A series of six studies spanning 5 countries found that inducing attachment anxiety increases the desire for high-status cars and houses in both men and women. Increasing or decreasing intrasexual competition enhanced or reduced this effect. The paper was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Status anxiety is the fear or stress people feel about their social standing compared with others. It involves worrying that one is not successful, respected, wealthy, or admired enough. This kind of anxiety is closely tied to how much value a person places on rank, prestige, and recognition. People with status anxiety tend to constantly compare their jobs, income, lifestyle, education, or achievements to those of others.
Social media, competitive work environments, and unequal societies can make these feelings stronger. Status anxiety can lead to shame, envy, insecurity, and pressure to appear successful even when a person is struggling. It motivates people to strive for status and in the course of this striving may also push them to overwork, overspend, or seek symbols of success mainly to impress others. In some cases, it can harm mental health by increasing stress, dissatisfaction, and feelings of failure. Status anxiety is not only about money, because people can feel it about beauty, popularity, intelligence, or professional reputation.
Study author Agata Gasiorowska and her colleagues note that status anxiety and striving for status sometimes serve as a substitute for a lack of intimate interpersonal relationships. They cite a previous author who attributed status anxiety to a preoccupation with social comparison against those perceived as more important than ourselves.
Based on this, these authors propose that it is attachment anxiety that causes striving for status through intrasexual competition i.e., through competition between same-sex rivals. Attachment anxiety is a pattern of insecurity in close relationships in which a person fears rejection, abandonment, or not being sufficiently loved by important others. More specifically, these authors hypothesized that intrasexual competition will explain the link between attachment anxiety and striving for status. They propose that intrasexual competition is amplified by attachment anxiety’s heightened sensitivity to threats and shaped by expectations that relationships are unpredictable**.**
They conducted a series of six studies – a pilot study and studies 1-5. Participants were recruited from the United States, United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada, and Poland. The number of participants per study varied, and, overall, all six studies together involved 4,456 participants.
The pilot study and the first three studies were surveys. In these studies, participants completed attachment assessments (the Experiences in Close Relationships-Revised Questionnaire, or the Experiences in Close Relationships – Short form), assessments of status striving (the Material Values Scale, the Status Consumption Scale, the Status subscale of the Fundamental Social Motives Scale, and the Dominance-Prestige Questionnaire), and assessments of intrasexual and intersexual competition (the Competitiveness Scale, the Intrasexual Competition Scale and a modified intersexual version).
Studies 4 and 5 were experiments and included experimental manipulations. In study 4, depending on the group, participants were either asked to recall a close relationship in which they felt uncomfortable being close to another person (inducing attachment avoidance) or one in which they felt that the other person was reluctant to get as close as the participant would have liked (inducing attachment anxiety).
Study 5 manipulated attachment anxiety in a similar way to study 4 (though the control group instead recalled a negative experience with a stranger), while also including a manipulation of intrasexual competition. In the boosted intrasexual competition condition, participants were asked to imagine that they were single for a while and that they finally found a person whom they liked, but that there were three other people who also liked that person and wanted to ask him/her on a date.
In the reduced intrasexual competition scenario, participants were told to imagine that they do not need to compete with anyone for the desired person. There was also a baseline group in which participants did not receive any additional information about the desired person. In these two studies, participants expressed their status strivings by rating car brands and houses.
Results of the surveys confirmed that attachment anxiety, rather than avoidance, predicts status strivings. Crucially, the researchers found that attachment anxiety is associated with pursuing status through dominance (using assertive, aggressive, or coercive tactics) rather than prestige (which is earned by demonstrating skills and helpfulness). This relationship is mediated by intrasexual competition, rather than by materialism or general competitiveness. In other words, results supported the notion that attachment anxiety makes people feel more threatened by same-sex rivals and that this, in turn, increases their striving for status.
Results of the two experimental studies showed that inducing attachment anxiety increases status striving – participants desired high-status cars and houses more after relationship anxiety was induced. Results of study 5 indicated that enhancing or reducing intrasexual competition increased or reduced the effect of attachment anxiety on status strivings, but only for high-status possessions. The effects were present in both men and women.
“Our findings show that anxiously attached individuals pursue status to compensate for relational insecurities, and they do so by competing with same-sex rivals. This research extends attachment theory to status pursuit and clarifies whether, when, and why individual differences in attachment patterns predict people’s status strivings,” the study authors concluded.
The study makes an important contribution to the scientific knowledge about the psychological underpinnings of status-related behaviors. However, it should be noted that all the studies were conducted on online samples primarily recruited via Prolific Academic. Furthermore, the researchers exclusively recruited cisgender heterosexual participants, meaning the findings may not necessarily generalize to LGBTQ+ populations. Results of studies on people more representative of the general population might not be identical.
The paper “Anxious Aspirations: Attachment Anxiety Fuels Status Strivings Through Intrasexual Competition” was authored by Agata Gasiorowska, Michał Folwarczny, and Tobias Otterbring.