A post by Robert Körner (robert.koerner@uni-bamberg.de )
In almost every type of relationship, whether romantic, professional, or friendly, hierarchies occur (Agnew & Harman, 2019). The most intensively studied hierarchy variables are power, dominance, and to some degree prestige.
Sense of power is the perceived ability to influence others (Anderson et al., 2012). Often, sense of power has been reported to be more predictive of behavioral outcomes than objective power. Dominance and prestige are two pathways to how social rank can be attained and maintained. Dominance describes the use of fear, threat, and aggression to intimidate others (Cheng & Tracy, 2014; Henrich & Gil-White, 2001). By contrast, prestige is a positively-valued strategy whereby rank is granted willingly to someone with superior knowledge and valuable abilities. Both dominance and prestige are temporally stable across several months and have unique patterns of associations with personality traits, feelings, and behavior, which suggests that they represent stable tendencies for navigating social hierarchies (Körner et al., 2023).
In our research (Körner et al., in press), we studied the interpersonal perception of another person’s sense of power, dominance, and prestige based on short written self-descriptions. We sought evidence of accuracy and consensus. We computed self-other agreement, that is, the similarity of targets’ self-ratings to judges’ ratings of the target. This reflects how well the judges understand and use the language cues that the participant has written to describe themselves (Back et al., 2008). Consensus describes how much the ratings of different judges converge. In addition, we computed sensitivity, which indicates whether judges use correct language cues to assess speakers’ qualities (e.g., does dominance correlate with the use of negative emotion words positively in both self-reports and judge ratings?).
Moreover, we studied how power, dominance, and prestige in self- and other-reports were related to language use, such as the use of positive emotion words (i.e., language correlates). That is, we used software to categorize words in several grammatical and psychological categories (e.g., first person singular pronouns, adverbs, social processes, tentative words) and examined whether the use of words of a certain category relates to speakers’ rated power, dominance, and prestige.
In two studies, German-speaking targets (400 in total) provided self-descriptions (around 5 sentences), such as “I am very positive, always try to see something good in everything, laugh a lot, am quite communicative and feel rather self-confident, assertive, while I also quite a lot of compromises, if this seems reasonable.” Participants then completed the Personal Sense of Power Scale (e.g., “In my relationships with others my ideas and opinions are often ignored”) as well as the Dominance-Prestige Scales (e.g., “Some people are afraid of me” for dominance, “My unique talents and abilities are recognized by others” for prestige). Judges (307 in total) read the self-descriptions and assessed targets’ power, dominance, and prestige (each target was rated by 5 judges). We used a zero-acquaintance setting, such that judges did not know the targets and the only information available to them were the written self-descriptions.
We found medium to high accuracies for power, dominance, and prestige. That is, judges’ assessments of these traits tended to be similar to the answers targets gave on questionnaires. Further, judges’ assessments converged strongly. Finally, the linguistic cues used by targets and judges were positively correlated for power and prestige but not for dominance. Thus, only for power and prestige judges used correct cues to assess speakers’ qualities.
We also observed several linguistic correlates for the hierarchy variables in self- and peer-reports. Powerful people tended to use words related to positive emotions (e.g., “love”) and reward (e.g., “benefit”) and rarely used negative emotion (e.g., “hurt”), negation (e.g. “not”), differentiation (e.g., “but”), and tentative (e.g., “maybe”) words. Dominance was the social hierarchy variable with the fewest language correlates. Prestige showed the highest positive associations with positive emotion, social process (e.g., “friend”), and reward words. In addition, prestigious persons tended to use less netspeak (e.g., “lol”) and fillers.
Interestingly, associations between word categories and other-rated power, dominance, and prestige were stronger than the associations found in self-reports. This indicates that judges used emotion, negation, tentative, feel (e.g., “touch”), and reward words as cues to assess speakers’ sense of power. Perceptual process (e.g., “look”) and feeling words had the strongest associations with other-rated dominance. For prestige, negations, anger (e.g., “hate”), and feeling words were mainly used to assess speakers’ prestige and showed negative links. By contrast, if speakers used positive emotion, affiliation (e.g., “ally”), and reward words, judges rated them higher in prestige. These findings match well with theory, for example, power is linked to positive emotions and confidence (e.g., Keltner et al., 2003) and it is thus plausible to observe these language correlates in short written texts, too.
Overall, we found that social hierarchy concepts can be accurately inferred from minimal textual information. The cues used by speakers and judges clearly corresponded above chance. We observed high consensus: Judges converge to a high degree when they assess others’ sense of power, dominance, and prestige. Apparently, social hierarchy concepts can be observed, which is an important skill. For example, people often want to learn and copy the skills and expertise of people high in prestige (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001) and thus need to perceive others’ prestige accurately. Because hierarchies are an important aspect of virtually every social interaction, it seems plausible that people develop skill at judging others on this dimension. High accuracy is adaptive, to avoid aggression by dominant others or to effectively communicate and navigate hierarchies (e.g., making requests toward power holders and not powerless persons). The findings may have important downstream consequences: For example, if observers judge a speaker to be high in sense of power, they may also judge this person to be an effective negotiator or leader.
Finally, we found that what people write about themselves is related to their position in a hierarchy. This has broad implications for theory and practice. Several theories focus on social power and rank attainment. Empirical findings testing these theories so far mostly rely on self-ratings, behavior and physiology tested in experimental settings. Our research suggests that future analyses of social hierarchies should also consider linguistic cues. Further, in the long run, the findings could be used in automatic language processing of everyday communications (e.g., job interviews) to assess someone’s sense of power. Such an approach could also be relevant in clinical contexts, where it could help to identify linguistic patterns of low-power clients and evaluate effects of empowering interventions. In organizational contexts, leaders may consider adjusting their own linguistic patterns, for example by using fewer tentative and discrepancy words to increase their appearance of power and competence. Potentially, this could even have positive downstream consequences on organizational function. Overall, power, dominance, and prestige are enacted through language: When describing themselves, people use certain words dependent on their experience related to hierarchy.
References
Agnew, C.R., & Harman, J.J. (Eds.). (2019). Power in close relationships. Cambridge University Press.
Anderson, C., John, O.P., & Keltner, D. (2012). The personal sense of power. Journal of Personality, 80(2), 313–344.
Back, M.D., Schmukle, S.C., & Egloff, B. (2008). How extraverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? Inferring personality from e-mail addresses. Journal of Research in Personality, 42(4), 1116–1122.
Cheng, J.T., Tracy, J.L., & Henrich, J. (2010). Pride, personality, and the evolutionary foundations of human social status. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(5), 334–347.
Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F.J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165–196.
Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D.H., & Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological Review, 110(2), 265–284.
Körner, R., Overbeck, J.R., Körner, E., & Schütz, A. (in press). The language of power: Interpersonal perceptions of sense of power, dominance, and prestige based on word usage. European Journal of Personality.
Körner, R., Heydasch, T., & Schütz, A. (2023). Dominance and prestige as self-concept facets. Journal of Personality Assessment, 105(5), 590–609