Why It Pays to Feel Happy Just Before You Join a Group

They way you feel at the moment when you join a new group has a significant impact on your initial – and later – status among your groupmates, according to Gavin J. Kilduff of New York University and Adam D. Galinsky of Columbia University. For example, people who were induced to feel happy (via writing about a happy experience) were subsequently rated by their teammates in a hypothetical snowstorm-survival task as having higher status (2.13 on a 1-to-7 scale) than those who hadn’t been primed to feel happy (1.79); similar effects were seen when people were primed to feel eager and powerful, and the status perceptions lingered for days, probably because of the reinforcing nature of group hierarchies. The findings suggest that whatever your baseline personality, you can achieve higher status by increasing your happiness, eagerness, or sense of power just before you join a group.