Brief articleMental representations of social status
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.
Section snippets
Study 1: university status and number
In Study 1, we investigate the existence of a semantic distance effect for social status, defined by various occupations in a university. We hypothesized that if occupations associated with different levels of social status were stored as symbolic, analogical representations, comparing two occupations of vastly different social status (i.e. president and janitor) will be a faster judgment than a comparison between occupations of similar social status (i.e. assistant and associate professor).
Study 2: Navy rank and number
In Study 1, the degree of agreement and familiarity for the rank orderings of occupations between participants was less relative to the agreement for the ordering of numbers. This may be due to participants’ varying expertise levels with university status hierarchies.
We controlled for the participant's level of category expertise in Study 2 by examining a category of status, US Navy ranks, where all group members, in this case US Navy Midshipmen, have explicit knowledge of the status hierarchy.
Conclusion
For both human and non-human primates, one's ability to know the status of oneself and others is critical to successful navigation of daily social relations and interaction. Despite the evolutionary importance of social status knowledge, little is known about how the human mind thinks about social status. In these two studies, we investigated the nature of human mental representations of social status.
Our results indicate that knowledge of social status is an abstract domain, like number, in
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Nilda Isidro for help implementing Study 1. This work was supported by an NSF PECASE Grant awarded to N.A. and a predoctoral NSF to J.Y.C.
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