Who's on first? People asymmetrically attend to higher-ranked (vs. lower-ranked) competitors

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2022.104405Get rights and content

Abstract

Rankings, hierarchies, and competitions are an integral part of peoples' personal and professional lives and knowing one's standing vis-à-vis others helps employees decide how to outdo higher-ranked colleagues and how to refrain from being outdone by lower-ranked others. But whom do people attend to when considering these rankings? In seven studies (and five supplementary studies; N = 4496) we document a robust asymmetry in attention to higher-ranked versus lower-ranked competitors. First, using unobtrusive measures, we show that people attend more to and exhibit better memory for their higher-ranked (vs. lower-ranked) peers. Second, we demonstrate that this asymmetry is reduced when attention is shifted to lower-ranked competitors, and is moderated by participants' own standing. Finally, we find that asymmetrically attending to higher-ranked others leads people to overestimate minority representation in rankings and to make suboptimal financial decisions. We discuss implications for social comparison theory, workplace rankings, and the psychology of competition.

Section snippets

Social comparisons in competitive rankings

Self-perceptions are generally formed by evaluating one's traits, skills, and abilities relative to similar, but slightly better-off, others (Festinger, 1954; Mussweiler, 2003). This is especially true when people lack objective metrics for self-assessment, but not as much when such quantifiable measures are readily available (Gerber, Wheeler, & Suls, 2018). One such context where quantifiable measures are available is competitive rankings, where absolute performance is translated into an

Asymmetric attention to higher-ranked individuals

We examine whether, unprompted, people attend to higher-ranked others and the consequences of doing so. Specifically, we examine whether people in competitive rankings asymmetrically attend to and have better memory for higher-ranked than lower-ranked others. Just as people are especially attuned to higher status others (Dietze & Knowles, 2016; Muscatell et al., 2012; Stellar, Manzo, Kraus, & Keltner, 2012), we argue that people pay asymmetrically more attention to those who rank higher rather

The moderating role of people's own ranking

Notably, whether people attend to their higher-ranked or lower-ranked competitors may be moderated by their own personal standing in the ranking (i.e., whether they rank at the top, middle, or bottom of the ranking). First, people typically compare themselves to familiar others (Corcoran & Mussweiler, 2009), especially those whose past performance is comparable to their own performance (Wheeler, Martin, & Suls, 1997) or who appear similar to them on various traits or attributes (Mussweiler, 2003

The consequences of asymmetrically attending to higher-ranked others

Asymmetrically attending to higher-ranked others may have important personal and societal consequences. Specifically, since selective attention impacts valuation and choice (Mrkva & Van Boven, 2017; Smith & Krajbich, 2019), disproportionately attending to higher-ranked others may lead people to rely more heavily on information gleaned from these higher-ranked competitors relative to lower-ranked competitors. Rather than attend to the entire distribution of their competitors, people may

Research overview

Seven studies (and five supplementary studies), examine whether people asymmetrically attend to and have better memory for their higher-ranked competitors. In addition, we investigate whether directing people's attention to their lower-ranked peers reduces this asymmetry in memory, and how one's position in the ranking affects the asymmetry. Finally, we examine potential implications of this asymmetry in two different contexts. Across all studies, we report all conditions run, exclusions, and

Study 1

We began by examining whether, even when they are not explicitly prompted to do so, people exhibit asymmetric attention to their higher-ranked competitors. To do so, we gave participants an opportunity to learn how their performance in a series of puzzles compared to their opponents. Rather than explicitly forcing participants to engage in upward or downward comparisons (as is done in the classic rank-order paradigm; Wheeler, 1966), we used a subtle and unobtrusive measure to surreptitiously

Studies 2a and 2b

Even when not explicitly instructed to actively choose who they want to compare themselves to (Wheeler, 1966), participants attended more to higher-ranked (vs. lower-ranked) others, and this was true regardless of whether the top performers were presented at the top, bottom, left, or right side of the screen. Moving beyond attention, we examined in Studies 2a and 2b whether people are more likely to remember their higher-ranked competitors. Indeed, various cognitive processes that are related

Study 2a

In Study 2a, using stimuli from a real-world competition, we examined whether higher-ranked competitors are more memorable than lower-ranked competitors. Specifically, we asked fans of the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament to recall all the teams slated to play in their team's regional bracket. Regardless of whether they rooted for a high-ranked (i.e., high seed) or low-ranked (i.e., low seed) team, we predicted that participants would recall a greater proportion of the teams ranked higher than

Study 2b

Because they attended more to them, participants in Study 2a exhibited significantly better recall for higher-ranked competitors. Yet, since top-seeded NCAA teams typically attract more media attention, such exposure may have advantaged their recall. To rule this out, we ran a conceptual replication in a controlled environment where, after seeing their and their peers' ranking, participants completed a surprise recognition task. As before, we predicted that participants would remember more of

Study 3

In a real-world setting, a controlled laboratory experiment, and a direct replication, participants exhibited far better recall for higher-ranked than lower-ranked competitors. Study 3 further examined this asymmetric recall by directly manipulating to whom participants attend. We argue that people exhibit better recall for higher-ranked competitors because they attend to them. Therefore, we predicted that drawing attention to lower-ranked competitors should improve people's memory for them

Study 4

Because participants were already more prone to attend to their better-performing peers, drawing their attention to their higher-ranked competitors had minimal impact on recall. In contrast, because they do not regularly attend to lower-ranked competitors, directing their attention to competitors that ranked lower than them significantly improved participants' memory and, as a result, reduced the asymmetry in recall.

Study 4 tested a potential boundary condition. Specifically, we examined

Studies 5a and 5b

Studies 1–4 documented a robust asymmetry in attention to rankings, which was moderated by participants' own standing in them. When participants were atop the rankings, they attended significantly more and had better memory for their higher-ranked versus lower-ranked competitors. In contrast, as they descended in the rankings, participants attended substantially less to their higher-ranked competitors. Whereas participants paid equal attention to their lower-ranked competitors regardless of

Study 5a

Study 5a examined how exposure to high-ranked females affects perceptions of overall female representation in competitions. To do so, we manipulated the distribution of higher-ranked (vs. lower-ranked) females in a competition while holding the total number of females constant, and examined people's memory for and perceptions of female representation. Although participants saw the same number of female competitors, we predicted that those exposed to more higher-ranked females would believe that

Study 5b

Study 5b examined how asymmetrically attending to higher-ranked others can impact decision making in another consequential domain: financial decision-making. We predicted that even when doing so may not be in their best interest, participants would be significantly more likely to emulate financial decisions made by higher-ranked others. That is, we predicted that asymmetrically attending to higher-ranked others would increase participants' memory for their investment decisions and,

General discussion

Given the ubiquity of rankings in daily life (Chun & Larrick, 2022), it is surprising how little is known about how people perceive and attend to them. Across seven studies (and five studies in the Supplementary Materials), using unobtrusive and subtle measures, we document an asymmetry in what people attend to in competitive rankings. Even when not explicitly prompted to do so, we find that people attend more to (Study 1) and remember information about (Studies 2a and 2b) higher-ranked

Conclusion

A colleague once lamented her job market misfortunes. Despite her strong performance on “the market,” this colleague kept ruminating on a few extremely successful colleagues, almost completely neglecting how better off she was than most of her struggling peers. Although attending to her better-performing colleagues clearly upset her, this colleague couldn't seem to help herself. Why are such “star performers” rarely satisfied with their own objectively superior performance? Our work suggests

Open practices

All materials, data, and analyses are available through the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/q73x8/?view_only=552205ded4ed4070bc4321568953b818. Studies 4 and 5a were preregistered and include links to their preregistrations in the study methodologies (https://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=3qc28t, https://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=ci76ex); these preregistrations were completed prior to running the study and examining the data, and all deviations from preregistered analyses or protocol are

References (57)

  • L. Wheeler et al.

    Related attributes in the choice of comparison others: It’s there, but it isn’t all there is

    Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

    (1982)
  • I. Barankay

    Rankings and social tournaments: Evidence from a crowd-sourcing experiment

    (2011)
  • I. Barankay

    Rank incentives: Evidence from a randomized workplace experiment

    (2012)
  • R.F. Baumeister et al.

    Bad is stronger than good

    Review of General Psychology

    (2001)
  • A. Bonezzi et al.

    Stuck in the middle: The psychophysics of goal pursuit

    Psychological Science

    (2011)
  • M. Boyle

    Performance reviews: Perilous curves ahead: Grading employees via forced rankings is a valuable management tool, say many companies

  • E.H. Chang et al.

    Diversity thresholds: How social norms, visibility, and scrutiny relate to group composition

    Academy of Management Journal

    (2019)
  • J.S. Chun et al.

    The power of rank information

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (2022)
  • K. Corcoran et al.

    The efficiency of social comparisons with routine standards

    Social Cognition

    (2009)
  • S. Davidai et al.

    The second pugilist’s plight: Why people believe they are above average but are not especially happy about it

    Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

    (2019)
  • S. Davidai et al.

    There must be more to life than this: The impact of highly-accessible exemplars on self-evaluation and discontent

    Self and Identity

    (2021)
  • S. Davidai et al.

    The headwinds/tailwinds asymmetry: An availability Bias in assessments of barriers and blessings

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (2016)
  • J. Denrell

    Why Most people disapprove of me: Experience sampling in impression formation

    Psychological Review

    (2005)
  • K. Diel et al.

    A motivational framework of social comparison

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (2021)
  • P. Dietze et al.

    Social class and the motivational relevance of other human beings: Evidence from visual attention

    Psychological Science

    (2016)
  • L. Festinger

    A theory of social comparison processes

    Human Relations

    (1954)
  • A. Fleischmann et al.

    More threatening and more diagnostic: How moral comparisons differ from social comparisons

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (2021)
  • A. Gaba et al.

    Risk behavior in response to quotas and contests

    Marketing Science

    (1999)
  • Cited by (0)

    This paper has been recommended for acceptance by Joris Lammers.

    View full text