Behaviors
- Persuasion
- Feedback and reinforcement
- Deception
- Impression management
Encoding (Gaze) - Dominance Ratio
- Dominance Ratio: percentage of time a person looks while speaking divided by the percentage of time a person looks while listening.
Dominance Ratio in ROTC
- ROTC Officers have DR=1, Cadets have DR < 1.
- When people’s relative status in a convo changes, their DR changes
Dominance Ratio and status
- Confederate introduced to college students as either high school student who wanted to work at gas station, or as chem honors student accepted into med school
- Results replicated same effects in ROTC study
Dominance Ratio and reward power
- opposite sex dyads came to lab to have conversation for extra credit
- 1 member of dyad randomly selected to have reward power to give other member more extra credit or not
- Their DR went up because of their reward power
Dominance Ratio in groups
- DR can be observed in group interactions
- High status people in a group displayed higher group VDR than low status people
- Especially true for female group members
Encoding dominance - clothing
- Men of high status wear more formal clothing than males of lower status
- No association between female status and clothing formality
- All targets evaluated while at work
Encoding dominance - posture & status
- In dyadic interactions, people of higher status exhibit more forward lean (toward the partner)
- This is done by men & women
- Also more open/relaxed posture
Decoding dominance - gaze
- Male and female confederates told to manipulate their own dominance ratio by 55/45, 40/60, and 25/75
- Judges rated individuals for dominance
- increased DR lead to increase in judgements of dominance
- Didn’t differ depending on F or M confederate
Decoding dominance - paralanguage
- Speech rate and duration correlated with power. Fast paced and longer speech seen as more powerful.
- Socially anxious people exhibit low status paralinguistic cues:
non confident speech
higher pitch
lower vocal intensity in men
lesser increase of goal intensity in command utterances
in men only, social anxiety was also associated with slower speech rate in request sentences
Decoding dominance - facial expressions
the study performed:
- Subjects rated photos of models posing different facial expressions of emotion
- Weak expressions had no impact on dominance ratings
- Strong facial affect influenced rating of dominance
Order of strongest facial expressions
- Happiness
- Anger
- Disgust
- Sadness
- Fear
Shaved heads and dominance
- A slow sign vehicle
- Men with shaved heads are judged to be more dominant than men with hair
- Even when hair was digitally removed from photos of men’s heads
- But men with shaved heads were also viewed as older and less attractive
Head tilt and dominance
- Subjects viewed 3D models of faces
- Head tilt of the faces varied
- Subjects rated them either more dominant or submissive
- Tilt more downward=submissive, upward=dominant
Decoding status from posture
- Judges associate more forward lean with higher status
- An accurate cue to judging status because it is also ENCODED with forward lean
- Open posture also associated with higher status
Decoding status from clothing
- Observers use formality of clothing as a cue to male’s status, but not females
- This is also accurate use of clothing formality as a cue because males, but not females, encode status through more formal attire
Men wearing red
- Male model’s shirt photoshopped either red or blue
- Women perceive men to be more attractive and sexually desirable when wearing red clothing
- This is due to status perceptions
- Influence of red appears to be specific to women’s romantic attraction to men
- Red did not influence men’s perceptions of other men
- Also didn’t influence women’s perceptions of men’s overall likability, agreeableness, and extraversion
Projecting nonverbal traits onto powerful others
STUDY: - vignettes about two people who differed in organizational rank or personality dominance - Rated imaginary characters on 70 behaviors RESULTS OF STUDY: - pays less attention to other - initiates hand shaking - engages in invasive behaviors - touches - facial disgust, facial anger, facial fear (down) - more gesturing - tilt head up - straight posture - interrupting more - fewer filled pauses/hesitancies
Do status cues activate parts of our brains?
STUDY:
- Participants show 4 sets of images
- Brow position, posture, gestures, and gaze
- High-status, low-status, and neutral for each
- Photos presented for 2 seconds
- fMRI scan of brain
RESULTS:
- The ventrolateral prefrontal cortex seems to be activated by nonverbal signs of status
- The VLPFC modifies behavior through behavioral inhibition - tells you to stop when you experience something that could be dangerous (i.e. hearing a rattlesnake on a hike)
- All this essentially means that the areas of the brain that are activated by high status are the same ones activated by warnings (even though high status is attractive)
