John Skvoretz

Research reported in this article examines the impact of race and gender as status characteristics on the selection of teammates for a collectively oriented task. Expectation states research provides the theoretical grounding for the project and for hypotheses tested with choice models. Results suggest that expectation states/status characteristics theory may not apply to the task of teammate selection. We find that race and gender have different effects on the choices made by respondents; race does not function as a status characteristic but, rather, as an identity characteristic in which the ingroup is favored; and respondents, regardless of their own racial identity and gender identity, exhibit a strong bias toward women as teammates.