Houston research: Understanding social hierarchy is key to professional success

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People who accurately perceive social hierarchies are also typically high performers, in part because of their high-status connections. 10'000 Hours/Getty Images

Social climbers get on people's nerves by constantly vying to be close to whoever is in charge. No wonder disparaging names for them abound: opportunists, social climbers, clout chasers. To those around them, the climbers' motives are transparent and their undignified antics laughable – until they succeed.

In a recent paper, Rice Business Professor Siyu Yu and Gavin Kilduff of the NYU Stern School of Business looked closely at social climbers' habits and their outcomes. The researchers concluded that these industrious networkers get a (partially) bad rap. In fact, the rest of us could learn from them.

To conduct their research, Yu and Kilduff launched four separate studies with a total of 1,334 people in university and corporate settings in China and the United States. Participants were asked to identify individuals in their study or workgroups who were especially "respected, admired or influential." The respondents whose choices were also deemed high-status by the rest of the group were labeled accurate perceivers of "perceived status hierarchy" (PSH). The respondents whose choices were deemed low-status by the others were labeled inaccurate perceivers of PSH.

The researchers then asked participants whom they sought out for advice and assistance. Those who previously tested accurately for PSH, they found, had more high-status contacts than those who tested poorly.

PSH accuracy was also found to be positively associated with performance, the researchers wrote. There's a logic to this. People with an accurate understanding of PSH are more likely to seek out high-status members in their social or professional group for mentorship and advice. They may also model the high-status colleagues' behavior. Through these connections, they're able to learn habits and strategies. Their alliances with high-status individuals have the power to improve their performance, gleaned from the individuals' best practices, knowledge and skillsets.

People who are less accurate status perceivers, the researchers said, typically build rapport with individuals who are lower on the totem pole. Through these lower-status members, they may learn inefficient and detrimental work habits, limiting their chances for success. To rise in any competitive hierarchy, it is imperative to identify, align and imitate high-status individuals.

But who exactly are these coveted high-status allies – and what makes them so valuable to others? Our species evolved to seek proximity and prolonged interaction with high performers, Yu and Kilduff noted. Within homogeneous units, prestigious individuals are typically more competent than lower-status group members. High-status individuals are often generous and group-motivated, so lower-status members benefit from their superior prowess.

Important as status associations are, the researchers argued, opportunities to interact with high-status individuals are involuntarily limited for people in marginalized groups. No matter how accurate a worker's PSH discernment may be, systemic forces may keep her from ever speaking – or being listened to – by someone with a high enough status to guide or advocate for her.

At the same time, research shows that diverse opinions are important for growth and decision-making. To improve efficiency and overall functioning, Yu's team argued, schools, businesses and other institutions need to create established paths for those perceived as low-status to have access to those higher in status.

One important tool, the team wrote, is the creation of well-rounded mentorship programs. Another is a process for scouring biases from selection and hiring processes.

Want to get to the top? Being nice to the receptionist and every other employee up and down the ladder makes a difference. But you'll also need to seek out colleagues with power and prestige. So the next time you see a status-chaser in action, stifle the righteous sneer. You may even decide to swallow your pride and try to curry some favor yourself.

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This article originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom and is based on research from Siyu Yu, assistant professor of management – organizational behavior at Jones Graduate School of Business, and Gavin J. Kilduff, associate professor of management and organizations at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business.

Most workers surveyed visualize their organization as either a ladder structure or a pyramid, and the quality of relationships in pyramid-structured workplaces is higher than in ladder-structured workplaces. Photo via Pexels

The way a workplace is structured can make or break business, Rice University research finds

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It's a paradox of power: research shows that hierarchies often undermine the very structures they are designed to uphold. Within organizations, conflicts between members can erode entire systems. In a groundbreaking paper, Rice Business Professor Siyu Yu shows that even visual perceptions of the hierarchy can influence its success.

In the first study of its kind, Yu joined a team of colleagues to explore how humans visualize the hierarchies to which they belong – and how that thought process influences group processes and outcomes.

The researchers found that most of the people they studied thought of hierarchies in terms of pyramids or ladders (a tiny minority visualized them as circles or squares). In a ladder hierarchy or stratified structure, each member occupies a particular rung. A pyramid hierarchy is more centralized, with one person at the top and multiple people on the lower levels. Think of corporate giant CISCO, a typical pyramid, versus a mid-size dry cleaning business, with the owner at the top and one person on each rung below, down to the entry-level cashier.

These are far more than fanciful images, the researchers argued. Psychological research has long shown that individuals think, feel and act in response to mental representations of their environment. Intuitively, the link between perception and behavior has been articulated as far back as biblical times: "As a man thinketh, so is he" – or, for that matter, she or they.

To better understand the practical effects of these visualizations, Yu's team conducted five studies with 2,951 people and 221 workplace groups. They chose from nationwide pools monitored by West and East Coast American universities. The studies took place in the United States and the Netherlands and included multiple ethnicities, men and women, and income groups ranging from college students to seasoned professionals earning upwards of $90,000 annually.

In the first study, the team asked participants to indicate the shape that best reflected how they thought about hierarchies: pyramid, ladder, circle or square. In the second study, the researchers measured social relationship quality within different groups: participants were asked to rate their answers to questions such as, "Are your needs met at work? Do you feel socially supported?" In the third study, the researchers focused on professional workgroups, measuring relationship quality, group performance and the likelihood that individuals compare themselves to others in the group.

Subjects who perceived their working group as a ladder, the researchers found, were more likely to compare their rank and station with others. Their relationships were also weaker: when asked whether they trusted their team members, most subjects disagreed or strongly disagreed. When asked whether they thought about if they were better or worse than their colleagues, they agreed and strongly agreed. These comparisons and lack of trust indirectly correlated with lower performance levels, the research showed.

Perceiving one's organization as a ladder structure, Yu's team argued, undermines group members' relationships with each other and hinders collective performance. In contrast, participants who visualized the same company as pyramids rated radically higher on all three quality measures.

Interestingly, the impact of these visualizations is similar, whether the visualizations reflect an actual company structure or simply an individual's perception of that structure. "It can be created by both perception and actual rank, for example, job titles," Yu said in an interview. "So, as a practical implication, companies should think about ways to reduce the ladder system, such as with a promotion system that seems more like a pyramid, or by creating the mutual belief that upward mobility within the company is not a ladder or zero-sum."

Managers, in other words, need to pay close attention to how subordinates see their workplace. Even if your firm is structured as a pyramid, your team members could perceive it to be a ladder – with a cut-throat climb to the top. For the sake of both work performance and quality of life, Yu said, managers, human resources directors and C-suite members should do their best to discern how their workers visualize the company – and, if the paradigm is a ladder, work hard to reduce the workplace vertigo that goes with it.

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This article originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom and is based on research from Siyu Yu, an assistant professor of management and organizational behavior at the Jones Graduate School of Business Rice University.

Research and common sense suggest that membership in a high social class improves one's sense of well being. Photo by fauxels from Pexels

Rice University researcher looks into what creates social well being

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How nice! You're early. It's just you and your mat, alone for a moment at the office's weekly Zoom yoga session. Breathing in, you silently applaud yourself for investing in your well-being.

Then a guy from upper management pops onto the screen for a bit of his own inner peace. He's not even looking your way, but suddenly you're comparing yourself to a fit, well-groomed, manicured corporate star. You wonder if you're a victim of a gender wage gap. You muse whether your social standing is undermined by race, age or your choice of partner.

Humans can't help comparing social status. What goes into the social pecking order, however, is surprisingly complex. What we call social class is actually a web of subtle signals telegraphing traits including wealth, education and occupational prestige.

But the effects of social class are concrete. Membership in a high social class alters our influence over other people, our professional and personal opportunities, even our health. Social class even affects the private, internal gauge of how we're doing – what researchers call subjective well-being, or SWB. And what you, in Zoom yoga, might call your level of chill.

But why exactly is external class ranking so potent?

For years, research and common sense suggested that external social class largely determines our subjective well-being. But the exact dynamic has never been fully analyzed. So in a recent paper, Rice Business Professor Siyu Yu and colleague Steven Blader, of NYU Stern, looked closely at how the status/well-being link functions – and why, in certain cases, it's irrelevant.

According to their findings, simply belonging to a higher social class actually has a weaker, less consistent effect on inner well-being than do two specific components of class: status and power.

To analyze the way status and power affect the impact of social class, Yu and Blader designed a set of four studies. In one, they used archival data from two employee surveys, Midlife In The United States and Midlife In Japan, to measure employee status and power and how these variables affected each individual's social class and sense of subjective well-being.

In the three others, the team analyzed the interplay of social class, power and status in various walks of life. To do this, they looked at employee data sets of 325 and 370 people respectively, drawn from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (a crowdsourced marketplace favored by researchers which performs tasks virtually). In one study, the researchers ranked each participant's self-perceived social class by asking them to state their own level of status and power. In another, they asked 250 participants questions about their individual psychological needs and how they might be addressed by status or by power. In the third, they isolated the precise ways that status and power affect subjective well-being.

Status, the researchers found, greatly boosted the effect of social class on subjective well-being. Power, they found, had separate and significant effects of its own on SBW. Of the two separate factors, status had the stronger impact. The researchers theorized that this is because power, energizing as it may be, also tends to stunt feelings of social support and relatedness, which is crucial to a sense of well-being. High status, on the other hand, is by definition a reflection of relationships, which we're hard-wired to crave. As Yu and her cowriter put it, status is "voluntarily and continuously conferred based on one's personal characteristics and behaviors and, thus, others' … highly personalized assessment of our value."

Both status and power, the evidence suggested, boost inner well-being because they fulfill key psychological needs: our desire to belong, for example, or our wish to have a say in situations affecting us.

Partly because of the study's methodology limitations, however, the researchers cautioned there's more to understand. Most pressing: in the U.S. sample, between 83%-95% of participants were white. Would the researchers' current findings hold true across a broader racial spectrum? How about with groups that have spent decades overcoming outside assaults on their sense of self?

What the team's research does show definitively is the multi-faceted nature of social class – something that otherwise might seem to be monolithic. It sheds light on the various facets that make up social rank. And it spotlights the need for research on the separate effects of power, of status, and how each element fulfills psychological needs. Isolating the effects of these factors, Yu and his colleague argued, show why researchers need to consider power and status distinctly when studying issues like income, education and occupation.

Back to Zoom yoga. Breathe out. Then do your best to just look away from your high-ranking colleague in the neighboring zoom box. You're not imagining the unease you felt when he sailed into the room. Yet who knows? Your high-flying superior worker may not actually feel as respected or empowered as you'd think when he rolls up his mat and goes back to his desktop. You, meanwhile, are equipped with new analytical insights that could help establish your next goals. Do you aspire to more power? More external esteem? Or maybe you already possess some other key to inner equilibrium – some element in apart from either status and power – that research has yet to uncover.

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This article originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom and is based on research from Siyu Yu, an assistant professor of management – organizational behavior at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

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Houston lab explores how AI bots can help the elderly

AI for aging

The University of Houston’s Empathetic Lifespan AI & Robotics for Aging (ELARA) Lab is currently conducting research into how AI bots may be able to help the elderly live more social and independent lives through several ongoing initiatives.

The lab officially launched last month as part of the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture & Design under the leadership of Assistant Professor Chorong Park. Part of the lab’s mission is tackling ongoing problems with aging, such as dealing with disabilities and social isolation. Researchers’ current work is focused on designing a new AI companion bot specifically tailored to the needs of older people.

“We need to take all the needs of older adults seriously,” Park said in a news release. “They won't use the robot if they don't feel at ease or if they feel they are being constantly watched.”

The field testing of new AI bots in this population hopes to overcome several traditional obstacles in technology use among the elderly. A study by Park shows that many older people have a fear of overt surveillance when using advanced AI. There is also ageism to consider. Most new technologies are designed with younger and employed buyers in mind, not retirees who may need help remembering daily tasks or accessing important information.

“The more older adults are excluded from technology development, the worse those technology gaps will become,” Park said. “AI and the majority of technologies are created for younger people, so my research method integrates older adults directly into the design process.”

ELARA recently collaborated with the Mamie George Community Center in Richmond, Texas, to track seniors’ response to desktop AI bots like Emo and Cupboo. Researchers also had participants use air-dry modeling clay to create their ideal robotic companion.

While the eventual AI bot may be able to help the elderly feel less isolated and more supported, there are concerns to consider. A study published in the Asian Journal of Psychology charted the development of delusional thinking in a 72-year-old woman who became convinced the empathic-response bot was in love with her. The rise of “AI psychosis” has the potential to exacerbate mental health problems, particularly in socially isolated people, which a quarter of Americans over the age of 65 are.

ELARA’s research is focused on creating “pet-like” AI models with enhanced trust cues. If it can overcome the dangers of socially isolated people relying on AI for companionship, it could be a big step forward for independent aging.

SpaceX IPO set to be biggest ever and could make Elon Musk a trillionaire

IPO News

SpaceX says it plans to raise up to $75 billion when it goes public this month, setting the stage for the largest-ever stock market debut and putting Elon Musk on course to becoming the world's first trillionaire.

The company, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said Wednesday it will sell 555.6 million shares at $135 a piece in an initial public offering. The estimated proceeds would easily top the $26 billion raised by oil giant Saudi Aramco in 2019. The offering would also give SpaceX a market value of $1.77 trillion. Only six companies in the S&P 500 are currently worth more, with Nvidia tops at $5.2 trillion.

Besides the size of the offering and the expected proceeds, SpaceX's amended prospectus updates details about how much control of the company Musk will have. As SpaceX's CEO, chief technical officer and chairman, Musk's voting power will come primarily through his ownership of 5.22 billion Class B shares, which give the holder 10 votes for every share held. According to the filing, Musk would have 82.4% of the voting power in the company.

Forbes currently values Musk's net worth at $826 billion and his stake in SpaceX at $542 billion. The estimated value of his SpaceX holdings was based on an overall value for the company of $1.25 trillion. Based on those numbers, a $1.77 trillion valuation for SpaceX would boost Musk's net worth by $223 billion, making him a trillionaire. However, much of Musk's worth is in stock that he has yet to cash in.

Even as it makes a bid for a blockbuster market debut, SpaceX is currently losing billions of dollars a year. The filing shows that the company lost $2.6 billion from operations last year on $18.7 billion in revenue, and the losses kept piling up at the start of this year, too.

Fantastical plans

Time will tell how SpaceX fares on the market. Musk's plans for the company are as fantastical as the money he hopes raise in the sale.

Colorful, even frightening in parts, the IPO document strikes a contrast with the typically dry, technical prose in IPO documents, detailing plans to use proceeds from the sale to help put men on the moon again and perhaps even Mars. In one section, it talks of a need to build "a permanent human colony" on the red planet with "at least one million inhabitants" as existential threats loom that could consign man to "the same fate as the dinosaurs."

Musk has almost equally ambitious plans for his other publicly traded company, Tesla. His goal is to transform the maker of electric vehicles into a producer of robotaxis and humanoid robots. Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities wrote in a research note that he expects Tesla and SpaceX to merge next year.

AI plays a key role

Key to the success of both companies — and any merged entity — is artificial intelligence. In its IPO filing, SpaceX says it sees potential revenue from AI of up to $26.5 trillion. But that depends on another lofty Musk ambition — putting data centers in space, which is not technologically possible at the moment.

Transforming his space company into a primarily AI-focused company will be a challenge for Musk, who started xAI in 2023 with 11 other co-founders who have all since left. Some were recruited away by rivals.

Its main AI product, the chatbot Grok, is "less impressive than anything that we see from any other major player in the space, whether that's OpenAI, or Anthropic, or (Google's) Gemini," said IDC analyst Arnal Dayaratna.

Dayaratna said that doesn't mean SpaceX doesn't have potential as a major AI player, thanks in part to its computing partnership with Anthropic and Musk's recent deal that gave SpaceX the rights to buy AI coding tool Cursor for $60 billion later this year. Folding in Cursor's capabilities would give SpaceX access to the coveted business customers now using Anthropic's Claude or OpenAI's ChatGPT.

SpaceX plans to use the net proceeds from the IPO to fund the expansion of infrastructure for its AI and rocket businesses, and to beef up the constellation of satellites that power Starlink Mobile, among other investments.

The company plans to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol "SPCX" and could begin trading as soon as the end of next week.

And SpaceX isn't the only colossal market debut investors are now bracing for. Earlier this week, Anthropic submitted a confidential filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to officially start its own IPO clock.

OpenAI has not yet reported filing the initial SEC paperwork, but an IPO from the ChatGPT maker is widely expected.

"This listing represents the first major test for public markets after years of muted IPO activity with SpaceX paving the way for AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI to follow soon after," Ives wrote.

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Associated Press Technology Writer Matt O'Brien contributed.

New UH survey reveals concerns over AI data center growth in Houston

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A new report out of the University of Houston shows that area residents remain wary of the long-term effects of operating data centers.

The recent survey from the University of Houston’s latest SPACE City Panel, conducted by the Center for Public Policy at the Hobby School of Public Affairs, shows that while 85 percent of Houston-area residents use AI, nearly 63 percent oppose the construction of AI data centers within 1 mile of their homes.

Respondents’ concerns centered around data centers’ high energy demand and the area’s power grid reliability. According to the survey, 32 percent of residents who oppose local data center projects would be more likely to support the centers if they relied on renewable energy over fossil fuels.

“Respondents understand that AI can bring economic and educational benefits, but they are also concerned about the physical infrastructure needed to fuel AI, especially data centers,” Soran Mohtadi, post-doctoral fellow at the Hobby School and a researcher on the report, said in a news release. “This physical infrastructure demands more electricity and water, leading to environmental impacts.”

Experts estimate that 6.5 gigawatts of data center capacity will be added to the Texas grid by 2030. And Houston’s data center capacity is predicted to more than double by 2028.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas also projects electricity demand could reach 218 gigawatts by 2031, which would be more than double the record peak set in August 2023. Data centers are expected to account for 86 gigawatts of that new demand.

Survey respondents also said they are concerned about the state's future water supply, given the large amounts of water that data centers need to stay cool.

In terms of who’s responsible for that issue, 57.6 percent of respondents said they put the onus on Texas lawmakers, while 31.5 percent say tech companies should be responsible.

Additionally, more than 75 percent of respondents believed that data center developers and technology companies—not residents—should bear the cost of infrastructure upgrades to support data centers.

“Every decision legislators make has implications on residents’ everyday lives and local infrastructure now and in the future,” Maria P. Perez Arguelles, lead researcher on the report and research assistant professor at the Hobby School, added in the news release. “This issue is going to become more important in years to come, so this is just the beginning.”

Read the full report here.

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