Prior research on the drivers of status has focused on individual-level effects, i.e., how an individual’s attributes and behaviors shape the status they are conferred in groups. However, by drawing on interpersonal perception literature, we propose that status conferral is also driven by dyadic-level effects, i.e., effects that only emerge through the joint attributes and behaviors of pairs of individuals in dyadic relationships within groups. Through Social Relations Model analyses of five empirical samples (N = 13,079 status observations) we demonstrate that a substantial amount of variance in status conferral is driven by these dyadic effects. This highlights the critical, yet overlooked, role that dyadic effects play in status conferral. We then study a particular dyadic effect on status conferral; related to the personality trait extraversion. In an interactive group study (N = 382 status observations), we find evidence that individuals confer high status to those sharing similar levels of extraversion, and that this dyadic effect is stronger when the conferring individual is less competent than other individuals in the group. Altogether, our research contributes toward a more comprehensive understanding of status, drawing attention to the importance of dyadic effects on status conferral in groups, and extraversion-similarity in particular.
