpleasant state, the theory predicts that the person will attempt to reduce it. Usually, dissonance reduction involves changes in the person’s attitudes. Thus, following a decision, the person may evaluate the chosen alternative more favorably and the unchosen one more negatively. Following behavior that is disso- nant with his or her prior attitude, the person’s attitude toward the behavior may become more positive. An alternative mode of dissonance reduc- tion is to change the importance one places on one or more of the attitudes. Following a decision, the person may reduce the importance of the cognitions that are dissonant with the choice; this is the well- known ‘‘sour grapes’’ phenomenon. Following disconﬁrmation of a belief, one may increase the importance attached to the disconﬁrmed belief. A third way to reduce dissonance is to change behav- ior. If the dissonance following a choice is great, the person may decide to choose B instead of A. Following disconﬁrmation, the person may change behaviors that were based on the belief. ATTITUDES 188 Numerous books and hundreds of articles about dissonance theory have been published since it was introduced by Festinger in 1957. There is a substantial body of research evidence that sup- ports various predictions from and elaborations of the theory. Taken together, this literature has produced a detailed taxonomy of situations that produce dissonance and of preferred modes of dissonance reduction in various types of situations. ATTITUDE STABILITY AND ATTITUDE CHANGE Both balance and dissonance theories identify the desire for consistency as a major source of stability and change in attitudes. The desire to maintain consistency leads the individual either to interpret new information as congruent with his or her existing cognitions (assimilation) or to reject it if it would challenge existing attitudes (contrast). This process is very important in preserving stability in one’s attitudes. At the same time, the desire for consistency will lead to attitude change when im- balance or dissonance occurs. Dissonance theo- ry explicitly considers the link between behav- ior and attitudes. It predicts that engaging in counterattitudinal behavior may indirectly affect attitudes. This is one mechanism by which social inﬂuences on behavior may indirectly affect atti- tudes. This mechanism comes into play when the person experiences changes in roles and the re- quirements of the new role are inconsistent with his or her prior attitudes. The classic perspective in the study of attitude change is the communication–persuasion paradigm, which grew out of the work by Hovland and his colleagues at Yale University. Persuasion is deﬁned as changing the beliefs or attitudes of a person through the use of information or argument. At- tempts at persuasion are widespread in everyday interaction, and the livelihood of advertisers and political consultants. According to the paradigm, each attempt involves source, message, target, and context. Thousands of empirical studies, many of them experiments done in laboratory settings, have investigated the inﬂuence of variations in these four components on the outcome of an attempt. In general, if the source is perceived as an expert, trustworthy, or physically attractive, the message is more likely to produce attitude change. Thus, it is no accident that magazine and television commercials feature young, attractive models. Mes- sage variables include the extent of discrepancy from the target’s attitude, whether it arouses fear, and whether it presents one or both sides. Under certain conditions, highly discrepant, fear-arous- ing, and one-sided messages are more effective. Target factors include intelligence, self-esteem, and prior experience and knowledge. The most researched contextual factor is mood. For a review of this research, see Perloff (1993). In the 1990s considerable work built upon the elaboration–likelihood model proposed by Petty and Cacioppo (1986). This model identiﬁes two basic routes through which a message may change a target’s attitudes: the central and the peripheral. Persuasion via the central route occurs when a target scrutinizes the arguments contained in the message, interprets and evaluates them, and inte- grates them into a coherent position. This process is termed elaboration . In elaboration, attitude change occurs when the arguments are strong, internally coherent, and consistent with known facts. Persua- sion via the peripheral route occurs when, instead of elaborating the message, the target pays attention primarily to extraneous cues linked to the mes- sage. Among these cues are characteristics of the source (expertise, trustworthiness, attractiveness), superﬁcial characteristics of the message such as length, or characteristics of the context such as response of other audience members. Several fac- tors inﬂuence whether elaboration occurs. One is the target’s involvement with the issue; if the target is highly involved with and cares about the issue addressed by the message, he or she is more likely to elaborate the message. Other factors include whether the target is distracted by noise or some other aspect of the situation, and whether the target is tired. Which route a message elicits in attitude change is important. Attitudes established by the central route tend to be more strongly held and more resistant to change because the target has thought through the issue in more detail. The literature on attitude change ﬂourished in the 1990s. The effects of many variables have been studied experimentally. A review of the re- search conducted in 1992 to 1995 concluded that any one variable may have multiple effects, de- pending upon other aspects of the persuasion attempt (Petty, Wegener, and Fabrigar 1997). For ATTITUDES 189 example, consider the effect of mood on attitude change. Assuming that happy people are more open to new information, one might predict that persuasive messages would lead to greater attitude change in happy persons than in sad ones. Howev- er, research indicates that happy people spend less time processing persuasive messages than persons in neutral moods, and so may be less inﬂuenced by them. The hedonic contingency hypothesis states that the effect of mood depends upon the hedonic tone of the message. Happy people want to main- tain their happy mood, so they are likely to scruti- nize and process happy messages but not sad ones. Sad people often want to change their mood, and most messages will improve it, so their processing is not affected by messages’ hedonic tone. The results of two experiments support the hypothesis (Wegener, Petty, and Smith 1995). Thus, the effect of mood on persuasion depends on whether the message is uplifting or depressing. ATTITUDE–BEHAVIOR RELATION The attitude–behavior relation has been the focus of considerable research since the early 1970s. This research has identiﬁed a number of variables that inﬂuence the extent to which one can predict a person’s behavior from his or her attitudes. Some of these variables involve the measure- ment of the attitude and of the behavior. The correspondence of the two measures is one such variable: one can predict behavior more accurately if the two measures are at the same level of speci- ﬁcity. An opinion poll can predict the outcome of an election because there is high correspondence between the attitude (’’Which candidate do you prefer for mayor in next month’s election?’’) and the behavior (voting for a candidate in that elec- tion). The length of time between the measure of attitude and the occurrence and measure of the behavior is also an important variable. The shorter the time, the stronger the relationship. The longer the elapsed time, the more likely the person’s attitude will change, although some attitudes are stable over long periods, for example, twenty years. The characteristics of the attitude also inﬂu- ence the degree to which one can predict behavior from it. In order for an attitude to inﬂuence behavior, it must be activated, that is, brought from memory into conscious awareness. An atti- tude is usually activated by a person’s exposure to the attitude object. Attitudes vary in accessibility , the ease with which they are activated. The more accessible an attitude is, the more likely it is to guide future behavior (Kraus 1995). Another vari- able is the source of the attitude. Attitudes based on direct experience with the object are more predictive of behavior. The certainty or conﬁ- dence with which the person holds the attitude also moderates the attitude–behavior relationship. The attitude–behavior relation is also inﬂu- enced by situational constraints—the social norms governing behavior in a situation. An attitude is more likely to be expressed in behavior when the behavior is consistent with these norms. An important attempt to specify the relation- ship between attitude and behavior is the theory of reasoned action , developed by Fishbein and Ajzen (1975). According to this theory, behavior is deter- mined by behavioral intention. Behavioral inten- tion is determined by two factors: attitude and subjective norm. Attitude is one’s beliefs about the likely consequences of the behavior and one’s evaluation—positive or negative—of each of those outcomes. Subjective norm is the person’s belief about other important persons’ or groups’ reac- tions to the behavior and the person’s motivation to comply with the expectations of each. One of the strengths of the theory is this precise speciﬁca- tion of the inﬂuences on behavioral intention. It is possible to measure quantitatively each of the four components (likely consequences, evaluation, likely reactions, motivation to comply) and use these to make precise predictions of behavior. Many em- pirical studies report results consistent with such predictions. The theory applies primarily to behav- ior that is under conscious, volitional control. On the other hand, researchers have shown that attitudes can affect behavior without being brought into conscious awareness (Bargh 1996). Attitudes toward objects inﬂuence our judgments and behavior toward those objects without con- scious awareness or intent. Stereotypes of social groups are often activated automatically, as soon as an individual is perceived as a member of the group. Automatic processing is more likely when the individual experiences information overload, time pressures, or is not interested in engaging in effortful processing. ATTITUDES 190 ATTITUDE AS INDICATOR Increasingly, attitudes are employed as indicators. Some researchers use attitude measures as indica- tors of concepts, while others study changes in attitudes over time as indicators of social change. Indicators of Concepts. Measures of speciﬁc attitudes are frequently used as indicators of more general concepts. For example, agreement with the following statement is interpreted as an indica- tor of powerlessness: ‘‘This world is run by the few people in power, and there is not much the little guy can do about it.’’ Powerlessness is considered to be a general orientation toward the social world and is a sense that one has little or no control over events. Feelings of powerlessness may be related to such varied behaviors as vandalism, not voting in elections, and chronic unemployment. Attitude measures have been used to assess many other concepts used in the analysis of politi- cal attitudes and behavior. These include the liber- alism–conservatism dimension, political tolerance (of radical or unpopular groups), trust in or disaf- fection with national institutions, and relative dep- rivation. (For a review of this literature, see Kinder and Sears 1985.) Attitude measures are used to assess many other characteristics of persons. In the realm of work these include occupational values, job s

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atisfaction, and leadership style. A major concern when attitudes are employed as indicators is construct validity , that is, whether the speciﬁc items used are valid measures of the underlying concept. In the powerlessness exam- ple, the connection between the content of the item and the concept may seem obvious, but even in cases like this it is important to demonstrate validity. A variety of analytic techniques may be used, including interitem correlations, factor analy- sis, and LISREL. Indicators of Social Change. Two methodo- logical developments have made it possible to use attitudes to study social change. The ﬁrst was the development of probability sampling techniques, which allow the investigator to make inferences about the characteristics of a population from the results obtained by surveying a sample of that population. The second is the use of the same attitude measures in surveys of representative sam- ples at two or more points in time. A major source of such data is the General Social Survey (GSS), an annual survey of a proba- bility sample of adults. The GSS repeats a core set of items on a roughly annual basis, making possi- ble the study of changes over a period of thirty years. Many of these items were drawn directly from earlier surveys, making comparisons over a forty- or ﬁfty-year timespan possible. A published book describes these items and presents the re- sponses obtained each time the item was used (Niemi, Mueller, and Smith 1989). Other sources of such data include the National Election Studies and the Gallup Polls. This use of attitude items reﬂects a general concern with social change at the societal level. The investigator uses aggregate measures of atti- tudes in the population as an index of changes in cultural values and social institutions. Two areas of particular interest are attitudes toward race and gender roles. In both areas, efforts have been made to improve access to educational programs, jobs, and professions, increase wages and salaries, and provide greater opportunity for advancement. The availability of responses to the same attitude items over time allows us to assess the consistency between these social changes and attitudes in the population. Consider the question ‘‘Do you think civil rights leaders are trying to push too fast, are going too slowly, or are moving at about the right speed?’’ This question was asked in surveys of national samples every two years from 1964 to 1976 and in 1980. The percentage of whites reply- ing ‘‘too fast’’ declined from 74 percent in 1964 to 40 percent in 1980 (Bobo 1988), suggesting in- creased white support for the black movement. In general, research indicates that both racial and gender-role attitudes became more liberal between 1960 and 1990, and this ﬁnding is consistent with the social changes in these areas. Other topics that have been studied include attitudes toward abor- tion, social class identiﬁcation, and subjective quali- ty of life. There are several issues involved in this use of attitude items. The ﬁrst is the problem of ‘‘nonattitudes.’’ Respondents may answer survey questions or endorse statements even though they have no attitude toward the object. In fact, when respondents are questioned about ﬁctional ob- jects or organizations, some of them will express an opinion. Schuman and Kalton (1985) discuss ATTITUDES 191 this issue in detail and suggest ways to reduce the extent to which nonattitudes are given by respondents. The second issue involves the interpretation of responses to items. In the example above, the analyst assumes that white respondents who reply ‘‘Too fast’’ feel threatened by the movement. How- ever, there is evidence that small changes in the wording of survey items can produce substantial changes in aggregate response patterns. This evi- dence and guidelines for writing survey items are discussed in Schuman and Presser (1996). Finally, there is the problem of equivalence in meaning over time. In order to make meaningful comparisons across time, the items need to be the same or equivalent. Yet over time the meaning of an item may change. Consider the item ‘‘Are you in favor of desegregation , strict segregation , or some- thing in between?’’ This question was asked of national samples in 1964 and every two years from 1968 to 1978. From 1964 to 1970, the percentage of white, college-educated adults endorsing deseg- regation increased; from 1970 to 1978, the per- centage decreased steadily. Until 1970, desegrega- tion efforts were focused on the South; after 1970, desegregation efforts focused on school integra- tion in northern cities. Evidence suggests that endorsement of desegregation changed because the meaning of the question for white adults changed (Schuman, Steeh, and Bobo 1985). REFERENCES Allport, Gordon W. 1985 ‘‘The Historical Background of Social Psychology.’’ In G. Lindzey and E. Aronson, eds., Handbook of Social Psychology , 3rd ed. New York: Random House. Bargh, John A. 1996 ‘‘Automaticity in Social Psycholo- gy.’’ In E.T. Higgins and A. Kruglanski, eds., Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Principles . New York: The Guilford Press. Bobo, Lawrence 1988 ‘‘Attitudes toward the Black Po- litical Movement: Trends, Meaning, and Effects on Racial Policy Preference.’’ Social Psychology Quarterly 51:287–302. Dawes, Robyn M., and Tom L. Smith 1985 ‘‘Attitude and Opinion Measurement.’’ In G.Lindzey and E. Aronson, eds., Handbook of Social Psychology , 3rd ed. New York: Random House. Eagly, Alice, and Shelly Chaiken 1998 ‘‘Attitude Struc- ture and Function.’’ In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, and G. Lindzey, eds., Handbook of Social Psychology , 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. Felson, Richard B. 1996 ‘‘Mass Media Effects on Violent Behavior.’’ In J. Hagen and K. Cook, eds., Annual Review of Sociology , vol. 22. Palo Alto, Calif.: Annual Reviews. Festinger, Leon 1957 A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Fishbein, Martin, and Icek Ajzen 1975 Belief, Attitude, Intention, and Behavior . Reading, Mass.: Addision-Wesley. Geen, Russel 1998 ‘‘Aggression and Antisocial Behav- ior.’’ In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, and G. Lindzey, eds., Handboook of Social Psychology , 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. Kiecolt, K. Jill 1988 ‘‘Recent Developments in Attitudes and Social Structure.’’ In W. R. Scott and J. Blake. eds., Annual Review of Sociology , vol. 14. Palo Alto, Calif.: Annual Reviews. Kinder, Donald R., and David O. Sears 1985 ‘‘Public Opinion and Political Action.’’ In G. Lindzey and E. Aronson, eds., Handbook of Social Psychology , 3rd ed. New York: Random House. Kraus, S.J. 1995 ‘‘Attitudes and the Prediction of Behav- ior: A Meta-Analysis of the Emperical Literature.’’ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 18:152–162. McGuire, William J. 1985 ‘‘Attitudes and Attitude Change.’’ In G. Lindzey and E. Aronson, eds., Hand- book of Social Psychology , 3rd ed. New York: Ran- dom House. Niemi, Richard G., John Mueller, and Tom W. Smith 1989 Trends in Public Opinion: A Compendium of Sur- vey Data . New York: Greenwood Press. Perloff, R. M. 1993 The Dynamics of Persuasion . Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum. Petty, Richard, and John Cacioppo 1986 ‘‘The Elabora- tion–Likelihood Model of Persuasion.’’ Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 19:123–205. Petty, Richard, Duane Wegener, and Leandre Fabrigan 1997 ‘‘Attitudes and Attitude Change.’’ Annual Re- view of Psychology 48:609–647. Roberts, Donald F., and Nathan Maccoby 1985 ‘‘Effects of Mass Communication.’’ In G. Lindzey and E. Aronson, eds., Handbook of Social Psychology , 3rd ed. New York: Random House. Schuman, Howard 1995 ‘‘Attitudes, Beliefs, and Behav- ior.’’ In K. S. Cook, G. A. Finc, and J. S. House, eds., Sociological Perspectives on Social Psychology . Boston: Allyn and Bacon. ———, and Stanley Presser 1996 Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys . Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications. ATTRIBUTION THEORY 192 Schuman, Howard, and Graham Kalton 1985 ‘‘Survey Methods.’’ In G. Lindzey and E. Aronson, eds., Hand- book of Social Psychology , 3rd ed. New York: Ran- dom House. Schuman, Howard, Charlotte Steeh, and Lawrence Bobo 1985 Racial Attitudes in America . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Wegener, Duane T., Richard E. Petty, and Stephen M. Smith 1995 ‘‘Positive Mood can Increase or Decrease Message Scrutiny: The Hedonic Contingency View of Mood and Message Processing.’’ Journal of Person- ality and Social Psychology 69:5–15. JOHN D. DELAMATER ATTRIBUTION THEORY Attribution is a cognitive process that entails link- ing an event to its causes. Attribution is one of a variety of cognitive inferences that are included within social cognition, which is one of several theoretical models within social psychology. Social cognition has been the most dominant social psy- chological perspective within psychology since the 1960s, and this is evident in the popularity of research on attribution. In the mid-1970s, as much as 50 percent of the articles in major social psy- chology journals concerned attributional process- es, in part because attribution theory is relevant to the study of person perception, event perception, attitude change, the acquisition of self-knowledge, and a host of applied topics including therapeutic interventions, close relationships, legal and medi- cal decision making, and so forth. Although the proportion of published research that focused on this topic declined during the 1980s, attribution remains one of the more popular ﬁelds of social psychological research. DEFINITION An attribution is an inference about why an event occurred. More generally, ‘‘attribution is a process that begins with social perception, progresses through a causal judgment and social inference, and ends with behavioral consequences’’ (Crittenden 1983, p. 426). Although most theories of and research on attribution focus on causal inference, empirical research has dealt with attributions not only of cause but also of blame and responsibility. Although these types of attributions are closely related, they are not conceptually identical. Fur- thermore, because personality characteristics con- stitute a major category of potential causes of behavior, attributions about individuals’ traits (both one’s own traits and those of others) have received explicit theoretical attention. MAJOR THEORIES OF ATTRIBUTION Even though attribution has been one of the most popular social psychological research topics in the social sciences, only a few theories of attribution have been developed. The study of attribution began with Fritz Heider’s (1958) original attempt to provide a systematic, conceptual explanation of ‘‘naive’’ psychology. Heider maintained that peo- ple strive to understand, predict, and control events in their everyday lives in much the same way as scientists do in their professional lives. On the basis of observation, individuals form theories about their social worlds, and new observations then serve to support, refute, or modify these theories. Because people act on the basis of their beliefs, Heider argued that it is important to un- derstand this layperson’s psychology. Although Heider did not develop an explicit theory of attri- bution, he did assert several principles that have guided all subsequent theorizing on this topic. Primary among these principles is the notion that people are inclined to attribute actions to stable or enduring causes rather than to transitory factors. Heider also stressed the importance of distinguishing unintentional from intentional be- havior, a distinction that has been particularly inﬂuential in theories of the attribution of respon- sibility. He identiﬁed environmental and personal factors as two general classes of factors that pro- duce action and hypothesized that an inverse rela- tionship exists between these two sets of causes. He also suggested that the ‘‘covariational princi- ple’’ is fundamental to attribution: An effect is attributed to a factor that is present when the effect is present and to a factor that is absent when the effect is absent. Heider’s early analyses of social perception represent a general conceptual framework about common sense, implicit theories people use in understanding events in their daily lives. The two most inﬂuential theories of attribu- tion are based on Heider’s work but go beyond it ATTRIBUTION THEORY 193 in the development of more systematic statements about attributional processes. Covariational model. Harold Kelley’s (1967, 1973) covariational model of attribution addresses the question of whether a given behavior is caused by an actor or, alternatively, by an environmental stimulus with which the actor engages. According to this model, the attribution of cause is based on three types of information: consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency. Consensus refers to the similarity between the actor’s behavior and the behavior of other people in similar circumstances. Distinctiveness refers to the generality of the actor’s behavior: Does she or he behave in this way toward stimuli in general, or is the behavior speciﬁc to this stimulus? Consistency refers to the actor’s behavior toward this stimulus across time and modality. There are many possible combinations of these three types of information, but Kelley makes explicit predic- tions about just three. The combination of high consensus, high distinctiveness, and high consis- tency supports an attribution to the environmen- tal stimulus, whereas a proﬁle of low consensus, low distinctiveness, and high consistency supports an attribution to the actor. When the behavior is inconsistent, regardless of the level of consensus or distinctiveness, an attribution to circumstances is predicted. Empirical tests of Kelley’s model have focused either on the effects of a particular type of infor- mation or, more in keeping with his formulation, on the effects of particular patterns of information (McArthur 1972). In an innovative analysis, Miles Hewstone and Jos Jaspars (1987) proposed a dif- ferent logic (although one consistent with Kelley’s model), suggesting that potential attributers con- sider whether different causal loci are necessary and sufﬁcient conditions for the occurrence of an effect. They conclude that the notion of causality is ﬂexible and thus assert that there may be some advantage to conceiving of situation-speciﬁc no- tions of causality. More recent work has examined the universality and external validity of Kelley’s model. Irina Anderson and Geoffrey Beattie (1998), for example, analyzed actual conversations be- tween men and women talking about rape. They found that men tended to use the reasoning out- lined in Kelley’s model by making reference to consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency, as well as by using these types of information to formulate attributions for behavior. Women, on the other hand, made less use of these variables and intro- duced the variable of ‘‘foreseeability’’ into their analyses. Correspondent inference. The theory of cor- respondent inference (Jones and Davis 1965; Jones and McGillis 1976) addresses the attribution of personality traits to actors on the basis of their behavior and focuses on attributions about per- sons in greater depth than does Kelley’s covariational model. These two theories thus address different questions. Kelley asks: When do we attribute an event to an actor or to some stimulus in the environment? Edward Jones asks: When do we attribute a trait to an actor on the basis of her or his behavior? The theory of correspondent inference focuses more narrowly on the actor but also yields more information about the actor in that it speci- ﬁes what it is about the actor that caused the behavior. Jones and his coauthors predict that two factors guide attributions: (1) the attributer’s prior expectancies for behavior, speciﬁcally, expectancies based either on knowledge of earlier behaviors of the actor (target-based) or on the actor’s social category memberships (category-based), and (2) the proﬁle of effects that follow from the behavior- al choices available to the actor. Edward Jones and Daniel McGillis propose that expectancies determine the degree of conﬁ- dence with which a particular trait is attributed; the lower the expectancy of behavior, the more conﬁdent the attribution. The proﬁle of effects helps the attributer identify what trait might have produced the behavior in question. Noncommon effects—effects that follow from only one of the behavioral options—provide information about the particular disposition. The fewer the noncommon effects, the clearer the attribution. Thus, behavior that contradicts prior expectancies and a proﬁle of behavioral choices with few noncommon effects combine to maximize the possibility of attributing a disposition to the actor (a correspondent infer- ence). Empirical research generally has supported these predictions. These two models share some attributional principles. Expectancy variables (target-based and category-based) are analogous to Kelley’s types of information. Although the predicted effects of consensus information and its analogue, category- based expectancies, are compatible, the predicted ATTRIBUTION THEORY 194 effects of consistency and distinctiveness informa- tion and their analogue, target-based expectancies, present some incompatibilities. This contradic- tion has been evaluated both conceptually and empirically (Howard and Allen 1990). Attribution in achievement situations. Ber- nard Weiner (1974) and his colleagues have ap- plied attributional principles in the context of achievement situations. According to this model, we make inferences about an individual’s success on the basis of the individual’s ability to do the task in question, how much effort is expended, how difﬁcult the task is, and to what extent luck may have inﬂuenced the outcome. Other possible caus- al factors have since been added to this list. More important perhaps is Weiner’s development of, ﬁrst, a structure of causal dimensions in terms of which these causal factors can be described and, second, the implications of the dimensional stand- ing of a given causal factor (Weiner, Russell, and Lerman 1978). The major causal dimensions are locus (internal or external to the actor), stability or instability, and intentionality or unintentionality of the factor. Thus, for example, ability is inter- nal, stable, and unintentional. The stability of a causal factor primarily affects judgments about expectancies for future behavior, whereas locus and intentionality primarily affect emotional re- sponses to behavior. This model has been used extensively in educational research and has guided therapeutic educational efforts such as attribution retraining. Cross-cultural research has explored the cultural generalizability of these models. Paul Tuss, Jules Zimmer, and Hsiu-Zu Ho (1995) and Donald Mizokawa and David Rickman (1990) re- port, for instance, that Asian and Asian American students are more likely to attribute academic failure and success to effort than are European American students, who are more likely to attrib- ute performance to ability. European American students are also more likely to attribute failure to task difﬁculty. Interestingly, as Asian Americans spend more time in the United States, they place less emphasis on the role of effort in performance. Attribution biases. The theoretical models described above are based on the assumption that social perceivers follow the dictates of logical or rational models in assessing causality. Empirical research has demonstrated, not surprisingly, that there are systematic patterns in what has been variously conceived of as bias or error in the attribution process (Ross 1977). Prominent among these is what has been called the ‘‘fundamental attribution error,’’ the tendency of perceivers to overestimate the role of dispositional factors in shaping behavior and to underestimate the impact of situational factors. One variant of this bias has particular relevance for sociologists. This is the general tendency to make inadequate allowance for the role-based nature of much social behavior. That is, perceivers fail to recognize that behavior often derives from role memberships rather than from individual idiosyncrasy. Again, cross-cultural research has called into question the generalizability of this bias. Joan Miller (1984) shows that the tendency to attribute behavior to persons is mark- edly more prominent in the United States, among both adults and children, whereas a tendency to attribute behavior to situational factors is more prominent among Indian Hindus, both adults and children, calling into question the ‘‘fundamentalness’’ of this attributional pattern. A second systematic pattern is the actor-ob- server difference, in which actors tend to attribute their own behavior to situational factors, whereas observers of the same behavior tend to attribute it to the actor’s dispositions. A third pattern con- cerns what have been called self-serving or egocen- tric biases, that is, attributions that in some way favor the self. According to the false consensus bias, for example, we tend to see our own behav- ioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate whereas those that differ from ours are perceived as uncommon and deviant. There has been heated debate about whether these biases derive from truly egotistical motives or reﬂect simple cognitive and perceptual errors. METHODOLOGICAL AND MEASUREMENT ISSUES The prevalent methodologies and measurement strategies within attributional research have been vulnerable to many of the criticisms directed more generally at social cognition and to some directed speciﬁcally at attribution. The majority of attributional research has used structured response formats to assess attributions. Heider’s original distinction between person and environmental cause has had a major inﬂuence on the development of these structured measures. Respondents typically are asked to rate the importance of situational and ATTRIBUTION THEORY 195 dispositional causes of events. These ratings have been obtained on ipsative scales as well as on independent rating scales. Ipsative measures pose these causes as two poles on one dimension; thus, an attribution of cause to the actor’s disposition is also a statement that situational factors are not causal. This assumed inverse relationship between situational and dispositional causality has been rejected on conceptual and empirical grounds. In more recent studies, therefore, respondents as- sign each type of causality separately. (Ipsative measures are appropriate for answering some ques- tions, however, such as whether the attribution of cause to one actor comes at the expense of attribu- tion to another actor or to society.) In theory, then, both dispositional and situational variables could be identiﬁed as causal factors. The breadth of these two categories has also been recognized as a problem. Dispositional causes may include a wide variety of factors such as stable traits and attitudes, unstable moods and emotions, and intentional choices. Situational cause is per- haps an even broader category. It is quite possible that these categories are so broad as to render a single measure of each virtually meaningless. Thus, researchers often include both general and more speciﬁc, narrower responses as possible choices (e.g., choices of attributing blame to an assailant or to the situation might be reﬁned to the assailant’s use of a weapon, physical size, and psychological state, on the one hand, and the location, time of day, and number of people nearby, on the other). Structured measures of attributions are vul- nerable to the criticism that the categories of causes presented to respondents are not those they use in their everyday attributions. Recogniz- ing this limitation, a few researchers have used open-ended measures. Comparative studies of the relative utility of several different types of meas- ures of causal attributions conclude that scale methods perform somewhat better in terms of their inter-test validity and reliability, although open-ended measures are preferable when research- ers are exploring causal attributions in new situa- tions. Some researchers have attempted to over- come some of the limitations of existing scales; Curtis McMillen and Susan Zuravin (1997), for example, have developed and reﬁned ‘‘Attributions of Responsibility’’ and ‘‘Blame Scales’’ for use in clinical research that may be useful for other kinds of attributional situations. The great majority of attribution studies use stimuli of highly limited social meaning. General- ly, the behavior is represented with a brief written vignette, often just a single sentence. Some re- searchers have shifted to the presentation of visual stimuli, typically with videotaped rather than actu- al behavioral sequences, in order to ensure comparability across experimental conditions. Rec- ognizing the limitations of brief, noncontextualized stimuli, a few researchers have begun to use a greater variety of more extended stimuli including newspaper reports and published short stories. Most of these stimuli, including the videotaped behavioral sequences, rely heavily on language to convey the meaning of behavior. Conceptual at- tention has turned recently to how attribution relies on language and to the necessity of consider- ing explicitly what that reliance means. Some re- searchers (Anderson and Beattie 1998; Antaki and Leudar 1992) have attempted to use more natural- istic approaches, incorporating into the study the analysis of spontaneous conversations among study participants. WHEN DO WE MAKE ATTRIBUTIONS? Long after attribution had attained its popularity in social psychology, a question that perhaps should have been raised much earlier began to receive attention: When do we make attributions? To what extent are the attributions in this large body of research elicited by the experimental procedures themselves? This is a question that can be directed to any form of social cognition. It is particularly relevant, however, to attribution. Most people, confronted with a form on which they are to answer the question ‘‘Why?,’’ do so. There is no way of knowing, within the typical experimental paradigm, whether respondents would make attributions on their own. In a sense there are two questions: Do people make attributions spontane- ously, and if they do, under what circumstances do they do so? In response to the ﬁrst question, Weiner (1985) has marshaled impressive evidence that people do indeed make attributions spontaneously. Inven- tive procedures have been developed for assessing the presence of attributional processing that is not directly elicited. This line of evidence has dealt almost entirely with causal attributions. Research ATTRIBUTION THEORY 196 suggests that trait attributions may be made spon- taneously much more often than causal attributions. In response to the second question, a variety of studies suggest that people are most likely to make attributions when they encounter unexpected events or events that have negative implications for them. SOCIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATTRIBUTION Attribution is a cognitive process of individuals; much of the extant research on attribution is, accordingly, highly individualistic. In the 1980s, however, researchers began to pay increasing at- tention to the sociological relevance of attribu- tion. The process of attribution itself is fundamen- tally social. Attribution occurs not only within individuals but also at the interpersonal, inter- group, and societal levels. Moreover, the process of attribution may underlie basic sociological phe- nomena such as labeling and stratiﬁcation. Interpersonal attribution. At the interperson- al level, attribution is basic to social interaction. Interpersonal encounters are shaped in many ways by attributional patterns. Behavioral conﬁrmation, or self-fulﬁlling prophecies, illustrate the behav- ioral consequences of attribution in social interac- tion; attribution of speciﬁc characteristics to social actors creates the expectancies that are then con- ﬁrmed in behavior. Considering attribution at this interpersonal level demonstrates the importance of different social roles and perspectives (actors vs. observers) as well as how attribution is related to evaluation. The self is also important to the attri- bution process; the evidence for attributional ego- tism (self-esteem enhancing attributional biases), self-presentation biases, and egocentrism is per- suasive. Attributions also affect social interaction through a widespread conﬁrmatory attribution bias that leads perceivers to conclude that their expectancies have been conﬁrmed in social interaction. Research has challenged the universality of egocentric biases by examining differences in attributional styles according to race, class, and gender. Several studies (Reese and Brown 1995; Wiley and Crittenden 1992; Broman 1992; An- drews and Brewin 1990) have shown that women are less likely than men to make self-serving dispo- sitions. In a study of academics’ accounts of their success in the profession, Mary Glenn Wiley and Kathleen Crittenden (1992) argue that women explain their success in a more modest manner in order to preserve a feminine identity, at the expense of their professional identities. This attributional style may make it more likely for women to blame themselves for various types of negative situations. Consistent with this reason- ing, Bernice Andrews and Chris Brewin (1990) found that female victims of marital violence tend- ed to blame themselves for their experience of violence. Childhood experiences of physical or sexual abuse increased women’s chances of characterological self-blame when, as adults, they found themselves in abusive relationships. (Other research, however, notes that the relationship be- tween attributions and adjustment is complex and not always so straightforward; see McMillen and Zuravin 1997.) Race and class characteristics also create dis- tinct attributional patterns; research on these fac- tors has been more likely than research on gender to consider possible interactive effects on attributions. In a study conducted by Fathali Moghaddam and colleagues (1995) on attributional styles of whites, blacks, and Cubans in Miami, for example, middle- class black respondents were more likely to blame negative outcomes on discrimination than were lower-class blacks. Lower-class whites were the only group to attribute failure to themselves personally. The great preponderance of research on so- cial interaction has been based on relationships between strangers in experimental contexts, which may seem to undermine the claim that attribution is signiﬁcant for interpersonal interaction. The best evidence of this signiﬁcance, then, is the increasingly large body of research on the role of attribution in the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of close relationships. There is sub- stantial evidence that attributions are linked to relationship satisfaction and behaviors such as conﬂict resolution strategies. There is also evi- dence that distressed and nondistressed couples make differing attributions for signiﬁcant events in their relationships; these patterns may actually serve to maintain marital distress among troubled ATTRIBUTION THEORY 197 couples, thus ultimately inﬂuencing marital satis- faction. Attributions also play an important role in relationship dissolution. Attributions are a critical part of the detailed accounts people provide for the dissolution of their relationships, and these accounts go beyond explanation to rationalize and justify the loss of relationships. Research on interpersonal attribution extends the intrapersonal approach in several ways. When people who interact have substantial knowledge of and feelings about each other, the attribution process involves evaluation as well as cognition. Issues of communication, and hence potential changes in preexisting attributions for recurrent relationship events, also become salient at the interpersonal level. There is very little research on how attributions change through interaction and relationships, but this is clearly a signiﬁcant topic. Attributions at the interpersonal level also entail greater concern with accountability for action; causality at this level also raises issues of justiﬁcation. Intergroup attribution. Intergroup attribution refers to the ways in which members of different social groups explain the behavior of members of their own and other social groups. At this level, social categorization has a direct impact on attri- bution. Studies using a variety of subjects from different social groups and often different coun- tries show consistent support for an ingroup-serv- ing attributional pattern, for example, a tendency toward more dispositional attributions for posi- tive as opposed to negative behavior for ingroup actors. The evidence for the converse pattern, more dispositional attributions for negative as opposed to positive behavior for outgroup actors, is not as strong. (Moreover, these patterns are stronger in dominant than in dominated groups.) Social desirability biases can counteract this pat- tern; Steven Little, Robert Sterling, and Daniel Tingstrom (1996), for example, found that white respondents held black actors less responsible for participating in a bar ﬁght than did black respon- dents. The authors suggest that this ﬁnding may be due to the desire of the white sample—under- graduates from a suburban area—to appear racial- ly progressive. Parallel studies of a group’s success and failure show a consistent pattern of ingroup protection. Outgroup failure is attributed more to lack of ability than is ingroup failure. Effects of group membership on attributions about success are not as strong. Interestingly, there is also some evi- dence of outgroup-favoring and/or ingroup-dero- gating attributions among widely recognized low- er-status, dominated groups such as migrant labor populations (Hewstone 1989). A third form of evidence of intergroup attribution is provided by studies of attributions about social positions occu- pied by existing groups. In general, these studies, like those cited above, show higher ratings of ingroup-serving as opposed to outgroup-serving attributions. Societal attribution. At the societal level, those beliefs shared by the members of a given society form the vocabulary for social attributions. The concept of social representations, which has its origins in Durkheim’s concept of ‘‘representation collectives,’’ was developed by Serge Moscovici (1976) to represent how knowledge is shared by societal members in the form of common-sense theories about that society. Social representations are intimately connected to the process of attribu- tion. Not only are explanation and accountability part of a system of collective representations, but such representations determine when we seek ex- planations. Social representations serve as catego- ries that inﬂuence the perception and processing of social information; moreover, they underscore the emphasis on shared social beliefs and knowl- edge. Social representations are useful in inter- preting research on laypersons’ explanations of societal events such as poverty and wealth, unem- ployment, and racial inequality. Poverty tends to be attributed to individualistic factors, for exam- ple, whereas unemployment tends to be attributed to societal factors. Not surprisingly, these patterns may be qualiﬁed by attributors’ own class back- grounds; although middle-class people attribute poverty more often to internal factors, those who are themselves poor attribute poverty more often to external factors such as governmental policies (Singh 1989). Gender and racial stereotyping can also shape attributions. Cynthia Willis, Marianne Hallinan, and Jeffrey Melby (1996), for example, found that respondents with a traditional sex-role orientation showed a favorable bias toward the male perpetrator in domestic violence situations. When the female victim was African American and married, both egalitarians and traditionalists were less likely to attribute blame to the man. ATTRIBUTION THEORY 198 Moving away from an emphasis on normative stereotyping, research has considered possible ef- fects of counter-stereotyping on attributional pat- terns, and of attributions on changes in stereo- types. Portrayals of structurally subordinate groups that counter stereotypical expectations can increase the perceived credibility of members of those groups (Power, Murphy, and Coover 1996). Moreo- ver, an attribution of counterstereotypic behavior to dispositional factors of clearly typical outgroup members can modify outgroup stereotypes (Wild- er, Simon, and Faith 1996). Cross-cultural research illustrates another as- pect of societal attributions. This work compares the extent and type of attributional activity across cultures. Although there has been some support for the applicability of Western models of attribu- tion among non-Western cultures, most of this research has demonstrated in a variety of ways the cultural speciﬁcity of particular patterns of attribu- tion (Bond 1988). As noted above, for example, Joan Miller (1984) provides cross-cultural empiri- cal evidence that the fundamental attribution er- ror, the tendency to attribute cause more to per- sons than to situations, is characteristic of Western but not non-Western societies. Attributions about the self also vary across cultures; members of some non-Western cultures attribute performance more to effort than to ability; the opposite pattern has been found in the United States. Cultural patterns also shape responsibility attributions; V. Lee Ham- ilton and Shigeru Hagiwara (1992) found that U.S. (and male) respondents were more likely to deny responsibility for their own inappropriate behav- iors than were Japanese (and female) respondents, who were more likely to apologize for the behav- iors. Hamilton and Hagiwara argue that the Japa- nese (and women) were more concerned with maintaining the quality of the interaction between the accuser and the accused. SOCIOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS It may be useful to identify several sociological phenomena to which theories of attribution are relevant. A number of scholars have suggested integrating attribution theory and labeling theory (Crittenden 1983). Attribution occurs within an individual; labels are applied by a group. Judith Howard and Randy Levinson (1985) offer empiri- cal evidence that the process of applying a label is directly analogous to attribution. They report that the relationships between attribution information and jury verdicts are consistent with predictions based on a labeling perspective. Richard Della Fave (1980) demonstrates the importance of attribution for understanding a key but neglected aspect of stratiﬁcation, namely, how it is that stratiﬁcation systems become legitimated and accepted by those disadvantaged as well as by those advantaged by those systems. He draws heavily on attribution theory in developing a theory of legitimation and in identifying possible sources of delegitimation. Attribution is a signiﬁcant social process that ranges widely from cognitive processes to collec- tive beliefs. The ﬁeld is still imbalanced; more work has been done at the intrapersonal and interpersonal levels. There is evidence for both intergroup and societal attributions, however, and research at these two levels is steadily increasing (Hewstone 1989). Recent research has demon- strated connections across areas as diverse as so- cial cognition, social interaction, intergroup rela- tions, and social representations; these connections provide increasing evidence of the importance of attribution for sociological phenomena. Indeed, in the next decade it may be that the fruits of attribution theories will be evident more in re- search on these other topics, than in research on attribution alone. REFERENCES Anderson, Irina, and Geoffrey Beattie 1996 ‘‘How Im- portant is Kelley’s Model of the Attribution Process When Men and Women Discuss Rape in Conversa- tion?’’ ( Semiotica ½:1–21. Andrews, Bernice, and Chris R. Brewin 1990 ‘‘Attributions of Blame for Marital Violence: A Study of Antece- dents and Consequences.’’ Journal of Marriage and the Family 52:757–767. Antaki, Charles, and Ivan Leudar 1992 ‘‘Explaining in Conversation: Towards an Argument Model.’’ Euro- pean Journal of Social Psychology 22:181–194. Bond, Michael H. (ed.) 1988 The Cross-Cultural Challenge to Social Psychology . Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage. Broman, Clifford L. 1992 ‘‘The Black Experience: At- tributing the Causes of Labor Market Success.’’ Na- tional Journal of Sociology 6:77–90. Crittenden, Kathleen S. 1983 ‘‘Sociological Aspects of Attribution.’’ Annual Review of Sociology 9:425–446. ATTRIBUTION THEORY 199 Della Fave, L. Richard 1980 ‘‘The Meek Shall Not Inher- it the Earth: Self-Evaluation and the Legitimacy of Stratiﬁcation.’’ American Sociological Review 45:955–971. Hamilton, V. Lee, and Shigeru Hagiwara 1992 ‘‘Roles, Responsibility, and Accounts Across Cultures.’’ Inter- national Journal of Psychology 27:157–179. Heider, Fritz 1958 The Psychology of Interpersonal Rela- tions . New York: Wiley. Hewstone, Miles 1989 Causal Attribution: From Cognitive Processes to Collective Beliefs . Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———, and Jos M. F. Jaspars 1987 ‘‘Covariation and Causal Attribution: A Logical Model of the Intuitive Analysis of Variance.’’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53:663–672. Howard, Judith A., and Carolyn Allen 1990 ‘‘Making Meaning: Revealing Attributions Through Analyses of Readers’ Responses.’’ Social Psychology Quarterly 52:280–298. Howard, Judith A., and Randy Levinson 1985 ‘‘The Overdue Courtship of Attribution and Labeling.’’ Social Psychology Quarterly 48:191–202. Jones, Edward E., and Keith E. Davis 1965 ‘‘From Acts to Dispositions: The Attribution Process in Person Per- ception.’’ Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 2:219–266. Jones, Edward E., and Daniel McGillis 1976 ‘‘Corre- spondent Inferences and the Attribution Cube: A Comparative Reappraisal.’’ In J. H. Harvey, W. Ickes, and R. F. Kidd, eds., New Directions in Attribution Research , Vol. 1. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. Kelley, Harold H. 1967 ‘‘Attribution Theory in Social Psychology.’’ Nebraska Symposium of Motivation 15:192–238. ———1973 ‘‘The Processes of Causal Attribution.’’ Ameri- can Psychologist 28:107–128. Little, Steven G., Robert C. Sterling, and Daniel H. Tingstrom 1996 ‘‘The Inﬂuence of Geographic and Racial Cues on Evaluation of Blame.’’ The Journal of Social Psychology 136:373–379. McArthur, Leslie Z. 1972 ‘‘The How and What of Why: Some Determinants and Consequences of Causal Attribution.’’ Journal of Personality and Social Psycholo- gy 22:171–197. McMillen, Curtis, and Susan Zuravin 1997 ‘‘Attributions of Blame and Responsibility for Child Sexual Abuse and Adult Adjustment.’’ Journal of Interpersonal Vio- lence 12:30–48. Miller, Joan G. 1984 ‘‘Culture and the Development of Everyday Social Explanation.’’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46:961–978. Mizokawa, Donald T., and David B. Ryckman 1990 ‘‘Attributions of Academic Success and Failure: A Comparison of Six Asian-American Ethnic Groups.’’ Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 21:434–451. Moghaddam, Fathali M., Donald M. Taylor, Wallace E. Lambert, and Amy E. Schmidt 1995 ‘‘Attributions and Discrimination: A Study of Attributions to the Self, the Group, and External Factors among Whites, Blacks, and Cubans in Miami.’’ Journal of Cross-Cultur- al Psychology 26:209–220. Moscovici, Serge 1976 La Psychanalyse: Son image et son public , 2nd ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Moskowitz, G. B. 1996 ‘‘The Mediational Effects of Attributions and Information Processing in Minority Social Inﬂuence.’’ British Journal of Social Psychology 35:47–66. Power, J. Gerard, Sheila T. Murphy, and Gail Coover 1996 ‘‘Priming Prejudice: How Stereotypes and Coun- ter-Stereotypes Inﬂuence Attribution of Responsi- bility and Credibility among Ingroups and Outgroups.’’ Human Communication Research 23:36–58. Reese, Laura T., and Ronald E. Brown 1995 ‘‘The Effects of Religious Messages on Racial Identity and System Blame among African Americans.’’ The Jour- nal of Politics 57:24–43. Ross, Lee 1977 ‘‘The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Proc- ess.’’ Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 19:174–220. Singh, Anup K. 1989 ‘‘Attribution Research on Poverty: A Review.’’ Psychologia 32:143–148. Tuss, Paul, Jules Zimmer, and Hsiu-Zu Ho 1995 ‘‘Causal Attributions of Underachieving Fourth-Grade Stu- dents in China, Japan, and the United States.’’ Jour- nal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 26:408–425. Weiner, Bernard 1974 Achievement Motivation and Attri- bution Theory . Morristown, N.J.: General Learn- ing Press. ———1985 ‘‘’Spontaneous’ Causal Thinking.’’ Psycho- logical Bulletin 97:74–84. ———, Dan Russell, and David Lerman 1978 ‘‘Affective Consequences of Causal Ascription.’’ In J. H. Har- vey, W. Ickes., and R. F. Kidd, eds., New Directions in Attribution Research , Vol. 3. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. Wilder, David A., Andrew F. Simon, and Myles Faith 1996 ‘‘Enhancing the Impact of Counterstereotypic Information: Dispositional Attributions for Deviance.’’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71:276–287. Wiley, Mary Glenn, and Kathleen S. Crittenden 1992 ‘‘By Your Attributions You Shall Be Known: Conse- quences of Attributional Accounts for Professional and Gender Identities.’’ Sex Roles 27:259–276. ATTRIBUTION THEORY 200 Willis, Cynthia E., Marianne N. Hallinan, and Jeffrey Melby 1996 ‘‘Effects of Sex Role Stereotyping among European American Students on Domestic Violence Culpability Attributions.’’ Sex Roles 34:475–491. JUDITH A. HOWARD DANIELLE KANE 201 B BALANCE THEORY See Attitudes; Cognitive Consistency Theories. BANKRUPTCY AND CREDIT Every society must resolve the tension between debtors and creditors, especially if the debtors cannot pay or cannot pay quickly enough. Many of the world’s religions have condemned lending money for interest, at least among co-religionists. In traditional societies, money lenders, although necessary for ordinary commerce, were often viewed as morally suspect. The development of a robust capitalism was based upon raising capital by paying interest or dividends, and so it has been important for capitalist societies to develop insti- tutions and mechanisms for handling debt and credit. The inherent tension between creditors and debtors turns upon the creditor’s claim to justice as the property owner and the debtor’s interest in fairness in the terms of repayment. To be sure, lenders sometimes used their position to create social control mechanisms such that debtors often could never work their way out of debt. Such arrangements as sharecropping and the use of the company store often tied laborers to employers through the bonds of debt. With some exceptions, states and legal regimes upheld property rights against the claims of the debtors. Through the years, societies have sanctioned creditors’ use of slavery, debt-prison, transporta- tion to debtors’ colonies, debt-peonage, seizure of assets or garnishment of wages to control debtors. Most such methods, however, work to the advan- tage only of the ﬁrst creditor or the most aggres- sive creditor to demand payment. Bankruptcy, as used in the United States and a number of other countries, provides a means for resolving not only the debtor-creditor conﬂict but also the potential conﬂict among creditors. Bankruptcy is a very old concept. The word itself comes from an Italian phrase meaning ‘‘broken bench,’’ because a bankrupt merchant’s work bench would be broken by his creditors if he could not repay the debt. In the United States, each state has laws governing debtor-creditor rela- tions, but the enactment of bankruptcy statutes is reserved to the Congress by the U.S. Constitution. United States bankruptcy occurs in the federal courts and is regulated by statutes enacted by Congress. Special bankruptcy courts are located in each federal judicial district, and specially appoint- ed bankruptcy judges oversee the caseload. Bank- ruptcy decisions may be appealed to the federal district court and subsequently to the federal ap- peals court and the U.S. Supreme Court. Bankruptcy is technically different from insol- vency. Insolvency refers to a ﬁnancial situation in which a person or business has liabilities that exceed assets. To be bankrupt, the debtor must ﬁle for bankruptcy protection in the federal court. Although the overwhelming majority of individu- als ﬁling for bankruptcy are also insolvent, occa- sionally a solvent business will ﬁle for bankruptcy because of anticipated liabilities that will exceed its assets. An example of such a bankruptcy is that of pharmaceutical manufacturer A. H. Robbins, whose BANKRUPTCY AND CREDIT 202 Dalkon Shield intrauterine device (a contracep- tive) was judged the cause of many injuries and some deaths among women who used it. As the ﬁnancial judgments against the company mount- ed, its management sought the protection of the bankruptcy courts. Bankruptcy allowed the com- pany to hold its creditors at bay for a period of time to allow the company to propose a ﬁnancial settlement. THE ROLE OF THE STATES Although bankruptcy is a federal matter, states also have laws to govern debtor-creditor relations. Each state’s debtor-creditor laws are affected by its history and by the debt conventions that are part of its history. Before becoming a state, for exam- ple, Georgia was a debtor’s colony. Before the Civil War, debtors in such southern states often ﬂed harsh debt-collection laws by going to Texas, indicated by ‘‘G.T.T.’’ in sheriffs’ records. Texas has traditionally retained pro-debtor statutory provi- sions, especially its generous exemption. An exemption is the property that a debtor may keep despite bankruptcy or a judgment for nonpayment. The federal bankruptcy statutes rec- ognize the right of state law to prescribe exemp- tions. There is also a federal exemption, but state legislatures may require their citizens to claim only the state exemption, which in some states is small- er than the federal exemption. State exemption laws vary widely, with some states allowing a sub- stantial exemption and other states exempting very little property. Even a generous exemption law, however, is not a guarantee that a debtor will keep a lot of property. A home is not exempt if there is a mortgage on the home, and other goods are similarly not protected from a secured creditor if they have been used as collateral for a debt. The states with a Spanish heritage often fol- lowed the Spanish tradition that a bankrupt’s fami- ly should have the means to continue to make a living. Thus, the state laws of Florida, Texas, and California, for example, have traditionally been liberal in permitting debtors to keep their home- steads and some other assets, such as the tools of their trade and current wages. Other states ex- empt items that are believed necessary for the family’s well being, such as children’s school books, certain farm equipment, sewing machines, and funeral plots. There is a recent trend toward sub- stituting dollar limitations for exemptions instead of listing speciﬁc items of property. The state exemption is the principal determi- nant of the resources a bankrupt debtor will have following the bankruptcy. The rest of the debtor’s postbankruptcy status depends upon the type of bankruptcy the debtor declares. TYPES OF BANKRUPTCY Bankruptcy may be entered either on a voluntary or on an involuntary basis. U.S. bankruptcy law arranges several ways by which debtors may volun- tarily declare bankruptcy. Either individuals or corporate actors, including incorporated and unincorporated businesses, not-for-proﬁt agencies, and municipalities may declare bankruptcy. The law makes special provision for the bankruptcies of railroads and stockbrokers. Creditors may in some circumstances initiate an involuntary bank- ruptcy. Only a small proportion of all bankruptcies is involuntary, and nearly all of those cases are targeted toward a business. The Clerk of the Bankruptcy Court classiﬁes each case ﬁled as a business bankruptcy or a nonbusiness bankruptcy. These distinctions are not always clear-cut. As many as one in every ﬁve ‘‘nonbusiness’’ debtors reports currently owning a business or having recently owned a business. Moreover, many of the ‘‘business’’ bankruptcies are small family-owned enterprises. Whether clas- siﬁed as business or nonbusiness, the bankruptcy of a small business owner typically affects the family’s welfare as well as that of the business. Individual, noncorporate debtors typically have two choices in bankruptcy: Chapter 7 liquidation or a Chapter 13 repayment plan . In a Chapter 7 case, the debtor’s assets over and above the exempt property will be sold and the creditors will be paid pro rata . Creditors with secured debts (those debts with collateral) will be allowed to have the collater- al. All remaining debt will be discharged, or wiped away by the court. The debtor will not be able to ﬁle a Chapter 7 bankruptcy again for six years. The Chapter 13 repayment plan is available only to individual debtors with a regular source of income. There are also other legal limitations, BANKRUPTCY AND CREDIT 203 such as maximum limits on the amount of debt owed. The debtor ﬁles with the court a plan for repaying debts over a three-to-ﬁve year schedule. The debtor must report all income to the court, and must also include a budget that provides the necessities of rent, food, clothing, medical treat- ment, and so on. The difference between the budgeted amount and the monthly income is the disposable income, which becomes the amount of the monthly payment. The Chapter 13 petitioner must pay to a trus- tee, who is appointed by the court, all disposable income for the period of the plan. The debtor gets to keep all property. The trustee disburses the funds to the creditors. For a judge to conﬁrm a Chapter 13 plan, the unsecured creditors must receive more money through the plan payments than they would have received in a Chapter 7 liquidation. At the conclusion of the plan, any remaining debt is discharged. Following this dis- charge, the Chapter 13 petitioner is also barred from further Chapter 7 bankruptcies for six years. About two of every three Chapter 13 ﬁlers do not complete the proposed plan. Although the Chapter 13 may provide some beneﬁts to the debtor—for example, he might have time to reor- ganize his ﬁnances—once plan payments are missed the court may dismiss the Chapter 13 and the debtor loses the protection of bankruptcy. Repay- ment plans such as Chapter 13 were begun by bankruptcy judges in northern Alabama before Congress wrote them into law. Even today, Chap- ter 13 is disproportionately popular in some judi- cial districts in the South. About one-third of all nonbusiness bankruptcies are ﬁled in Chapter 13. Some debts survive bankruptcy, regardless of the chapter in which the bankruptcy is ﬁled. Child support, alimony, federally-backed educational loans, and some kinds of taxes are among those effectively nondischargeable in Chapter 7. Credi- tors may also object to the discharge of a speciﬁc debt if the debt arose from certain misbehavior, including fraud and drunkenness. Creditors may also object to the discharge generally on the grounds of debtor misbehavior, including hiding assets, disposing of assets before the bankruptcy, and lying to the court. A judge may object to a debtor ﬁling in Chapter 7 if the judge believes that the ﬁling represents a ‘‘substantial abuse.’’ A Chapter 13 plan must be ﬁled in ‘‘good faith.’’ For persons with substantial assets and for businesses there is an additional choice, Chapter 11 , also called a reorganization . In Chapter 11, a debtor business seeks the protection of the court to reorganize itself in such a way that its creditors can be repaid (although perhaps not one hundred cents on the dollar). Creditors are given an oppor- tunity to review the plan and to vote on its accepta- bility. If a sufﬁcient number of creditors agree, the others may be forced to go along. In large cases, a committee of creditors is often appointed for the duration of the Chapter 11. Reorganizations may provide a means to save jobs while a business reorganizes. In recent years, critics have charged that undo- ing business obligations has become an important motive for companies to reorganize under Chap- ter 11. Various companies have been accused of trying to avoid labor contracts, to avoid product liability, or to insulate management from chal- lenges. These strategic uses of bankruptcy are potentially available to solvent companies. Although strategic uses of bankruptcies by individuals prob- ably occur, most studies have found that the indi- viduals in bankruptcy are in poor ﬁnancial condi- tion, often with debts in excess of three years’ income. There is also Chapter 12 bankruptcy, another type of reorganization speciﬁcally for farmers. It was introduced in 1986 and in most years between one and two thousand cases are ﬁled in Chapter 12. Federal law permits the fact of a bankruptcy to remain on a credit record for ten years, but the law also prohibits discrimination against bankrupt debt- ors by governments or private employers. BANKRUPTCY TRENDS The number of business bankruptcies remains relatively small, usually fewer than 75,000 in a year, with exceptions in a few years. The number of nonbusiness bankruptcies, however, has gener- ally risen for about two decades, from about 313,000 in 1981 to 811,000 in 1991. Nonbusiness bank- ruptcies passed the millionmark in 1996, and by 1998 there were more than 1.4 million nonbusiness bankruptcies in the United States. Embedded within the general increase in bank- ruptcy are substantial regional variations in ﬁling BANKRUPTCY AND CREDIT 204 rates that seem to follow the business cycle. Some analysts believe that bankruptcy is a lagging indica- tor; that is, some months after an economic slow- down, bankruptcies begin to rise as laid-off work- ers run out of resources or small business owners ﬁnd they cannot remain in business. Each bankruptcy affects at least one house- hold, and one estimate puts the average number of creditors affected at eighteen. Some creditors, such as credit card issuers, are affected by numer- ous bankruptcies within a single year. Some bank- ruptcies initiate a chain of events: The bankruptcy of a single business may lead later to the bankrupt- cies of employees who lost their jobs, of creditors whose accounts receivable were never received, and of suppliers who could not ﬁnd new custom- ers. Creditors often argue that the rising numbers of bankruptcies cause them costs that are then passed on to all consumers in the form of higher interest rates. A bankruptcy may be ﬁled either by a single individual or jointly by a couple. Since the early 1980s, there has been a sharp increase in the proportion of bankruptcies ﬁled by adult women. Several studies indicate between one-third and one-half of bankruptcies are now ﬁled by women. Over half of bankrupt debtors are between the ages of thirty and ﬁfty. Their mean occupational prestige is approximately the same as that of the labor force as a whole, and their educational level is also similar to that of the adult population. The proportion of immigrants in the bankrupt popula- tion is approximately the same as their proportion in the general population. There are conﬂicting ﬁndings about the extent to which minority popu- lations are overrepresented or underrepresented in bankruptcy. Despite their educational and occu- pational levels, however, the median incomes of bankrupt debtors are less than half the median income of the general population. CAUSES OF BANKRUPTCY Much of what social scientists know about bank- ruptcy comes from reviewing the bankruptcy peti- tions ﬁled in courts, and from interviewing judges, lawyers, clerks, and others who work in the bank- ruptcy courts. Information about the causes of bankruptcy, however, typically comes from inter- views with the debtors themselves. Because many debtors are ashamed of their bankruptcies, and because American debtor populations are geo- graphically mobile, interview studies often have somewhat low response rates. For learning the cause of a bankruptcy, however, there is probably no substitute for asking the debtor. Debtors often report ‘‘inability to manage mon- ey’’ or ‘‘too much debt’’ as the reason for their bankruptcy. In pro

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bing a little deeper, however, researchers have found ﬁve major issues involved in a large fraction of all bankruptcies: job prob- lems, divorce and related family problems, medi- cal problems, homeowner problems, and credit card debts. Many debtors have been laid off completely, lost overtime, or had their hours of work or their pay rates reduced. Some debtors have had long periods of unemployment; others have lost their jobs because of the closure of the plant or the store where they worked. The job loss causes an unplanned loss of income, and this fact in turn often creates a mismatch between the petitioner’s debt obliga- tions and the ability to meet those obligations. During the recession of the early 1990s, when many industries were downsizing and otherwise restructuring their labor forces, about two in every ﬁve bankrupt debtors reported a job-related rea- son for bankruptcy. Divorce and other family problems may result in lower incomes for the two ex-spouses (especially the ex-wife). Moreover, in most divorce settle- ments the debts are also divided, and the debt burden may be too great for one of the ex-spouses. Sometimes an ex-spouse will ﬁle bankruptcy know- ing that any jointly-incurred debts discharged by the bankrupt spouse will have to be paid by the other ex-spouse. Although alimony and child sup- port cannot be discharged as debts, for custodial parents who do not receive the payments the ﬁnancial consequences may be grave. Similarly, for parents who must make the payments, a reduc- tion in other debts may make the payments more possible. Finally, it is harder to support two house- holds on the income that used to support just one household. For all of these reasons, the recently divorced may ﬁnd themselves in bankruptcy. Medical problems may lead to higher debts if the debtor is uninsured or if insurance is insufﬁ- cient to pay for needed medical procedures, phar- maceuticals, and professional services. Medical BANKRUPTCY AND CREDIT 205 problems may at the same time lead to lower incomes if a person is too ill or injured to work. Either way, a spell of illness or an automobile accident may push a previously solvent person into a situation in which debts are no longer manageable. Medical problems rise in frequency as a reported cause of bankruptcy for adults aged ﬁfty-ﬁve to sixty-four, years in which medical prob- lems may increase but before Medicare coverage becomes available. Earlier efforts to examine medical debts as an indicator of the causes of bankruptcy showed medi- cal debt to be a fairly insigniﬁcant cause, whereas direct interviews of debtors are more likely to reveal medical issues as causative. There are rea- sons to believe that the debt indicators underesti- mate this reason for bankruptcy. Insurance will often pay medical providers but will not replace income, so that debts to hospitals or physicians might not appear in the records even though the illness or injury is nevertheless the reason that the debtor cannot repay debts. Moreover, some medi- cal providers accept credit cards, so that the medi- cal expenses are hidden within credit card debt. And some debtors will make efforts to pay off their medical creditors ﬁrst for fear of being denied services. On the other hand, there may be some overestimate of the impact of medical issues in interviews, because respondents may believe a medical reason may be seen as a socially accept- able cause for bankruptcy. Bankrupt debtors are somewhat less likely to be homeowners than the general population, but a substantial number of homeowners ﬁle for bank- ruptcy, often to prevent the foreclosure of their mortgage. Chapter 13 permits homeowners to pay the arrearages (missed payments) on their mort- gage along with their current payments. Home ownership may also be an issue for a worker who is transferred to a different city and buys a second home before the ﬁrst home is sold. Equity is the portion of the home’s value for which the home- owner has made payment. The recent prolifera- tion of home-equity loans, which allow homeown- ers to use the equity in their homes as collateral, has also put homes at risk even if the payments on the principal mortgage are current. Small business owners are often required to use their homes as collateral for business loans, which means that a failing business may also entail the threat of the family losing its home. Home-equity lending is being extended to a number of other situations, including college loans and credit cards, with the result that many Americans are risking their homes, often without realizing it. A ﬁnal reason for bankruptcy is large credit card debts, often at high rates of interest. All- purpose cards (such as Visa, MasterCard, and American Express) are now used for many con- sumption purposes, including payment of federal income taxes, payment of college tuition, and many goods and services, with the result that credit card debt is assumed for many different purposes. Most ordinary living expenses can now be charged with a credit card, so that interpreting a high credit card debt is difﬁcult. High rates of interest accelerate the credit card debt quickly. Credit card debt is the fastest-growing reason for bankruptcy being given by debtors. BANKRUPTCY MYTHS Empirical studies have refuted a number of myths about bankruptcy. One such myth is that some people ﬁle for bankruptcy again and again. Several studies have been unable to conﬁrm this myth, but there are a number of people who are unsuccess- ful at Chapter 13 who eventually ﬁle Chapter 7. These people have not really repeated bankruptcy, because they have never received a discharge from their debts in their Chapter 13 ﬁlings. Another myth is that large numbers of bank- rupt debtors have high debts because of alcohol- ism, drug abuse, and gambling. Although most empirical studies have identiﬁed a few isolated cases in which one of these problems plays a role, the great increase in bankruptcy numbers cannot be attributed to a great increase in addictive behavior. A third myth is that there is widespread abuse of the bankruptcy process because many debtors could allegedly pay all of their debts. Most studies of the repayment possibilities for the debtors ﬁnd that the debtors are unable to repay their debts, even if their families live on very modest budgets (such as the model low-income budget of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). The few studies that have found debtors able to repay have often elimi- nated from repayment whole categories of debt that the debtors themselves cannot eliminate. There are, however, documented cases of fraudulent or BANKRUPTCY AND CREDIT 206 abusive use of bankruptcy, some of which are prosecuted by the government as criminal matters. STRUCTURAL SOURCES OF BANKRUPTCY Several changes in American ﬁnancial life have contributed to the imbalance of debt with income and may have increased the numbers of people who ﬁle for bankruptcy. Consumer credit has been available for dec- ades, principally as a means to help households ﬁnance a large purchase over a period of time. Individual sellers extended credit, often on the basis of personal knowledge of the borrower and the borrower’s ability to repay. Later, banks, credit unions, and personal ﬁnance companies helped ﬁnance the purchase of homes, cars, and small appliances. These institutional arrangements of- fered more protection to the seller and made a personal acquaintanceship less important in the lending decision. The development of credit cards, with preapproved credit limits, allowed consumers to buy a large variety of goods or services on credit, not just large or expensive items. It was not just the invention of the credit card, however, but some later developments in its use that have changed consumer ﬁnancial patterns in a way that may have inﬂuenced higher bankruptcy rates. First, beginning in the late 1970s, most states repealed their laws making usury an offense, and Congress made state usury laws largely ineffective. Usury, the charging of excessive interest, was for- merly regulated by the states, most of which set limits on the maximum amount of interest that could be charged to borrowers. With the repeal of these laws, high rates of interest—some as high as 20 percent or more—could legally be charged. Prior to this time, such high rates of interest were usually deﬁned as criminal and were associated with loan-sharking and the lending practices of organized crime. Second, credit cards became a major proﬁt center for many banks, especially because of the high interest rates that could be charged. Market- ing of credit cards mushroomed. New markets, including relatively low-income families, became the targets of sophisticated mail and telephone campaigns. Even though many of the families might not be able to repay everything they charged, the large interest payments made the lending prof- itable. Credit cards are now extensively marketed to young people, especially college students, who are relatively unfamiliar with ﬁnancial matters. Third, credit devices proliferated to include gold and platinum levels, cash advances, and many other features that were both proﬁtable to card issuers and attractive to card holders. Sometimes card holders did not understand how these fea- tures worked; for example, many card holders did not realize that there is no grace period for repay- ing a cash advance, and the interest rate on a cash advance is often higher than the rate for purchases. Fourth, merchants who accepted credit cards enjoyed increased business because the buyers did not have to carry a large supply of cash. Advertis- ing by stores and restaurants increasingly empha- sized the acceptability of credit cards, so that the advertising for goods and services reinforced the advertising of the credit card issuers. Meanwhile, the credit card issuers provided protection against nonpayment to the merchant who accepted a cred- it card, and they also provided some protection for the card-holder against the fraudulent use of the cards. Fifth, a major restructuring of the U.S. econo- my occurred at the beginning of the 1990s, in which millions of workers were laid off or could ﬁnd only contingent jobs. Many of these workers found credit cards to be a convenient way to maintain consumption levels and their family’s lifestyle even though their expected income stream was interrupted. These trends contributed to an increase in the numbers of people who had high debt-to-income ratios. Some people incurred high levels of debt, often at high interest rates, and simultaneously experienced declining or stagnant income. While not every person with a high debt-to-income ratio ﬁled for bankruptcy, those who did ﬁle for bank- ruptcy had very high ratios. Changes in the Ameri- can economy during the decade of the 1990s probably inﬂuenced the increase in the number of bankruptcies. In particular, the increasing indebt- edness of Americans closely tracked the rise in bankruptcies. Rising Indebtedness. The economic changes of the 1990s, in addition to the well-entrenched borrowing for home mortgages, car purchases, BANKRUPTCY AND CREDIT 207 and college expenses, have resulted in an increase in consumer credit outstanding from 298 billion dollars in 1980 to 1,025 billion in 1995. Thus, while the U.S. population increased by 16 percent, indebtedness increased by 244 percent. These are nominal dollars, but even accounting for inﬂation (constant dollars) the debt burden doubled. Dur- ing this same time frame, mortgage lending in- creased by 223 percent, from 1,463 billion dollars in 1980 to 4,724 billion dollars in 1995. Credit card debt, which was only 81.2 billion dollars in 1980, had increased by 351 percent to 366.4 dollars in 1995. Thus, while there was an increase in all forms of indebtedness, credit card debt—which began from a smaller base—showed the largest percentage increase. Industry sources estimate that in 1990 there were 1.03 billion credit cards in circulation in the United States, and that by 2000 a projected 1.34 billion cards will be in circulation. In 1990, these cards accounted for 466 billion dollars of spend- ing and resulted in 236 billion dollars of debt. By 2000, the projected spending is 1,443 billion dol- lars, with 661 billion dollars as debt. In its survey of how consumers use credit cards, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System reported that 54.5 percent of the sample always paid off the balance on their credit cards each month. Another 19.1 percent some- times pay off the balance, and the remaining 26.4 percent hardly ever pay off the balance. It is from this latter group that the credit card issuers run the greatest risk of eventual nonpayment but also have the possibility of earning the greatest amount of interest. About 30 percent of the consumers earn- ing less than $50,000 a year ‘‘hardly ever’’ pay off the balance, compared with only 10.5 percent of those who earn more than $100,000. Over 35 percent of the consumers under the age of thirty- ﬁve hardly ever pay off their balance, compared with 10.5 percent of people over the age of sev- enty-ﬁve. Credit cards alone do not pose a major ﬁnan- cial problem for most people, even for those who maintain a balance; the median balance is about $1,000, with a median charge of $200 a month. For those people with larger balances, however, and with interest charges and sometimes penalties and late fees added to the principal, indebtedness may become a serious problem. And although facing this problem can be postponed by making small monthly payments, the balance can quickly be- come too large ever to be handled on most salaries. The ubiquity and convenience of credit cards has led to their growing use for additional purpos- es: as a form of identiﬁcation, as security for returning rented cars and videotapes, and—per- haps ironically—as an indicator of creditworthi- ness for additional extensions of credit. INTERNATIONAL CREDIT ISSUES Besides the indebtedness of the individuals in a population, there is also growing concern about other forms of indebtedness. Many countries, es- pecially those with less developed economies, have borrowed large sums of money from more devel- oped countries. The repayment of these loans, and the terms that are demanded, have provided a source of tension between the richer nations and the poorer nations. International agencies such as the International Monetary Fund often prescribe austerity measures to help a country meet its repayment obligations. The development of transnational corpora- tions has also raised issues of which set of debtor- creditor laws govern transactions that may span several countries. Debtor-creditor laws and the laws of insolvency and bankruptcy vary dramatical- ly from country to country, and an important issue in international commerce is how to handle prob- lems of nonpayment. Many of these issues remain highly contested and largely unsettled. REFERENCES Caplovitz, David 1974 Consumers In Trouble: A Study of Debtors in Default . New York: Free Press. Delaney, Kevin J. 1992 Strategic Bankruptcy: How Corpora- tions and Creditors Use Chapter 11 to Their Advantage . Berkeley: University of California Press. Jacob, Herbert 1969 Debtors in Court; The Consumption of Government Services . Chicago: Rand McNally. Ritzer, George 1995 Expressing America: A Critique of the Global Credit Card Society . Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press. Ryan, Martin 1995 The Last Resort: A Study of Consumer Bankrupts . Aldershot, Eng.: Avebury. BEHAVIORISM 208 Stanley, David T., and Marjorie Girth 1971 Bankruptcy: Problem, Process, Reform . Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution. Sullivan, Teresa A., Elizabeth Warren, and Jay Lawrence Westbrook 2000 The Fragile Middle Class . New Ha- ven, Conn.: Yale University Press. ——— 1999 As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America . Reprint. Chevy Chase, Md.: Beard Books. ——— 1995 ‘‘Bankruptcy and the Family.’’ Marriage and Family Review 21, ¾ (1995):193–215. ——— 1994 ‘‘Consumer Debtors Ten Years Later: A Financial Comparison of Consumer Bankrupts 1981– 1991.’’ American Bankruptcy Law Journal 68,2 (Spring):121–154. ——— 1994 ‘‘The Persistence of Local Legal Culture: Twenty Years of Evidence from the Federal Bank- ruptcy Courts.’’ Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 17,3 (Summer):801–865. T ERESA A. S ULLIVAN BEHAVIORISM Behaviorism is the conceptual framework underly- ing the science of behavior. The science itself is often referred to as the experimental analysis of behavior or behavior analysis . Modern behaviorism emphasizes the analysis of conditions that main- tain and change behavior as well as the factors that inﬂuence the acquisition or learning of behavior. Behaviorists also offer concepts and analyses that go well beyond the common-sense understand- ing of reward and punishment. Contemporary behaviorism provides an integrated framework for the study of human behavior, society, and culture. Within the social sciences, behaviorism has referred to the social-learning perspective that emphasizes the importance of reinforcement prin- ciples in regulating social behavior (McLaughlin 1971). In addition, sociologists such as George Homans and Richard Emerson have incorporated the principles of behavior into their theories of elementary social interaction or exchange (Emer- son 1972; Homans 1961). The basic idea in social exchange approaches is that humans exchange valued activities (e.g., giving respect and getting help) and that these transactions are ‘‘held togeth- er’’ by the principle of reinforcement. That is, exchange transactions that involve reciprocal rein- forcement by the partners increase in frequency or probability; those transactions that are not mu- tually reinforcing or are costly to the partners decrease in frequency over time. There is a grow- ing body of research literature supporting social exchange theory as a way of understanding a variety of social relationships. SOME BASIC ISSUES The roots of behaviorism lie in its philosophical debate with introspectionism—the belief that the mind can be revealed from a person’s reports of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Behaviorists opposed the use of introspective reports as the basic data of psychology. These researchers ar- gued for a natural-science approach and showed how introspective reports of consciousness were inadequate. Reports of internal states and experi- ences were said to lack objectivity, were available to only one observer, and were prone to error. Some behaviorists used these arguments and also others to reject cognitive explanations of behavior (Skinner 1974; Pierce and Epling 1984; but see Bandura 1986 for an alternative view). The natural-science approach of behaviorism emphasizes the search for general laws and princi- ples of behavior. For example, the quantitative law of effect is a mathematical statement of how the rate of response increases with the rate of reinforce- ment (Herrnstein 1970). Under controlled condi- tions, this equation allows the scientist to predict precisely and to regulate the behavior of organ- isms. Behavior analysts suggest that this law and other behavior principles will eventually account for complex human behavior (McDowell 1988). Contemporary behaviorists usually restrict themselves to the study of observable responses and events. Observable events are those that are directly sensed or are made available to our senses by instruments. The general strategy is to manipu- late aspects of the environment and measure well- deﬁned responses. If behavior reliably changes with a manipulated condition, the researcher has established an environment-behavior relationship. Analysis of such relationships has often resulted in behavioral laws and principles. For example, the principle of discrimination states that an organism BEHAVIORISM 209 will respond differently to two situations if its behavior is reinforced in one setting but not in the other. You may talk about politics to one person but not to another, because the ﬁrst person has been interested in such conversation in the past while the second has not. The principle of dis- crimination and other behavior principles account for many aspects of human behavior. Although behaviorism usually has been treat- ed as a uniform and consistent philosophy and science, a conceptual reconstruction indicates that there are many branches to the behavioral tree (Zuriff 1985). Most behavior analysts share a set of core assumptions; however, there are internal dis- putes over less central issues. To illustrate, some behaviorists argue against hypothetical constructs (e.g., memory) while others accept such concepts as an important part of theory construction. Throughout the intellectual history of behaviorism, a variety of assumptions and con- cepts has been presented to the scientiﬁc commu- nity. Some of these ideas have ﬂourished when they were found to further the scientiﬁc analysis of behavior. Other formulations were interesting varia- tions of behavioristic ideas, but they became ex- tinct when they served no useful function. For instance, one productive assumption is that a per- son’s knowledge of emotional states is due to a special history of verbal conditioning (Bem 1965, 1972; Skinner 1957). Self-perception and attributional approaches to social psychology have built on this assumption, although researchers in this ﬁeld sel- dom acknowledge the impact. In contrast, the assumption that thinking is merely subvocal speech was popular at one time but is now replaced by an analysis of problem solving (Skinner 1953, 1969). In this view, thinking is behavior that precedes and guides the ﬁnal performance of ﬁnding a solution. Generally, it is important to recognize that behaviorism continues to evolve as a philosophy of science, a view of human nature, and an ideology that recommends goals for behavioral science and its applications. THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOR Behaviorism requires that a scientist study the behavior of organisms for its own sake. Behaviorists do not study behavior in order to make inferences about mental states or physiological processes. Although most behaviorists emphasize the impor- tance of biology and physiological processes, they focus on the interplay of behavior and environment. In order to maintain this focus, behaviorists examine the evolutionary history and physiologi- cal status of an organism as part of the context for speciﬁc environment-behavior interactions. For example, a biological condition that results in blindness may have profound behavioral effects. For a newly sightless individual, visual events, such as watching television or going to a movie no longer support speciﬁc interactions, while other sensory events become salient (e.g., reading by braille). The biological condition limits certain kinds of behavioral interactions and, at the same time, augments the regulation of behavior by oth- er aspects of the environment. Contemporary behaviorism therefore emphasizes what organisms are doing, the environmental conditions that regu- late their actions, and how biology and evolu- tion constrain or enhance environment-behavior interactions. Modern behaviorists are interested in volun- tary action, and they have developed a way of talking about purpose, volition, and intention within a natural-science approach. They note that the language of intention was pervasive in biology before Darwin’s functional analysis of evolution. Although it appears that giraffes grow long necks in order to obtain food at the tops of trees, Darwin made it clear that the process of evolution in- volved no plan, strategy of design, or purpose. Natural variation ensures that giraffes vary in neck size. As vegetation declines at lower heights, ani- mals with longer necks obtain food, survive to adulthood, and reproduce; those with shorter necks starve to death. In this environment (niche), the frequency of long-necked giraffes increases over generations. Such an increase is called natural selection. Contemporary behaviorists insist that selection, as a causal mode, also accounts for the form and frequency of behavior during the life- time of an individual. A person’s current behavior is therefore composed of performances that have been selected in the past (Skinner 1987). An important class of behavior is selected by its consequences. The term operant refers to behav- ior that operates upon the environment to pro- duce effects, outcomes, or consequences. Operant BEHAVIORISM 210 behavior is said to be emitted because it does not depend on an eliciting stimulus. Examples of operant behavior include manipulation of objects, talking with others, problem solving, drawing, read- ing, writing, and many other performances. Con- sequences select this behavior in the sense that speciﬁc operants occur at high frequency in a given setting. To illustrate, driving to the store is operant behavior that is likely to occur when there is little food in the house. In this situation, the operant has a high probability if such behavior has previously resulted in obtaining food (i.e. the store is open). Similarly, the conversation of a person also is selected by its social consequences. At the pub, a student shows high probability of talking to his friends about sports. Presumably, this behavior occurs at high frequency because his friends have previously ‘‘shown an interest’’ in such conversa- tion. The behavior of an individual is therefore adapted to a particular setting by its history of consequences. A speciﬁc operant, such as opening a door, includes many performance variations. The door may be opened by turning the handle, pushing with a foot, or even by asking someone to open it. These variations in performance have a common effect upon the environment in the sense that each one results in the door being opened. Because each variation produces similar consequences, behaviorists talk about an operant as a response class. Operants such as opening a door, talking to others, answering questions, and many other ac- tions are each a response class that includes a multitude of forms, both verbal and nonverbal. In the laboratory, the study of operant behav- ior requires a basic measure that is sensitive to changes in the environment. Most behaviorists use an operant’s rate of occurrence as the basic data for analysis. Operant rate is measured as the fre- quency of an operant (class) over a speciﬁed peri- od of time. Although operant rate is not directly observable, a cumulative recorder is an instru- ment that shows the rate of occurrence as changes in the slope (or rise) of a line on moving paper. When an operant is selected by its consequences, the operant rate increases and the slope becomes steeper. Operants that are not appropriate to the requirements of the environment decrease in rate of occurrence (i.e., decline in slope). Changes in operant rate therefore reﬂect the basic causal process of selection by consequences (Skinner 1969). Behavior analysts continue to use the cumula- tive recorder to provide an immediate report on a subject’s behavior in an experimental situation. However, most researchers are interested in com- plex settings where there are many alternatives and multiple operants. Today, microcomputers collect and record a variety of behavioral measures that are later examined by complex numerical analysis. Researchers also use computers to ar- range environmental events for individual behav- ior and provide these events in complex patterns and sequences. CONTINGENCIES OF REINFORCEMENT Behaviorists often focus on the analysis of environ- ment-behavior relationships. The relationship be- tween operant behavior and its consequences de- ﬁnes a contingency of reinforcement . In its simplest form, a two-term contingency of reinforcement may be shown as R(Sr . The symbol R represents the operant class, and Sr stands for the reinforcing stimulus or event. The arrow indicates that ‘‘if R occurs, then Sr will follow.’’ In the laboratory, the behavior analyst arranges the environment so that a contingency exists between an operant (e.g., pecking a key) and the occurrence of some event (e.g., presentation of food). If the presentation of the event increases operant behavior, the event is deﬁned as a positive reinforcer. The procedure of repeatedly presenting a positive reinforcer contin- gent on behavior is called positive reinforcement (see Pierce and Epling 1999). A contingency of reinforcement deﬁnes the probability that a reinforcing event will follow operant behavior. When a person turns the igni- tion key of the car (operant), this behavior usually has resulted in the car starting (reinforcement). Turning the key does not guarantee, however, that the car will start; perhaps it is out of gas, the battery is run down, and so on. Thus, the probability of reinforcement is high for this behavior, but rein- forcement is not certain. The behavior analyst is interested in how the probability of reinforcement is related to the rate and form of operant behav- ior. For example, does the person continue to turn the ignition key even though the car doesn’t start? Qualities of behavior such as persistence, depression, and elation reﬂect the probability of reinforcement. BEHAVIORISM 211 Reinforcement may depend on the number of responses or the passage of time. A schedule of reinforcement is a procedure that states how con- sequences are arranged for behavior. When rein- forcement is delivered after each response, a con- tinuous schedule of reinforcement is in effect. A child who receives payment each time she mows the lawn is on a continuous schedule of reinforce- ment. Continuous reinforcement produces a very high and steady rate of response, but as any parent knows, the behavior quickly stops if reinforcement no longer occurs. Continuous reinforcement is a particular form of ratio schedule. Fixed-ratio schedules state the number of responses per reinforcement. These schedules are called ﬁxed ratio since a ﬁxed num- ber of responses are required for reinforcement. In a factory, piece rates of payment are examples of ﬁxed-ratio schedules. Thus, a worker may re- ceive $1 for sewing twenty pieces of elastic wrist- band. When the ratio of responses to reinforce- ment is high (value per unit output is low), ﬁxed- ratio schedules produce long pauses following reinforcement: Overall productivity may be low, leading plant managers to complain about ‘‘slack- ing off’’ by the workers. The problem, however, is the schedule of reinforcement that ﬁxes a high number of responses to payment. Reinforcement may be arranged on a variable, rather than ﬁxed, basis. The schedule of payoff for a slot machine is a variable-ratio schedule of rein- forcement. The operant involves putting in a dol- lar and pulling the handle, and reinforcement is the jackpot. The jackpot occurs after a variable number of responses. Variable-ratio schedules pro- duce a high rate of response that takes a long time to stop when reinforcement is withdrawn. The gambler may continue to put money in the ma- chine even though the jackpot rarely, if ever, oc- curs. Behavior on a variable-ratio schedule is said to show negative utility since people often invest more than they get back. Behavior may also be reinforced only after an interval of time has passed. A ﬁxed-interval sched- ule stipulates that the ﬁrst response following a speciﬁed interval is reinforced. Looking for a bus is behavior that is reinforced after a ﬁxed time set by the bus schedule. If you just missed a bus, the probability of looking for the next one is quite low. As time passes, the rate of response increases with the highest rate occurring just before the bus arrives. Thus, the rate of response is initially zero but gradually rises to a peak at the moment of reinforcement. This response pattern is called scalloping and is characteristic of ﬁxed-interval re- inforcement. In order to eliminate such patterning, a variable-interval schedule may be stipulated. In this case, the ﬁrst response after a variable amount of time is reinforced. If a person knows by experi- ence that bus arrivals are irregular, looking for the next bus will occur at a moderate and steady rate because the passage of time no longer signals reinforcement (i.e., arrival of the bus). The schedules of reinforcement that regulate human behavior are complex combinations of ratio and interval contingencies. An adjusting sched- ule is one example of a more complex arrange- ment between behavior and its consequences (Zeiler 1977). When the ratio (or interval) for reinforce- ment changes on the basis of performance, the schedule is called adjusting. A math teacher who spends more or less time with a student depending on the student’s competence (i.e., number of cor- rect solutions) provides reinforcement on an ad- justing-ratio basis. When reinforcement is arranged by other people (i.e., social reinforcement), the level of reinforcement is often tied to the level of behavior (i.e., the greater the strength of response the less the reward from others). This adjustment between behavior and socially arranged conse- quences may account for the ﬂexibility and varia- bility that characterize adult human behavior. Human behavior is regulated not only by its consequences. Contingencies of reinforcement al- so involve the events that precede operant behav- ior. The preceding event is said to ‘‘set the occa- sion’’ for behavior and is called a discriminative stimulus or Sd . The ring of a telephone (Sd) may set the occasion for answering it (operant), although the ring does not force one to do so. Similarly, a nudge under the table (Sd) may prompt a new topic of conversation (operant) or cause the per- son to stop speaking. Discriminative stimuli may be private as well as public events. Thus, a head- ache may result in taking a pill or calling a physi- cian. A mild headache may be discriminative stimu- lus for taking an aspirin, while more severe pain sets the occasion for telephoning a doctor. Although discriminative stimuli exert a broad range of inﬂuences over human behavior, these BEHAVIORISM 212 events do not stand alone. These stimuli regulate behavior because they are an important part of the contingencies of reinforcement. Behaviorism has therefore emphasized a three-term contingency of reinforcement, symbolized as Sd:R®Sr . The nota- tion states that a speciﬁc event (Sd) sets the occa- sion for an operant ® that produces reinforce- ment (Sr). The discriminative stimulus regulates behavior only because it signals past consequences. Thus, a sign that states ‘‘Eat at Joe’s’’ may set the occasion for your stopping at Joe’s restaurant because of the great meals received in the past. If Joe hires a new cook, and the meals deteriorate in quality, then Joe’s sign will gradually lose its inﬂu- ence. Similarly, posted highway speeds regulate driving on the basis of past consequences. The driver who has been caught by a radar trap is more likely to observe the speed limit. CONTEXT OF BEHAVIOR Contingencies of reinforcement, as complex ar- rangements of discriminative stimuli, operants, and reinforcements, remain a central focus of behavioral research. Contemporary behaviorists are also concerned with the context of behavior , and how context affects the regulation of behavior by its consequences (Fantino and Logan 1979). Im- portant aspects of context include the biological and cultural history of an organism, its current physiological status, previous environment—be- havior interactions, alternative sources of rein- forcement, and a history of deprivation (or satia- tion) for speciﬁc events or stimuli. To illustrate, in the laboratory food is used typically as an effective reinforcer for operant behavior. There are obvi- ous times, however, when food will not function as reinforcement. If a person (or animal) has just eaten a large meal or has an upset stomach, food has little effect upon behavior. There are less obvious interrelations between reinforcement and context. Recent research indi- cates that depriving an organism of one reinforcer may increase the effectiveness of a different behav- ioral consequence. As deprivation for food in- creased, animals worked harder to obtain an op- portunity to run on a wheel. Additionally, animals who were satiated on wheel running no longer pressed a lever to obtain food. These results imply that eating and running are biologically interrelat- ed. Based on this biological history, the supply or availability of one of these reinforcers alters the effectiveness of the other (Pierce, Epling, and Boer 1986). It is possible that many reinforcers are biologically interrelated. People commonly believe that sex and aggression go together in some un- speciﬁed manner. One possibility is that the availa- bility of sexual reinforcement alters the reinforc- ing effectiveness of an opportunity to inﬂict harm on others. CHOICE AND PREFERENCE The emphasis on context and reinforcement con- tingencies has allowed modern behaviorists to explore many aspects of behavior that seem to defy a scientiﬁc analysis. Most people believe that choice and preference are basic features of human nature. Our customary way of speaking implies that people make decisions on the basis of their knowledge and dispositions. In contrast, behavior- al studies of decision making suggest that we choose an option based on its rate of return compared with alternative sources of reinforcement. Behaviorists have spent the last thirty years studying choice in the laboratory using concurrent schedules of reinforcement. The word concurrent means ‘‘operating at the same time.’’ Thus, con- current schedules are two (or more) schedules operating at the same time, each schedule provid- ing reinforcement independently. The experimen- tal setting is arranged so that an organism is free to alternate between two or more alternatives. Each alternative provides a schedule of reinforcement for choosing it over the other possibilities. A per- son may choose between two (or more) response buttons that have different rates of monetary pay- off. Although the experimental setting is abstract, concurrent schedules of reinforcement provide an analogue of choice in everyday life. People are often faced with a variety of alter- natives, and each alternative has its associated beneﬁts (and costs). When a person puts money in the bank rather than spending it on a new car, television, or refrigerator, we speak of the indi- vidual choosing to save rather than spend. In everyday life, choice often involves repeated selec- tion of one alternative (e.g. putting money in the bank) over the other alternatives considered as a single option (e.g. buying goods and services). Similarly, the criminal chooses to take the proper- ty of others rather than take the socially acceptable BEHAVIORISM 213 route of working for a living or accepting social assistance. The arrangement of consequences for crime and legitimate ways of making a living is conceptually the same as concurrent schedules of reinforcement (Hamblin and Crosbie 1977). Behaviorists are interested in the distribution or allocation of behavior when a person is faced with different rates of reinforcement from two (or more) alternatives. The distribution of behavior is measured as the relative rate of response to, or relative time spent on, a speciﬁc option. For exam- ple, a student may go to school twelve days and skip eight days each month (not counting week- ends). The relative rate of response to school is the proportion of the number of days at school to the total number of days, or 12/20 = 0.60. Expressed as a percentage, the student allocates 60 percent of her behavior to school. In the laboratory, a person may press the left button twelve times and the right button eight times each minute. The distribution of reinforcement may also be expressed as a percentage. In everyday life, it is difﬁcult to identify and quantify behavioral conse- quences, but it is easily accomplished in the labora- tory. If the reinforcement schedule on the left button produces $30 an hour and the right button yields $20, 60 percent of the reinforcements are on the left. There is a fundamental relationship between relative rate of reinforcement and rela- tive rate of response. This relationship is called the matching law . The law states that the distribution of behavior to two (or more) alternatives matches (equals) the distribution of reinforcement from these alternatives (Herrnstein 1961; de Villiers 1977). Although it is difﬁcult to identify rates of reinforcement for attending school and skipping, the matching law does suggest some practical solu- tions (Epling and Pierce 1988). For instance, par- ents and the school may be able to arrange positive consequences when a child goes to school. This means that the rate of reinforcement for going to school has increased, and therefore the relative rate of reinforcement for school has gone up. According to the matching law, a child will now distribute more behavior to the school. Unfortunately, there is another possibility. A child may receive social reinforcement from friends for skipping, and as the child begins to spend more time at school, friends may increase their rate of reinforcement for cutting classes. Even though the absolute rate of reinforcement for going to school has increased, the relative rate of reinforcement has remained the same or decreased. The overall effect may be no change in school attendance or even further decline. In order to deal with the problem, the matching law implies that interven- tions must increase reinforcement for attendance and maintain or reduce reinforcement for skip- ping, possibly by turning up the cost of this behav- ior (e.g., withdrawal of privileges). The matching law has been tested with human and nonhuman subjects under controlled condi- tions. One interesting study assessed human per- formance in group discussion sessions. Subjects were assigned to groups discussing attitudes to- ward drug abuse. Each group was composed of three confederates and a subject. Two confeder- ates acted as listeners and reinforced the subject’s talk with brief positive words and phrases, provid- ed on the basis of cue lights. Thus, the rate of reinforcement by each listener could be varied depending on the number of signals arranged by the researchers. A third confederate asked ques- tions but did not reinforce talking. Results were analyzed in terms of the relative time subjects spent talking to the two listeners. Speakers matched their distribution of conversation to the distribu- tion of positive comments from the listeners. Ap- parently, choosing to speak to others is behavior that is regulated by the matching law (Conger and Kileen 1974). Researchers have found that exact matching does not always hold between relative rate of reinforcement and relative rate of response. A more general theory of behavioral matching has been tested in order to account for the departures from perfect matching. One source of deviation is called response bias . Bias is a systematic preference for an alternative, but the preference is not due to the difference in rate of reinforcement. For exam- ple, even though two friends provide similar rates of reinforcement, social characteristics (e.g., status and equity) may affect the distribution of behavior (Sunahara and Pierce 1982). Generalized match- ing theory is able to address many social factors as sources of bias that affect human choice and pref- erence (Baum 1974; Pierce and Epling 1983; Bradshaw and Szabadi 1988). A second source of deviation from matching is called sensitivity to differences in reinforcement.