Does virtue lead to status? Testing the moral virtue theory of status attainment.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported online in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on Oct 24 2019 (see record 2019-63656-001). In the article "Does Virtue Lead to Status? Testing the Moral Virtue Theory of Status Attainment" by Feng Bai, Grace Ching Chi Ho, and Jin Yan, funding acknowledgments were omitted from the author note. The second paragraph of the author note should read as follows: This research was funded by an internal start-up grant (1-ZE74) awarded to Feng Bai from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and a grant (NSFC 71572175) awarded to Jin Yan from the National Natural Science Foundation of China.] The authors perform one of the first empirical tests of the moral virtue theory of status attainment (MVT), a conceptual framework for showing that morality leads to status. Studies 1a to 1d are devoted to developing and validating a 15-item status attainment scale (SAS) to measure how virtue leads to admiration (virtue-admiration), how dominance leads to fear (dominance-fear), and how competence leads to respect (competence-respect). Studies 2a and 2b are an exploration of the nomological network and discriminant validity to show that peer-reported virtue-admiration is positively related to moral character and perceptions such as perceived warmth and unrelated to amoral constructs such as neuroticism. In addition, virtue-admiration mediates the positive effect of several self-reported moral character traits, such as moral identity-internalization, on status conferral. Study 3 supports the external validity of the virtue route to status in a sample of fulltime managers from China. In Study 4, a preregistered experiment, virtue evokes superior status while selfishness evokes inferior status. Perceivers who are high in moral character show stronger perceptions of superior status. Finally, Study 5, another preregistered experiment, shows that virtue leads to higher status through inducing virtue-admiration rather than competence-respect, even for incompetent actors. The findings provide initial support for MVT arguing that virtue is a distinct, third route to status. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).