Climbing the social ladder

Abstract

When people think and talk about social status, they often relate it to physical variables such as height, size and numerousity. This have recently lead to the idea that social status might be processed by a generalized magnitude system in the brain that represents magnitude as a feature of several different dimensions, such as size, time and numerousity. In this study I conducted an experiment to test if psychophysical phenomena related to this magnitude system can be found in social status comparisons. Specifically tested here are the size- and distance effect. The results give support to the idea that magnitude is an attribute of social status, albeit with caveats regarding the size effect.

Date of Award	2015
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Oslo
Supervisor	Thomas W. Schubert (Supervisor 1)