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Abstract BackgroundShame is a deeply painful emotion people feel when they perceive that they have fallen short of socially constructed expectations. In this study,professional shamerefers to shame experiences that stem from people's perceptions that they have failed to meet expectations or standards that are relevant to their identities in a professional domain. While socially constructed expectations placed on engineering students have been implicitly addressed in the engineering education literature, they have rarely been the subject of specific inquiry. PurposeAs part of a broader study on professional shame in engineering, we investigated the co‐construction of social worlds that place expectations on engineering students. MethodWe conducted 10 ethnographic focus groups with undergraduate engineering students from two universities. These groups were either heterogeneous or homogeneous, regarding racial and gender identity, to examine multiple social realities. ResultsWe present significant findings related to engineering students' collective noticing, defining, and experiencing of social worlds. The findings give a sense of overlapping but distinct social realities among student groups and highlight how failing to meet expectations can contribute to deeply painful emotional responses. We also note when students' responses reproduce, resist, or redefine the broader cultural norms in which the students are embedded. ConclusionsThe study has implications for the theoretical exploration of shame, engineering education research on identity and diversity and inclusion, and the messaging and interactions in which the engineering education community engages.
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Multiple social identities cloud norm perception: responses to COVID-19 among university aged Republicans and Democrats
IntroductionMost work on social identity, defined as one's sense of self derived from membership to social groups, focuses on a single identity and its behavioral consequences. But a central insight of social identity theory is that people belong to multiple social groups, derive self-esteem from multiple identities and care to conform to the norms for those identities. However, very little work has turned its attention to understanding when and how multiple social identities interact. We motivate hypotheses with a framework that extends a social identity model to include multiple identities. MethodsUsing a longitudinal sample (N> 600) of university students located primarily in Texas and throughout the US, we use university social identity, and the associated university norms, to characterize COVID related social distancing norms between April and October of 2020 and then unpack how another identity, the student's political identity, impacts perception of those norms. ResultsDespite incentives to do otherwise, we find that beliefs about university norms differ depending on the respondent's political identity. We interpret this as a spillover effect of attitudes from one identity to another. DiscussionWe relate our results back to a model of social identity, to the literature on spillovers where such psychological spillovers are hard to empirically identify, and to methods for future work on identity and spillovers.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2027513
- PAR ID:
- 10497322
- Editor(s):
- Filippos Exadaktylos
- Publisher / Repository:
- Frontiers, Behavioral Public Policy Section
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Behavioral Economics
- Volume:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2813-5296
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- social norms, social identity, COVID-19
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/frbhe.2023.1205873
