This article describes a field experiment in which we sent fictitious résumés to advertised job openings throughout the American South. We randomly altered the résumés to indicate affiliation in one of seven religious groups or a control group. We found that applicants who expressed a religious identity were 26 percent less likely to receive a response from employers. In general, Muslims, pagans, and atheists suffered the highest levels of discriminatory treatment from employers, a fictitious religious group and Catholics experienced moderate levels, evangelical Christians encountered little, and Jews received no discernible discrimination. We also found evidence suggesting the possibility that Jews received preferential treatment over other religious groups in employer responses. The results fit best with models of religious discrimination rooted in secularization theory and cultural distaste theory. We briefly discuss what our findings suggest for a more robust theory of prejudice and discrimination in society.

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This study examines the effects of physical attractiveness and aggression on popularity among high school students. Previous work has found positive relationships between aggression and popularity and physical attractiveness and popularity. The current study goes beyond this work by examining the interactive effects of physical attractiveness and aggression on popularity. Controlling for race and gender, the results indicate that attractive students are seen as more physically and relationally aggressive than those who are less attractive. We also found that those who are both physically attractive and aggressive are perceived to be more popular than those without such characteristics. However, the same interaction showed the opposite effect when predicting sociometric popularity instead of perceived popularity. These results contribute to the understanding of the differences between those who are well-liked (sociometric popularity) and those who are socially visible (perceived popularity), and the unique predictors of these two dimensions of status in the peer group.

In recent decades, the growth of finance and rising income inequality has become a pervasive feature of the political economies in affluent capitalist democracies. This study investigates the long-run effects of financialization on three measures of income inequality—market-generated income inequality, redistribution, and state-mediated income inequality—in 18 affluent capitalist democracies from 1981 to 2011. We focus on three aspects of financialization (finance, insurance, and real estate employment; credit expansion; and financial crises). We find support for our claims that all three measures of financialization increase market-generated and state-mediated income inequality. The results for redistribution are mixed: credit expansion decreases redistribution as expected, but financial crises increase redistribution—a finding that supports the welfare state stabilization hypothesis.

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