Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to make good decisions is critical in life. Although anecdotal and preliminary evidence suggests that social comparison could impair decision making, surprisingly little attention has been paid to such dynamics within cognitive science. The present study aimed to address this gap by exploring, via a sample of 1.5 million chess games and a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, whether higher status of competitors could cause individuals to commit more errors. Critically, chess data includes overt symbols of social status, viz. titles conferred at arbitrary thresholds of ratings that represent playing strength, and an objective measure of errors could be calculated by contrasting the moves that players chose in games against the optimal moves determined by powerful chess engines. I found no evidence that the mere presence of status titles impacted error rates.