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 atleast 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.
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.
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.