“Social status helped and hindered by the same behaviors and traits worldwide
by University of Texas at Austin
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-social-status-hindered-behaviors-traits.html
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“Humans live in a social world in which relative rank matters for nearly everything—your access to resources, your ability to attract mates, and even how long you live,” said UT Austin evolutionary psychologist David Buss, one of the study’s lead authors. “From an evolutionary perspective, reproductively relevant resources flow to those high in status and trickle slowly, if at all, to those lower on the social totem pole.”
The researchers compared people’s impressions of 240 factors—including acts, characteristics and events—to determine what increased and impaired a person’s esteem in the eyes of others. They found that certain qualities such as being honest, hard-working, kind, intelligent, having a wide range of knowledge, making sacrifices for others, and having a good sense of humor increased a person’s social value.
“From the Gypsies in Romania to the native islanders of Guam, people displaying intelligence, bravery and leadership rise in rank in the eyes of their peers,” said UT Austin psychology graduate student Patrick Durkee, who led the study with Buss. “But possessing qualities that inflict costs on others will cause your status to plummet, whether you live in Russia or Eritrea.”
Being known as a thief, as dirty or unclean, as mean or nasty, acquiring a sexually transmitted disease, and bringing shame on one’s family decreased a person’s social status or value. These status-harming actions can also lead to a person being ostracized from the group—”an action that would have meant near-certain death in ancestral environments,” the researchers said.
“Although this study was conducted prior to the current pandemic, it’s interesting that being a disease vector is universally detrimental to a person’s status,” Buss said. “Socially transmitted diseases are evolutionarily ancient challenges to human survival, so humans have psychological adaptations to avoid them. Lowering a person’s social status is an evolutionarily ancient method of social distancing from disease vectors.”
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David M. Buss et al, Human status criteria: Sex differences and similarities across 14 nations., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2020).
DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000206
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspa0000206
