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

by Will Storr

Back in the Stone Age, increased status meant access to better mates, more food and greater safety for ourselves and our offspring. It still does today. So we’re driven to seek connection and rank: to be accepted into groups and win status within them. This is the game of human life.

The brain feeds us distorted, simplistic and self-serving tales about why they are above us and they are beneath.

We’re going to define three different forms of the status game – the dominance game, the virtue game and the success game – and ask how certain kinds of play can lead us into a fairer, wealthier tomorrow.

insult – which, ironically, is status play: an attempt to downgrade others and thereby raise ourselves up.

When people defer to us, offer respect, admiration or praise, or allow us to influence them in some way, that’s status. It feels good.

We are today as we’ve always been: tribal.

‘social status is a universal cue to the control of resources’,

Disconnection is a fearsome state for a social animal to find itself in. It’s a warning that its life is failing and its world has become hostile: where there’s no connection, there’s no protection.

when we become depressed we ‘mentally withdraw from the competition for higher status’. This keeps us off ‘high-status individuals’ radars’ and conserves energy, helping us cope with the ‘reduced opportunities imposed by low status’.

WE DON’T FEEL like players of games. We feel like heroes in stories.

A psychologically healthy brain excels at making its owner feel heroic.

In one study, participants guessed what percentage of time they exhibited a range of virtuous behaviours. Six weeks later, they were asked again, but this time they were also shown the average ratings of other people. On the vast majority of behaviours, they rated themselves as much more moral than these normals. What they didn’t realise was the ‘average ratings’ for others were, in fact, their own ratings from six weeks earlier.

Studies suggest that, unlike status, the desire for power over others is not fundamental in humans. Unlike status, it doesn’t strongly predict wellbeing.

The status detection system never switches off.