A series of six studies across five countries found that inducing attachment anxiety increased the desire for luxury cars and homes in both men and women. Increasing or decreasing intrasexual competition increased or decreased this effect. The paper was published in. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Status anxiety is the fear or stress people feel about their social status compared to others. It includes worrying that you are not successful enough, respected enough, wealthy enough, or admired enough. This type of anxiety is closely related to how much value a person places on status, prestige, and recognition. People with status anxiety tend to constantly compare their jobs, income, lifestyle, education, achievements, etc. to others.
Social media, competitive work environments, and unequal societies can further intensify these feelings. Status anxiety can lead to shame, envy, anxiety, and pressure to appear successful, even when you’re struggling. It motivates people to strive for status, and in the process of that striving it may lead them to overwork, waste, or seek symbols of success, primarily to impress others. In some cases, it can increase stress, frustration, and feelings of failure, which can take a toll on your mental health. Status anxiety isn’t just about money. You may also feel insecure about your beauty, popularity, intelligence, or professional reputation.
Study author Agata Gasiorowska and her colleagues note that status anxiety and striving for status can substitute for a lack of close interpersonal relationships. They cite previous authors who have stated that status anxiety consists in being preoccupied with social comparisons with people who are perceived to be more important than oneself.
On this basis, these authors propose that it is attachment anxiety that gives rise to intrasexual competition, the effort to gain status through competition between rivals of the same sex. Attachment anxiety is a pattern of anxiety in close relationships, where a person fears being rejected, abandoned, or not loved enough by a significant other. More specifically, these authors hypothesized that the association between attachment anxiety and status-seeking striving would be explained by intrasexual competition. They propose that intrasexual competition is amplified by heightened sensitivity to threat through attachment anxiety and is shaped by expectations that relationships are unpredictable**.
They conducted a series of six studies, a pilot study and studies 1 to 5. Participants were drawn from the United States, United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada, and Poland. The number of participants per study varied; overall, all six studies included 4,456 participants.
The pilot study and the first three studies were surveys. In these studies, participants completed attachment assessments (“Experiences in Close Relationships – Revised Questionnaire,” or “Experiences in Close Relationships – Short Form”), ratings of status striving (“Material Value Scale,” “Status Consumption Scale,” the status subscale of the “Basic Social Motivation Scale,” and “Dominance-Prestige” Questionnaire), and ratings of intrasexual and intersexual competition (Competitiveness Scale, Intrasexual Competition Scale, and Modified Intersexual Version).
Studies 4 and 5 were experiments and included experimental manipulations. In Study 4, depending on the group, participants were asked to recall an intimate relationship in which they felt uncomfortable when approached by another person (inducing attachment avoidance) or an intimate relationship in which they felt the other person did not want to be as close as the participant desired (inducing attachment anxiety).
In Study 5, we manipulated attachment anxiety in a manner similar to Study 4 (except that the control group instead recalled a negative experience with a stranger). It also included a manipulation of intrasexual competition. In the enhanced intrasexual competition condition, participants were asked to imagine that they had been single for a while and had finally found someone they liked, but that there were three other people who liked that person and wanted to ask them out on a date.
In the reduced intrasexual competition scenario, participants were asked to imagine not having to compete with anyone for the desirable person. There was also a baseline group in which participants did not receive additional information about who they wanted. In these two studies, participants expressed their efforts to improve their status by evaluating car brands and housing.
Our results confirm that attachment anxiety, but not avoidance, predicts status enhancement efforts. Importantly, the researchers found that attachment anxiety is associated with seeking status through dominance (using assertive, aggressive, or coercive tactics) rather than prestige (which can be gained by demonstrating skill or being helpful). This relationship is mediated by intrasexual competition, rather than materialism or a general sense of competition. In other words, the results support the idea that attachment anxiety makes people feel more threatened by same-sex rivals, which in turn increases their status-seeking efforts.
Results from two experimental studies showed that inducing attachment anxiety increases status enhancement efforts. After relationship anxiety was induced, participants began to desire higher-status cars and homes. The results of Study 5 showed that enhancing or reducing intrasexual competition increased or decreased the influence of attachment anxiety on status enhancement efforts, but only for high status possessions. The effect was present in both men and women.
“Our findings show that anxiously attached individuals pursue status to compensate for relationship insecurity and do so by competing with same-sex rivals. This study extends attachment theory to status seeking and reveals whether, when, and why individual differences in attachment patterns predict people’s status strivings,” the study authors concluded.
This study makes an important contribution to scientific knowledge about the psychological underpinnings of status-related behavior. However, it should be noted that all studies were conducted using online samples primarily recruited through Prolific Academic. Additionally, the researchers only recruited cisgender heterosexual participants, so the findings may not necessarily be generalizable to the LGBTQ+ population. Study results for people who are more representative of the general population may not be the same.
The paper, “Anxious Desires: Attachment Anxiety Promotes Status Struggles Through Sexual Competition,” was authored by Agata Gasiorowska, Michał Forwarczny, and Tobias Otterbring.
