We Don’t Grow out of Junior High: Cues of Antisocial Orientation Contribute to Status Conferral

Conventional accounts of status conferral focus on candidates’ competence and willingness to contribute to a group. We propose that "competence" is just one valued individual attribute that can lead to high status, and that willingness to contribute reflects one’s social orientation, a different kind of status-conferral cue. We challenge and extend conventional accounts by arguing that not only prosocial orientation cues, but also--consistent with the literatures on coolness and on child and adolescent popularity--antisocial cues foster status conferral, particularly in social contexts. Three studies test these notions. Study 1 establishes that perceivers recognize individual attributes and social orientation cues in task and social contexts as we conceptualize them. Study 2 shows that antisocial orientation cues in a social context and competence cues in a task context produce highest status judgments. Finally, Study 3 shows that antisocial cues are effective even when observers disapprove.