Who Attains Status? Similarities and Differences Across Social Contexts

Abstract

Informal groups form hierarchies and allocate social status in order to coordinate action and make collective decisions. Although researchers have identified characteristics of people who tend to get status, the extent to which these characteristics are context-dependent is unclear.In two studies, participants from the United States (N = 157) and Germany (N = 95) engaged in affiliative or competitive group interactions. We investigated whether the nature of the group's task moderated the relationship between status attainment and personality. As in previous research, we found that extraversion predicted status in both competitive and affiliative contexts.In contrast, agreeableness was only associated with status in affiliative contexts. These findings underscore the importance of examining the relationship between personality and social status in context. KEYWORDS: Status, Person Perception, Individual Differences, Interpersonal Processes, Personality STATUS ATTAINMENT ACROSS SOCIAL CONTEXTS Who Attains Status? Similarities and Differences Across Social ContextsStatus-based hierarchies are formed through dynamic processes that aim to facilitate collective decisions and coordinate actions. Without a formally assigned leader, group members distribute status amongst themselves and grant more status to some people than to others.Researchers have identified numerous strategies and characteristics that contribute to status attainment (e.g, Anderson, John, Keltner & Kring, 2001;Berger, Cohen & Zelditch, 1972;Cheng, Tracy, Foulsham, Kingstone & Henrich, 2013). But do these characteristics predict status across situations, or are they context-dependent?In the current investigation, we examined whether the same personality traits predicted status in groups performing different tasks. We were particularly interested in determining the degree to which individual differences in agreeableness and extraversion would be associated with status in affiliative versus competitive contexts. Previous investigations of status attainment have tended to neglect the role of different contexts, even though status differentiation processes may vary across situations. Individuals with status are instrumental in directing their group in social and organizational settings, and understanding when certain individuals tend to attain status may inform future research aimed at increasing group efficacy in these settings. Who Attains Status?When people interact in groups without formally designated leaders, they spontaneously form informal hierarchies based on social status-how much respect, esteem or influence group members confer onto one another (Berger, Rosenholtz & Zelditch, 1980;Magee & Galinsky, 2008). The primary function of a hierarchy is to facilitate efficient performance toward a common goal (Magee & Galinsky, 2008), and the person who attains status often becomes an informal leader who coordinates the group's actions. STATUS ATTAINMENT ACROSS SOCIAL CONTEXTSGroups allocate status based, in substantial part, on who will help the...

When and why is “extraversion” associated with social popularity?

“…Although several studies have examined and found an association between extraversion and popularity (Ciarrochi & Heaven, 2009;DesJardins, Srivastava, Küfner, & Back, 2015;Feiler & Kleinbaum, 2015;Jensen-Campbell et al, 2002;Jensen-Campbell & Malcolm, 2007;Lubbers et al, 2006;Scholte, van Aken, Marcel A. G., & Van Lieshout, 1997;Stopfer, Egloff, Nestler, & Back, 2013;van der Linden et al, 2010;Wortman & Wood, 2011), few studies have assessed this association before adolescence. A study that differentiated between two types of popularity measures, namely sociometric and perceived popularity, has found that self-ratings of extraversion were associated with perceived popularity in adolescence, yet no associations between extraversion and sociometric popularity were found in middle childhood (mean age 9.39) or in adolescence (mean age 12.05) (Andrei, Mancini, Mazzoni, Russo, & Baldaro, 2015).…”

“…Studies have pronouncedly examined the association between extraversion and popularity among adolescents (Wolters et al, 2014) and young adults (DesJardins et al, 2015). These examinations have most often considered students in school classrooms (Jensen-Campbell et al, 2002;Jensen-Campbell & Malcolm, 2007;Scholte et al, 1997;van der Linden et al, 2010) or university students (possibly most frequently psychology freshmen, although the particular discipline of the students is rarely reported) (Anderson et al, 2001;DesJardins et al, 2015;Selfhout et al, 2010) as the population under study. Although it is convenient to collect data each year from a fresh group of students from a researcher's own department, this procedure does not improve the generalizability of the results.…”

Peer Sociometric Status and Personality Development from Middle Childhood to Preadolescence

“…Findings regarding reputational sociometric status have been less consistent, with some studies reporting a positive correlation (Hubers et al, 2016;Wolters et al, 2014) and others a null finding (Massey et al, 2015;van der Linden et al, 2010). Among older youth samples, the findings are more inconsistent for emotional sociometric status (Ilmarinen et al, 2016;Wortman & Wood, 2011) and null for reputational status (Anderson et al, 2001;Lawless DesJardins et al, 2015).…”

Social Interaction Processes and Personality

“…One potential reason for this is that in such contexts, behavioral cues that are perceived as indicative of agreeableness (e.g., smiling) are, in fact, stronger expressions of extraversion while target differences in agreeableness express only in more intimate and longer-term oriented social contexts. In the context of leadership emergence, it has, for example, been shown that more extraverted individuals were chosen as leaders across social contexts while more agreeable individuals were evaluated more positively only in more cooperative interaction contexts (Lawless DesJardins, Srivastava, Küfner, & Back, 2015).…”