Regional and network neural activity reflect men’s preference for greater socioeconomic status during impression formation. Denise M. Barth, Bradley D. Mattan, Tzipporah P. Dang & Jasmin Cloutier. Scientific Reports volume 10, Article number: 20302. Nov 20 2020. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-76847-z
Abstract: Evidence from social psychology suggests that men compared to women more readily display and pursue control over human resources or capital. However, studying how status and gender shape deliberate impression formation is difficult due to social desirability concerns. Using univariate and multivariate fMRI analyses (n = 65), we examined how gender and socioeconomic status (SES) may influence brain responses during deliberate but private impression formation. Men more than women showed greater activity in the VMPFC and NAcc when forming impressions of high-SES (vs. low-SES) targets. Seed partial least squares (PLS) analysis showed that this SES-based increase in VMPFC activity was associated with greater co-activation across an evaluative network for the high-SES versus low-SES univariate comparison. A data-driven task PLS analysis also showed greater co-activation in an extended network consisting of regions involved in salience detection, attention, and task engagement as a function of increasing target SES. This co-activating network was most pronounced for men. These findings provide evidence that high-SES targets elicit neural responses indicative of positivity, reward, and salience during impression formation among men. Contributions to a network neuroscience understanding of status perception and implications for gender- and status-based impression formation are discussed.
Across complementary univariate and multivariate analyses, the present findings reveal consistent evidence of greater sensitivity to status (viz., SES) in men than in women. In line with previous findings6,28, we observed greater activity in brain regions indexing positive evaluations of others26 and social reward/salience (e.g., NAcc, amygdala) as men (but not women) formed impressions of high-SES (vs. low-SES) faces. Seed PLS analyses revealed that preferential responses to high (vs. low) SES in the VMPFC were associated with greater co-activation in contrast images reflecting high SES > low SES within an extended network involved in person evaluation and mentalizing, including the precuneus, temporoparietal junction, insula, and orbitofrontal cortex. This co-activation pattern was similar for women and men, suggesting that despite a greater VMPFC preference for high SES in men, both genders show similar patterns of functional connectivity when they do show a pro-high-SES bias in the VMPFC. Beyond our focal regions of interest involved in person evaluation, an exploratory task PLS analysis revealed a coordinated network of brain regions that was sensitive to high-SES (vs. low-SES) faces. Again, this pattern was only reliably observed for men in our sample. The functional network emerging from these analyses is consistent with greater relevance and/or engagement with status cues in men. Taken together, the findings provide evidence that high versus low SES is associated with neural responses indicative of positivity, reward, and salience during impression formation for men. The present findings are noteworthy for their contribution to a network neuroscience understanding of status perception but also for their implications regarding how gender and status interact to shape our impressions of others. We elaborate on these implications in separate sections below. Additionally, by examining both target and perceiver gender, this work provides greater representation in samples than is often used for psychophysiological studies and avoids the potential pitfall of assuming that women respond to status in the same way that men do66. Indeed, as the present and previous work suggest, this is only sometimes the case.
Toward a network neuroscience approach to social hierarchy perception
The present study is among the first to use a multivariate brain network approach to investigate status-based impression formation. This data-driven approach revealed a functional brain network responsive to perceiving high-SES compared to low-SES people, particularly in men. This network shows considerable overlap with a previously identified set of regions involved in status-based attention6,67 and more broadly with networks believed to support salience detection60,62 and attention61,62. However, the observed co-activation network extended beyond these core networks, possibly implicating broader domain-general networks supporting focused task engagement62,63,64,65. Complementing our ROI approach, which focused on brain regions previously shown to support status-based evaluations6,28, the preferential involvement of this large brain network was also driven primarily by men in our sample (see Fig. 5). Taken together, these findings suggest that men may be especially engaged when forming impressions of high-SES people and that these impressions are likely positive14.
It is worth noting that the inferior parietal cortex emerged as one component of the status-based attention network identified through task PLS analysis. This region has been implicated in computing social distances68,69,70,71,72, showing greater activity for difficult comparisons between two closely ranked individuals compared to easy comparisons between very differently ranked individuals71. The involvement of the inferior parietal cortex in the SES-based functional network suggests that men in our sample may dedicate greater attention to differentiating SES when forming impressions of others, particularly when those individuals are high in SES. This interpretation would be consistent with findings from the human and animal literature that high-status (vs. low-status) individuals more readily attract and/or re-direct attention6,73,74,75,76 and are more easily remembered76.
Implications for status and gender of the perceiver
One key takeaway in the present study is that the participant’s gender consistently altered sensitivity to perceived SES. In multiple regions thought to support status-based evaluations6,25,28, men more reliably showed neural responses that were more indicative of positive impressions for high- versus low-status targets. Men also showed greater coordination for increasing target SES in an extended set of regions implicated in salience, attention, and task engagement as discussed in the preceding section. In other words, men more than women showed evidence of positive evaluations and more deliberative engagement with high-SES faces during impression formation. This finding is consistent with evolutionary psychological accounts suggesting that men more readily display, attend to, and/or pursue higher status18,77,78.
Notably, the effect of perceiver gender on neural responses to target SES was not further modulated by target gender. Based in part on predictions derived from theories of sexual selection19, it has been argued that women and men may prefer different dimensions of status, both for themselves77,78 and for potential heterosexual mates19,20,79. Despite some support for this theory in the behavioral literature, it receives little support from the extant albeit sparse neuroimaging literature on gender and status36. One important caveat is that no fMRI study to date has explicitly invoked a context relevant to mating.
Implications for status and gender in person perception
Operationalizing target status
Status can be conveyed along multiple dimensions ranging from commonly studied attributes like dominance36 and finances23,24,80 to social categories such as race21,22,81 and gender36. One important aspect of this study is its focus on SES instead of dominance, which has perhaps received greater attention so far in neuroimaging studies of gender in hierarchical contexts36. As a measure of social rank, SES comprises an individual’s standing in terms of education, income, and occupational prestige82. Although SES may convey dominance in some contexts, these two constructs are not the same6,83. Accordingly, neural responses to perceived dominance may not reflect responses to status when it is operationalized in terms of SES. Indeed, previous work suggests that VMPFC responses to high status depend on the dimension of status in question, with greater responses for high moral status than for high financial status23,24.
In addition to the dimension of status in question, it is also important to consider the means by which status is conveyed. In the present study, status was conveyed through colored cues previously paired with high or low SES. This approach is particularly important for neuroimaging studies of status due to potential confounds that exist in more naturalistic and subtle cues of status such as facial cues84 and clothing81,85,86,87. For example, clothing can shape impressions of dominance85, competence86,87, and attractiveness88, all of which are imperfectly tied to perceptions of status83. This is important for neuroimaging studies of status for two reasons. First, using such cues makes it difficult to distinguish whether purported effects of social rank may instead be due to related but non-equivalent attributes such as competence. Second, this problem would be compounded when comparing the perception of two groups that stereotypically differ in terms of competence87. The present study largely bypasses these limitations by relying on ascribed SES knowledge through color assignment rather than clothing or facial expressions.
Absence of effects of target gender
Although the gender of perceivers shaped neural responses to target status during impression formation, these responses did not differ based on the gender of targets. This is noteworthy for a few reasons. First, participants did explicitly rate women are more likeable than men after scanning, suggesting that they did attend to gender to some extent. Additionally, previous work has revealed distinct neural correlates of target gender, regardless of whether gender is explicitly processed36,89. Given the relative salience of social category cues such as gender90,91, we anticipated that gender might interact with target status. Indeed, Marsh and colleagues36 observed greater responses in the VMPFC and right amygdala for increasingly dominant body postures of only the woman targets. However, as previously mentioned, the fact that status was based on different dimensions (SES vs. dominance) and antecedents (perceptual attributes vs. person knowledge) may explain these differences. Furthermore, neuroimaging work examining status-based impression formation in the presence of another salient social category (viz., race) also only found effects of status21,22. One possibility is that participants disregarded initial impressions based on gender information by focusing on the available status knowledge to form more individuated impressions92.
The absence of effects of target gender is also noteworthy from the perspective of some proposals arising from evolutionary psychology. Due in part to a lower minimal male investment in child-rearing93, evolutionary psychologists argue that males were frequently engaged in ancestral conflicts within and between groups, resulting in greater natural selection of physical and psychological characteristics associated with dominance in males than in females18. This relationship between sex and social hierarchy cues may also extend to social constructions such as the clothes we wear. For example, previous work has shown that men wearing high-status attire are more readily attended94 and rated as more competent87 than women wearing high-status attire. In contrast with this previous work, the present study showed no unique effects of SES for faces depicting men compared to women. One possibility is that conveying status through person knowledge rather than appearance eliminates potential gender bias in how status shapes social attention and evaluations6.
Alternative interpretation
Prior to concluding, it is worth considering an alternative interpretation of the present work. Given that the impression formation task did not include a control task condition, one could argue that our findings are not related to the status information ascribed to each target during impression formation. In this perspective, one could imagine obtaining similar findings if the faces of women and men were grouped based on other social information than social status such as their preference for different kinds of food. If so, then our findings might mean that men are more sensitive than women to social information in general rather than social status, per se.
Notwithstanding existing research suggesting that, in some instances, women may be more sensitive to social information than men95,96,97, we believe it is more parsimonious to focus our interpretation in the context of status sensitivity, rather than sensitivity to social information more generally, for three reasons. (1) Given that the face stimuli were equated across various dimensions and counterbalanced across participants within gender, we think it would be prudent not to over-generalize our findings to other social information. (2) The present findings are consistent with the literature suggesting greater status-driven perception and behaviors in men10,14,15,16,17,18,98. (3) Assuming that men were more sensitive to social information in general, it is unclear why men didn’t also show greater neural sensitivity to perceived gender, a dimension that has demonstrable biological and psychological relevance as a function of perceiver gender19,20. The present study was focused primarily on SES as the perceived status dimension, finding evidence of greater neural sensitivity to high (vs. low) SES in men compared to women. Importantly, SES is but one possible dimension of social status, being composed of subcomponents (e.g., income, education, occupational prestige) that may or may not elicit the same kinds of evaluations6,28,83. Other social hierarchies that have been studied using fMRI include hierarchies based on dominance/ability/competence31,99, power80,100, and moral character23,24. With few exceptions23,24, these studies have focused on just one hierarchy dimension and often just one gender, usually men. In general, these studies frequently find the VMPFC and NAcc are responsive to high-ranking individuals. Other work by Kumaran and colleagues suggests that the VMPFC in particular may be implicated in updating social hierarchy knowledge in hierarchies involving the self100. However, it is unclear whether these effects are similarly driven by men as they were for SES in the present study. In future research, it will be important to replicate and extend the present work to determine whether men also show greater neural sensitivity to high status compared to women for other status dimensions as well as for social dimensions that are potentially ordinal but not frequently used to delineate hierarchies (e.g., age).
In sum, we believe our present findings can be interpreted as a gender-specific differential in sensitivity to perceived status. However, we do not believe that men’s greater sensitivity to SES in this study precludes the possibility that women (or men) might be more responsive to other social information in other contexts. For example, it is possible that subsequent studies may uncover a preference in women for other dimensions of status such as communal/moral character23,24,77 or that women may value high-SES individuals more than men in certain contexts. These questions among others are ripe for future inquiry and consistent with recent calls to explore how perceiver gender may differentially shape sensitivity to other dimensions of social information66. We hope that this study will pave the way for future work exploring gender differences in sensitivity to different forms of social information.
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