Motivational Accounts of the Vicious Cycle of Social Status: An Integrative Framework Using the United States as a Case Study

Social mobility is limited in most industrialized countries, and especially in the United States: Children born to relatively poor parents are less likely to prosper than other children. This observation has multiple explanations; in the current article, we focus on emerging motivational perspectives, synthesizing them into a novel integrative framework grounded in a classic theory of motivation: expectancy-value theory. Together, these findings...