Status As a Valued Resource

Abstract

The striving for status has long been recognized in sociology and economics. Extensive theoretical arguments and empirical evidence propose that people view status as a sign of competence and pursue it as a means to achieve power and resources. A small literature, however, based on arguments from biology and evolutionary psychology, proposes that people pursue status as an (emotional) goal in itself, independent of competence and expressed by culturally flexible symbols. We present results of an experiment with human subjects from five different national cultures. We found that the subjects valued status independently of any monetary consequence and were willing to trade off some material gain to obtain it. Although this result was stable across the five cultures, the intensity of the striving for status and the desirability of a public display of status varied strongly: the intensity of the status motive corresponded to Hofstede's power distance index of the respective culture. Finally, the amount of status seeking observed differed for men and for women, a preliminary but intriguing observation that deserves further study.