Pyrrhic victories: the need for social status drives costly competitive behavior

Competitive behavior is commonly defined as the decision to maximize one's payoffs relative to others. We argue instead that competitive drive derives from a desire for social status. We make use of a multi-player auction task in which subjects knowingly incur financial losses for the sake of w...

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Published inFrontiers in neuroscience Vol. 7; p. 189
Main Authors van den Bos, Wouter, Golka, Philipp J. M., Effelsberg, David, McClure, Samuel M.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Switzerland Frontiers Research Foundation 01.01.2013
Frontiers Media S.A
Subjects
Advantages
Auctions
Competition
Competitive behavior
Competitiveness
cortisol
Experiments
Hypotheses
neuroeconomics
Neuroscience
reinforcement learning
Social interactions
social status
Testosterone
Germany
social status
cortisol
competition
testosterone
minimal groups
affect
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN1662-453X
1662-4548
1662-453X
DOI10.3389/fnins.2013.00189

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Summary:Competitive behavior is commonly defined as the decision to maximize one's payoffs relative to others. We argue instead that competitive drive derives from a desire for social status. We make use of a multi-player auction task in which subjects knowingly incur financial losses for the sake of winning auctions. First, we show that overbidding is increased when the task includes members of a rival out-group, suggesting that social identity is an important mediator of competitiveness. In addition, we show that the extent that individuals are willing to incur losses is related to affective responses to social comparisons but not to monetary outcomes. Second, we show that basal levels of testosterone predict overbidding, and that this effect of testosterone is mediated by affective responses to social comparisons. Based on these findings, we argue that competitive behavior should be conceptualized in terms of social motivations as opposed to just relative monetary payoffs.
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This article was submitted to Decision Neuroscience, a section of the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.
Reviewed by: R. McKell Carter, Duke University, USA; Luke J. Chang, University of Colorado, USA
Edited by: Steve W. C. Chang, Duke University, USA; Masaki Isoda, Kansai Medical University, Japan
These authors have contributed equally to this work.
ISSN:1662-453X
1662-4548
1662-453X
DOI:10.3389/fnins.2013.00189