The Position-Reputation-Information (PRI) scale of individual prestige

Abstract

Prestige is a key concept across the social and behavioral sciences and has been implicated as an important driver in the processes governing human learning and behavior and the evolution of culture. However, existing scales of prestige fail to account for the full breadth of its potential determinants or focus only on collective social institutions rather than the individual-level perceptions that underpin everyday social interactions. Here, we use open, extensible methods to unite diverse theoretical ideas into a common measurement tool for individual prestige. Participants evaluated the perceived prestige of regional variations in accented speech using a pool of candidate scale items generated from free-listing tasks and a review of published scales. Through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, we find that our resulting 7-item scale, composed of dimensions we term position, reputation, and information ("PRI"), exhibits good model fit, scale validity, and scale reliability. The PRI scale of individual prestige contributes to the integration of existing lines of theory on the concept of prestige, and the scale's application in Western samples and its extensibility to other cultural contexts serves as a foundation for new theoretical and experimental trajectories across the social and behavioral sciences.

Fig 1. Overall factor loadings from exploratory factor analysis of attitudinal data.

Visual display of the values in S1.1A Table in S1 Appendix. Position, reputation, and information items are shown in light blue, gold, and pink, respectively. Other prestige items are shown in black (prestigious, not used in scale) and gray (later dropped from internal prestige structure shown in Fig 2). Solidarity items are in green. Dynamism items are in purple.

Fig 2. Prestige domain item loadings from exploratory factor analysis of attitudinal data.

Visual display of the values in S1.1B Table in S1 Appendix. Position, reputation, and information items are shown in light blue, gold, and pink, respectively.

Fig 3. Path diagram and estimates from confirmatory factor analysis of the Position-Reputation-Information scale model.

Standardized parameter estimates are shown as weighted edges. Residual variances are shown as self-loops. Dotted lines indicate that the loadings of the first indicator of each factor were fixed to 1.0 for estimation.