Grinners Gain More Followers: Signaling Status Through the Expression of High Arousal on Social Media

Individuals engage in various consumption and self-presentation practices to gain status (and followers) on social media. The current research examines the effect of expressing arousal on status perceptions and social media outcomes. Analyses of posts from nearly 200,000 Twitter users and data from five preregistered experiments find that expressing high (versus low) arousal signals high social status, which corresponds to a greater number of followers on social media. This effect does not vary as a function of the valence of the expressed arousal or whether arousal is expressed in luxury versus non-luxury contexts. We further show the conferral of status to high arousal expressers is driven by the perception that they are more assertive. Therefore, discounting the belief that expressing arousal is associated with greater assertiveness attenuates the arousal-status effect.