Social Status: Down the Rabbit Hole

Metadata

• Author: [[Kevin Simler]]
• Full Title: Social Status: Down the Rabbit Hole
• Category: #articles
• URL: https://meltingasphalt.com/social-status-down-the-rabbit-hole/

Highlights

• Even though we’re capable of a seemingly-infinite variety of individual behaviors, our patterns of behavior are a lot more constrained — in particular, by the laws of economics and game theory.
• So for a behavioral pattern to arise — and more importantly, to persist — within a population, it needs to be both economically productive and game-theoretically stable, i.e., viable. And the set of viable behavior patterns is much, much smaller than the set of all behaviors we’re physically or intellectually capable of. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, if Nature has already struck upon many of these viable patterns and decanted them, through natural selection, into the instincts of other species. The patterns are simply "out there," like timeless Platonic forms, just waiting to be discovered — or, in our case, rediscovered.
• The beginning of wisdom about social status is learning to distinguish its two (and only two) primary forms: dominance and prestige.
  • Tags: [[social status]]
• To understand dominance, we need to focus on the high-status behaviors. To understand prestige, however, we need to focus on the low-status behaviors.
• Babblers don’t just passively or occasionally offer to help each other. Instead they compete intensely for the privilege of doing so.
• "What selfish motive does an individual babbler have to help others?" The answer, in a word, is prestige.
• Bottom line: Prestige-seeking and admiration (deference) are complementary teaming instincts. They help babblers stay attached to a group, keep groupmates happy, and secure a larger share of the group’s reproductive "spoils."
• The point is, we want to be friends, allies, and teammates with people who do good things for
• More generally, however, we admire not only those who actually do good things for their teammates, but also those who show the potential to do good things, i.e., by demonstrating useful skills.
  • Tags: [[status]] [[favorite]]
• The Golden Rule of ethics says, Do unto others as you would have done unto you. But the Golden Rule of politics, which has arguably created more prosperity for our species, goes something like this: Admire those who would make good allies.
• Money, in this view, is a reified, tangible, industrial-strength form of prestige status.