City Research Online

Abstract

Social hierarchies are a key factor shaping social dynamics. To understand the psychology underlying social hierarchies, a key question is how people evaluate their social position. The purpose of the paper is to explore this question. Four empirical studies reveal that the subjective value attributed to social position does not depend exclusively on the current position but also on the context. Specifically, the analyses show that subjective value is higher when one is accustomed to lower social positions and an improvement in position is weighted more when one's positions have fluctuated less in the past. These observations fit with a model postulating two parameters: a reference point, in comparison to which one's position is appraised as satisfying or dissatisfying and an uncertainty parameter, which determines how much discrepancies from the reference point are weighted. Altogether, the paper offers the first empirical and theoretical investigation of how people evaluate social position.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Publisher Keywords:	Social rank, social status, social position, evaluation, context
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > HM Sociology R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Departments:	School of Health & Psychological Sciences School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Psychology
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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