When Do Low Status Individuals Accept Less? The Interaction between Self- and Other-Status during Resource Distribution

Philip R. Blue, Jie Hu, Xueying Wang, Eric van Dijk, Xiaolin Zhou

In real-world social interactions, social status influences responses to resource distribution. However, the way in which one's own social status interacts with another's status to influence responses to resource distribution is far from clear. In the current study, we dynamically manipulated participants' social status and then asked participants to act as recipients in the ultimatum game (UG) along with proposers whose social status was made known to the participants. Experiment 1 used a between-participants design in which the participants were assigned as being of either high or low status according to their performance in a math competition (i.e., rank-inducing task). In Experiment 2, social status was manipulated within-subjects using the same rank-inducing task, with rounds of UG interleaved between rank-inducing sessions. Findings from the two experiments showed that both self-status and other-status influenced responses to UG offers, as participants were more likely to accept low offers from high status than low status proposers; this effect was particularly robust for low status participants when compared with high status participants. These findings suggest that, in comparison with individuals in high status, individuals in low status are more willing to accept low offers during resource distribution and are more affected by other-status considerations.