Mental representations of social status

Abstract

How do people think about social status? We investigated the nature of social status and number representations using a semantic distance latency test. In Study 1, 21 college students compared words connoting different social status as well as numbers, which served as a control task. Participants were faster at comparing occupations and numbers that were semantically farther apart relative to those more closely related. In Study 2, we examined the semantic distance effect for a social status category, for which participants have as much knowledge of, as with numbers. We asked 15 US Navy Midshipmen to compare the social status associated with different ranks in the Navy as well as compare number magnitudes. Participants were fastest when comparing ranks far in status relative to ranks close in status. These findings reveal that humans have mental representations of social status that share properties with that of number.

Introduction

A crucial skill used in daily social life is recognizing one's own status and the status of others within a group. Research in animal and human social organization suggests that status or rank relations permeate group structure for several reasons. Ranking allows individuals to have a set of expectations about their own role and the role of others during group situations (Ridgeway & Diekema, 1989). High-rank individuals often have preferential access to precious resources such as food, land, information or social respect. They also have the ability to elicit imitative behavior from those of lower rank. Meanwhile, low-rank individuals expect a certain degree of protection and care by those of higher rank (Fiske, 1992). Thus, an individual's ability to recognize status relationships is a critical part of successful social interaction and group functioning.

Comparative psychologists argue that non-human primates use mental representations to store and retrieve knowledge about their own and others’ rank in the social hierarchy. Numerous studies have shown that monkeys have abstract concepts and use them to classify physical entities, such as objects, in the world (Cheney & Seyfarth, 1990). Monkeys’ mental abilities for object representation and recognition apply to the knowledge domain of conspecifics and the social relations between them. For example, monkeys can identify mother–offspring pairs, ranks of individual monkeys within their group, and peers. Furthermore, the ability to attend to and distinguish between these kinds of relationships is based not on simple association mechanisms but instead on more abstract representations (Cheney & Seyfarth, 1990).

Humans also have mental representations for knowledge about non-social domains ranging from the abstract, such as numbers and letters in the alphabet (Birbaum and Jou, 1990, Dehaene et al., 1993, Moyer and Landauer, 1967), to the perceptual, for example hue, and size (Moyer, Bradley, Sorensen, Whiting, & Mansfield, 1978). The nature of mental representations for various conceptual domains is revealed by the cognitive mechanisms that operate on them. For instance, when comparing numbers ranging from 0 to 100, people are faster at comparing 5 with 100 as opposed to 5 with 6. The amount of time it takes to compare two numbers is an inverse function of how much numerical distance separates those numbers (Koechlin et al., 1999, Moyer, 1973, Moyer and Landauer, 1967). Numerous studies investigating this numerical distance effect have further shown that mental representations of number are symbolic, amodal, and analogical (Dehaene et al., 1993, Moyer, 1973). The distance effect has also been demonstrated for knowledge of other non-social domains, such as letters in the alphabet and the relative size of objects, so long as the exemplars within that domain can be compared on a shared dimension (Birbaum & Jou, 1990).

Given the existence of mental representations for status knowledge in non-human primates and the evolutionary importance of this knowledge to navigating primate social relations, we hypothesize that humans also have internal representations of social status knowledge. The goal of the following studies is to investigate the nature of mental representations of status by assessing to what extent these representations are similar or distinct from those of non-social knowledge, such as number.