A Meta-Analytic Review of the Associations of Personality, Intelligence, and Physical Size with Social Status

Theories have proposed diverse reasons for why individual differences such as personality traits lead to social status attainment in face-to-face groups. We integrated these different theoretical standpoints into a model with four paths from individual differences to status: a dominance, a competence, a virtue, and a micropolitics path. To investigate these paths, we meta-analyzed over 100 years of research on bivariate associations of personality traits, cognitive abilities, and physical size with the attainment of status related outcomes in face-to-face groups (1,064 effects from 276 samples including 56,153 participants). The status related outcome variables were admiring respect, social influence, popularity (i.e., likeability), leadership emergence, and a mixture outcome variable. The meta-analytic correlations we found were largely in line with the micropolitics path, tentatively in line with the competence and virtue paths, and only partly in line with the dominance path. These findings suggest that status attainment depends on the competence and virtue of an individual but also on how individuals can enhance their apparent competence or virtue by behaving assertively, by being extraverted, or through self-monitoring. We also investigated how the relations between individual differences and status related outcomes were moderated by kind of status related outcome, nature of the group task, culture (collectivism/individualism), and length of acquaintance. The moderation analysis yielded mixed and inconclusive results. The review ends with directions for research such as the need to separately assess and study the different status related outcomes.

诸多理论提出了种种原因，用以解释为何个体差异，如人格特质，会导致面对面群体中的社会地位获得。我们将这些不同的理论观点整合到一个模型中，该模型从个体差异到地位包含了四条路径：支配路径、能力路径、美德路径和微观政治路径。为探究这些路径，我们对过去一百年的研究进行了元分析，这些研究探讨了人格特质、认知能力和身体尺寸与面对面群体中地位相关结果的双变量关联（包括276个样本和56,153名参与者的1,064个效应）。地位相关的结果变量包括钦佩尊重、社会影响力、受欢迎程度（即令人喜爱）、领导力出现以及混合结果变量。我们发现的元分析相关系数主要与微观政治路径一致，试探性地与能力路径和美德路径一致，而仅部分与支配路径一致。这些发现表明，地位的获得不仅取决于个体的能力和美德，还取决于个体如何通过 assertive 的行为、外向的性格或自我监控来提升其显性能力和美德。我们还研究了个体差异与地位相关结果之间的关系如何受到地位相关结果类型、群体任务性质、文化（集体主义/个人主义）以及熟人关系长度的调节。调节分析产生了混合且结论不明确的结果。综述以对研究方向的建议结束，例如需要单独评估和研究不同的地位相关结果。