The Big Five Personality Traits & Social Status Seeking - How Your Personality Affects Status-Seeking Behavior

Psychology

Mar 1

As you continue to develop as a human in your early and later years of life, you may have noticed how preoccupied you are with how others perceive you. Are you valuable enough in the eyes of other people? Do they respect and even admire you? What’s your relationship with the people in your group, and how do you stand in the social hierarchy compared to them?

These are fair questions that are central yet sometimes obfuscated in the unconscious part of human existence. We care about status as if our survival depends on it, and it does, to a certain degree. We seek to accumulate status through achievements and accolades so that our ranking in society increases and we are rewarded with more resources in the form of money, partners, and tangible and intangible possessions.

As defined by Rob Henderson, social status (which is what I am referring to throughout this essay) is how much value others accord to you - it exists in each individual’s (and hence the collective) mind.

There are multiple ways to analyze social status and its causes and effects on humans. One approach is through the lens of evolutionary psychology, which is the primary angle I am using in this essay. According to this view, one of the primary aims of human status-seeking is to produce offspring and pass down our genes across generations.

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Status-seeking is not only present in humans. It happens in other animal species too, and it is a hallmark of animals that organize in groups because groups are always organized in hierarchies, and status is a way to define them, with the highest ranking animals at the top of the pyramid. The difference in status-seeking behavior between humans and other animals is in the how. There are two primary routes to status:

Dominance - Based on force and fear. It involves physical strength and intimidation, which are common in primates and other mammals. This route provides coercive power (Chapais, 2015). In animals and humans alike, the dominance route can manifest through physical fights and territory defensiveness, for example. You can especially notice this in less prestigious strata of human society, especially among males, where physical strength and force are valued more highly than in higher-prestige groups, and physical fights happen often as ritualized forms of status display and acquisition.
Prestige - Based on competence, skills, and knowledge. This route attracts followers and provides influence rather than coercion (Chapais, 2015). This is characteristic of humans, and it is freely given based on merit and the degree to which other benefit from your presence and behaviors.

Following this line of reasoning, much of the things you do daily revolve around acquiring status points within your groups, whether through the Dominance or the Prestige route. Think about how you go to the gym or practice sports to shape your body to be desirable by other people, signaling health and strength. Or how you may publicly share thoughts that follow the latest moral trends even though maybe you haven’t really thought about the topic in depth, or you even hold a different opinion upon deeper introspection. Those are merely examples of universal status markers that exist across cultures, including:

Good health
Strong family/friend alliances
Trustworthiness
Strong moral character
Generosity
Valuable knowledge

The Big Five Personality Traits & Their Relationship to Social Status

The degree to which you pursue social status depends on your personality traits, education level, IQ (intellectual quotient), and likely other factors.

When it comes to personality, the Big Five Personality Framework (OCEAN) is one of the most accurate personality assessments currently available. Each trait is further subdivided into facets (e.g., Conscientiousness comprises Orderliness and Industriousness). For this analysis, I'm focusing only on the main traits, as including individual facets wouldn't significantly alter the analysis or add meaningful nuance to our understanding of personality and status-seeking behavior.

Here is how each Personality Trait relates to status-seeking behaviors. Keep in mind that each trait only has a relative influence on status-seeking behavior. It is only by observing the full mix of personality traits within each person that we can better understand their propensity to engage in status-seeking behaviors.

Openness to Experience: Associated with creativity, entrepreneurship, and higher education. There is a positive correlation between this trait and status-seeking behavior. People who score high in Openness to Experience tend to be interested in ideas and creative pursuits, and they can change their minds more easily than those who score lower in this trait. This mental flexibility makes highly open individuals more likely to engage in status-seeking behaviors such as virtue signaling (increasing status through expressions of moral value to society at large) and generosity.
Conscientiousness: Linked to success in school/work, better impulse control, and careful speech patterns. People who score high in Conscientiousness tend to enjoy order and value hard work, and these characteristics can serve as status signaling devices, highlighting strong moral character, trustworthiness, and sophisticated communication skills.
Extraversion: Predicts leadership emergence and social success; extraverts tend to have more friends and social connections than their less extraverted peers, which serves as a status-signaling device that increases power and influence through social networks.
Agreeableness: Associated with conflict avoidance and lower earnings, especially in men. Agreeable people tend to seek social harmony by avoiding conflict and often not expressing their deeper truths for fear of confrontation. This can be advantageous in situations where diffusing negative emotions is beneficial, yet counterproductive when truth-seeking and direct confrontation would be the better approach.
Neuroticism/Emotional Stability: Affects mood variability and emotional reactions to setbacks. People who score high in Neuroticism tend to experience strong emotional reactions to situations, particularly negative ones. Unlike other traits, Neuroticism doesn't appear to positively correlate with status-seeking behaviors or enhance one's status. Instead, it connects more closely with basic survival instincts rather than higher-level social aspirations.

Status games

We all love good stories—especially those that involve a hero's journey from low to high status. All enticing stories follow this common pattern (see hero's journey). We tend to sympathize with characters who have lower status than they deserve, partly because that resembles us. We wish to be higher status—and this is generally true no matter your current level of status, because virtually everyone engages in upward social comparison. This makes us easily identify with characters whose current status is lower than what they deserve. We judge this worthiness by the character's actions. Do they remain passively complicit in their low status (which we don't sympathize with), or do they actively take steps to increase their status and overcome challenges (which we naturally root for)?

We play the hero's journey in our own lives, and we also play many other status games. For example, Transactional Analysis conceptualizes our roles in relationships as one or more of the Parent, Adult, and Child (the 3 Ego states). We signal status through various means—our language, how we dress, how we care for our bodies through exercise, and how we accumulate possessions through conspicuous consumption—all representing different status games we play.

Some people engage more frequently and intensely with these games, others less intensely — everyone does engage with them to some degree.

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Keep in mind that viewing social status through the evolutionary psychology lens is only one perspective of the whole, very complex nature of human beings. With this post, I've attempted to shed light on this particular angle. There are many other ways to examine social status and human psychology, and I encourage you to explore these alternatives—otherwise, you risk getting stuck in one-dimensional thinking, trying to explain everything through a narrow lens that feels comprehensive to you. This pitfall is especially common with evolutionary psychology because it's broad and attempts to analyze humans from first principles. Yet, determining true causality in human behavior is often incredibly complex, if even possible.

Resources

Anderson, C., Hildreth, J. A. D., & Howland, L. (2015). Is the desire for status a fundamental human motive? A review of the empirical literature. Psychological Bulletin, 141(3), 574-601
Shenk, M. K., Kaplan, H. S., & Hooper, P. L. (2016). Status competition, inequality, and fertility: Implications for the demographic transition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 371(1692), 20150150
Halevy, N., Chou, E. Y., Cohen, T. R., & Livingston, R. W. (2012). Status conferral in intergroup social dilemmas: Behavioral antecedents and consequences of prestige and dominance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(2), 351-366
Majolo, B., Lehmann, J., de Bortoli Vizioli, A., & Schino, G. (2012). Fitness-related benefits of dominance in primates. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 147(4), 652-660
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