The Assessment of Social Status: A Review of Measures and Experimental Manipulations

A. C. Weidman · J. L. Tracy Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada In this chapter, we provide an overview of measures and experimental methods available for assessing and manipulating social status. Numerous measures and manipulations have been used in the fairly vast literature on social status, so we focus our review on a diverse set of methodologies that were systematically developed and well validated. In addition, in keeping with the volume’s focus on social rank differences that arise spontaneously in social interactions, we exclude methodologies aimed at measuring or manipulating institutionally endowed differences in power, which refers to asymmetric control over resources between, for example, a boss and a subordinate. Institutionally endowed power is a related but distinct concept from naturally emerging social rank (see Blader and Chen, Chap. 4, this volume; Magee and Galinsky 2008), and a variety of power measures and manipulations exist (see Smith et al. 2008) but are beyond the scope of this review. Subsequently, we first summarize available self-reports, peer-reports, and behavioral measures of status; then we review experimental methods that have been used to effectively manipulate status.