Human Status Criteria: Sex Differences and Similarities Across 14 Nations

Abstract

Social status is a central and universal feature of our highly social species. Reproductively relevant resources, including food, territory, mating opportunities, powerful coalitional alliances, and group-provided health care, flow to those high in status and trickle only slowly to those low in status. Despite its importance and centrality to human social group living, the scientific understanding of status contains a large gap in knowledge-the precise criteria by which individuals are accorded high or low status in the eyes of their group members. It is not known whether there exist universal status criteria, nor the degree to which status criteria vary across cultures. Also unknown is whether status criteria are sex differentiated, and the degree of cross-cultural variability and consistency of sex-differentiated status criteria. The current article investigates status criteria across 14 countries (N = 2,751). Results provide the first systematic documentation of potentially universal and sex-differentiated status criteria. Discussion outlines important next steps in understanding the psychology of status. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

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Human Status Criteria: Sex Differences and Similarities Across 14 Nations
David M. Buss and Patrick K. Durkee
The University of Texas at Austin
Todd K. Shackelford
Oakland University
Brian F. Bowdle
Grand Valley State University
David P. Schmitt
Brunel University London
Gary L. Brase
Kansas State University
Jae C. Choe
Ewha Womans University
Irina Trofimova
McMaster University
Social status is a central and universal feature of our highly social species. Reproductively relevant
resources, including food, territory, mating opportunities, powerful coalitional alliances, and group-
provided health care, flow to those high in status and trickle only slowly to those low in status. Despite
its importance and centrality to human social group living, the scientific understanding of status contains
a large gap in knowledge—the precise criteria by which individuals are accorded high or low status in
the eyes of their group members. It is not known whether there exist universal status criteria, nor the
degree to which status criteria vary across cultures. Also unknown is whether status criteria are sex
differentiated, and the degree of cross-cultural variability and consistency of sex-differentiated status
criteria. The current article investigates status criteria across 14 countries (N⫽2,751). Results provide
the first systematic documentation of potentially universal and sex-differentiated status criteria. Discus-
sion outlines important next steps in understanding the psychology of status.
Keywords: evolution, cross cultural, hierarchy, sex differences, status
“We come into this world with a nervous system that worries about
rank” (Frank, 1985, p. 7).
The human social landscape is not flat. Variable degrees of
hierarchical organization and differential access to resources char-
acterize every known human group. Hierarchical rank applies at all
levels of human populations, pertaining to all individuals and
groups within a population—to men, to women, to kin-groups
within the larger group (e.g., the Kennedys, the Kardashians), to
coalitions and collectives within populations (e.g., different gangs
within a city or clans within a kingdom, religions, organizations),
and to larger groups within the human population (e.g., ethnicities,
racial groups). Social status is the subcategory of hierarchical rank
in human social groups based on respect and reputational regard
(Anderson & Kilduff, 2009; Magee & Galinsky, 2008; Ridgeway
& Walker, 1995). A person’s status is inherently a judgment by
others containing both evaluative and descriptive inferences de-
rived from a range of events, actions, possessions, communica-
David M. Buss and XPatrick K. Durkee, Department of Psychology,
The University of Texas at Austin; XTodd K. Shackelford, Department
of Psychology, Oakland University; Brian F. Bowdle, Department of
Psychology, Grand Valley State University; XDavid P. Schmitt, Centre
for Culture and Evolution, Brunel University London; XGary L. Brase,
Department of Psychological Sciences, Kansas State University; Jae C.
Choe, Department of Life Science and Division of EcoScience, Ewha
Womans University; XIrina Trofimova, Department of Psychiatry and
Behavioural Neurosciences, McMaster University.
David M. Buss and Patrick K. Durkee share first authorship. We are
immensely grateful to the cross-national collaborators who provided, or
helped to provide, data from their respective countries: Lucio Ferreira
Alves (Brazil), Alois Angleitner (Germany), Henok Araya (Eritrea),
Sergey Biriucov (Russia), Mariko Hasegawa (Japan), Toshikazu Hasegawa
(Japan), Carol Hodge (Guam), Stanislaw Mika (Poland), Kathleen My-
ambo (Zimbabwe), Toomas Niit (Ukraine), and Kaiping Peng (China).
Additional thanks go to Richard Alexander, Don Brown, Michael Chen,
Leda Cosmides, Courtney Crosby, Todd DeKay, Bruce Ellis, Arlette Greer,
Kim Hill, Warren Holmes, Tim Ketelaar, Bobbi Low, Randy Nesse, Steve
Pinker, Anna Sedlacek, Jennifer Semmelroth, Barb Smuts, Don Symons,
John Tooby, and Valerie Stone for helpful critical reactions on earlier
drafts of this article.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to David M.
Buss or Patrick K. Durkee, Department of Psychology, The University of
Texas at Austin, 108 East, Dean Keeton Street, Austin, TX 78712. E-mail:
dbuss@austin.utexas.edu or pdurkee@utexas.edu
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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:
Attitudes and Social Cognition
© 2020 American Psychological Association 2020, Vol. 2, No. 999, 000
ISSN: 0022-3514 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000206
1

tions, characteristics, alliances, allegiances, grievances, and rival-
ries— each charged with positive or negative valence that
increases or decreases status.
Relative rank is central to many scientific disciplines. Among
sociologists, class and socioeconomic status are among the most
important “structural” variables (Kraus, Piff, & Keltner, 2011).
Status differentials loom large in the ethnographies of anthropol-
ogists (e.g., Chagnon, 1983; Hart & Pilling, 1960), and articles
address topics such as “the big man” (Brown, 1990) and the
prestige functions of “potlaches” (Piddocke, 1969). Among econ-
omists, status striving is regarded as a universal human motive that
drives much observed economic behavior (Frank, 1985). And for
evolutionary scientists, access to key reproductive resources—
such as desirable mates, formidable allies, abundant food, privi-
leged territory, high-quality tools, and social influence— has been
linked historically and cross-culturally to rank within the group,
providing a selective rationale for the evolution of status-striving
and status-evaluating mechanisms (Betzig, 1986; von Rueden &
Jaeggi, 2016). For psychologists, the processes and criteria by
which status is assessed, accorded, and tracked must be based in
psychological mechanisms.
Unknowns of Human Status
Despite the centrality of hierarchy and status to many scientific
disciplines relatively little is known about the precise criteria by
which humans assess and allocate status, respect, admiration, and
reputational regard. Most theories of human status tend to focus on
the broad dimensions along which humans allocate and attain
status, such as dominance, power, benefit generation, competence,
prosociality, expertise, and prestige (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009;
Chapais, 2015; Cheng, Tracy, Foulsham, Kingstone, & Henrich,
2013; Hawley, 1999; Henrich & Gil-White, 2001; Lukaszewski,
Simmons, Anderson, & Roney, 2016; Price, 2003; Willer, 2009).
Although crucial for building a theory of status, these broad
dimensions provide little guidance to the specific and diverse array
of inputs that regulate human status assessment and allocation.
Given the range of adaptive challenges faced across the environ-
ments in which humans evolved, a complete understanding of
human social status requires the additional examination of the
more substantive content-saturated status criteria—the specific
acts, characteristics, interactions, and events—that humans use to
evaluate and allocate status and to track status trajectories over
time.
Research has not yet documented which, if any, status criteria
are species-typical and culturally universal; whether some criteria
are reliably sex-differentiated across cultures; nor whether and
how status criteria shift according to culture, ecology, group com-
position, life stage, relationship, or other contextual factors. The
goal of this article is to provide an initial framework for detailing
the criteria that humans use to evaluate and accord status, the ways
in which these criteria differentially affect men and women, and to
provide empirical tests in 14 cultures.
Status in Evolutionary Perspective
Status is a product of universal evaluative mechanisms that rank
individuals within groups hierarchically and groups within popu-
lations hierarchically according to subjective perceptions of value,
which create patterns of deference over resources (Blader & Chen,
2014; Garfield, Hubbard, & Hagen, 2019). The criteria of human
status—the events, actions, communications, and associations that
lead to increases and decreases in respect, admiration, reputation,
prestige, deference, and influence—are evaluated by evolved psy-
chological mechanisms that are adaptively patterned, species-
typical, numerous, and specific, reflecting the different adaptive
problems that ancestral humans had to solve when interacting with
others.
From an evolutionary perspective, hierarchies exist in part be-
cause individuals within groups benefited from avoiding costly
conflict over resources by recognizing asymmetries in abilities,
circumstances, and motivations that lead to differential success in
conflict (van Vugt & Tybur, 2015). In nonhuman animals, an
individual’s rank within hierarchies tends to be heavily dependent
on success in agonistic encounters (Bush, Quinn, Balreira, &
Johnson, 2016; Chase & Seitz, 2011; Holekamp & Strauss,
2016).With the expansion of the human lineage into a greater
number of niches and the development of language and complex
symbol systems, the dimensions along which status were accorded
became commensurately more numerous and complex (cf.
Barkow, 1989; Henrich & Gil-White, 2001). No longer was status
based primarily on patterns deference to aggressively dominant
individuals, but on patterns of deference across a broad and com-
plex range of social interactions.
Dedicated and complex psychological machinery would need to
have evolved in humans to monitor and accord status to others and
to the self, and to track changes in status and status trajectories
over time (Barkow, 1989). The psychological mechanisms that
interpret and evaluate status criteria would have imposed a pow-
erful selection pressure over evolutionary history on the behavioral
strategies of humans. Consequently, behavioral strategies should
have evolved that function to embody the status criteria imposed
by the evaluative mechanisms of other humans, much as mating
strategies have evolved in part to embody the qualities desired in
potential mates that individuals are motivated to attract. These
strategies may be regulated by systems that compare one’s traits
and abilities in evolutionarily relevant domains to a cognitive map
of socially valuable traits to compute feelings of self-esteem pro-
portional to the degree one should be held in esteem by others,
such as the hierometer or sociometer hypotheses suggest (e.g.,
Barkow, 1980; Kirkpatrick & Ellis, 2001).
The Evolution of Status Criteria
The criteria by which individuals are accorded status are deeply
rooted in human evolutionary history and highly nonarbitrary. Just
as edible objects differ in food value and places differ in habitat
value (Symons, 1987), people within a group differ in a myriad of
fitness-relevant ways, such as mate value (Buss, 1994/2016; Buss
& Schmitt, 1993; Symons, 1987) and coalitional value (Tooby &
Cosmides, 1988). These differences result in systematic differ-
ences in perceptions of relational value, and ultimately respect,
reputation, prestige, and status. The psychological mechanisms
that evaluate and determine status criteria are designed by the
forces of natural selection operating over thousands or millions of
years. Therefore, the criteria that humans use to allocate and
evaluate status will ultimately be determined by factors that would
have influenced the survival and reproductive success of our
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2BUSS ET AL.

ancestors. Just as humans evolved separate taste preferences for
sugar, fat, salt, and protein to solve different nutritional require-
ments, we expect that humans have evolved mechanisms to eval-
uate status criteria that correspond to the different adaptive chal-
lenges and fitness consequences posed by interacting with others.
Because of the multitude of ways in which other individuals can
affect our survival and reproductive success, the psychological
mechanisms that have evolved to evaluate and accord status to
others are likely to be numerous and specific (cf. Symons, 1987).
Hypotheses about the evolution of specific status criteria in
humans require consideration of the selection pressures recurring
across human ancestral environments. Although creating a plausi-
ble model of the human environment of evolutionary adaptedness
(EEA) is fraught with difficulties (DeVore & Tooby, 1987), re-
searchers and theoreticians have converged on several basic points
of reasonable consensus. Through converging information from
the paleontological record, the archaeological record, our knowl-
edge of ancient habitats, our knowledge of patterns of primate
homology, the characteristics present in contemporary small-scale
societies (e.g., hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, horticulturalists), and
characteristics present in modern humans, we can piece together a
plausible scenario of some key aspects of human ancestral condi-
tions (see DeVore & Tooby, 1987).
Ancestral Environments
Throughout human evolution, males had lower obligatory
parental investment than females. Females bore the energetic
and time costs of gestation and months or years of breastfeed-
ing, whereas a male’s minimum investment was only the con-
tribution of sperm required for successful fertilization (Trivers,
1972). Over evolutionary time, this asymmetry would have
driven women to be more selective about whom to mate with
relative to men, at least in some mating contexts (Buss, 1994/
2016). Men would have had to compete comparatively more for
sexual access.
Evidence overwhelmingly suggests that hunting and gather-
ing were major human activities across human evolutionary
history (DeVore & Tooby, 1987; Hill, 1982; Liebenberg, 2008).
Ancient humans ate a variety of foods, but calories from meat
tend to be more nutrient-dense than calories from plants, so
meat would have been valuable food. The time constraints of
breastfeeding combined with the impracticality of caring for an
infant throughout protracted hunting expeditions suggests that
ancestral women probably spent more time gathering and pro-
cessing sessile foods than chasing game. Hunting, especially
large-game hunting, was practiced primarily by coalitions of
men.
Hunting makes it possible to obtain large, calorically dense
packets of meat—more than the amount any one hunter needed
or could reasonably consume. But hunting returns are highly
variable across cultures (Hawkes, O’Connell, & Jones, 1991;
Kaplan, Gurven, Hill, & Hurtado, 2005; Kaplan & Hill, 1985).
The interaction between large payoffs and high variability
created conditions that elevated levels of food-sharing to a
degree not seen in other primate species and promoted the
evolution of psychological mechanisms for social exchange
(Cosmides & Tooby, 2015; Stanford, 1999); early cultural
norms likely arose from these mechanisms. The benefits of
living in larger groups—and the increasing costs of ostracism
(e.g., starvation, predation)—would have created additional se-
lection pressures honing adaptations for group living (e.g.,
reputation management; Stibbard-Hawkes, 2019).
Hunting— especially large-game hunting—also required higher
levels of cooperation among males, creating selection pressures to
form coalitions and psychological mechanisms attendant to coali-
tions (Tooby & Cosmides, 1988, 2010). The existence of coalitions
created further opportunities for acquiring resources (e.g., terri-
tory, food, mates) through intercoalitional aggression, which cre-
ated selection pressures for coalitional defense (Alexander, 1987).
There is compelling evidence for the hypothesis that men formed
cooperative coalitions for the purposes of large-game hunting,
coalitional aggression (sometimes to capture wives), and coali-
tional defense against aggressive male coalitions (e.g., Alexan-
der, 1987; Chagnon, 1983; Pandit, Pradhan, Balashov, & Van
Schaik, 2016). There is no evidence that women in ancestral
environments formed coalitions with other women to raid
neighboring tribes to capture husbands or to hunt large-game
animals (Tooby & Cosmides, 1989), although women likely
formed alloparenting networks (Hrdy, 2009; Shostak, 1981).
Intergroup conflict and warfare likely exerted strong selection
pressures on men across human evolutionary history (Manson et
al., 1991; Tooby & Cosmides, 1988; Van Vugt, De Cremer, &
Janssen, 2007).
Calorically dense food packets from hunting created the
possibility for heightened average levels of male parental in-
vestment, exceeding that of other primates. Women who could
reliably access high-calorie nourishment for themselves and
their offspring would have had higher reproductive success than
women who could not. Thus, the genes of women who secured
investing mates, as well as those of men who invested, would
have been better represented in subsequent generations—lead-
ing to higher male investment over time. The combination of
higher male parental investment and relatively concealed ovu-
lation in women selected for men who placed greater impor-
tance on assuring their paternity in offspring of long-term
mates. The interaction between long-term mating strategies and
relatively high male parental investment created selection pres-
sures on men to select mates of high long-term reproductive
value (i.e., young, healthy, nulliparous women; Sugiyama,
2015; Symons, 1979). Tradeoffs between short-term and long-
term mating led to the evolution of short-term and long-term
sexual strategies (Buss & Schmitt, 1993, 2019).
Sketches of some of the important and relatively invariant features
of ancestral environments provide a crudely formulated context for
advancing general hypotheses about the status criteria that humans
use to evaluate each other. Sex differences in reproductive biology
and investment selected for sex differences in psychology and behav-
ior, which led to sexual divisions of subsistence labor in our hunter-
gatherer ancestors (Broude, 1990). These ancestral divisions of labor
fostered sexually asymmetric cultural values and expectations
whereby different traits and affordances became differentially valu-
able in and to men and women, creating a feedback loop between
culture and our evolved psychology; culture and psychology co-
evolved. Sex differences in value that emerged across a range of
relationship domains—from mate value to kin value—would have
been maintained by individual expectations and cultural norms, ulti-
mately manifesting in differences in the criteria of status. A diagram-
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3
HUMAN STATUS CRITERIA

matic depiction of our model of the evolution of human status criteria
is shown in Figure 1.
General Hypotheses About Status Criteria
The status criteria linked with each of the different major forms of
human relationships, shown in Table 1, are expected to be partially
overlapping and partially distinctive. The mate value of a woman, for
example, can be an asset to potential mates, as well as to her kin
group—particularly in cultures in which marriage is arranged by kin
and women are exchanged between groups (e.g., Apostolou, 2007).
The higher a woman’s mate value, the higher her value to kin in
forming political alliances and in obtaining desirable wives and other
resources in exchange (e.g., Apostolou, 2013; Hart & Pilling, 1960).
Analogously, a man’s athletic prowess and hunting ability can in-
crease his value as a coalition member, as a kin member, as a
reciprocal ally, and as a mate (Gurven & von Rueden, 2006; Hill &
Hurtado, 1996; Patton, 2005).
The utility of differentiating the different classes of value is not
that these classes are entirely independent (they are not), but rather
that some criteria differentially affect one’s value within each of
these major forms of human relationships. We may tolerate lack of
reciprocation from kin, for example, but refuse to tolerate it in a
nonkin dyadic alliance. We may value strength or bravery more
strongly in a coalitional partner than a reciprocal exchange partner,
or value agreeableness more in an exchange partner than coalition
member. To take another example, a substantial cost may be
incurred if one’s mate has an extramarital affair, but not if a friend
has an extramarital affair (unless it is with one’s mate).
Costs and benefits differ depending on the nature of the rela-
tionships. It is plausible to hypothesize that distinct psychological
mechanisms have evolved for each of these relationships to the
degree that the constituents of value differ for each, the costs
carried by relationship violations differ for each, and hence the
adaptive problems one must solve to extract the relevant value
differ for each (cf., Tooby & Cosmides, 1988). Thus, we expect
some degree of overlap in the status criteria between relationship
domains. We delineate hypotheses and predictions that apply
equally to women and men and those that differ between the sexes.
Status Criteria Central to Both Sexes
Given the multitude of adaptive problems that are the same for
men and women, we expect that many of the criteria that humans
use to assess and allocate social status will not be sex-
differentiated (see Figure 2).
Health would have been central to the social value of men and
women across all fitness-relevant domains (Sugiyama, 2015); thus,
we hypothesize that overall health will be equally important for
both women and men. We also hypothesize that many components
of kin-support, as well as general aspects of group value and social
exchange value, will not be sex-differentiated because many as-
pects of value in each domain are not sex-differentiated. Specifi-
cally, we predict that criteria related to kin-alliances will be central
to both men and women because kin would have tended to be the
strongest allies and would have provided a consistent pool of
shared resources to draw from. Having high-status and supportive
kin members would have been beneficial for both men and women
for raising social-exchange value. Being a valuable member across
domains (e.g., being trusted, willingness to share resources) should
be central to both men’s and women’s status because others would
be more willing to reciprocate or initiate fitness-enhancing social
exchanges. Thus, we expect that many aspects of group and social
value would not be sex-differentiated. We also do not expect direct
reproductive output, such as having children, to have different
impacts on the status of men and women.
Sex-Differentiated Status Criteria
Sex differences are only expected to occur within the delimited
domains in which women and men have recurrently faced different
adaptive problems over human evolutionary history (Buss, 1995).
In contrast, where they have faced similar adaptive problems,
psychological similarity is expected. We hypothesize that status
criteria will differentially impact men and women in domains
where there are sex differences in the perceived components of
relational value. Examples of cues that are hypothesized to impact
the relational value and consequent status of men and women
differently shown in Figures 3 and 4, respectively.
Figure 1. Model of the evolution of human status criteria from ultimate to proximal causes of manifest criteria.
See the online article for the color version of this figure.
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4BUSS ET AL.

Status Criteria Central to Men
Given that men participated in coalitional hunting and raiding at
higher rates than women throughout human evolution, we hypoth-
esize that components of value relevant to the success of hunting
and warfare coalitions will be more central to the status of men
than women. The success of male coalitions would have depended,
in part, on their ability to coordinate actions in the pursuit of
collective goals; thus, we expect that leadership qualities will be
more central to men’s status than women’s. This is not the same as
claiming that leadership abilities will not enhance women’s status,
but rather that leadership abilities will be more crucial for men’s
status than women’s, on average. Another major component of
coalitional success is the ability and willingness of its members to
achieve shared goals (e.g., tracking and killing an animal, defeat-
ing a rival group). This would depend heavily on men’s athleti-
cism, physical formidability, bravery, and likelihood of defection,
so we expect men’s status to hinge more heavily on these criteria
than women’s status. Many of these traits would also have been
relevant to a man’s ability and willingness to protect their mates
and offspring, which strengthens our expectation that these com-
ponents of status criteria will be more central to men than women.
Because resource acquisition ability would have been a critical
component of men’s mate value, we also expect that components
of the ability to provide resources (e.g., hunting ability) will be
more central to men’s status than women’s status. This does not
imply that ability to acquire resources will not be important to
women’s status (it should), but rather that it will be more important
to men’s than to women’s status.
Status Criteria Central to Women
For reasons outlined previously, ancestral women would have
been responsible for most domestic duties (e.g., processing food,
childcare). Thus, we hypothesize that women’s status will depend
more on domestic skills than will men’s status. This prediction
may obtain more strongly in traditional societies. Cultural shifts
toward egalitarian domestic duty sharing in many Western cultures
may diminish or even eliminate these sex differences in more
modern countries. We also hypothesize that physical attractiveness
will be more central to women’s status than men’s due to the
greater weight physical attractiveness has played in women’s mate
value over evolutionary time, particularly in long-term mating
contexts (Buss, 1989; Buss & Schmitt, 2019). A woman’s attrac-
tiveness would have impacted her ability to access high-resource
mates and, consequently, her relational value to kin and social
partners.
Mating Strategy and Status Criteria
High status— obtained by embodying the criteria imposed by
others— enables an individual to carry out his or her preferred
sexual strategy, whereas low status inhibits an individual’s ability
to carry out his or her preferred sexual strategy. For men, this tends
to mean better odds of obtaining— or failing to obtain—long-term
mates of high desirability (e.g., youthful, physically attractive, not
promiscuous), as well as access to multiple mates or short-term
opportunistic copulations. For women, this tends to mean better
odds of obtaining— or failing to obtain—a long-term mate or
marriage partner who invests heavily (e.g., commitment, parental
investment), a marriage partner of high mate desirability (e.g., one
Table 1
Abstract Classes of Relational Value and Conceptual Definitions
Classes of relational value Conceptual definition
Kin value Value to immediate and extended family.
Coalitional value Value to specific coalitions, collective action, hunting, and war parties.
Mate value Value to one’s mate and prospective mates.
Reciprocal exchange value Value as partner across one-shot and repeated dyadic interactions (e.g.,
trading, alliance).
Figure 2. Model depicting examples of cues central to the relational
value of both men and women across domains that ultimately result in
universal status criteria.
Figure 3. Examples of cues that are expected to be more central to the
relational value and status of men.
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HUMAN STATUS CRITERIA

with resources), and under some circumstances, being able to
attract short-term sexual liaisons and access the resources and
possibly genes of high status men. Here we test the prediction that
carrying out one’s preferred sex-typical sexual strategy will be
associated with higher status, whereas being unable to carry out the
preferred sexual strategy will be associated with lower status.
Thus, we hypothesize that criteria central to men’s sexual strategy
(e.g., having a young, fertile mate) will have greater impacts on the
status of men than women, and that criteria central to women’s
sexual strategy (e.g., securing high-resource mates) will impact
women’s status more than men’s status.
The Current Study
No systematic analysis has detailed the relative impacts that
various personal characteristics have on status and reputational
regard across cultures. No studies explicitly test which actions,
events, qualities, and associations reliably affect the status of men
and women differently across cultures. There remains a gap in the
scientific understanding of status—the precise qualities, actions,
and events that humans use to evaluate the status of other individ-
uals. To fill this lacuna, we employ ratings of the status impacts of
240 specific events, characteristics, and behaviors, and from 14
countries, from Brazil to Zimbabwe, to explore and document
human status criteria, and we test basic predictions based on
hypotheses drawn from evolutionary metatheory about sex differ-
ences and sex similarities in human status criteria.
To summarize, we hypothesize that (a) men’s and women’s
status criteria will depend equally on skills and characteristics that
increased their relational value equally across domains throughout
our evolutionary history and (b) that that there will be sex differ-
ences in status criteria where ancestral relational value differed
between the sexes. Regarding status criteria central to both men
and women, we predict that health, characteristics related to gen-
eral group and social exchange value, having children, and kin
alliances, will not have sex-differentiated status impacts. Regard-
ing sex differences, we predict that men’s status will be more
dependent on characteristics relating to willingness and ability to
protect, athleticism, leadership qualities, and resource acquisition
abilities, whereas women’s status will be more dependent on
characteristics relating to reproductive value (e.g., attractiveness)
and domestic skills. Importantly, we predict that sex-differentiated
aspects of men’s and women’s sexual strategies will also have
sex-differentiated status impacts.
Method
Participants
A total of 2,751 (1,487 women) people from 14 countries across
five continents participated in this research. The sex-specific sam-
ple size and average participant age for each country is presented
in Table 2.
Materials and Procedure
Generation of status-affecting items. The status-affecting
items—the acts, characteristics, and events that raise or lower
Figure 4. Examples of cues that are expected to be more central to the
relational value and status of women.
Table 2
International Sample Sizes and Ages
Sample
Sample size Age of men Age of women
Men Women Total MSD M SD
Brazil 100 100 200 27.24 10.79 24.40 8.98
China 113 93 206 NA NA NA NA
Colombia 100 100 200 21.14 4.13 19.80 2.15
Eritrea 118 64 182 21.41 2.97 19.85 1.65
Estonia 46 92 138 21.96 5.22 22.00 5.08
Germany 83 148 231 23.84 4.92 24.11 5.68
Guam 35 70 105 20.74 6.06 19.99 4.26
Japan 100 100 200 19.18 1.01 20.03 1.35
Korea 100 102 202 22.86 3.23 22.64 3.40
Poland 48 36 84 23.04 1.75 22.17 1.89
Romania 55 42 97 34.53 11.22 30.86 13.72
Russia 100 100 200 NA NA NA NA
U.S. 143 362 505 22.16 5.43 24.27 6.74
Zimbabwe 123 78 201 20.61 3.19 20.38 2.68
Total sample 1,264 1,487 2,751 23.23 4.99 22.54 4.80
Note.NA⫽age data were not collected in this sample. The Romania sample is a convenience sample of
Romanian Gypsies in Roma.
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6BUSS ET AL.

status—were generated through a mix of act-nomination proce-
dures and expert input. Early in the item generation process, one
sample of American undergraduates nominated actions, character-
istics, and events that could increase status and reputation, while a
second sample nominated actions, characteristics, and events that
could decrease status and reputation. We culled the nominations,
eliminating redundancies, grammatical errors, and vague state-
ments, but erred on the side of overinclusion, retaining all acts and
events that had even partial distinctiveness. This process resulted
in 175 status-affecting items.
Additional items were added stochastically over time as a result
of discussions with anthropologists and psychologists who had
specific knowledge of different cultures. For example, our Chinese
collaborator suggested that having a male child may increase status
in China more than having a female child, so two items were added
to reflect this nuance. Additional items were added to test the
specific hypotheses outlined above. For example, “showing brav-
ery in the face of danger” was added to test the hypothesis about
sex-linked status criteria as a function of the different forms of
male and female coalitions. Researchers who collected cross-
national data added additional items over time. In total, this gen-
eration process resulted in 240 status-affecting actions, character-
istics, and events.
We make no claims that this list is exhaustive. In principle,
thousands of acts, events, characteristics, and interactions have
consequences for increasing or decreasing an individual’s status.
Moreover, some status criteria will be specific to novel forms of
modern culture, which change constantly. For example, skill at
computer coding or data visualization could not have been status
criteria among human ancestors, but among some modern subcul-
tures these skills are highly valued. Consequently, no list of status
criteria will be exhaustive or complete. Rather, this study provides
an initial foray into the large gap in understanding what causes
people’s status to rise or fall. It also provides initial cross-cultural
tests of hypotheses about universal and sex-differentiated status
criteria.
Status-impact ratings. Respondents across the 14 countries
rated the distinct impact of the full list items available at the time
of data collection
1
according to the prompt:
“In this study, we are interested in the effects of certain events and
behaviors on the status and reputation of the persons who perform
these acts or experience these events. Some will be likely to increase
a person’s status and reputation in the eyes of their peer group; others
will be likely to decrease their status and reputation in the eyes of their
peer group.
Please use the scale below (ranging from ⫹4to⫺4) to rate the likely
effects of each act or event on status and reputation (1) for males
(event happens to or is performed by a man) and (2) for females (event
happens to or is performed by a woman). For some events and
behaviors, the effects on status and reputation may be the same for
men and women; for others, the effects on status and reputation may
be different for men and women.”
Respondents rated each item twice— once in reference to the
impact on men, and once in reference to the impact on women.
Researchers who collected data within each country translated the
prompt and items into the language most relevant to their culture
or country using a three-step process. First, a bilingual speaker
translated the items into the relevant language. Then, a second
bilingual speaker translated the items back into English. Finally,
a third bilingual speaker resolved any discrepancies between the
original wording and the back-translation. The full instructions
sent to cross-national collaborators are provided in the Open
Science Framework (OSF) materials (https://osf.io/2av76/).
Astute readers may notice that the rating prompt is somewhat
double-barreled because it asked raters to think about the “effect
on status and reputation.” Theoretically, these constructs are ex-
pected to overlap to a large degree, but they are partially distinct.
It is possible that this conflation could qualitatively affect our
results. Given that this archival dataset was collected over a decade
ago, we could not directly address this issue. We did, however,
attempt to investigate the likelihood that the double-barreled
prompt led to qualitatively different results than ratings of only
status or only reputation.
We asked separate groups of American raters to rate all 240
status-affecting items using the same prompt as in the international
data collection, but we altered to prompt throughout to say either
only “effects on status” (n⫽41) or only “effects on reputation”
(n⫽34). These more specific ratings exhibited high interrater
agreement (ICCs ranged from .76 –.92). Moreover, they were very
highly intercorrelated for both male and female targets (M
r
⫽.84,
range ⫽.80 –.92), as well as with the ratings from every country
based on the original prompt (M
r
⫽.85, range ⫽.73–.95). The full
correlation matrix between status-only ratings, reputation-only rat-
ings, and international ratings based on the original prompt is
provided in the OSF materials (https://osf.io/2av76/). The high
correlations between ratings based on different prompts suggest
that results based on ratings from the original prompt are unlikely
to be qualitatively— or even statistically— different had it speci-
fied only status or only reputation.
Item clustering. We directed four trained research assistants
to group the status-affecting items according to shared content,
which we labeled accordingly (content clusters). We then further
grouped these content-clusters into theoretically relevant domains
(domain clusters) according to our hypotheses. Groupings were set
before analyses were conducted. Some of the status-affecting items
did not fit neatly into our hypotheses (e.g., aspects of personality,
drug use), so we grouped them separately for use in exploratory
analyses. In cases in which the items potentially overlapped across
domain or content clusters, we opted to keep categories separate
rather than to merge them to preserve unique information. Dis-
crepancies in grouping decisions were resolved through discus-
sion. A table showing the placement of all 240 items within
clusters and domains is presented in the OSF materials (https://osf
.io/2av76/).
Analytic Strategy
We examined the magnitudes of sex differences in status criteria
across three levels of analysis: item level, content level, and
domain level. The item level assessed sex differences at the level
of specific items (e.g., “being brave in the face of danger”; “being
bold”; “being physically strong”; “being a good fighter”). The
1
Because the list of status-affecting items was added to over time, the
number of items available for participants in each country to rate also
changed. Due to a researcher miscommunication, Eritrean participants only
assessed the status criteria pertaining to their own sex.
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7
HUMAN STATUS CRITERIA

content level meta-analyzed the item-level sex differences within
content clusters (e.g., bravery, formidability). Finally, the domain-
level analyses meta-analyzed the item-level sex differences ac-
cording to domain clusters (e.g., ability and willingness to protect).
Item level analyses. To examine the overall effect of referent-
sex on the status impacts on each of the 240 acts, events, or
characteristics across the 14 countries, we used the lme4 package
in R (Bates et al., 2015) to conduct multilevel regression analyses
that accounted for the nested structure of the data (i.e., ratings
nested within participants who are nested within countries) by
allowing random intercepts for both participants and countries, and
random slopes for countries, while controlling for raters’ reported
gender. In addition to Bonferroni-correcting each pvalue for alpha
inflation from 240 tests, we also adopted a critical alpha level of
.005 (cf., Benjamin et al., 2018). After adopting this extremely
conservative significance threshold, we still had 80% power to
detect statistically significant effects for even practically trivial
differences because of our large sample size and within-subjects
design. We therefore computed classical Cohen’s dfor each ef-
fect—which is desirable because it is design-blind and comparable
across designs (Morris & DeShon, 2002)—and relied on conven-
tional cutoffs to evaluate the practical significance of effects.
Content and domain level meta-analyses. After computing
item-level effects, we meta-analyzed sex differences across the
prespecified content and domain clusters. To do so, we grouped
effects according to content (e.g., cleanliness,cooking ability) and
theoretical domain (e.g., domestic skills). We then reverse-coded
effects where warranted so that effects within a content-cluster
were directionally consistent (e.g., “being a bad cook” was
reverse-coded to directionally match the other item in the cooking
ability cluster, “being a good cook”). We subsequently weighted
each effect by its respective sample size and number of countries
sampled and averaged the sex differences within each content and
domain cluster. These aggregated content and domain clusters
provide more powerful, robust, and reliable tests of our hypotheses
because (a) they assess differences across the broader conceptual
and theoretical domain that each item samples, and (b) the ob-
served sex differences are less dependent on the specifics of item
phrasing and item-specific sample sizes.
Results
Item-Level Overview
Of the 240 items rated by participants across the 14 nations, 123
were judged to increase a person’s status among their peers and
117 were judged to decrease status. Figure 5 presents an overview
of the item-level tests of sex differences in status criteria. Most
were expected a priori and fell within the small to medium effect
size range (i.e., Cohen’s dbetween .2 and .5). Most of the items
that exhibited trivial differences (d⬍.2) were either expected not
to differ a priori or were exploratory. The means and standard
deviations of the 15 most beneficial and detrimental status-
affecting items for men and women combined are presented in
Table 3.
In the interest of efficiency and economy of presentation, we
now focus on the content and domain levels of analysis for primary
tests of our hypotheses, highlighting interesting nuances in the
item-level results where relevant. The complete results and plots of
the 240 item-level analyses are provided in the online supplemen-
tal materials.
Status Criteria Central to Both Men and Women
Domain level. We hypothesized that the domains of health,
general group and social value, having children, and kin alliances,
would be equally important to the status of both men and women
(i.e., not sex-differentiated). These hypotheses were supported; the
Figure 5. Distribution of item-level effect sizes (Cohen’s d) arranged from smallest to largest. The dark-shaded
circles represent items that were hypothesized be sex-differentiated, and the light-shaded squares represent items
that were not hypothesized to differ or were exploratory. Dotted lines represent conventional cutoffs for small
(d⫽.2), medium (d⫽.5), and large effects (d⫽.8). Cohen’s dvalues greater than zero favor women and values
less than zero favor men. See the online article for the color version of this figure.
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8BUSS ET AL.

meta-analyzed sex differences are trivial across the domain clus-
ters health,general group and social value,having children, and
kin alliances (see Figure 6).
Content level. Even at the content-cluster level, nearly all sex
differences across the domains of having children,group and
social value,health, and kin alliances were trivial (see Figure 7).
The two exceptions were small male-favoring sex differences in
(a) the insult retaliation cluster, containing items addressing retal-
iation for public insults (e.g., “defending oneself after being
slapped in the face”); and (b) the relationship differential cluster,
Table 3
The 15 Most Status-Increasing and 15 Most Status-Decreasing Criteria for Men and Women
Combined Across Countries
Status-Affecting Item
Status impact
MSD
15 Most Status-Increasing Criteria
Being a trusted group member 3.05 1.23
Being intelligent 2.96 1.29
Getting accepted at a prestigious university 2.95 1.36
Being an exceptional leader 2.80 1.48
Having a wide range of knowledge 2.80 1.25
Being creative 2.71 1.33
Always being honest 2.68 1.52
Being able to speak well in public 2.65 1.36
Having a job that pays well 2.64 1.39
Having a good sense of humor 2.64 1.38
Having an executive position 2.62 1.53
Being kind 2.59 1.33
Being brave in the face of danger 2.56 1.44
Having a college education 2.55 1.53
Being a hard worker 2.53 1.50
15 Most Status-Decreasing Criteria
Failing to perform group task ⫺2.27 1.67
Getting dismissed from school ⫺2.28 1.57
Being lazy ⫺2.29 1.58
Being unable to control one’s sexual behavior when drunk ⫺2.36 1.93
Being unreliable ⫺2.42 1.77
Acting immature or irresponsible ⫺2.51 1.47
Being mean or nasty to others ⫺2.53 1.64
Expressed racist remarks ⫺2.61 1.68
Bringing social shame on one’s family ⫺2.61 1.40
Having bad manners ⫺2.62 1.50
Takes illegal drugs ⫺2.66 1.74
Getting a sexually-transmitted disease ⫺2.70 1.63
Being stupid ⫺2.71 1.47
Being unclean or dirty ⫺2.96 1.49
Being known as a thief ⫺3.30 1.34
Figure 6. Meta-analyzed sex differences within domain clusters that were hypothesized to be central to the
status of both men and women. Dotted lines represent conventional effect size cutoffs. Error bars represent 95%
confidence intervals.
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9
HUMAN STATUS CRITERIA

containing items related to standing within interpersonal relation-
ships (e.g., “having the upper hand in a relationship”).
In summary, many status criteria are not sex-differentiated and
appear to have similar effects across nations sampled in our study,
suggesting possible universality. Acts, characteristics, and events
that are associated with general value to the group and to individ-
uals within the group, value to one’s kin, and physical health are
three candidates for universal status criteria.
Status Criteria More Central to Men
Domain level. We predicted that clusters relevant to the do-
mains of leadership,ability and willingness to protect others,
resource acquisition,athleticism, and men’s sexual strategy (e.g.,
having a young, fertile mate) would be more important to men’s
status than women’s status; we found support for small but reliable
sex differences across all these domains, except for resource ac-
quisition ability (see Figure 8).
Content level. Analysis at the content level revealed addi-
tional interesting nuances (see Figure 9). The overall sex dif-
ference of men’s sexual strategy on status appears to be driven
by medium-sized sex differences in having younger mates,
which has a negative association with women’s status, but a
positive association with men’s status. Additionally, although
the overall domain of resource acquisition ability is not sex-
Figure 7. Plot of universal status criteria, organized by domain-cluster, depicting the average relative status
impact of a given content-specific act, characteristic, or event on men’s and women’s status, as well as the
absolute magnitude of the sex difference (Cohen’s dand 95% confidence intervals). See the online article for
the color version of this figure.
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10 BUSS ET AL.

differentiated, closer examination at the content level revealed
that hunting ability increases men’s status more than it does
women’s.
The domain of leadership also warrants further examination.
Leadership qualities appear more central to men’s than women’s
status at the domain level, but the influence content-cluster in-
creases women’s status about as much as it increases men’s status.
The difference at the domain level appears to be driven by con-
formity, which lowers men’s status more than women’s, and hold-
ing a leadership position, which increases men’s status more than
women’s (see Figure 9).
Status Criteria More Central to Women
Domain level. We found support for the domain-level predic-
tions that domestic skills,attractiveness, and aspects of women’s
sexual strategy (e.g., chastity/purity) would be more central to
women’s status than men’s status (see Figure 10).
Content level. As shown in Figure 11 the content-level anal-
yses further confirmed that all components of attractiveness (i.e.,
hygiene, appearance) and domestic skills (i.e., cooking ability,
parenting skill, and cleanliness) are more central to women’s status
than men’s status across the countries sampled. Sex differences in
the effects of women’s sexual strategy on status are especially
clear at the content level. Fidelity,chastity/purity, and long-term
mating success increase women’s status more than men’s. Sexual
promiscuity lowers the status of both sexes, but lowers it more
dramatically for women than for men (see Figure 11).
Some additional item-level findings are noteworthy. The overall
sex difference in hypergamy that favors women seems to be driven
by item-level differences in (a) “having a spouse who is more
intelligent than oneself” (d⫽0.56; 95% CI [0.35, 0.77]); and (b)
“having a spouse who earns more money than oneself” (d⫽0.84;
95% CI [0.64, 1.04]) which both raise women’s status, but lower
men’s status. Additionally, securing a wealthy mate is equally
beneficial for the status of both men and women at the content
level, but item-level analyses suggest that women’s status is more
damaged than men’s by marrying someone who is poor
(d⫽⫺0.25; 95% CI [⫺0.32, ⫺0.17]). At the item level, being a
virgin is harmful to men’s status but beneficial to women’s status
(d⫽0.81; 95% CI [0.64, 0.98]), and losing one’s virginity before
marriage is detrimental to women’s status but has essentially no
effect on men’s (d⫽⫺0.78; 95% CI [⫺0.93, ⫺0.62]; see online
supplemental materials, Section 1.2, Figure 3). Finally, the sex
difference in the impact of long-term mating success appears to be
driven by the larger decrease in status that women experience upon
failing to secure a mate, or after being divorced—items that
address simply finding a long-term mate tend to be equally ben-
eficial to the status of both men and women (see online supple-
mental materials, Section 1.2, Figure 3).
Exploratory Analyses
Finally, we explored the impacts of content-clusters and items
about which we did not make a priori predictions. As shown in
Figure 12, some interesting sex differences exist at the level of
content clusters that were not predicted. First, drug use and delin-
quency seems to harm men’s status much less than women’s.
These differences are even more pronounced at the item level; for
example, “being able to drink more alcohol than one’s peers”
increases men’s status slightly but decreases women’s status se-
verely (d⫽⫺0.76; 95% CI [⫺0.87, ⫺0.62]; see online supple-
mental materials, Section 1.4, Figure 2). Second, at the content-
level, most of the effects of personality are not sex-differentiated,
but there does appear to be a small bias in extraversion that favors
men (see Figure 12).
For the most part, these exploratory effects do not appreciably
differ at the item-level, but there are some notable exceptions.
First, “crying in front of one’s friends” is much more damaging to
men’s status than women’s (d⫽0.63; 95% CI [0.50, 0.77]; see
online supplemental materials, Section 1.4, Figure 5). Second, the
sex difference in the effect of gender-prototypically on status is
Figure 8. Meta-analyzed sex differences within domain clusters that were hypothesized to be more central
men’s status than women’s status. Dotted lines represent conventional effect size cutoffs. Error bars represent
95% confidence intervals.
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11
HUMAN STATUS CRITERIA

trivial at the content-level of analysis, but the items within that
cluster—“acting masculine” and “acting feminine”—are the most
sex-differentiated items in our data, with respective Cohen’s d
values of ⫺1.80 (95% CI [⫺2.12, ⫺1.48]) and 2.20 (95% CI [1.96,
2.45]). Acting masculine lowers women’s status but raises men’s;
and acting feminine lowers men’s status but raises women’s (on-
line supplemental materials, Section 1.4, Figure 3).
Results Summary
An overview of our meta-analytic results at the domain level
according to our hypotheses is shown in Figure 13. The domain-level
results largely support our hypotheses: we found only trivial sex
differences in domains that were hypothesized to be equally important
to both men and women. We also found sex differences in all but one
of domains that were hypothesized to be sex-differentiated. The sole
exception centered on resource acquisition ability, for which there
was a sex difference in the predicted direction, but with a trivial effect
size, mostly driven by the effect of hunting skills.
Discussion
This 14-nation study provides the first systematic examination
of (a) the detailed criteria used by humans to assess and allocate
Figure 9. Plot of status criteria central to men, depicting the average relative status impacts on men and women
as well as the absolute magnitude of the sex difference (Cohen’s dand 95% confidence intervals). See the online
article for the color version of this figure.
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12 BUSS ET AL.

status; and (b) the impacts that specific acts, characteristics, and
events have on the status of men and women. Drawing on evolu-
tionary metatheory, we hypothesized that human status criteria
reflect numerous and specific evolved preferences, values, and
expectations across the full range of evolutionarily recurrent rela-
tionships, such as mating relationships, coalitional relationships,
familial relationships, and social exchange partnerships. We there-
fore expected the criteria by which men and women are evaluated
to be similar across many domains, and that sex differences in
status criteria would exist in domains where components of rela-
tionship value differed for men and women across our evolution-
ary history. Data from 14 countries on the status-impacts of a
multitude of acts, characteristics, and events provide preliminary
support for our theory of human status criteria.
Status Criteria Shared by Men and Women
At the core of human status criteria is a set of traits that would
have been valuable in both men and women across the ancestral
social landscape. Being healthy, having strong kin alliances, and
embodying characteristics generally valuable across relationship
domains—such as trustworthiness, willingness to share resources
with others, and having a wide range of knowledge—are central to
the status of both men and women among their peers. These
Figure 10. Meta-analyzed sex differences within domain clusters that were hypothesized to be more central
women’s status than men’s. Dotted lines represent conventional effect size cutoffs.
Figure 11. Plot of status criteria central to women, organized by domain-cluster, depicting the average relative
status impacts on men and women as well as the absolute magnitude of the sex difference (Cohen’s dand 95%
confidence intervals). See the online article for the color version of this figure.
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13
HUMAN STATUS CRITERIA

qualities render both men and women valuable as mates, as dyadic
allies, as kin members, and as coalition members—and apparently
do so for men and women equally.
The only nontrivial sex difference we observed across the set of
content clusters that we predicted to be the same for men and
women was “retaliating after an insult”; results showed that this
act is not as beneficial to women’s status as men’s. In hindsight,
this difference makes sense on Nisbett’s (1993) theory of the role
of violence in honor. He hypothesized that men who failed to
respond with strong retaliation after public insult would suffer
large blows to their status, particularly among men living in
ecological conditions in which reputation for retaliation deterred
other men from encroaching on critical and purloinable resources.
Future work could test predictions from this hypothesis by study-
ing the status impacts of retaliation in cultures that vary in these
ecological conditions, such as contrasting herding cultures with
agrarian cultures, cultures with weak versus strong systems of law
enforcement, and so on. Aside from this sole sex difference that we
failed to predict a priori, the numerous status criteria that are not
sex-differentiated reflect the broad array of adaptive problems and
components of social value largely shared by men and women.
Sex-Differentiated Status Criteria
We now turn to domains in which we hypothesized that adaptive
challenges and components of social value would have differed
somewhat for men and women across our evolutionary history,
therefore leading to sex-differentiated status criteria. Consistent
with our hypotheses, women’s status differentially hinged on both
physical attractiveness and domestic skills. Although our results
show that physical attractiveness is important to the status of both
men and women, physical attractiveness had a greater effect on
women’s status, in accordance with the hypothesis that ancestral
women’s value across relationships would have been somewhat
more dependent on physical attractiveness than that of men’s. In
contrast, men’s status centered on specific components of coali-
tional value, such as athleticism, bravery, physical formidability,
and aspects of leadership, which by hypothesis was relatively less
central to ancestral women’s relationship value.
We also predicted that men’s status would be more dependent
on wealth, industriousness, education, and career success than
women’s because ancestral men’s value across relationship do-
mains would have been at least partially dependent on resource
acquisition abilities; however, we found no sex differences in these
domains, with the sole exception of hunting skills. The reason for
this is not immediately clear, as it is well established that economic
resources are more central to men’s than to women’s mate val-
ue—a finding robust across several large-scale cross-cultural stud-
ies (Buss, 1989; Buss & Schmitt, 2019; Walter et al., 2020).
Perhaps our reasoning about this domain was flawed and we
should not have expected sex differences across such a broad array
of resource acquisition abilities. After all, any person who could
reliably access resources would be valuable across many do-
mains—regardless of their sex. Considering these findings, this
hypothesis should be revised to expect sex differences only in the
Figure 12. Plot of exploratory status criteria depicting the average relative status impacts on men and women
as well as the absolute magnitude of the sex difference (Cohen’s dand 95% confidence intervals). See the online
article for the color version of this figure.
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14 BUSS ET AL.

specific types of resource acquisition that would have made a
larger impact on the value of ancestral men than women, such as
the robust sex difference in the impact of hunting ability. Alter-
natively, it is possible that resource acquisition abilities, broadly
construed, have a more significant impact on the relative status of
men and women in real-world situations involving mate selection
than would be suggested by subjects’ responses to the items in our
study. Future research will need to test this revised hypothesis
more explicitly.
Sexual strategies and status. We found support for the pre-
diction that sexual strategies are associated with status for both
men and women. Aspects of men’s sexual strategy, such as secur-
ing short-term mating opportunities, being generous to potential
mates, and attracting young, fertile mates were indeed more central
to men’s status than women’s status. Contrary to predictions, we
did not find sex differences in the status impacts of having a
faithful mate or forgiving infidelity; both were predicted to affect
men’s status more than women’s status based on the stronger
selection pressures that cuckoldry has exerted on men’s fitness.
The impacts of sexual strategy on women’s status, in contrast,
center on criteria reflecting chastity, purity, fidelity, and lack of
promiscuity. These differences in the impacts of sexual strategy on
the status of men and women closely mirror the sex-specific
criteria that are desired in potential mates (Buss & Schmitt, 2019).
Figure 13. Overall meta-analyzed sex differences for each domain, grouped according to our hypotheses.
Dotted lines represent common Cohen’s deffect-size cutoffs. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
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15
HUMAN STATUS CRITERIA

Men and women who embodied these criteria could have used
their resulting status to further their preferred sexual strategies,
which likely upregulates self-esteem and further increases ability
to pursue preferred sexual strategies (Schmitt & Jonason, 2019).
Masculinity and femininity. The large sex differences in the
impacts of acting masculine and feminine found in our exploratory
analyses deserve further consideration for three reasons— because
they were not predicted by our model, because they appear to have
profound status consequences, and because they show the largest
sex-differentiated status consequences in the entire 14-nation
study. Prior research has found that masculine traits include as-
sertive, forceful, has leadership abilities, is willing to take risks,
dominant, and has a strong personality, and feminine traits include
affectionate, sympathetic, sensitive to the needs of others, under-
standing, compassionate, warm, tender, and gentle (Gaudreau,
1977). Other research has found that both masculine and feminine
traits can have positive group-beneficial qualities as well as neg-
ative group-harmful qualities. For example, the negative aspects of
masculinity (unmitigated agency) include making decisions with-
out consulting others involved in them, ridiculing someone in the
presence of the group, and instructing others to perform menial
tasks rather than doing them oneself (Buss, 1990). Negative as-
pects of femininity (unmitigated communion) include walking out
of a store knowing one has been short-changed without saying
anything, tolerating an insult without retorting, and “Agreeing that
I was wrong even though I wasn’t” (Buss, 1990). It appears that
participants’ folk concepts track more closely the positive aspects
of masculinity and femininity than the negative aspects because
both are associated with higher sex-specific status.
Theoretical Implications and Future Directions
Taken together, these findings offer evidence that manifest
human status criteria reflect evolved mechanisms designed to
assess and order conspecifics according to sex-specific fitness
affordances. Manifest status is a combination of all the numerous
acts, characteristics, and events that we have examined here, and
undoubtedly many that we have not examined. The sex differences
in status criteria, ranging from small to medium in effect size, have
substantial practical and theoretical implications that offer many
potential directions for future study across psychological research.
Evolutionary implications. The differences in the impacts of
a given attribute or ability for men and women quickly compound.
Over human evolutionary history, these small effects would have
had profound fitness consequences. For example, men who
achieved high status by virtue of their value as a coalition member
and as a potential mate would have been preferentially sought out
by desirable coalitions and desirable mates—something known to
occur in many cultures, for example among Ache men who attain
status from their hunting skills (Hill & Hurtado, 1996). Similarly,
women who achieved high status by virtue of their value in
different relationships or alliances would have been preferentially
sought, would have obtained more valuable mates, and would have
possessed social capital beneficial to kin and offspring. Over
evolutionary time, these differences would have created and sus-
tained selection pressures that further maintained the patterns of
behavior, values, attitudes, thoughts, feelings, and cultural norms
and status criteria present in modern human cultures.
Of course, we are not denying that culture can either amplify or
diminish the magnitude of such sex differences through socializa-
tion. Nor are we denying that various cultures provide distinct
kinds of opportunities for the development and expression of these
sex differences. However, positing that these sex differences are
rooted in evolutionary processes can explain the fact that such
differences appear to be culturally universal. The available evi-
dence suggests that these phenomena cannot be explained solely in
terms of the arbitrary social creation and enforcement norms and
values imposed by one dominant group. Whatever our attitudes
may be toward such norms and values, evolutionary biological
analyses are crucial to a full understanding of their origins.
Mismatches between ancestral and modern environments.
There exist known mismatches between ancestral and modern
environments (Li, van Vugt, & Colarelli, 2018). The underlying
mechanisms that evaluate social value and drive status criteria,
therefore, do not necessarily reflect reliable differences in social
value in the modern world.
For example, physical formidability may have been critical to
ancestral male coalitions that required feats of strength and psy-
chological bravery to prevail in small-group warfare or large-game
hunting. The fact that we found that these qualities continue to
contribute to men’s status may reflect one such mismatch in the
modern environment; aside from delimited athletic contests, there
is no evidence that physical formidability directly contributes to
the success of coalitions in business settings, university settings, or
among teams of computer programmers. On the other hand, for-
midability and bravery may continue to be relevant social assets in
protecting kin, mates, and friends from physical assault or sexual
assault, for example as implied by the “bodyguard hypothesis”
(Wilson & Mesnick, 1997). Future research is needed to identify
which status criteria continue to contribute to social value and
which are archaic vestiges of adaptive problems no longer relevant
in modern environments.
Another interesting direction would be to study whether and
how certain behaviors that were status-enhancing in our ancestral
past are now maladaptive. For example, men’s participation in
violent coalitional contests may have been adaptive in the ancestral
past as way to display bravery and physical prowess, and ulti-
mately increase their status—selecting for motivations in young
men to pursue those activities. In many modern cultures, these
motivations might lead young men to engage in activities that have
negative social consequences, no longer increase status, reduce the
chances of attracting a mate, or are otherwise detrimental to
fitness. For instance, the growing body of research suggesting that
the disproportionate amount of time young men invest in violent
multiplayer video games lowers their physical fitness, economic
prospects, and attractiveness to women (e.g., Dorn, & Hanson,
2019) provides some evidence of a potential mismatch between
evolved status criteria and the modern world.
Levels of abstraction. The current conceptual framework and
limited empirical research partially elides a key issue: levels of
abstraction in status criteria. Looking across cultures, one culture
might value hunting ability, another a medical degree, and a third
entrepreneurial achievement. At a higher level of abstraction,
however, these seemingly diverse status criteria may simply em-
body traits or skills relevant to the generation or acquisition of
socially valued benefits within a specific cultural context. Simi-
larly, those in Canada might esteem hockey ability, those in
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16 BUSS ET AL.

Europe soccer skill, and indigenous Amazonians success in chest-
pounding duals (Chagnon, 1983); but at a higher level of abstrac-
tion, all are components of athletic prowess or formidability.
What appears at lower-order levels to be culturally variable
status criteria may in fact be universal status criteria at a higher
level of abstraction. Deciding the appropriate level of abstraction
will therefore be critical in accurately understanding cultural vari-
ability in status criteria. Future theoretical and empirical work will
need to address this complicated, and perhaps only somewhat
tractable, issue of mapping culturally specific status criteria at the
correct level of abstraction.
Conceptualizations of status. There are several conceptual-
izations of hierarchical rank in the literature. For example, theo-
retical distinctions are made between power, rank, dominance-
based status, prestige-based status, reputational regard, and status
broadly conceptualized; these distinctions are actively debated
(Cheng et al., 2013; Galinsky, Rucker, & Magee, 2015; Lukasze-
wski et al., 2016). In this preliminary investigation, we adopted a
relatively broad conceptualization of status as a component of
hierarchical rank based on respect and reputational regard. Inter-
esting differences in the centrality of certain criteria may arise
using alternative conceptualizations of status. A critical direction
for future research will be to empirically examine differences in
the weight given to different criteria under different theoretical
conceptualizations. Such investigations may help to distinguish
empirically between overlapping status constructs and address
definitional issues.
Perspectival shifts in status criteria. Status criteria exist “in
the eyes of the beholder,” or perhaps more precisely “in the
adaptations of the beholder.” Just as individuals’ value changes
depending on who they are being evaluated by and the purpose for
which the evaluation is made, so too should the criteria used to
allocate and assess status. Therefore, status criteria should predict-
ably shift according to characteristics of the individual doing the
evaluating, such as their age, their relationship to the referent, their
own physical characteristics and abilities, and their own status.
Family members, for instance, might place greater weight on a
woman’s fertility and reproductive success when evaluating her
status than will a potential same-sex friend who is evaluating her
as a reciprocal exchange partner because reproductive potential is
more closely tied to kin value than to a reciprocal exchange
partner. Similarly, a man’s coalitional allies may place greater
weight on his bravery and willingness to take risks for the group
than does his mate for whom those risks may imperil the survi-
vorship of her partner and coparent.
Ecological shifts. Future research should examine ecological
shifts in status criteria, where ecology includes both the physical
and cultural environment. Different physical and cultural environ-
ments select for different skills and traits to be valued; status
criteria should shift accordingly. In environments with high para-
site loads, for instance, attractiveness, health, and caretaking skills
may be especially valued and should consequently be weighted
more heavily in status assessments. Likewise, hunting ability
should be weighted more heavily in environments in which large-
game, cooperative hunting is common or in which hunting returns
are extremely variable than in environments characterized by
small-game hunting, fishing, or greater dependence on horticul-
ture.
Other important ecological factors will need to be examined,
such as (a) extant sex ratio, which could lead to status criteria
being more important for the sex that is overrepresented in the
mating market; (b) gender egalitarianism of the culture under
investigation, which could reduce sex differences in status criteria
for some domains, such as domestic skills; and (c) history of
warfare, which might influence the weight placed on characteris-
tics relevant to men’s coalition value in assessing status. A critical
future direction will be to explicitly examine the ecological vari-
ables that predict shifts in specific status criteria, which will
require a larger and more diverse sampling from cultures than we
secured for this initial investigation.
Although our 14-nation study covers a diverse range of coun-
tries and cultures, there are many interesting and diverse popula-
tions that remain understudied (Gurven, 2018). Future research
should sample even more countries and cultures to afford a more
holistic assessment of the nuances in status criteria across ecolo-
gies and cultures. For example, comparisons could be made be-
tween broad cultural characteristics, such as individualistic and
collectivistic cultures (Triandis, 1996), WEIRD-ness (Henrich,
Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010), and between dignity and honor
cultures (Leung & Cohen, 2011), as well as more comparisons of
status criteria between racial groups within countries and between
rural and nonrural populations.
The ontogeny of status criteria. Status criteria undoubtedly
have sex-typical ontogeny curves. Adolescents males, for example,
are generally regarded as lower in status than mature males—at
least by women seeking long-term mates. Adolescent females, in
contrast, accrue status in many cultures for their value as potential
mates (Symons, 1979). The status accorded to older people varies
across cultures, depending on their culture-specific value to kin
and coalitions. In cultures in which older people command valu-
able political resources or valuable information, such as among the
Tiwi of northern Australia (Hart & Pilling, 1960), they would be
predicted to be highly valued.
The status ontogeny curves for men and women are also pre-
dicted to be different, in part because of age differences in the
components of sex-differentiated social value and because of the
variance linked with these components. A woman’s mate value—
which we have shown is central to her status—is highly influenced
by her reproductive value, which declines with age. A man’s mate
value, on the other hand, is more influenced by hunting skills,
which typically peak somewhere between the mid- to late-30s
(Gurven, Kaplan, & Gutierrez, 2006; Hill & Hurtado, 1996;
Walker, Hill, Kaplan, & McMillan, 2002). In Western societies,
financial income peaks between the mid-30s and mid-50s. Thus,
our theory predicts sex-specific ontogeny curves for status, with
men’s generally peaking later than women’s. Men’s resource ac-
crual trajectories are also more variable than women’s reproduc-
tive value trajectories. Consequently, chronological age should be
a stronger predictor of women’s status than men’s status.
The ratings of status impacts in the current study were provided
by relatively young samples of convenience. Consequently, our
findings may generalize better to populations of similarly aged
individuals than to older populations. Future research should sam-
ple a broader range of ages and examine age-related shifts in status
criteria explicitly.
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17
HUMAN STATUS CRITERIA

Conclusion
The current investigation is the first to examine the specific
criteria by which humans evaluate and accord status cross-
nationally. Our theoretical model suggests that human status cri-
teria reflect a complex mixture of evolutionary, environmental,
and cultural forces. Our findings highlight the myriad criteria
central to both men and women, as well as those that are sex-
differentiated. Future research is needed to further examine the
complicated array of factors that led to the evolution and mainte-
nance of numerous and specific human status criteria and the
multitudes of adaptations that have evolved to navigate the com-
plexities of status hierarchies.
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Received December 16, 2019
Revision received April 8, 2020
Accepted April 9, 2020 䡲
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20 BUSS ET AL.