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All Ranks Are Local: Why Humans Are Both (Painfully) Aware and (Surprisingly) Unaware of Their Lot in Life

Moments in life that involve discovering one’s social rank are among the most emotionally evocative experienced by humans. Reflect for a few moments on a time you came in first in some pursuit. Now do the same, but for a time you came in last. Remembering that science prize in middle school felt great—but the pain of that last-place finish in the 100-yard dash still stings. Kraus, Tan, and Tannenbaum (this issue) marshal an impressive interdisciplinary set of data to document the pervasiveness and power of rank in everyday life. From health to happiness to social interactions, rank matters, and is a key predictor of outcomes. Yet an interesting puzzle arises in the study of rank. People can be totally unaware of the shape of the distribution, and even of their place in that distribution—which would seem to suggest that rank doesn’t matter that much. And yet as the research summarized in Kraus et al. (this issue) demonstrates, rank also seems to matter immensely. How can people be so surprisingly unaware of their lot in life, yet be painfully affected by it at the same time? First, the lack of awareness. In a recent study, Norton and Ariely (2011) asked a national sample of Americans a series of seemingly simple questions about the distribution of wealth among Americans. Specifically, respondents were asked to estimate the percentage of all the wealth in the United States that was owned by the richest 20% of Americans, the second richest 20%, and so on, down to the poorest 20%. They estimated that the richest quintile owned about 60% of the wealth and that the bottom 40% owned about 10%—in other words, they reported that wealth was quite unevenly distributed. The problem is that these estimates, although directionally accurate, are surprisingly inaccurate. In fact, the richest quintile owns about 85% of all the wealth—a full 25% more than respondents estimated—whereas the poorest 40% of Americans basically own nothing. And rich respondents and poor respondents were equally erroneous in their estimates, suggesting that for one of the most salient markers of rank—wealth—people are not even aware of the shape of the distribution. Not only that, but people also appear to be unaware of their place in that distribution. In a survey conducted in Argentina, respondents were asked, “There are 10 million families in Argentina. Of those 10 million, how many do you think have an income lower than yours?” Because the researchers also collected data on respondents’ household income, they were able to assess the accuracy of respondents’ beliefs. Of interest, the most stringent criteria suggested that a paltry 15% of Argentinians placed themselves in the correct income quintile; even a more lenient analytical approach suggested that a full 55% of Argentinians displayed at least some error in their estimate (Cruces, PerezTruglia, & Tetaz, 2013). Taken together, Cruces et al. (2013) and Norton and Ariely (2011) offer support for the notion that people do not know their lot in life, and do not even know the shape of the distribution from which those lots are drawn. How can people be unaware of such basic facts about ranks yet be so deeply influenced by their rank? The answer lies in a modification of a famous saying by former U.S. Congressman Tip O’Neill: All ranks are local. The broad shape of an overall distribution of outcomes matters much less than the local shape of an individual’s most salient distributions: When you came in last in that 100-yard dash, you compared yourself only to your classmates, not the 100-yard dash times of all 12-year-olds in the world. (Although if we are being honest with ourselves, the average academic is probably still pretty near the bottom of any speedrelated distribution.) This is why interesting results like those in Boyce, Brown, and Moore (2010) emerge: People’s own income means little for their happiness until they compare it to the income of others. This general lack of awareness of rank, coupled with the powerful effects on humans once ranks are known, offers enormous potential for social scientists to conduct experiments to “get under the hood” of the psychology of ranks. In other words, if people did have full information on distributions and their place in those distributions, social scientists could simply measure objective characteristics of people (their income, etc.) in order to predict their behavior. Instead, because rank is constantly constructed in the situation—by who and what is salient for comparison at any point in time—research exploring the many ways in which ranks affect thought, emotion, and behavior is just getting under way. Indeed, in the Cruces et al. (2013) research just described, lower income individuals who were informed that they were lower in the