In retrospect, I probably should have put more care into the wording of my comments in this thread (which I wrote more quickly and with less proofreading than usual). Several people have understood my positions as more extreme than I honestly meant them to be, and I evidently failed in conveying some of the more subtle points I had in mind.
While I agree with most of your above comment, there seems to be a major misunderstanding here (probably due to my lack of clarity):
Presumably one could test your hypothesis by finding out whether individuals lose interest in reading when they gain status; my personal experience suggests this is not the case, and that instead books compete with other forms of stimulation.
Well, insofar as reading is a directly status-related activity, nothing I hypothesized predicts that, nor is it the case in reality. In fact, if you enjoy high status as an intellectual, you are required to read a lot constantly to maintain that status; having nothing much to say when you’re asked what you’ve read lately would be a major embarrassment. Of course, this is rarely by itself a very prominent motivation—people who achieve high intellectual status usually have more than enough interest in reading out of curiosity and professional needs—but I wouldn’t say it’s entirely negligible either, especially when it comes to trendy highbrow literature.
However, that’s not at all what I had in mind with my reading-as-gossip-super-stimulus hypothesis. What I had in mind there is that the appeal of certain genres of literature and other storytelling media might be in part due to the fact that they stimulate the same urges that make people enjoy gossip. Thanks to these media, besides the thin diet of mundane real-world gossip, you get to enjoy huge amounts of artificial gossip skillfully crafted to be super-interesting, albeit about people who are fictional (or at least remote and personally irrelevant).
This mechanism has nothing at all to do with one’s actual status and behaviors that influence it. The status connection here lies the fact that the gossip-enjoying urges had previously evolved under the influence of status dynamics, in which gossip is one of the key practical instruments. Their present stimulation with concentrated artificial gossip delivered via literature and other media no longer serves this function; it is merely stimulating an urge that evolved as an adaptation to a different environment.
In retrospect, I probably should have put more care into the wording of my comments in this thread (which I wrote more quickly and with less proofreading than usual). Several people have understood my positions as more extreme than I honestly meant them to be, and I evidently failed in conveying some of the more subtle points I had in mind.
While I agree with most of your above comment, there seems to be a major misunderstanding here (probably due to my lack of clarity):
Well, insofar as reading is a directly status-related activity, nothing I hypothesized predicts that, nor is it the case in reality. In fact, if you enjoy high status as an intellectual, you are required to read a lot constantly to maintain that status; having nothing much to say when you’re asked what you’ve read lately would be a major embarrassment. Of course, this is rarely by itself a very prominent motivation—people who achieve high intellectual status usually have more than enough interest in reading out of curiosity and professional needs—but I wouldn’t say it’s entirely negligible either, especially when it comes to trendy highbrow literature.
However, that’s not at all what I had in mind with my reading-as-gossip-super-stimulus hypothesis. What I had in mind there is that the appeal of certain genres of literature and other storytelling media might be in part due to the fact that they stimulate the same urges that make people enjoy gossip. Thanks to these media, besides the thin diet of mundane real-world gossip, you get to enjoy huge amounts of artificial gossip skillfully crafted to be super-interesting, albeit about people who are fictional (or at least remote and personally irrelevant).
This mechanism has nothing at all to do with one’s actual status and behaviors that influence it. The status connection here lies the fact that the gossip-enjoying urges had previously evolved under the influence of status dynamics, in which gossip is one of the key practical instruments. Their present stimulation with concentrated artificial gossip delivered via literature and other media no longer serves this function; it is merely stimulating an urge that evolved as an adaptation to a different environment.