Social Status Across Contexts

Abstract

Social groups without formally designated leaders spontaneously form status-based hierarchies in order to facilitate efficient and effective progress toward a common goal. The prevailing theoretical perspectives about who tends to attain status in these groups suggest that status allocation should be context-dependent. That is, the person who is given the most status should have qualities that help the group achieve its goal, and, because goals vary across groups, the characteristics that predict status should also vary. However, most research to date has focused only on the individual differences that predict status across a wide variety of situations, and has largely neglected the role of the specific context in which the group is situated. The primary aim of this dissertation was to investigate the contextualized, interpersonal processes that contribute to status attainment. To this end, I investigated the consistency with which the same people attained status across different groups and relationships, and how stable individual differences and social context interacted to predict status in a variety of situations and relationships.

In the first study, N = 346 participants completed up to four activities with four different groups of their peers. Status attainment was moderately consistent across groups. Extraversion and its aspects, assertiveness and enthusiasm, as well as compassion, conscientiousness and intellect predicted status across all four tasks. The largest differences in the predictors of status attainment appeared to be due to how the task was completed, rather than the goal of the task: generally pro-social attributes predicted status attainment in collaborative tasks, whereas neuroticism and low agreeableness predicted status in more knowledge-based, rote tasks.

In the second study, N = 651 informants provided perceptions of N = 267 participants. Status was fairly inconsistent across participants’ relationships with different informants. There was some evidence that different personality traits predicted status in different types of relationships: compared to relationships with friends, agreeable and neurotic participants tended to attain status in their romantic relationships, whereas participants low in dominance tended to attain status with their college friends. Together, these results indicate that different personality traits predict status attainment across situations and relationships.