Evidence from social psychology suggests that men compared to women more readily display and pursue control over human resources or capital. However, studying how status and gender shape deliberate impression formation is difficult due to social desirability concerns. Using univariate and multivariate fMRI analyses (n = 65), we examined how gender and socioeconomic status (SES) may influence brain responses during deliberate but private impression formation. Men more than women showed greater activity in the VMPFC and NAcc when forming impressions of high-SES (vs. low-SES) targets. Seed partial least squares (PLS) analysis showed that this SES-based increase in VMPFC activity was associated with greater co-activation across an evaluative network for the high- SES versus low-SES univariate comparison. A data-driven task PLS analysis also showed greater co-activation in an extended network consisting of regions involved in salience detection, attention, and task engagement as a function of increasing target SES. This co-activating network was most pronounced for men. These findings provide evidence that high-SES targets elicit neural responses indicative of positivity, reward, and salience during impression formation among men. Contributions to a network neuroscience understanding of status perception and implications for gender- and status- based impression formation are discussed.

Generally, White (vs. Black) and high-status (vs. low-status) individuals are rated positively. However, implicit evaluations of simultaneously perceived race and SES remain to be considered. Across four experiments, participants completed an evaluative priming task with face primes orthogonally varying in race (Black vs. White) and SES (low vs. high). Following initial evidence of a positive implicit bias for high-SES (vs. low-SES) primes, subsequent experiments revealed that this bias is sensitive to target race, particularly when race and SES antecedents are presented in an integrated fashion. Specifically, high-SES positive bias was more reliable for White than for Black targets. Additional analyses examining how implicit biases may be sensitive to perceiver characteristics such as race, SES, and beliefs about socioeconomic mobility are also discussed. Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of examining evaluations based on race and SES when antecedents of both categories are simultaneously available.