Joey T. Cheng

Authentic and Hubristic Pride: The Affective Core of Self-esteem and Narcissism

Do individuals with high self-esteem enjoy positive interpersonal relationships, or are they aggressive and antisocial? Does narcissism reflect an abundance of self-worth, or inflated self-views driven by an overcompensation for low self-esteem? The present research addresses the apparently two-sided nature of self-esteem and narcissism by distinguishing between two distinct self-regulatory processes (narcissistic self-aggrandizement and genuine self-esteem), and proposing that two distinct facets of pride—authentic and hubristic—form the affective core of each. Specifically, findings demonstrate that when narcissistic and genuine self-esteem are empirically distinguished, genuine self-esteem (along with authentic pride) is positively related to successful social relationships and mental health, whereas narcissistic self-aggrandizement (along with hubristic pride) is positively related to aggression and other antisocial behaviors.

A Naturalist’s View of Pride

Although pride has been central to philosophical and religious discussions of emotion for thousands of years, it has largely been neglected by psychologists. However, in the past decade a growing body of psychological research on pride has emerged; new theory and findings suggest that pride is a psychologically important and evolutionarily adaptive emotion. In this article we review this accumulated body of research and argue for a naturalist account of pride, which presumes that pride emerged by way of natural selection. In this view, pride is prevalent in human life because of the functional and adaptive role it has played in the attainment, maintenance, and communication of social status throughout our evolutionary history.

Gaze allocation in a dynamic situation: Effects of social status and speaking

Human visual attention operates in a context that is complex, social and dynamic. To explore this, we recorded people taking part in a group decision-making task and then showed video clips of these situations to new participants while tracking their eye movements. Observers spent the majority of time looking at the people in the videos, and in particular at their eyes and faces. The social status of the people in the clips had been rated by their peers in the group task, and this status hierarchy strongly predicted where eye-tracker participants looked: high-status individuals were gazed at much more often, and for longer, than low-status individuals, even over short, 20-s videos. Fixation was temporally coupled to the person who was talking at any one time, but this did not account for the effect of social status on attention. These results are consistent with a gaze system that is attuned to the presence of other individuals, to their social status within a group, and to the information most useful for social interaction.

The psychology of social status

The pursuit of social status is a recurrent and pervasive challenge faced by individuals in all human societies. Yet, the precise means through which individuals compete for and effectively acquire social standing remains unclear. Despite a large literature examining the factors that lead to rank differentiation, this body of work currently lacks a unifying framework. The current chapter addresses this gap by proposing the adoption of the Dominance-Prestige Account, an evolutionary framework that proposes two distinct pathways to rank attainment in human societies: dominance, or the use of force and intimidation to induce fear, and prestige, or the sharing of expertise or know-how to gain respect. Here, we show how this account provides a parsimonious explanation for the large body of previously disconnected findings that have emerged on rank attainment, and demonstrate that it offers the additional benefit of explaining why various behaviors, traits, and attributes effectively promote rank, rather than simply describe which of these factors promote rank. In light of its parsimony and explanatory power, we advocate the Dominance-Prestige Account as an empirically grounded framework for organizing, understanding, and generating research on human social rank dynamics.

Gossip as an effective and low-cost form of punishment

The spreading of reputational information about group members through gossip represents a widespread, efficient, and low-cost form of punishment. Research shows that negative arousal states motivate individuals to gossip about the transgressions of group members. By sharing information in this way groups are better able to promote cooperation and maintain social control and order.

The World at 7:00: Comparing the Experience of Situations Across 20 Countries

The purpose of this research is to quantitatively compare everyday situational experience around the world. Local collaborators recruited 5,447 members of college communities in 20 countries, who provided data via a Web site in 14 languages. Using the 89 items of the Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ), participants described the situation they experienced the previous evening at 7:00 p.m. Correlations among the average situational profiles of each country ranged from r = .73 to r = .95; the typical situation was described as largely pleasant. Most similar were the United States/Canada; least similar were South Korea/Denmark. Japan had the most homogenous situational experience; South Korea, the least. The 15 RSQ items varying the most across countries described relatively negative aspects of situational experience; the 15 least varying items were more positive. Further analyses correlated RSQ items with national scores on six value dimensions, the Big Five traits, economic output, and population. Individualism, Neuroticism, Openness, and Gross Domestic Product yielded more significant correlations than expected by chance. Psychological research traditionally has paid more attention to the assessment of persons than of situations, a discrepancy that extends to cross-cultural psychology. The present study demonstrates how cultures vary in situational experience in psychologically meaningful ways.

The Impact of Wealth on Prestige and Dominance Rank Relationships

As Kraus, Tan, and Tannenbaum compellingly argued in their thoughtful target article, there is little doubt that social class has a pervasive influence on human cognition. Here, we build on their article by examining how and why wealth and signals of wealth influence rank dynamics. In our view, a comprehensive account of the impact of social class on psychological functioning must address not only the direct intrapsychic effects of possessing or lacking wealth but also the ways in which wealth and signals of wealth qualitatively alter rank-based social relationships between the haves and have-nots. In other words, how does wealth affect the distribution of social rank and the nature of rank-based social relationships? Within the social sciences, several theoretical models of rank attainment currently prevail, though some have received greater empirical support than others (see Cheng, Tracy, Foulsham, Kingstone, & Henrich, 2013, for a review). In prior work, we have found considerable empirical support for the Dominance-Prestige Account (J. Henrich & Gil-White, 2001), a framework that takes an explicitly evolutionary approach to human social rank dynamics. In our view, this account offers the greatest explanatory power and the most complete integration of the extant empirical knowledge. The major novel contribution of this model is its distinction between freely conferred rank based on respect for a leader’s skills and knowledge (i.e., prestige) and coercively forced rank based on a leader’s ability to invoke fear and intimidate followers (i.e., dominance). Social class inequalities can give rise to differences in both of these two forms of rank, because symbols of class and wealth signal success and skill (and, by implication, promote prestige), yet also result in an ability to wield power and control resources, which can elicit fear and feelings of powerlessness among subordinates (and, by implication, promote dominance). By conceptualizing wealth as a signal and an individual-difference variable that can produce both prestigeand dominance-based hierarchical relationships, we acquire a more nuanced and theoretically rich understanding of the effects of social class on interpersonal relationships and social psychology. Next we discuss this account in detail, first by presenting a brief overview of the Dominance-Prestige Account of rank attainment, then by examining how wealth signals prestige, and finally by examining the ways in which wealth also influences dominance. Throughout this discussion, we focus on wealth, rather than social class more broadly, because we view wealth and resource control as one of the critical conceptual components of class that gives rise to class differences. Although class can also be based on other inequalities, such as educational status and hereditary birthright, these demographics and their associated symbols (e.g., diploma, family name) tend to be less widely advertised, visually salient, or reliably signaled in social interactions, compared with cues of wealth (e.g., jewelry, flashy clothing). For this reason, wealth and cues of wealth provide a better point of entry for examining the effects of class on social interactions, but we hope that in future work the approach delineated below can be fruitfully applied to other aspects of social class.

Naturalism and the Tale of Two Facets

Williams and DeSteno (2010) and Gladkova (2010) question the validity, utility, and theoretical support for the bifurcation of pride into hubristic and authentic facets. Though these commentators highlight unanswered questions and important directions for future research, we argue that the broad, evolutionarily informed framework for the two facets, presented in our target article nonetheless provides the best fit and explanation for the existing pattern of evidence. We offer several empirical suggestions for future studies addressing the questions raised by the commentators, and emphasize the need for emotion researchers to hew closely to empirical data in developing theoretical accounts.

The psychological structure of humility

Psychological inquiry into humility has advanced considerably over the past decade, yet this literature suffers from 2 notable limitations. First, there is no clear consensus among researchers about what humility is, and conceptualizations vary considerably across studies. Second, researchers have uniformly operationalized humility as a positive, socially desirable construct, while dismissing evidence from lay opinion and theological and philosophical traditions suggesting that humility may also have a darker side. To redress these issues, we conducted the first comprehensive, bottom-up analysis of the psychological structure of humility. Here we report 5 studies (total N = 1,479) that involve: (a) cluster analysis and categorization of humility-related words, generated by both lay persons and academic experts; (b) exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of momentary and dispositional humility experiences; and (c) experimental induction of a momentary humility experience. Across these studies, we found converging evidence that humility can take 2 distinct forms, which we labeled “appreciative” and “self-abasing” humility. Appreciative humility tends to be elicited by personal success, involve action tendencies oriented toward celebrating others, and is positively associated with dispositions such as authentic pride, guilt, and prestige-based status. In contrast, self-abasing humility tends to be elicited by personal failure, involves negative self-evaluations and action tendencies oriented toward hiding from others’ evaluations, and is associated with dispositions such as shame, low self-esteem, and submissiveness. Together, these findings provide a systematic and empirically grounded understanding of humility.

Further Thoughts on the Evolution of Pride’s Two Facets: A Response to Clark

In Clark’s thoughtful analysis of the evolution of the two facets of pride, he suggests that the concurrent existence of hubristic and authentic pride in humans represents a “persistence problem,” wherein the vestigial trait (hubristic pride) continues to exist alongside the derived trait (authentic pride). In our view, evidence for the two facets does not pose a persistence problem; rather, hubristic and authentic pride both likely evolved as higher-order cognitive emotions that solve uniquely human—but distinct— evolutionary problems. Instead of being conceptualized as serial homologues, with one the vestigial form of the other, we argue that hubristic and authentic pride are both derived homologues of a vestigial proto-pride emotion that existed in our shared ancestry with other primates.