Why do High Status People Have Larger Social Networks? Belief in Status-Quality Coupling as a Driver of Broadening Networking Behavior and Social Network Size

Previous research has demonstrated that the size and reach of people's social networks tend to be positively related to their social status. While several explanations help to account for this relationship—for example, higher status people may be part of multiple social circles and therefore have more social contacts with whom to affiliate—we present a novel argument involving people's beliefs about the relationship between status and quality, what we call “status-quality coupling.” Across five separate studies, we demonstrate that the positive association between social status and network broadening behavior (as well as social network size) is contingent on the extent to which people believe that status is a reliable indicator of quality. Across each of our studies, high- and low-status people who viewed status and quality as tightly coupled differed in their networking behaviors as well as in the size of their reported social networks. Such differences were significantly weaker or nonexistent among equivalently high- and low-status people who viewed status as an unreliable indicator of quality. Because the majority of participants—both high- and low-status—exhibited beliefs in status-quality coupling, we conclude that such a belief marks an important, but so far unaccounted for driver of the relationship between status and social networks. Implications for research on social capital, help-seeking, and inequality are highlighted in the discussion section.