Status Characteristics/Expectation States Theory

Expectation State

An expectation state is an out-of-awareness anticipation or hunch about one's capacity to engender the behaviors, attitudes, and competence necessary to elicit more (or less) deference from other group members. Expectation states have four important properties.

• 1.
  They are activated nonconsciously. People are not aware of the instantaneous mental process that occurs when expectation states begin to affect their actions. Psychological social psychologists refer to this kind of mental activity as implicit processing, as opposed to explicit processing, which entails conscious thinking.
• 2.
  An expectation state is a relative notion: People cannot have a higher level of expectation for their actions if they do not compare their capacities with those of others within a group.
• 3.
  An expectation state is distinctive to the specific social situation. Just because an expectation state is triggered in one situation does not mean that it will be triggered in other situations.
[Page 845]
• 4.
  An expectation state is unobservable, in that we cannot directly measure when an expectation state is activated. However, we can presume that an expectation state has been activated by observing the behavioral inequalities displayed by group members. These differences in behavior are indicators of the presence of an activated expectation state.

The type of expectation state central to SCT is the performance expectation: an out-of-awareness anticipation of one's capacity and abilities relative to those of other group members to complete a group task successfully.

Status Situation

The other important concept central to expectation states theory is the status situation. This is a microencounter in which two or more people work on a task given to a group to complete successfully. Roles for each group member are not formally assigned before the beginning of the group's work. Rather, group members organize their roles and behaviors informally, on their own, as they carry out the task.

...