Joey T. Cheng’s research while affiliated with New York University and other places

Objective: We investigated how these motivations combined within individuals to form unique profiles, and how these different profiles relate to personality traits and team behaviors. Background: Dominance, prestige, and leadership motives each play a key role in shaping social success or failure in gaining social rank and influence. Method: We used latent profile analysis across two samples (engineering student project teams, Nstudent = 1088; working adults, Nworker = 466) to identify profile configurations and how such profiles related to important outcomes. Results: We identified qualitatively distinct profiles: ultra-dominance profile (prominent dominance motive with high prestige and leadership motives); prestigious leadership profile (moderately high prestige and leadership motives, low dominance motive); and weak social power motive profile (low on all three motives). Individuals with the prestigious leadership profile were more likely to emerge as leaders, compared to those with a weak social power motive profile. People with an ultra-dominance profile scored higher on narcissism and tended to perceive themselves as leaders, despite not being deemed more leader-like by teammates. Conclusion: Using a person-centered approach allowed us to identify three power motive profiles across independent samples and generate insights into how these profiles manifest different social behaviors and outcomes.

Individuals high in autistic traits can have difficulty understanding verbal and non-verbal cues, and may display atypical gaze behaviour during social interactions. The aim of this study was to examine differences among neurotypical individuals with high and low levels of autistic traits with regard to their gaze behaviour and their ability to assess peers’ social status accurately. Fifty-four university students who completed the 10-item Autism Quotient (AQ-10) were eye-tracked as they watched six 20-second video clips of people (“targets”) involved in a group decision-making task. Simulating natural, everyday social interactions, the video clips included moments of debate, humour, interruptions, and cross talk. Results showed that high-scorers on the AQ-10 (i.e., those with more autistic traits) did not differ from the low-scorers in either gaze behaviour or assessing the targets’ relative social status. The results based on this neurotypical group of participants suggest that the ability of individuals high in autistic traits to read social cues may be preserved in certain tasks crucial to navigating day-to-day social relationships. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for theory of mind, weak central coherence, and social motivation theories of autism.

People in economically advantaged nations tend to evaluate their life as more positive overall and report greater well-being than people in less advantaged nations. But how does positivity manifest in the daily life experiences of individuals around the world? The present study asked 15,244 college students from 62 nations, in 42 languages, to describe a situation they experienced the previous day using the Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ). Using expert ratings, the overall positivity of each situation was calculated for both nations and individuals. The positivity of the average situation in each nation was strongly related to the economic development of the nation as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI). For individuals’ daily experiences, the economic status of their nation also predicted the positivity of their experience, even more than their family socioeconomic status. Further analyses revealed the specific characteristics of the average situations for higher HDI nations that make their experiences more positive. Higher HDI was associated with situational experiences involving humor, socializing with others, and the potential to express emotions and fantasies. Lower HDI was associated with an increase in the presence of threats, blame, and hostility, as well as situational experiences consisting of family, religion, and money. Despite the increase in a few negative situational characteristics in lower HDI countries, the overall average experience still ranged from neutral to slightly positive, rather than negative, suggesting that greater HDI may not necessarily increase positive experiences but rather decrease negative experiences. The results illustrate how national economic status influences the lives of individuals even within a single instance of daily life, with large and powerful consequences when accumulated across individuals within each nation.

Illuminating the nature of leadership and followership requires insights into not only how leaders and followers behave, but also the different cognitions that underpin these social relationships. We argue that the roots of leader and follower roles and status asymmetries often lie in basic mental processes such as attention and visual perception. To understand not only how but also why leaders’ and followers’ behavioral patterns vary, we focus here on underpinning attentional processes that often drive rank-based behaviors. Methodologically, this focus on basic attentional and perceptual processes lessens the reliance on self-report and questionnaire-based data, and expands our scientific understanding to actual, real-world leadership dynamics. Here, we review the available evidence indicating that leaders and followers differ in whether and how they receive, direct, and pay visual attention. Our review brings together diverse empirical evidence from organization science, primatology, and social, developmental, and cognitive psychology on eye gaze, attention, and status in adults, children, and non-human primates. Based on this review of the cross-disciplinary literature, we propose future directions and research questions that this attention-based approach can generate for illuminating the puzzle of leadership and followership.

Objective Why do dominant leaders rise to power via the popular vote? This research tests whether when people feel threatened by intra-group disorder they desire stronger, more dominant leaders. Methods Participants (N = 1,026) read a vignette that depicts a within-group norm violation. We then used a between-subjects design to randomly assign participants to a specific version of the vignette in which (a) a focal target individual in the scenario varied in their dominance (punitiveness: from no to moderate to strong); and (b) the local group faced little or substantial intra-group conflict and disorder (threat: from low to high). Following this, participants reported how much they endorse the target individuals as leader and the individual’s perceived prestige. Results We find that intra-group conflict motivates a psychology that favors the rise of dominant leaders: Highly punitive individuals (seen as highly dominant) are endorsed as leaders when in-group threat is high, but comparably disfavored when threat is low. Under low threat, non-punitive individuals (who are seen as less dominant) are endorsed as leaders. Subsequent analyses reveal that these shifts in leader preferences are explained by corresponding changes in prestige. Under conditions of high threat, dominance confers prestige, whereas under low threat, dominance suppresses prestige. Tests of mediation further show that the effect of dominance on increased leader support under high threat is mediated by prestige. Conclusions In contexts of threat, such as internal disorder, dominant leaders are favored and gain prestige, owing to their perceived ability to supply benefits such as in mediating internal conflicts.

We test the theoretical and practical utility of the vigilante identity, a self-perception of being the kind of person who monitors their environment for signs of norm violations, and who punishes the perceived norm violator, without formal authority. We develop and validate a measure of the vigilante identity scale (VIS) and demonstrate the scale’s incremental predictive validity above and beyond seemingly related constructs (Studies 1 – 2e). We show that the VIS predicts hypervigilance towards organizational wrongdoing (Studies 2 and 4), punishment intentions and behavior in and of organizations (Studies 3 and 4) as well as in the wider community (Study 1), and is activated under organizational justice failure conditions (Study 3). We maintain that vigilantes can impact organizations and society from both inside and outside organizational walls and we discuss theoretical implications for scholarship on vigilantes, as well as on morality, social norms, and third-party punishment in organizations.

Dominance captures behavioural patterns found in social hierarchies that arise from agonistic interactions in which some individuals coercively exploit their control over costs and benefits to extract deference from others, often through aggression, threats and/or intimidation. Accumulating evidence points to its importance in humans and its separation from prestige—an alternate avenue to high status in which status arises from information (e.g. knowledge, skill, etc.) or other non-rival goods. In this review, we provide an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of dominance as a concept within evolutionary biology, discuss the challenges of applying it to humans and consider alternative theoretical accounts which assert that dominance is relevant to understanding status in humans. We then review empirical evidence for its continued importance in human groups, including the effects of dominance—independently of prestige—on measurable outcomes such as social influence and reproductive fitness, evidence for specialized dominance psychology, and evidence for gender-specific effects. Finally, because human-specific factors such as norms and coalitions may place bounds on purely coercive status-attainment strategies, we end by considering key situations and contexts that increase the likelihood for dominance status to coexist alongside prestige status within the same individual, including how: (i) institutional power and authority tend to elicit dominance; (ii) dominance-enhancing traits can at times generate benefits for others (prestige); and (iii) certain dominance cues and ethology may lead to mis-attributions of prestige. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies’.

Dominant leadership is, surprisingly, on the rise globally. Previous studies have found that intergroup conflict increases followers’ support for dominant leaders, but identifying the potential benefits that such leaders can supply is crucial to explaining their rise. We took a behavioral-economics approach in Study 1 ( N = 288 adults), finding that cooperation among followers increases under leaders with a dominant reputation. This pattern held regardless of whether dominant leaders were assigned to groups, elected through a bidding process, or leading under intergroup competition. Moreover, Studies 2a to 2e ( N = 1,022 adults) show that impressions of leader dominance evoked by personality profiles, authoritarian attitudes, or physical formidability similarly increase follower cooperation. We found a weaker but nonsignificant trend when dominance was cued by facial masculinity and no evidence when dominance was cued by aggressive disposition in a decision game. These findings highlight the unexpected benefits that dominant leaders can bestow on group cooperation through threat of punishment.