Abstract
A person’s ability to form relationships and seek and attain social status affects their chances of survival. We study how anxious and avoidant-attachment styles and subsequent winning or losing affects the testosterone (T) levels of team members playing two status contests. The first is a management game played by teams striving to earn the most profits. Winners and losers emerge due to the cognitive endeavor of the players, which provokes intense status dynamics. Avoidant-attached winners do not show higher T levels whereas anxious-attached winners do. The second is an economic game which is rigged and favors some teams to become richer than others; teams have the option though to trade with each other and reduce the self-perpetuating rich-poor dynamics embedded in the game. Besides attachment styles, we here also explore how authentic pride as a self-conscious emotion affects team members’ T levels as players trade with others to create more fairness. As in the first status contest, players’ T levels are not significantly affected by their avoidant attachment style, neither as a main effect nor in interaction with winning or losing the game. However, similar to the first game, players’ anxious attachment style affects their T levels: anxious-attached players generate significantly higher T levels when winning the game, but only when experiencing high authentic pride during the game. In short, the moderating effects of attachment style on winners’ T levels are partly replicated in both status games which allows us to better understand the functioning of working models of attachment styles during and after status contests and gives us a better understanding of working models of attachment styles in general.
Highlights
A person’s ability to form relationships with conspecifics influences their chances of survival due to the effect this ability has on mental and physical health (Cacioppo et al, 2003)
To test the effect of this team status contest on players’ hormonal responses, we computed an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) with the status achieved after the game and the scores on anxious and avoidant-attachment style as
Anxious-attached people have higher T levels on winning the game and this confirms exploratory hypothesis 2a. It proposes that anxious-attached people, whose attachment system is over-activated, become aware that the status game might threaten their self-esteem and acting as “a defender” against status loss might compensate for this threat
Summary
A person’s ability to form relationships with conspecifics influences their chances of survival due to the effect this ability has on mental and physical health (Cacioppo et al, 2003). Attachment Styles and Status Games and has been the focus of much interest (e.g., Mikulincer and Shaver, 2009). Little is known about the relationship between attachment style and seeking social status. In a personal relationship context, McDermott et al (2017) show that both anxious and avoidant-attached students show dominant orientations. For anxious-attached people, partners who are pulling away from them might provoke frustration and so they might seek to draw their partner closer. Note the heterogeneity of the different contexts and the clear lack of research into a context or situation where people’s status in a group is at stake, such as in status games, which might provoke specific working model dynamics and provide us with closer insights into the role of attachment styles when people engage in status competition
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