The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It

by Will Storr

And this, ultimately, is the choice facing each one of us: hikikomori or play.

We have an inbuilt preference for those who match our age, race and gender. We attend to them, and thus offer them status, preferentially. This is a deep source of much of the cliquishness and prejudice that pollutes so many status games.

This is how cultures often progress. At the core of the process is our individual tendency to mimic prestigious people in the hope that we’ll become prestigious ourselves.

An African proverb says, ‘the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth’. If the game rejects you, you can return in dominance as a vengeful God, using deadly violence to force the game to attend to you in humility. The life’s work of Professor Gilligan led him to conclude the fundamental cause of most human violence is the ‘wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride’.

When players’ wealth was hidden everyone, including the elites, became more egalitarian. But when wealth was displayed, players in every game became less friendly, cooperated ‘roughly half as much’ and the rich were significantly more likely to exploit the poor.

This is why poverty alone doesn’t tend to lead to revolutions. Revolutions – defined as mass movements to replace a ruling order in the name of social justice – have been found to occur in middle-income countries more than the poorest. Sociologist Professor Jack Goldstone writes, ‘what matters is that people feel they are losing their proper place in society for reasons that are not inevitable and not their fault’. The anxiety caused by their games’ loss of status reflects that which is found in the depression and suicide research. What goes for ourselves goes for our groups: when we and our people sense our collective status is in decline, we become dangerously distressed.

Adolescent students learn a harsh lesson of human life: not only are there hierarchies of status within games, the games themselves form a hierarchy, with some nearer the top, and others lower down. Elite cliques are formed by players who are naturally better at making friends. ‘Social mammals are status seeking, that is, interested in befriending powerful, appealing, or popular individuals,’ writes Professor Nicholas Christakis, an expert in social networks. ‘Those desirable partners tend to be connected to other desirable partners because they get to choose who they are friends with. Partly as a result, less popular individuals wind up being friends with less popular individuals.’ It’s this type of sorting that results in our ‘status-based society’.

To succeed in these games, we seek high-status allies. When we find them, our copy-flatter-conform circuitry switches on. We mimic not just their behaviour but their beliefs. The better we believe, the higher we rise. And so faith, not truth, is incentivised.