Accurate When It Counts – 1 Accurate When It Counts: Perceiving Power and Status in Social Groups

Several years ago, one of us came across an advice book titled 30 Things Everyone Should Know How To Do Before Turning 30 (Adcock, 2003). Said milestone having already passed, your correspondent was interested in knowing what crucial age-appropriate expertise he did or did not possess, intending to brush up if needed. Amid instructions on how to change a car tire (check), open a Champagne bottle (check), and fold a fitted sheet (really?) was a chapter on how to win the affections of cats and dogs that you have just met. The key to interacting successfully with cats and dogs, apparently, is to understand the two questions that the animal most cares about, and then to provide a suitable answer. And it turns out that cats and dogs are interested in very different things. For cats, who are solitary hunters, the two key questions are " What the hell is that? " and " Is it mine? " (Hence cats' endless fascination with laser pointers.) But for dogs, highly social animals that run in packs, the two key questions are " Who is dominant? " and " Who likes me? " These questions resonated with this particular reader on both a personal and professional level (and not just because he is more of a dog person). A recurring theme in psychology and other social sciences is that two similar dimensions organize much of human interpersonal life. These dimensions recur under a variety of different names and in different theoretical contexts, including agentic and communal modalities (Bakan, 1966), power and intimacy motivations (McAdams, 1985), status and love concerns in relationships (Foa & Foa, 1974), dominant and affiliative dimensions of personality Xu, 2002), and strategies for " getting ahead " and " getting along " in the social world (Hogan, 1983). In a more abstract sense, the two recurring dimensions can be represented spatially as a vertical dimension, representing positions over or under one another in a hierarchy, and a horizontal dimension, representing interpersonal closeness or distance. In social and personality psychology, a great deal of attention has been paid to the horizontal constructs – topics like closeness, intimacy, social support, etc. Vertical constructs have often been further in the background, as an important theme in research on intergroup processes and bases of social stratification like race, gender, and class. In recent years, however, there has been a growing emphasis among psychologists …