Matthias S. Gobel, PhD
SAGE Junior Research Fellow
Social Hierarchies
Social hierarchies control many aspects of human life including the functioning of teams, companies, and entire societies. In interdependent tasks, for example, social hierarchies make group actions more efficient, and evolutionary theory suggests that leadership developed in response to growing group sizes that required more efficient coordination among members. Although decades of research in organizational behavior and management sciences show the important role that leaders play in coordinating group activities, many questions remain unanswered: Who rises to the top and becomes a leader? When and why is it beneficial for group members to pay attention to leaders? How is social hierarchy represented in the brain? The answers to these questions, as often is the case in science, are complex. As a social psychologist, I do not assume social hierarchies to be static structures. In contrast, my research program examines how social hierarchies are modulated by situational and cultural variables. In addition, I am interested in what cognitive processes underlie human behavior in social hierarchies, and how social hierarchy is represented at the neuronal level.
When glancing at passers-by or meeting people for the first time, we try to find out who the other person is while conveying who we are ourselves. In social contexts, one of the most important signals to convey is whether an individual is lower or higher ranked than another.
But how do individuals decide or know who is relatively higher or lower ranked? What are the specific characteristics of relatively higher social rank that people consensually agree upon? And how is social rank signaled in everyday life, when people interact for very brief moments in time? Our research tries to answer these questions and proposes that cultural differences in power distance beliefs influence how social rank is signaled and perceived.
You can read more about it on our SPSP2013 Poster
Signaling and Perceiving Rank across Cultures
Social Gaze across Cultures and Rank
Eye movements are important social cues in humans and primates. By observing where another individual is looking, we can learn where potential danger or reward is situated in our environment. Previous psychological research has demonstrated that the eyes of higher ranked individuals are extensivelly attended to. In our research, we investigate cultural differences in gazing behavior when looking at the eyes of higher or lower ranked individuals. In addition, we test whether merely observing a target or being in an interaction with it modulates looks to the target's eyes. Our results propose that culture influences who's eyes people attend to most, and whether they maintain eye contact when interacting with higher and lower ranked individuals.
You can read more about this topic in our ECEM2013 Poster
Beliefs about Rank and Inhibition of Return
Cognitive psychology has long been studying attentional processes. For example, inhibition of return describes slower reaction times to targets that appear in the same location as events that have previously drawn visual attention there. But how are Inhibition of Return effects influenced by social contexts? Does knowing we complete a spatial cueing paradigm with another person change the way we allocate our visual attention? Do we modify our attention allocation when engaging in such task with a person who is higher or lower ranked than us? In our research, we investigate how social beliefs influence allocation of attention and specifically inhibition of return. Our results suggest that engaging in a spatial cueing task with another person, and specifically with a person that is lower in rank, increases Inhibition of Return effects.
You can read more about it on our SPSP2014 Poster
The endowment effect describes people’s tendency to ask for more money when selling objects than they are willing to pay when buying these objects. Previous research found that endowment effects differ in magnitude across cultures. We are interested in examining the influence of social context in which the trade occured. We ask participants to imagine being either the owner or the buyer of a coffee mug, and to imagine using this mug in either a public or private context. Assessing participants’ monetary value of the mug, we find that Asians show endowment effects in private but not in public contexts. In contrast, Westerners show endowment effects across both social contexts.
You can read more about this topic in our SPSP2014 Poster
Culture, Social Context and the Endowment Effect
