Status anxiety at work

People who compare themselves against their junior colleagues tend to be more content at work than those who compare themselves against their seniors, researchers have found.

Measuring ourselves up against those around us is a fundamental aspect of human nature, providing another source of information to fuel our boundless self curiosity. But according to Douglas Brown and colleagues, little or no research has previously been conducted on the role of these social comparisons in the workplace.

Nine-hundred and ninety-one university graduates, from teachers to salespeople, completed an online survey about their tendency to compare their fortunes with those above or below them at work. Several factors were associated with a person’s tendency to compare themselves against their superiors. Participants who lacked autonomy at work, who were unclear about their responsibilities, and/or who were uncertain about their own status and abilities, were more likely to compare themselves to those above them at work. This in turn was associated with job dissatisfaction, and a tendency to look elsewhere for work.

Of course, the link between lack of job autonomy, job ambiguity and job dissatisfaction are well established by previous research, but Douglas Brown’s team said they are the first to highlight the important mediating role social comparison plays in all this.

Only one factor – uncertainty about one’s own status and abilities – was associated with making more frequent comparisons against one’s junior colleagues, a somewhat surprising finding considering the same factor was also associated making more upward comparisons. In turn, comparing oneself with more junior colleagues was associated with more job satisfaction.

While acknowledging their cross-sectional design meant the causal role of social comparisons at work has not been established, the researchers concluded “these findings have important implications for understanding how social comparisons work in an organisational context, and how job attitudes form and job search behaviour is initiated”.
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Brown, D.J., Ferris, D.L., Heller, D. & Keeping, L.M. (2006). Antecedents and consequences of the frequency of upward and downward social comparisons at work. Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, 102, 59-75.

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Humans can track scents like a dog

Bloodhounds are unlikely to be out of work just yet, but researchers have found humans can track a scent on the ground in the same way that dogs do. While humans are traditionally considered to have a poor sense of smell compared with many of their mammalian cousins, the new finding suggests this reputation may be unfair.

Jess Porter and colleagues first observed that 21 out of 32 participants were able to track a 10 metre trail of chocolate essential oil through an open field using their sense of smell alone. By contrast, none of them were able to track the scent when their nostrils were taped up. (watch film)

Moreover, it seems this latent ability is ripe for improvement through practice. In a second experiment the researchers asked four participants to practise tracking scents for three hours a day, for three days. Afterwards, the participants were more than twice as fast at tracking a scent, and they deviated less from the scent trail. The researchers said such improvements needn’t end there: "Our sense of smell is less keen partly because we put less demand on it", Porter said. "But if people practice sniffing smells, they can get really good at it.”

Next, in a move that opponents of animal experimentation would surely approve of, the researchers used human participants to find out more about how animals track scents. They wanted to know if such tracking is done by comparing odour intensity across the two nostrils, in much the same way that sound is localised by comparing across the ears. Some have argued the nostrils are spaced to close together to be used in this way, but it’s been a difficult issue to research with even in the most well-behaved dogs objecting to their nostrils being blocked.

So 14 human participants attempted to track a scent either with one nostril taped, or with both nostrils clear. Accuracy dropped to 36 per cent with a taped nostril (compared with 66 per cent with both nostrils clear) and speed dropped by 26 per cent. Another experiment used a special device that combined airflow so that both nostrils received the same information, and this was again found to impair performance.

“Here we find that mammals performing a scent-tracking task, freely able to move their nose and sample the olfactory environment in real time, reap added benefit from sampling via their two spatially offset nostrils”, the researchers concluded.
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Porter, J., Craven, B., Khan, R.M., Chang, S-J., Kang, I., Judkewicz, B., Volpe, J., Settles, G. & Sobel, N. (2006). Mechanisms of scent tracking in humans. Nature Neuroscience, 10, 27-29.

Link to film showing human tracking scent.

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