Individuals perceiving their social status as higher tend to be worse at perceiving emotions of others

New research has found that individuals who perceive their own social status as higher tend to be worse at perceiving the emotions of other people. The study also reported evidence that self-assessed increases in social status over one’s lifespan were associated with worse emotion perception as well. The paper was published in Scientific Reports.

Humans are highly social beings. Interactions with other humans are crucial for them. The core ability for having satisfying interactions with others is the ability to understand how others are feeling and what they are likely thinking. However, some studies have indicated that emphatic accuracy, i.e. one’s ability to identify and perceive the emotions of others, depends on one’s social status.

Social status is the relative position or rank a person holds within a group or society. Throughout evolution, higher status meant better access to resources, mates, and protection, which increased chances of survival. Today, social status influences access to education, healthcare, and economic opportunities. It also affects psychological well-being, as people with higher status tend to report greater self-esteem and life satisfaction.

Low social status, on the other hand, is linked to higher stress, anxiety, and feelings of exclusion. Status shapes how individuals are treated by others, guiding respect, trust, and influence in social interactions. Recent studies have indicated that individuals of lower social status tend to rely more on their social perception abilities to guide their interactions with others. This is not surprising, as for those who possess relatively few resources, these social cognitive abilities (i.e., abilities to accurately tell how others are feeling and what they are thinkings) are important for survival. On the other hand, there are also views that better social cognitive abilities will allow a person to improve his/her social status.

Study author Victoria K. Lee and her colleagues wanted to address this question – is better use of social cognitive abilities something that is characteristic of people with lower social status, or is it something that advances one’s social status, meaning that people with higher social status will have better social cognitive abilities? They conducted an online experiment.

Study participants were 1197 U.S. adults recruited via Prolific. They were required to be fluent in English and to have had at least 98% of their previous Prolific submission approved. Participants’ average age was 38 years, 50% of them were female. 74% were white. 50% declared themselves to be Democrats. Participants received $4 for their participation, with an opportunity to earn up to $2 more based on their performance.

Participants first completed two emotion perception tasks – one examining their ability to perceive emotions of individuals (the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test), and one examining their ability to perceive emotions of groups (the Ensemble Emotion Task). In the scope of the second task, they also completed a non-social perception task as a control condition. After completing these tasks, participants answered a series of questions asking about their subjective and objective measures of social status, and demographic information.

Subjective social status was assessed using the MacArthur Subjective Social Status Scale, Subjective Social Class Scale, and Subjective SES Scales. The first of these shows participants a ladder in which the highest rung represents the people who are best off (e.g., most money, education, career prospect), and the lowest rung those who are the worst off in the society. Participants’ task is to indicate the rung that corresponds to their situation. Objective measures of social status were participants’ answers to questions about income and education attainment (their own and that of their parents).

The results showed that individuals who self-reported their social status as better tended to be worse at perceiving emotions expressed by individuals. However, this association did not extend to perception of emotions of groups or to nonsocial perception. Study authors also report finding preliminary evidence that self-assessed increases in social status over the lifespan were associated with worse emotion perception.

“These patterns support the perspective that social status shapes emotion perception abilities, but importantly, this relationship depends on one’s subjective sense of their status, both in comparison to others and in evaluations of one’s own lifespan trajectory,” the study authors concluded.

The study sheds light on the links between social status and social cognitive abilities. However, it should be noted that the emotion perception tasks used in the study included making judgements about emotions of people shown in pictures, and not perceiving emotional states of real people. Results of studies looking into perception of emotions in real life might differ.

The paper, “Higher self-assessed subjective social status is associated with worse perception of others’ emotions,” was authored by Victoria K. Lee, Mel W. Khaw, Rachel E. Kranton, and Scott A. Huettel.