Nonverbal Cues and Status: An Expectation States Approach

Recent findings relating nonverbal cues to face-to-face status have not been placed within a general theoretical account so that they can be understood in relation to other factors in the status process. To address this problem, we organized recent results into two empirical generalizations about status and nonverbal task cues and offered an initial proposition to account for them in terms of expectation states theory. In an experimental test of the proposition that the task cue level of one actor in relation to that of another is a direct function of one person's expectation advantage relative to the other's, we found that subjects' verbal latency and initial gaze (two task cues) varied with the expectation advantage created by differences in the tatus characteristics of sex.