Differences in rank are a ubiquitous feature of social life. Moving beyond the traditional static view of social hierarchy, five studies spanning multiple contexts examined how intertemporal changes in rank influenced people's status judgments. When final rank was held constant, people, products, and institutions were judged as higher status when they had arrived at this position by ascending, rather than descending, the hierarchy; moreover, these judgments affected downstream pricing recommendations, willingness to pay for products, and influence accepted from others. This impact of rank history on status judgments was accounted for by expectations of future status and moderated by the involvement of the self: The self and others are afforded an equivalent status boost for ascending to a given rank; however, only the self is pardoned the status tax that is levied on others for descending to the same rank. The theoretical utility of a dynamic approach to social hierarchy is discussed.
Many evolutionary models of cooperation assume that altruists possess telltale signs of disposition that they use to find and selectively associate with each other. Prior research finds that people can detect these signs of altruism in strangers, but we do not yet know whether this results in altruism homophily. We argue that dispositions should matter less in repeated interactions, where behavior is based on reciprocity. As a consequence, we should not expect people to have accurate insight into the dispositions (egoism vs. altruism) of their friends, nor should we expect these relations to be characterized by altruism homophily. Three studies, employing diverse methodologies and measures, find no evidence of altruism homophily. Moreover, we find that people have poor insight into their friends' altruism. We discuss the implications of these findings for the emergence of altruism and the role of embedded interactions in sustaining human cooperation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.