The perception of status: How we infer the status of others from their social relationships

Abstract

AbstractThis paper investigates how we infer the status of others from their social relationships. In a series of experimental studies, we test the effects of a social relationship's type and direction on the status judgments of others. We demonstrate empirically, possibly for the first time, a widely-assumed connection between network structure and perceptions of status; that is, that observers do infer the status positions of group members from their relationships. Moreover, we find that observers' status judgments vary with the direction and type of social relationship. We theorize that underlying this variance in status judgments are two relational schemas which differentially influence the processing of the observed social ties. Our finding that only the linear-ordering schema leads to status inferences provides an important scope condition to prior research on network cognition, and specifically on the perceptions of social status.