T disutility from actions that threaten this identity. Similarly,www.frontiersin.orgOctober Volume Article van den Bos et al.Pyrrhic victoriespeople may well derive utility from actions that effect their perceived status,specifically when social status is hugely salient (Immorlica et al. Our identities are complex and fluid. Because of this,diverse social contexts emphasize unique aspects of our identity. Analysis from social psychology has shown that minimal group paradigms alter the salience of social comparisons (Brewer and Weber. The heightened relevance of social comparison may possibly raise the desirability of getting perceived as a highstatus individual (Ridgeway Garcia et al and in turn effect social preferences over outcomes (i.e improved utility for winning andor elevated disutility for losing). In the initially experiment we investigated the impact of elevated salience of social status by taking benefit of a naturally occurring rivalry involving two universities. We contrast bidding when participants believed that outgroup members were present within the auction against when participants execute the task inside the absence of explicit group identities. We hypothesized that the emphasis around the participants’ K03861 web identity,particularly offered the existing competitive relationship targeted by our manipulation (Schloss et al,would enhance the utility gained from getting status and therefore enhance overbidding (Akerlof and Kranton. Finally,we explored the part of affective response to social outcomes in relation to the formal analyses of person differences in social utility. Our second study takes benefit of the reality that differences in basal testosterone levels predict the drive for social status,both across folks and inside individuals across time (Mazur and Booth Mehta et al. Eisenegger et al. Further evidence indicates that people with higher basal testosterone levels practical experience pleasure or dysphoria once they succeed or fail to achieve higher status,whereas low testosterone people show no such affective responses to status adjustments (Josephs et al. Newman et al. Mehta et al. We hypothesized that basal hormone levels would influence affective responses to status adjustments inherent in our auction activity,and hence would be related with elevated overbidding. We test this prediction inside a second experiment. All round,we argue that competitive drive arises from a need to obtain or keep social status,providing rise to behaviors that might have negative financial consequences. We conclude that competitiveness is strongly driven by emotions arising from social comparison and that economic theory ought to incorporate motivations associated to social context and status.Sealed bid popular worth auctionEXPERIMENT : STANFORD vs. BERKELEYMETHODParticipantsWe recruited male participants from a paid participant pool maintained by the Stanford University Psychology Division. The control group consisted of participants (mean age . years,SD) soon after excluding who did not believe the cover story. The experimental group was composed of subjects (M . years,SD); 1 participant was excluded since of prior experience inside a sealed bid auction experiment. The study was authorized by the Stanford University Institutional Critique PubMed ID:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24047420 Board and all participants gave written,informed consent prior to finishing the process.Frontiers in Neuroscience Decision NeuroscienceIn order to test predictions with the model on competitive behavior,participants played numerous rounds of a pla.