The results supported the proposition that seniority influences allocations in part because of the assumed covariation of seniority with competence, and revealed evidence of culture-sepcific values. Seniority, however, was a relatively pervasive determinant of allocation behavior among both American and Chinese allocators, regardless of recipients' social competence, task competence, and sex. Thus seniority appears to be quite a general normative basis for reward allocation. Two large random-sample surveys of adults age 18 and over show high, stable mean levels of perceived control in the age range 18 through 50, followed by successive steps down in progressively older age groups. Physical impairment and low education account for much of the low sense of control reported by older respondents.
Education accounts for more of the age-group differences than does impairment.
More than half of the age-group mean differences remain after adjustment. The relative importance of education suggests that intergenerational improvements in lifetime living and working conditions might account for much of the remaining association between old age and low sense of control. A task-oriented group such as a jury, a committee, or a work team is a network of patterned social relations. Most of the current research on task groups, particularly that guided by Berger, Fisek, Norman and Zelditch's expectation-states theory, assumes that these patterns are functions of the actors' performance expectations for themselves and each other, which in turn are functions of their diffuse and sepcific status characteristics and of pertinent verbal and nonverbal cues. Yet previous assessments of such ideas have mainly tested task groups' tendency to become vertically organized, a minimal prediction that does not differentiate competing hypotheses or models.