Within the framework of occupational prestige assessment, this survey was carried out amongst future physiotherapists in Australia to determine their perceived standing of physiotherapy relative to a range of occupations including several within the medical field. A questionnaire was administered to 258 undergraduate physiotherapy students. Twelve occupations were rated on six dimensions, ie le...

It has been widely reported that speech provides cues to a speaker’s regional background. Little is known about how such cues influence human behavior, however. In the present study we used a matched-guise design to test how speakers’ regional accents affect listeners’ decision-making. In three scenarios, 72 subjects from three regions in Switzerland were asked to choose either the Standard Ger...

Bridging the literatures on social dilemmas, intergroup conflict, and social hierarchy, the authors systematically varied the intergroup context in which social dilemmas were embedded to investigate how costly contributions to public goods influence status conferral. They predicted that contribution behavior would have opposite effects on 2 forms of status-prestige and dominance-depending on it...

A trust network is a social network in which edges represent the trust relationship between two nodes in the network. In a trust network, a fundamental question is how to assess and compute the bias and prestige of the nodes, where the bias of a node measures the trustworthiness of a node and the prestige of a node measures the importance of the node. The larger bias of a node implies the lower...

I n September 2001, Jernej Ule began his Ph.D. work in Robert Darnell's lab at the Rockefeller University in New York City. Although he undertook an old project that no one expected to turn up anything of interest, Ule soon stunned everyone by turning the endeavor into the premier work in the lab, according to Darnell. The project was to develop a new technique, called cross-linking and immunop...

The office of the Chief Justice of the United States has received considerable renown but has been the subject of relatively little research. It is common to refer to the Chief as primus inter pares, but little attention has been paid to the relative significance of the primus as opposed to the pares. The office of the Chief Justice has been considered “second in national authority and prestige...