AUTHOR=Krems Jaimie Arona , Merrie Laureon A. , Short Victoria , Duarte Krystal , Rodriguez Nina N. , French Juliana E. , Sznycer Daniel , Byrd-Craven Jennifer TITLE=Third-Party Perceptions of Male and Female Status: Male Physical Strength and Female Physical Attractiveness Cue High Status JOURNAL=Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution VOLUME=10 YEAR=2022 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.860797 DOI=10.3389/fevo.2022.860797 ISSN=2296-701X ABSTRACT=
Status is a universal feature of human sociality. A lesser-studied adaptive problem surrounding status is assessing who has which levels of status in a given group (e.g., identifying which people possess high status). Here, we integrate theory and methods from evolutionary social science, animal behavior, and social psychology, and we use an emotion inference paradigm to investigate what cues render people high status in the eyes of social perceivers. This paradigm relies on robust associations between status and emotion display—particularly the anger display. If a target is expected to enact (but not necessarily feel) anger, this would suggest that social perceivers view that target as higher status. By varying target attributes, we test whether those attributes are considered status cues in the eyes of social perceivers. In two well-powered, pre-registered experiments in the United States (