Social status shapes affective evaluation and dyadic motor interactions

Interpersonal behaviours in human societies are deeply influenced by the hierarchical position (e.g. status) each agent occupies. Previous findings suggest that social status modulates different aspects of social cognition (e.g. attention, imitation and action perception). However, little is known about whether social status influences online dyadic motor interactions. In a first behavioural experiment (N = 26), we tested the effectiveness of a new status-inducing procedure (i.e. an interactive game with two fake players). Players’ status was induced by manipulating the achieved scores of the two fake players so that one of them would rank first (high status) and the other would rank last (low status). Before and after the manipulation we measured participant’s implicit affective evaluation of the two players with a modified version of the Affective Misattribution Procedure (AMP) and collected explicit ratings of the two players’ attractiveness, competence, intelligence and dominance after the manipulation. Testifying the effectiveness of our manipulation, we found a decrease from the first to the second AMP session associated to the low status player which was also rated as less competent and intelligent than the high status one. In a second kinematic experiment, we tested the effects of social status on motor interactions by asking participants to synchronize with the two players (in a within-subjects design) to perform imitative or complementary reach-to grasp movements. Preliminary results indicate that, only during complementary actions, participants achieved a better performance when interacting with the low status player compared to the high one suggesting that hierarchical status plays a role in interpersonal coordination.