Social creatures like humans have an innate sense of each other’s status. We learn to perceive it but are usually not explicitly taught how. Leaving so much implicit in our learning about status has meant that we talk about it in the same slippery, allusive terms that we tend to use for some of our special senses. Scent perceptions, for example, are largely discussed in metaphors — “This smells like a rose,” or “That smells like the beach” — but we have very little vocabulary for talking about scent on its own terms. Status is similar: we use terms and metaphors that successfully communicate some things while papering over what we can’t articulate or don’t understand about it.
I want to to triangulate a definition of status that feels workable to me by starting from a few axiomatic descriptors that I’ve gleaned from other people’s discussions of status:
Status is different from power: Status and power are two different mechanisms through which people get others to change their behaviors or beliefs. Status achieves this through affection, while power does it through coercion. Status and power sometimes coincide, but are often distinct. Rob Henderson uses the example of an Olympic athlete as someone who has high status but no power, and a nightclub bouncer as someone who has (highly local) power but low status. Alice Evans writes that differential status accorded to men and women drives gender inequality around the world. But when you look at her examples, I think she’s really talking about power: either violence or economic coercion being used against women to keep them from challenging men.
Status can rise and fall due to intrinsic or extrinsic factors: People have to work hard to earn status, but creative ways for them to immolate it are never far away thanks to the internet. Outside events can change the status of an individual, too. Tyler Cowen’s March 2020 list of who will rise or fall in status thanks to COVID is instructive. On the one hand, he suggests that Peter Thiel might rise in status due to his ongoing warnings about how globalization makes us more vulnerable. Here, an event might makes others see merit in a position where they previously hadn’t. On the other, he thinks that the threat of COVID will cause people to reconsider the value of social justice warriors’ concerns (hahaha). In both of these cases, Peter Thiel and SJWs just keep doing what they’ve been doing, but COVID gave others cause to reevaluate them.
High status is addictive: Once a person has high status, they don’t want to give it up. Scratch that: once they’ve climbed a single rung up the ladder of status, they’ll do just about anything to avoid going back down. They say that comparison is the thief of joy, but it seems like that only applies when people compare themselves to those with higher status.
Status can vary from group to group: Status isn’t like money. It’s not fungible, so as you travel, your status doesn’t necessarily travel with you. There’s no status exchange at the border between the in-group and out-group, and the loss of status can be traumatic for many. This can harden identification with people’s group memberships, which are further reinforced through ritual. One important ritual is bashing the other team, and that often takes the form of denigrating their high status members. The American right is partly so enamored of Trump because of how successfully he infuriates the left. We relish our status even in small groups, and the internet has facilitated our finding some niche where we can be elevated into higher status. Nick Currie (AKA Momus) wrote that, “In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.” If those are the only people who will give us high status, then fifteen people is better than none.
The big question that none of these descriptors address is why people want status. The answer isn’t as self-evident as it might be for other things that we strive for. Take money: we aim to accumulate money because, all things being equal, it allows us to have more options — options for the kind of work we do and how often, options for where and how we live, options for what we do in our spare time. Health is similar. When we’re in good health, there are just more options available to us than when we’re in poor health, which occupies both our time and our energy. Status, though, constrains more than it opens up new options, at least in the absence of the extra money or health it might bring. Society expects a lot from high status people, and the anxiety of losing status is always present.
Probably the most obvious answer is the one in which status is desirable because it creates reproductive opportunities. There’s clearly some validity to this, although we mostly see it in niche areas these days: think of cult leaders who have children with half their female followers. And if it were true in the past — even in pre-human times — that status-seekers reproduced more than people who didn’t seek status, then that trait might be selected for and we’d all be stuck with it.
At the same time, traits that are deemed high status often frustrate its supposed reproductive advantages. For example, clergy, eunuchs, and elderly people have been or are given high status in many cultures. These groups generally don’t reproduce. Monogamy is the most broadly endorsed form of reproductive relationship across most of the world, despite the fact that it limits the options of high status people. We also seem to strive for status even if we can’t directly enjoy any of its benefits. People work hard for their legacy, which is a kind of posthumous social status — obviously we’re not reproducing then. And, above all, the reproductive explanation for why status is desirable just doesn’t seem that useful in understanding behavior in our times, where fertility is low overall.
The idea of cultural evolution might be a more helpful framing for understanding status. If you’re not familiar with the field of cultural evolution, it’s a highly interdisciplinary area of research — its main influences are from anthropology, computational biology, and economics — that uses Darwinian concepts to understand how different practices spread through human cultures. One of the main questions occupying researchers in cultural evolution is the use of social versus asocial learning: that is, learning from others through observation or training, or figuring things out yourself. It’s this contrast between social and asocial learning that I see as the key to a novel reading of status.
In his book Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age, Alberto Acerbi gives the example of finding yourself among a group of others in a forest full of fruit-bearing trees. Eventually you grow hungry and have to decide what to eat. How do you approach that problem? You can see which fruits other people are eating and copy their strategy, or you can settle on your own unique approach. Deciding on your strategy gets even harder if you see other people following different strategies. Maybe some people are eating only red fruits. Others are eating only blue fruits. And a third group is eating everything but the blue fruits.
You really don’t want to get food poisoning in the middle of the forest that you’ve been magically transported to. So, while you can always create your own strategy, asocial learning feels unnecessarily risky when you can learn from others. One strategy you could use would be to do whatever the majority is doing. This would be called conformity bias. But maybe you’re feeling rebellious and you want to take the opposite tack by adopting the strategy of the smallest group: this would be anti-conformity bias. You could also just do whatever the highest status person does. Maybe someone has emerged as a leader and they seem to be doing well enough. This would be called prestige bias.
The thing about status is that it’s generally not a very fine-grained measure of expertise. We wouldn’t have any reason to believe that the leader of our hungry little band would know any more about fruits than anyone else, but we might still be drawn towards following their actions. Attributing expertise to high status people outside of what they’ve demonstrated is exactly why prestige bias is called a bias. It’s also why Michael Jordan became a spokesman for Hanes underwear and George Clooney featured in ads for Nespresso — both examples from Acerbi’s book. Despite there being no reason to believe that Jordan knows anything more than us about underwear or to suspect that Clooney even drinks coffee, these men were able to get paid a lot of money to lend their status to their sponsors. They got paid because of our tendency to follow high status people, even in areas completely outside of their expertise.
High status people are less prone to prestige bias, at least in part because there are fewer people who are above them in the status hierarchy. But it also actively diminishes your status to be too susceptible to prestige bias. Think about the pejorative ‘basic’, meaning someone that tries too hard to lift up their own status with easy signals. This often means competing amongst themselves for proximity to the people and brands that they’ve come to see as high status, thus making themselves vulnerable to whatever is flashy and novel. As Kreayshawn says, “Gucci Gucci, Louis Louis, Fendi Fendi, Prada. Basic bitches wear that shit so I don’t even bother.” Even the academic literature uses an uncharacteristically venomous term for this group that shows the contempt it arouses: scroungers.
Because high status people are less prone to status bias, the salience of other forms of learning increases for them. High status people conform and seek novelty, of course, but they have more room for asocial learning. Others intuitively give high status people a kind of license for greater asocial learning, which in turn comes to be valued because of their status. This brings me to the first version of my thesis, that status is a monopoly on the value of your asocial learning. When you’re high status, everyone recognizes your asocial learning as your own, and gives you credit for it. This leads to monetary profit as well as other forms of reward.
Asocial learning isn’t inherently high status, of course. Lower status people naturally engage in asocial learning too, but the difference is that there’s minimal social value placed on it. We tend to call low status asocial learners things like cranks if they practice asocial learning in science, or pretentious if they do it in art, or tinkerers in engineering. All of these are terms that speak to the lack of value we place on the products of their asocial learning, which we certainly won’t be copying. To the extent that they create value through asocial learning, they have to be careful that it isn’t somehow captured by a higher status person. This is what happens when successful authors plagiarize more obscure writers. It’s also the steelman version of cultural appropriation: a low status group innovates and receives little recognition; then, a high status group takes these innovations, presents them slightly differently, and profits.
Nobody can use asocial learning for every aspect of their lives. When people have the option to choose between learning strategies for some challenge, they tend to use asocial learning in the areas where they’re most interested. (Having to practice asocial learning on something you don’t care about is both low status and torturous.) Because high status people get to choose when to practice asocial learning, asocial learning overlaps significantly with play for them. There’s just much less fun to be had in the process of conforming, whatever its value might be in creating an easier life. It’s not even that fun to adopt a novel practice, which you might value for its contribution to your identity rather than enjoyment of the practice itself. But it’s fun to put your own twist on things and to see high status people doing the same.
Another way to look at status then — in addition to a monopoly on the value of your asocial learning — would be as the accumulation of further status through play. As a high status person plays, they become higher status. An intellectual, for example, is someone who plays with expertise in public. Richard Feynman exemplified this by clearly having fun, but people can also be more serious about their play and still gain status. When a musician becomes a writer or a photographer becomes a musician, this is an example of play across mediums, and it creates additional status.
Putting these pieces together, we arrive at our definition of status: status is the opportunity to capitalize on play.
This understanding of status can be explained by the four axioms I listed at the beginning of this article. Status is different from power: The monopolies I’ve spoken of aren’t enforced by threats, but by the fact that everyone recognizes the products of your asocial learning — the fruits of your play in other words — couldn’t be made by anyone else. Status can rise and fall due to external or internal factors: The intangible marketplace of status has trends just like the financial marketplace. Your unique form of cultural production may be more or less in demand for any number of reasons. Maybe something happens that brings extra attention to your asocial learning, like what happened with Katalin Karikó at the start of the COVID pandemic. Or maybe a competitor comes along with something more compelling on offer, thus causing your status to fall. High status is addictive: Nobody wants to give up a monopoly. As Peter Thiel’s famous quote goes, “Competition is for losers.” The status implications of that couldn’t be clearer — giving up your monopoly not only cuts you off from its rewards but it lowers your status, reducing the value of your asocial learning in the process. Finally, status can vary from group to group: The main insight of the “status game” metaphor is that there are lots of games available to play. I can’t follow most games well enough to even know who’s winning, just as many other people would probably find the status games that are relevant to me completely inscrutable. That’s okay: nobody would assume that a jai alai champion would have high status within the chess world. In the end, we all just want people to play with and status can enable a way to fill our bellies through that play.