Emotion Constraints: Ego and Social Status

The fact that humans are social animals explains some of the constraints on creativity we experience in groups. As social animals, we seek a legitimate and honorable place, and this is represented by our status in the groups we are part of. Whether or not we are conscious of it, the human need to gain status—or to avoid losing it—is a prime driver of our behavior in groups.

In fact, one way to think of meetings is as status contests in which the participants’ behavior serves to drive their relative social status up or down. It’s easy to see this in conspicuous behaviors like running the critical finite element analysis for the project without being asked. More subtly, status can be affected by body language, by the ways we dress, and by what we say, how we say it, and to whom. Research has shown that people in groups watch behaviors like touching, interruption, and members’ unconscious reactions to ideas as clues for assessing relative status (e.g., Knapp, 1978). Being the one who is touched, who is interrupted, or whose ideas are ignored (for example, by not being written on the board) are all signs of low or decreasing status. In contrast, status can increase if me....