Psychological foundations of human status allocation

Abstract

Competing theories of status allocation posit divergent conceptual foundations upon which human status hierarchies are built. We argue that the three prominent theories of status allocation-competence-based models, conflict-based models, and dual-pathway models-can be distinguished by the importance that they place on four key affordance dimensions: benefit-generation ability, benefit-generation willingness, cost-infliction ability, and cost-infliction willingness. In the current study, we test competing theoretical predictions about the relative centrality of each affordance dimension to clarify the foundations of human status allocation. We examined the extent to which American raters' (n = 515) perceptions of the benefit-generation and cost-infliction affordances of 240 personal characteristics predict the status impacts of those same personal characteristics as determined by separate groups of raters (n = 2,751) across 14 nations. Benefit-generation and cost-infliction affordances were both positively associated with status allocation at the zero-order level. However, the unique effects of benefit-generation affordances explained most of the variance in status allocation when competing with cost-infliction affordances, whereas cost-infliction affordances were weak or null predictors. This finding suggests that inflicting costs without generating benefits does not reliably increase status in the minds of others among established human groups around the world. Overall, the findings bolster competence-based theories of status allocation but offer little support for conflict-based and dual-pathway models.

Keywords: affordances; dominance; hierarchy; prestige; status.

Fig. 1.

World map highlighting 14 nations where the archival status allocation data were collected. Each nation’s centroid depicts the ratio of men and women in each sample, and the centroid’s size is relative to other nations’ total sample size.

Fig. 2.

Heat map of item-level zero-order correlations between affordance inferences for men and women and status impacts across countries for men and women. CIA, cost-infliction ability; CIW, cost-infliction willingness; BGA, benefit-generation ability; BGW, benefit-generation willingness.

Fig. 3.

Standardized population effect-size estimates from Bayesian multilevel models predicting status from each affordance inference for men and women (depicted by dark purple and light green colors, respectively). The sex-specific population effect estimates across countries are depicted by shaded diamonds and error bars representing 95% Bayesian credible intervals. The distribution of the random effects is depicted by density distributions, and the individual glyphs jittered directly below mark the model-estimated random effects for each country. CIA, cost-infliction ability; CIW, cost-infliction willingness; BGA, benefit-generation ability; BGW, benefit-generation willingness.