Human social status has long been of interest to evolutionary and social psychologists. The question of who gets to control resources and be a leader has garnered a lot of attention from these and other fields, and this thesis examines evidence for there being two different mechanisms of achieving high status, and their correlates. The mechanisms are 1) Dominance: being aggressive, manipulative and forcing others to follow you, and 2) Prestige: possessing qualities which make others freely follow you. Chapter 1 is an introductory chapter in which I explain selection pressures, group formation, and the need for social hierarchies; I then describe the two proposed methods of attaining social status and how facial characteristics can give clues as to an individual’s social status. In Chapter 2, my first experimental chapter, I examined how faces created to appear either high in dominance or high in prestige were judged with respect to those traits as well as personality characteristics. Taking this further, in Chapter 3, I looked at how natural variation in real faces would reflect differences in other- and self-perceived ratings of dominance and prestige. Chapter 4 served to examine whether, given a set of words related to social status, I would find differences in what words were placed into dominant or prestige categories. Findings within these chapters are consistent with dominance and prestige being separable methods of attaining high status, from differences in facial appearance (Chapter 2 and 3), to personality characteristics (Chapter 2), to word usage (Chapter 4). Once I had established that these were two distinct routes to achieving high status, I chose to focus on dominance in Chapter 5 and explored the conceptual relationships between dominance and facial expressions. I found that manipulating perceptions of dominance affected how intense expressions of anger, sadness, and fear were perceived (Chapter 5). As there has been a paucity of research in the area of women’s social status, in Chapter 6, I went on to explore what effects cosmetics use in women would have on their perceived social status. I found differences in how men and women perceived women wearing cosmetics, which again points to a distinction between dominance and prestige. My thesis then presents a broad view of the two different mechanisms for attaining high status. Using new methods not otherwise used in exploring dominance and prestige I was able to explore correlates and indicators, as well as perceptions of both strategies. These findings will allow us to determine who might be capable of attaining social status, which of the two methods they might use, as well as what implicit associations we hold about each. They will also open doors for future research into the two strategies, and even help interpret previous research, as many previous studies simply relate to high status and do not distinguish between dominance and prestige.

This research investigated the relationships among four personality traits (affiliation, achievement, aggression, and dominance), actual influence, perceived influence, and individual consensus. My hypotheses consisted of a path model showing the relationships among these variables. The purpose of this research is to increase our understanding of group dynamics. By understanding group dynamics, managers can design meetings to optimize the commitment to and quality of the group’s decision. The methodology for my research was relational. In relational studies, variables aren’t manipulated. To test my hypotheses, I measured several variables that weren’t manipulated but were obtained in an experimental situation. Subjects (308) were randomly placed in 77 four-person groups. Each group consisted of three subjects and a confederate. The confederates weren’t part of my study and I didn’t collect data on them. All group members completed the Lost on the Moon exercise three times: an initial individual rank, a group rank, and a final individual rank. For each subject, I collected data on seven variables: affiliation, achievement, aggression, dominance, actual influence, perceived influence, and individual consensus. I measured affiliation, achievement, aggression, and dominance with Jackson’s Personality Research Form. Actual influence was measured by the absolute difference between the group member’s individual ranking and the final group ranking. A low score indicated high influence. Perceived influence and individual consensus were measured with a questionnaire. Both scales were derived from a factor analytic study. I found the following significant relationships: - affiliation was negatively related to actual influence, - affiliation was positively related to individual consensus, - achievement was positively related to perceived influence, - achievement was positively related to individual consensus, - actual influence was positively related to perceived influence, and - perceived influence was positively related to individual consensus. The first five relationships were found to be significant at the .05 level. The relationship between perceived influence and individual consensus was found to be significant at the .01 level. In interpreting the results, this relationship is suspicious. Since both scales were derived from a factor analysis of the same questionnaire, this significant relationship may result partially from measurement bias. In my exploratory analysis, I found gender to affect group dynamics more than personality. Therefore, further studies which manipulate gender need to be performed before the relationships among gender, personality traits, and group dynamics are fully understood. / Master of Science

Derived from a marxist/liberal humanist view of power, conventional critiques and historical accounts of the socio-medical sciences in South Africa see only their power to repress and negate the true bodily attributes and authentic person of the African. In so doing, they ignore the productive capacity of these knowledges and practices as a manifestation of what Michel Foucault termed "disciplinary" power, by which the human body is manufactured and made manageable as an object of medical knowledge and industrial utilisation. Accordingly, this thesis offers just such a Foucaultian reading of western socio-medical knowledge in South Africa to demonstrate how it has operated to fabricate the bodies of Africans as visible objects possessed of distinct attributes that have provoked particular strategies for their surveillance, management, and government in health and disease. / Psychology / D. Litt. et Phil. (Psychology)

Derived from a marxist/liberal humanist view of power, conventional critiques and historical accounts of the socio-medical sciences in South Africa see only their power to repress and negate the true bodily attributes and authentic person of the African. In so doing, they ignore the productive capacity of these knowledges and practices as a manifestation of what Michel Foucault termed "disciplinary" power, by which the human body is manufactured and made manageable as an object of medical knowledge and industrial utilisation. Accordingly, this thesis offers just such a Foucaultian reading of western socio-medical knowledge in South Africa to demonstrate how it has operated to fabricate the bodies of Africans as visible objects possessed of distinct attributes that have provoked particular strategies for their surveillance, management, and government in health and disease. / Psychology / D. Litt. et Phil. (Psychology)

Drawing especially on Donna Haraway's notion of the cyborg, this thesis argues that Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl novels, through their depiction of the cyborg and their use of metafiction, intertextuality, and irony, subvert binaries and hierarchies that cause social injustice. Chapter one argues that Colfer's characters disrupt the oppressive binary opposition between innocence and experience that characterizes children's literature. Chapter two argues that Colfer's fairy hierarchy satirizes the human hierarchy. Chapter three argues that Colfer's cyborg, by disrupting the boundary between machine and organism, breaches the wall around the pervasive garden hierarchy of childhood innocence. Chapter four argues against the traditional textual hierarchies which classify children's literature as inferior, and which give adult writers power over child readers.

The author examines how a North American commercial Web site developed by Environmental Systems Research Institute serves as a vehicle through which American hegemony and cultural imperialism are propagated to Latin America. The author argues that the content of the web site pages, which contain American cultural symbols and values, may serve to influence or change the values of its Latin American visitors.