Are We Essential, or Sacrificial? The Effects of Felt Public Gratitude on Essential Worker Recovery Activities During COVID-19.

COVID-19 has been characterized by unprecedented levels of public gratitude to some, but not all, essential workers. In this research, we integrate insights from the stigmatized occupations and gratitude literature to build theory on the positive and negative relationships between such displays of public gratitude and essential workers' recovery activities. We argue that felt public gratitude positively relates to adaptive recovery activities (e.g., exercise) and negatively relates to maladaptive recovery activities (e.g., overdrinking). We further explain how felt public gratitude impacts (mal)adaptive recovery activities through (a) felt invisibility and (b) negative/positive affect. We find support for our predictions in a two-wave survey of 186 corrections officers (Study 1) and an experiment with 379 essential workers across a variety of industries (Study 2).

A trajectories based perspective on status dynamics.

After decades of taking a relatively static view on status, the last few years has seen an increasing interest in better understanding status from a dynamic perspective. In this review, we organize this recent research into three related areas: i) How do people respond to their own potential or actual status change?, ii) How do people respond to others' potential or actual status changes?, and iii) Who strives for status change? We focus specifically on integrating this work around the notion of status trajectories - namely, that people appear to see themselves and others on status trajectories, where past changes and/or current behaviors inform expectations of a 'status future' that they react to, and in some cases actively work to realize or to prevent.

The impact of dynamic status changes within competitive rank-ordered hierarchies.

Jockeying and competing for higher status is an inherent feature of rank-ordered hierarchies. Despite theoretically acknowledging rank changes within hierarchies, the extant literature has ignored the role of competitors' dynamic movements on a focal actor's resulting behavior. By using a dynamic lens to examine these movement in competitive situations, we examine how positive change in a competitor's rank-that is, positive status momentum-affects a focal actor's psychology and resulting performance. We consider the real-world contexts of 5.2 million observations of chess tournaments and 117,762 observations of professional tennis players and find that a focal actor's performance in both cognitive and physical competitions is negatively impacted when facing a competitor with positive momentum. Additionally, 4 experimental studies reveal that a competitor's positive momentum results in the focal actor's positive projection of the competitor's future rank, which, in turn, increases the psychological threat for the actor. Collectively, our findings advance the social hierarchy literature by helping to elucidate the manner in which rank-ordered hierarchies are negotiated and disrupted over time.

Rising stars and sinking ships: consequences of status momentum.

Differences in rank are a ubiquitous feature of social life. Moving beyond the traditional static view of social hierarchy, five studies spanning multiple contexts examined how intertemporal changes in rank influenced people's status judgments. When final rank was held constant, people, products, and institutions were judged as higher status when they had arrived at this position by ascending, rather than descending, the hierarchy; moreover, these judgments affected downstream pricing recommendations, willingness to pay for products, and influence accepted from others. This impact of rank history on status judgments was accounted for by expectations of future status and moderated by the involvement of the self: The self and others are afforded an equivalent status boost for ascending to a given rank; however, only the self is pardoned the status tax that is levied on others for descending to the same rank. The theoretical utility of a dynamic approach to social hierarchy is discussed.

The eyes and ears of status: how status colors perceptual judgment.

To those with high status, abundance is granted. Moving beyond the multitude of objective benefits, the authors explore how status, once conferred, colors the perceptual world people inhabit. In four experiments, participants' status state influenced their judgments of status-relevant features in their environment. Participants in a state of high status reported hearing applause (Experiment 1) and seeing facial expressions (Experiment 2), in reaction to their performance, as louder and more favorable. In addition, expectations of how others will respond--expectations stemming from one's current status state--accounted for this effect (Experiment 3). Finally, differences in judgments between participants experiencing high versus low status were observed only when the target of the evaluation was the self (Experiment 4). These results advance scholars' understanding of the psychological experience of status and contribute to the growing literature on the dominant influence psychological states have on people's judgments of their social world.