Status and mental focus

[nancylebov]

http://www.physorg.com/news130073059.html

Executive functions help people maintain and pursue their goals in difficult, distracting situations.

.....

In one experiment, the participants completed a Stroop task, a common psychological test designed to exercise executive functions. Participants who had earlier been randomly assigned to a low-power group made more errors in the Stroop task than those who had been assigned to a high-power group. Smith and colleagues also found that these results were not due to low-power people being less motivated or putting in less effort. Instead, those lacking in power had difficulty maintaining a focus on their current goal.

This is one smallish experiment, so I'm cautious about drawing large conclusions. I'd like to see experiments relating to executive function and real-world status, and some work on how some people have executive functioning much better or worse than their status. Still, this could be significant.

Link indirectly thanks to en_ki. They put it in an lj post, I went to post it at Steve Barnes' forum, and found someone else had posted about (roughly?) the same article from a page which had a prettier format.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Give people responsibility, and they do better. Anyone but a manager should easily understand that.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Responsibility and status are related, but I don't think they're the same thing.

[madfilkentist]

And without more information, it's hard to tell which one was at work here.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I suspect the high status group was catered to and the low status group was kept waiting and such, but it would be very interesting to find out just what was done to establish status.