Recent research on status and group productivity has highlighted that status hierarchies encourage contributions to group efforts by rewarding contributors with enhanced status. However, that and other work has typically assumed that status hierarchies are widely agreed-upon among group...

Scholars have recently proposed that overconfidence pervades self-judgment because of the social benefits it provides individuals, such as higher status in groups (Anderson, Brion, & Moore, 2010). A counter-argument to this social-functional account of overconfidence is that the possible social...

Individuals who occupy positions of high status and authority tend to engage in overconfidence more than others. While prior work suggests that this excessive overconfidence is partly a product of their elevated status, the current research tested whether overconfidence can also lead to status:...

In explaining the prevalence of the overconfident belief that one is better than others, prior work has focused on the motive to maintain high self-esteem, abetted by biases in attention, memory, and cognition.An additional possibility is that overconfidence enhances the person’s social...

We explore the phenomenon of status disagreement in groups, which occurs when two group members both believe they have higher status than each other. Across two studies, we investigate the consequences of status disagreements for group performance and group member behavior. In Study 1, we incite...

Dozens of studies in different nations reveal that socioeconomic status only weakly predicts an individual’s subjective well-being (SWB). These effects suggest that although the pursuit of social status is a fundamental human motivation, achieving high status has little impact on...

Functional theories of reputation imply that individuals’ reputations are tied to their history of behavior. However, indirect evidence suggests that the link between reputation and behavior may be tenuous at best. In three studies we tracked the development of reputations over time among...