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Physical closeness Higher-status people tend to stand or sit more closely to others than do those lower in status.

Openness Higher-status people have a more open body orientation, meaning that their arms and legs extend out more. Lower-status individuals are more likely to have their arms and legs in a more closed position.

Before you memorize these four nonverbal factors associated with status, you should note that even these dimensions are not too reliable. Hall concluded that some nonverbal cues are trustworthy in some situations but not others. Loudness, for example, is a modest predictor of dominance when people are talking to others who share the same social class. However, when people of different social classes are talking with each other, the person from the lower social class tends to speak more loudly.

What made Hall’s analysis so important was that many of the behaviors that most people believed were related to status weren’t. For example, most people are convinced that higher-status people fidget less, smile less, talk more quickly, have a more relaxed and deeper voice, touch others more, and stand farther away from others. Not true. In other words, what you think is signaling status and power in a group probably isn’t.

One reason people are so bad at detecting the powerful people in the room is that the less powerful often do things to make themselves appear more important than they really are. A few years ago I attended a museum exhibit that tested people’s abilities to identify status. A video displayed a series of brief office encounters between pairs of adult men. The viewer guessed which of the two people was the boss and who was the underling. Generally, one of the two people sat upright, didn’t smile much, and leaned forward in his chair. The other sat back in his chair and seemed more informal. Because there was no sound, the viewer had to guess status based solely on nonverbal behaviors.

Most of the viewers wrongly thought that the serious and more rigid person was the one in command. In fact, the videos were job interviews and the person sitting upright was the person looking for the job. The job seekers were trying to look in control, serious, and not nervous. The interviewers were simply being themselves. They had interviewed dozens of people before and were much more relaxed in their roles. The museum visitors were fooled because they thought that people who acted dominant were really dominant.

LANGUAGE INDICATORS OF STATUS

The words people use in their conversations, e-mails, and letters predict where they rank in the social hierarchy surprisingly well. As you might guess, status is revealed by function words rather than the content of what is being said. Of all the types of function words, the single dimension that separates the high- from the low-status speakers is pronouns. And even among the pronouns, only a small group of words is important:

Low use of I-words People higher in the social hierarchy use first-person singular pronouns such as I, me, and my at much lower rates than people lower in status. In any interaction between two people, the person with the higher status uses fewer I-words. This is not a typo. High-status people, when talking to lower-status people, use the words I, me, and my at low rates. Conversely, the lower-status people tend to use I-words at high rates.

High use of we-words Those higher in status use first-person plural pronouns (we, us, our) at much higher rates than those lower in status.

High use of you-words In written and spoken conversation, the person who uses more second-person pronouns like you and your is likely to be the person higher in status.

Depending on the situation, other classes of words can be related to status as well. But in reality, the pronouns I, we, and you are by far the words that consistently reveal status. In many ways, it isn’t too surprising that pronouns are so tightly linked with status. Pronouns are the most social of all word categories