Social status amplifies perception of standards that are not normative to the whole

From College Students Lose Respect for Peers Who Hook Up Too Much by Daniel Fowler.

The research is exploring attitudes towards casual sex on campuses.

The study relied on a subsample of more than 19,000 students from the 2011 Online College Social Life Survey (OCSLS), which includes data from 22 different colleges.

Seems likely this is a self-selected group so all sorts of caveats as to what conclusions might be drawn from the study, particularly as the analysis rests on a single question.

What interests me is how many different ways the findings can be spun. Here are the actual results:

According to the study, approximately 48 percent of the college students in the survey were egalitarian conservatives—meaning they judge men and women with similar sexual histories by the same standard and lose equal respect for members of both genders who they believe hook up too much. In addition, roughly 27 percent of the students surveyed were egalitarian libertarians (i.e., they lose respect for neither men nor women regardless of how much they hook up); nearly 12 percent held a traditional double standard (i.e., they lose respect for women, but not men, for hooking up too much); and approximately 13 percent held a reverse double standard (i.e., they lose respect for men, but not women, for hooking up too much).

The ASA went with:

College Students Lose Respect for Peers Who Hook Up Too Much

Which is true.

But there are other headlines that are true as well:

75% of students apply same standards of sexual behavior to both sexes

Students view promiscuous men more negatively than promiscuous women

25% of students apply double standards to men and women

Large plurality of students condemn promiscuous behavior

The ASA makes a point of pointing out that Male Athletes and male Fraternity members have twice the rate of the traditional double standard. This has the initial feel of a liberal organization condemning those whom they despise and perhaps that is what is at work here. If male Athletes and Fraternity members have such a strong streak of double standard, then there has to be lurking some women with a strong streak of female reverse double standard elsewhere. The article points out that this is the case with sorority members. Since the numbers of sorority members on campus are usually going to be many fewer than the number of athletes plus fraternity members, there statistically have to be a lot of other women with this reverse double standard. The article doesn't identify or dwell on that issue reinforcing the impression that this is an arbitrary prejudice on the part of the researchers against males.

That said though, there is a good point that they make arising from the male discrepancy.

While the majority of men did not hold a traditional double standard, male athletes and Greek affiliated men were more likely than men who were neither involved in campus athletics nor engaged in Greek life, to negatively evaluate women, but not men, for frequent hooking up. Thirty-eight percent of male athletes and 37 percent of Greek affiliated men in the study held a traditional double standard. The authors suggested that Greek culture tended to permeate university culture, leading many to erroneously believe that the traditional double standard was the most common view of hooking up on campus.

“Because Greek brothers and athletes tend to be at the top of the social stratification ladder—the big guys on campus—we see this adversarial double standard infused in people’s perceptions of college and hook up culture,” said Barbara Risman, co-author of the study and a sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “These men, who are in fact the minority, end up holding a great deal of social power on campus.”

An interesting hypothesis of how social status amplifies perception of standards that are not normative to the whole.