What does status signalling do? When successful, what does it achieve?
I was reading this old post by Scott Alexander: Right is the New Left. In it, Scott talks about status signalling and the urge to be “cool” and be seen as such. Reading the article, I realized that much of the experience that Scott describes is alien to me. I understand on a theoretical level that status-seeking is a big thing. But I have only a hazy sense of it in practice.
Now, I am highly introverted, so I do not interact with people that much. I also have Asperger, so even when I do interact with people, there may be much that goes over my head.
I do not remember ever having a very clear sense of what my status was in the various groups I have been in, nor who was considered high or low status. I have a sense of whether people like me. And I have a sense of whether people people value my work and my jokes. But those are just some of the obviously useful aspects of social interaction. As far as I understand, status also has zero-sum components which hinge on being up-to-date with fashion and memes. For example, Scott writes in his article:
So suppose we start off with a country in which everyone wears identical white togas. One day the upper-class is at one of their fancy upper-class parties, and one of them suggests that they all wear black togas instead, so everyone can recognize them and know that they’re better than everyone else. This idea goes over well, and the upper class starts wearing black.
After a year, the middle class notices what’s going on. They want to pass for upper-class, and they expect to be able to pull it off, so they start wearing black too.
I do not remember ever having done this, nor do I particularly remember having noticed other people doing it. I remember that my sister talked about how her friends were doing this kind of thing when we were teens, but I do not think I actively noticed it.
But most importantly, I do not understand why people do the above. If you successfully signal high-status fashion sense like in Scott’s example… then what? What does that achieve? Do people treat you differently? If so, how?
And what is the difference between signalling status towards strangers and signalling status towards people who already know you?
Moreover: Assuming that people treat you differently because you signal fashion sense… to what extent are these people rationally acting on incentives, and to what extent are they just being irrational? I can understand that it is rational to treat people better if they appear to be rich and powerful (because they might reward or punish you), but it is not obvious to me that fashion sense is useful.
Thanks in advance!
People naturally feel a desire to do nice things for people who they perceive as high status. This is because people with lots of money/power/influence have an outsized ability to influence you (for good or bad), so it’s often worthwhile to be in their good graces. This means it’s good to be high-status for the benefits of people treating you better (and if you’re high-status, then there’s a second-order effect from your friends being high-status). Some people seek status instrumentally in this way, but it’s also a feel-good in the same way as food or sex or comfort, so people also seek status just because it feels good.
Status signaling is somewhat different from other kinds of signaling since people’s perception of your status is in itself a form of status.
Thanks for the reply.
I already mentioned that in the OP. But what about fashion? Why do people feel a desire to do nice things for people who follow the newest fashion?
People who follow the newest fashion are likely to
be rich (newest fashion is often expensive)
have good social skills (to successfully decode what the newest fashion is)
Both these things make them potentially useful allies and dangerous enemies.
Your point 1 makes sense. But as for your point 2, it seems to me that the observer would need to have just as good social skills in order to tell who is wearing the newest fashion.
Good catch, but maybe recognizing something fashionable is easier than setting it up?
Or maybe, a near miss is much worse than a safe choice, so the people who are not entirely sure will play it safe, but will be impressed by those who take the risk and don’t get laughed at.
The real rules are even more complicated, there is no such thing as universally fashionable; the choice must fit the social situation—you wouldn’t play sport dressed the same way you would go to an opera. The social situation includes other people; if you undershoot, you look like a loser, if you overshoot, you look like you try too hard; the optimum is to overshoot just by little: to look better but in a deniable way.
I think the general rules are that (1) people can judge the level slightly above them, but can’t compare levels too high above them; and (2) trying too hard and getting it wrong is worse than not trying, in the eyes of those qualified to judge you. So you judge those around your level directly, and those too high by how other people higher than you judge them.
(Or maybe I don’t actually understand it.)
I recently adopted the use of status in my vocabulary as a kind of currency and ever since, most of human behaviour which had in prior times confounded me became immediately legible with explanation.
In many ways, I consider it be one the strongest human motivators (arguably even more so than money) with embedded circuity throughout almost all of our cognitive appliances.
Most of human behaviour is not rationally decided, it is emotionally motivated. Our emotional circuits are subject to evolutionary drift as a result of the delta in update speed between genetic and sociological systems.
Our emotional circuits prioritize survival in society where individualism gets you killed. Status is a proxy for dominance in negotiating co-operative behaviours and terms of a group. In my opinion, Higher status ~= more pull you have over collective actions.
Whether that pull is determined through fear, maligned proxies on proxies of worth, or genuine reciprocal capacity is irrelevant: status is the moniker that zero’s out the ‘why’ and leaves you only with ‘how much’ someone is capable determining broader group norms or behaviour.
Therefore, being in favour with someone of high status, means you implicitly have control over tribe/group trajectories, which one can use to direct towards their own benefit (resource acquisition, sexual selection, terms of safety). Over time, high status individuals develop signalling mechanisms to identify each other as larger and larger groups coalesce. These are the norms you distinguished.
Status is not necessarily as rationally imperative in modern society, where one does not need a tribe to survive (only an income), but all of the old system’s which made obtaining it so evolutionary advantageous have stuck around.
Despite this, obtaining power in modernity still requires it heavily. As your ability to gain favour with certain individuals becomes a proxy for that in continued capacity later on. Eliezer has a very good example of this in one of his writings as it pertains to startup investing, though I don’t have it on hand. And, in my opinion, a signalling mechanism is an instance of this kind in microcosm.
Thanks. I have heard the evolutionary-psychology explanation before, but I struggle to understand how it works in terms of practical psychology.
Your explanation is very theoretical. I was more fishing for a phenomenological explanation—or at least a behaviorist explanation in detail.
I apologize for sounding dismissive, but you sound like someone who has read about how humans operate rather than someone who has experienced life as a human. I was hoping that someone more extroverted and more neurotypical than I could explain how status signalling (and especially fashion) feels when you are in the midst of it.
It feels like an implicit sense of excitement that if you get validation from that particular person or group, your future will contain additional degrees of freedom you maybe can’t directly qualify as precise or rational hypothesis over and above the feeling of new and exciting opportunities. I was trying to keep it mildly PG for the sake of the tone of the forum but I can be more direct. When I was younger I was extremely status driven (without being aware of it until calming down in later years).
When I was in high school there was an extremely high status person X who threw semi-exclusive parties with what many considered to be most attractive members of the opposite sex in not just our school but the district.
Person X had a particular style and fashion taste. I had the notion that if I dress in a way person X will think is cool, or people that can influence person X’s opinion of my own ‘coolness’ due to a signalling of a shared particular taste—it would increase the odds I will become friends with person X, as person X would consider me to somewhat of a peer in those status bearing considerations.
In most cases, the particular fashion sense wouldn’t be definable in shorthand. There would be too many load bearing constraints, which is exactly why it would be a fitting marker for ‘taste similarity’
The idea was, the next time person X throws one of their parties there will be increased odds I will be invited, and increased odds that when I go to said parties, those attractive people will consider me attractive because of my status associations with Person X. Therefore, I will have increased chances of getting lucky, or a girlfriend who otherwise I would have no reasonable chance at ‘getting with’ .
After getting included in person X’s group, I am compelled to uphold these fashion norms, for fear if I don’t, person X will consider me as the kind of association that reduces their signalled value to the individuals they care about retaining status with, call them, their X primes. Not upholding these norms therefore would lead to not being invited to the parties anymore, and therefore, no more opportunities. To some degree, that would feel like a return to ‘hopelessness’.
This kind of thinking dominated my teenage mind, because there was nothing I found intrinsically more exciting or motivating than having a girlfriend. And the more high status of a girlfriend (of which attractiveness is one major variable) , the more that would compound favour externally (with person X or their X primes) and further snowball increased selection—long past whether it would work out with any particular girlfriend or not.
I found that after entering the professional world many such notions evaporated, but interestingly, not within many of my old contacts from high school—who still rely on similar mechanisms (though different signalling factors) to maintain their social groups into adulthood.
Thanks! This does make sense.
Scott Alexander’s article also mentions that people want to avoid looking like low-status people. Do you recognize this? If so, can you please say something about how that feels like?
It feels like being fearful of losing something. Like, the feeling of being afraid you are going to get some kind of call with bad news. In the case of these status pursuits, you would be afraid of ‘missing out’ on some social gathering or interaction and it would hurt in your chest if it happened, rejection causes people a form of semi-physical pain (at least, the same parts of the brain light up during rejection as they do for physical discomfort), and looking low status risks being treated like it, and thus risks putting yourself in a painful scenario.
They’re signalling to the normies, people who take the outward signs of a thing for the thing itself. Hence people wearing spectacles with flat glass to look more intelligent, buying degrees from degree mills to put fake letters after their name, name-dropping people who don’t know their name, putting on airs of importance, and so on.
The much-cited “Impro” is a manual for actors presenting the outward signs to an audience. It has nothing to with attaining to genuine respect for your qualities and accomplishments.
Behind all that is the idea of “status” as a D&D stat with no gears, you just compare it with a die roll for the GM to tell you, “Yes, your bluster overawed the guard, and he lets you pass.” And perhaps the GM makes a note that as soon as you’ve swept past, the guard gets on the speaking tube to summon reinforcements, because ultimately, the only causal force in fiction is the author’s decisions.
You can con people for a while with “signalling”, but we have a lot of words for people who have worn their pretence thin.
Thanks for the reply, but this feels like strawmanning and not particularly rational. I get the impression that you would rather feel superior to the “normies” than understand them.
You mean, my comment was a status grab? Wow, so was yours! And so is this one! Everything anyone says is a status grab! There is only status!
Sigh.
What? No, I did not mean to imply that your comment was a status grab.
May I ask what you mean by that “sigh”? Intuitively I interpret it as a passive-aggressive jab meaning something like “you are too stupid to understand me”, but I might be wrong.
That was how I read your “you would rather feel superior to the “normies” than understand them.
About the sigh, that was just an expression of exasperation, not at you specifically, but at the prevalence of people leaping to status explanations. The meta-problem I have with status explanations is that the move sucks all the oxygen out of the air. Someone says “status”, and suddenly no-one can say anything that won’t be interpreted as a status move, and it’s impossible to get back to the object level.
I agree with your asking the original question about why signalling, to which my first comment gave my answer.
Ah, I understand how I gave that impression.
IMO there is a big difference between trying to feel superior to normies and trying to look superior to normies. The latter could be a status grab.
Your post above did not look like a status grab to me, because IMO it did not make you look good. I did not imagine that anyone on Less Wrong would think: “Wow, this guy looks down on ‘normies’ - he is so cool!”
I am just another aspie speculating, but my best guess is signalling to people who know you is a combination of:
a) they don’t know you perfectly; you want them to go “I thought I knew him, but now I see he is actually cool”
b) mostly futile, as described in Luke 4:24.