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

by Will Storr

LIFE IS A game. There’s no way to understand the human world without first understanding this. Everyone alive is playing a game whose hidden rules are built into us and that silently directs our thoughts, beliefs and actions. This game is inside us. It is us. We can’t help but play. Life takes this strange form because of how we’ve evolved. Like all living organisms, humans are driven to survive and reproduce. As a tribal species, our personal survival has always depended on our being accepted into a supportive community. Powerful emotions compel us to connect: the joy of belongingness and agony of rejection. But once inside a group, we’re rarely content to flop about on its lower rungs. We seek to rise. When we do, and receive acclaim from our people, we feel as if our lives have meaning and purpose and that we’re thriving. In ways small and large, the conditions of life begin to improve. Back in the Stone Age, increased status meant greater influence, access to a wider choice of mates and more security and resources for ourselves and our children. It still does today. So we’re programmed to seek connection and rank: to be accepted into groups and win status within them. It’s part of our nature. It’s the game of human life.

When our games win status, we do too. When they lose, so do we. These games form our identity. We become the games we play. Our need for status gives us a thirst for rank and a fear of its loss that deforms our thinking and denies us the possibility of reliable happiness.

When asked why we do the things we do, we rarely say, ‘It’s because of status. I really love it.’ It can be distasteful to think of it as any kind of motivating force, let alone a vital one. It contradicts the heroic story we like to tell of ourselves. When we pursue the great goals of our lives, we tend to focus on our happy ending. We want the qualification, the promotion, the milestone, the crown. These motivations, that tend to spring to mind immediately, are known by researchers as ‘proximate’. They’re absolutely real and valid but they have other upstream ‘ultimate’ causes. Ultimate causes are often subconscious and so hidden from us: they’re the reason we want the qualification, the promotion, the milestone, the crown, in the first place. They’re an essential impulse that’s been selected by evolution and laid down in the wiring of our brains. As the evolutionary biologist Professor Nichola Raihani writes, ‘Ultimate explanations help us to understand why we feel the motives we do, and why brains are designed the way they are.’

Status isn’t about being liked or accepted: these are separate needs, associated with connection. 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. Feeling good about it is part of our human nature. It’s in our basic coding, our evolution, our DNA. And it doesn’t require a stupendous achievement like scoring a goal in the World Cup or blowing up the Death Star. We can feel the velvet touch of status repeatedly throughout the course of a single conversation or in the glance of a passing stranger. Whenever we’re in the presence of humans, consciously or unconsciously, we’re being judged, measured. And their judgements matter. Wherever psychologists look, they find a remarkably powerful link between status and wellbeing.

Humans are a species of great ape. We survive by belonging to highly co-operative groups that share labour. We’ve been living in settled communities for around five hundred generations. But we existed in mobile hunter-gatherer bands for far longer than this – at least one hundred thousand generations. Our brains remain programmed for this style of life. We are today as we’ve always been: tribal. We have instincts that compel us to seek connection with coalitions of others. Once we’ve been accepted into a group, we strive to achieve their approval and acclaim. If we’re to flourish, this approval and acclaim is critical.

Evolution has programmed us to seek groups to join and then strive for rank within them. But, especially in the modern era, we’re not limited to one group. For those of us not in prison, a typical life involves the playing of multiple games. Wherever we connect with like-minded others, the game will be on: at work, online, on the sports field, at the volunteer centre, in the club, park or activist collective – even at home. The minimum requirement for play is connection. Before we can be rewarded with status, we must first be accepted into the group as a player.

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. Isolation damages us so profoundly it can change who we are. It can force us into a ‘defensive crouch’, writes psychologist Professor John Cacioppo, in which we seek to fend off the threat of further rejection. Our perceptions of other people become warped. They start to appear ‘more critical, competitive, denigrating, or otherwise unwelcoming’. These faulty interpretations ‘quickly become expectations’. We can become scrappy, bitter and negative, a mindset that ‘leads to greater marital strife, more run-ins with neighbours, and more social problems overall’.

We’re rarely content to linger on the lowest social rungs of our groups, likeable but useless. We desire worth, acclaim, to be of value. There’s an itch to move up.

Those who decide to end their lives, finally quitting the game that’s caused such agony, might have experienced a recent financial loss, or have been made unemployed. They might’ve lost reputation. They might simply have stayed still whilst others have accelerated away from them: ‘suicide is encouraged not just by falling, but by falling behind’. This game that we play is deadly serious.

Much of what seems inarguably real and true, in the space around us, is not. The actual world is monochrome and silent. Sounds, colours, tastes and smells exist only in the projection in our heads. What’s actually out there are vibrating particles, floating chemical compounds, molecules and colourless light waves of varying lengths. Our perceptions of these phenomena are special effects in a brain-generated movie. And our senses can only detect the tiniest fraction of what’s out there. Our eyes, for instance, are able to pick up less than one ten-trillionth of the available light spectrum. So the brain creates our experience of the world. Next it conjures us, the self at its centre. It is a hero-maker, manufacturing both the illusion of self and its gripping narrative, framing our life as a journey towards a hopeful destination. The story it tells even has a narrator, an inner voice that chirrups away, performing a live improvisation of our autobiography.

A psychologically healthy brain excels at making its owner feel heroic. It does this by reordering our experiences, remixing our memories and rationalising our behaviour, using a battery of reality-warping weapons that make us believe we’re more virtuous, more correct in our beliefs and have more hopeful futures in store than others. For psychologist Professor Thomas Gilovich, the evidence is ‘clear and consistent: we are inclined to adopt self-serving beliefs about ourselves, and comforting beliefs about the world’. The most powerful of these weapons is thought to be the moral bias. No matter what we do, and how dishonestly we play, the brain nudges us to conclude we’re ultimately a better person than most.

High-status people tend to speak more often and more loudly; are perceived to be more facially expressive; achieve more successful interruptions in conversation; stand closer to us; touch themselves less; use more relaxed, open postures; use more ‘filled pauses’ such as ‘um’ and ‘ah’ and have a steadier vocal tone (although some of these symbols may vary culturally). When researchers took candid photos of ninety-six pairs of co-workers interacting, cut them out and stuck them against a white background to remove contextual information, people were ‘exceedingly accurate’ in their estimates of who had higher status. Merely by glancing at a still image of them talking, they could tell who was on top.

Researchers find our reward systems are activated most when we achieve relative rather than absolute rewards; we’re designed to feel best not when we get more, but when we get more than those around us.

We come into being as a collective when we connect with like-minded others whose brains process reality in similar ways; who dream the same dream of life. We recognise the same symbols; play the same game.

We know how to live successful lives today because we’ve inherited instructions from humans who’ve lived before us. Their rules tell us how we must act and who we must be in order to win. They’re stored in two separate places: as the anthropologist Professor Robert Paul writes, there are ‘two separate channels of inheritance at work in human life’. Each channel contains its own set of instructions. The first set was laid by our ancestors who spent millions of years living in mobile, tribal bands. This was the era in which our brains did much of their evolution. Everyone alive today is still coded to play hunter-gatherer games. These rules are stored in our DNA. Hunter-gatherer rules were designed for a specific purpose: to help keep our tribes functional and their members working together peacefully and well. A game was created in which prosocial behaviour that benefitted the group was incentivised. Roughly speaking, the more you put the tribe’s interests before your own, the more you’d earn status and the better your conditions of life would become. These rules were essential because humans can often be greedy, dishonest and aggressive. One survey of sixty premodern societies uncovered seven common rules of play that are thought to be universal: help your family; help your group; return favours; be brave; defer to superiors; divide resources fairly; respect others’ property. These elemental rules dictate the ways humans keep their tribes working well. They tell us basical...

The second set of rules comes from people who’ve been around more recently. They’re encoded in culture. Every culture has a distinct set of rules by which it wants its members to live. We’re judged by others, as we judge ourselves, by how well we play by them. Like the ancient DNA rules, they become so embedded into our perception that we barely know they’re there, unless someone violates them.

Much of the rest of human life is comprised of three varieties of status-striving and three varieties of game: dominance, virtue and success. In dominance games, status is coerced by force or fear. In virtue games, status is awarded to players who are conspicuously dutiful, obedient and moralistic. In success games, status is awarded for the achievement of closely specified outcomes, beyond simply winning, that require skill, talent or knowledge. Mafias and armies are dominance games. Religions and royal institutions are virtue games. Corporations and sporting contests are success games. It’s important to note that these games aren’t strictly categorical. There are probably no completely pure games, only blends of dominance, virtue and success.

The three varieties of game tend towards three general varieties of human: we can be Idi Amin, Mother Theresa or Albert Einstein. But everyone contains elements of all three archetypes. Humans have the capacity to source status from acts of dominance, virtue and competence and, crazed as we are, we’re going to use any strategy we can: a scientist, a princess and a cartel boss will all use shifting modes of dominance, virtue and success as they play their games of life. We’re all a sometimes uncomfortable, often contradictory mixture of these three routes to the great prize.

What mattered increasingly was not how brutal we were, but what our co-players thought of us. We could earn this kind of prestige-based status by showing we were useful to the group. We could do this in two ways. Firstly, by being successful, demonstrating knowledge and skill that benefitted others. We could tell great stories, accurately predict the future, be an excellent hunter, sorcerer, toolmaker, tracker or honey-finder. In Panama, members of the Kuna tribe play success games by keeping a lifetime record of their tapir kills, those with the highest number receiving heightened status. Similarly, the best turtle hunters among the Meriam people of the Torres Strait earn respect from village elders and have their opinions disproportionately supported in public meetings and private disputes. Secondly, we could earn prestige-based status by being virtuous: by demonstrating beliefs or behaviours that served the group’s interests. This kind of status is awarded to those who show concern for the public good, display commitment to the group or enforce its rules. They’ll also rise up the rankings if they’re thought of as being courageous or generous towards their co-players. In Tanzania, Hadza hunters who share meat widely ‘gain great social status – prestige that can be parlayed into powerful social alliances, the deference of other men, and greater mating success’, writes Buss. People engage in ‘competitive altruism’, battling to be ‘seen by others as great contributors to th...

Prestige is our most marvellous craving. It’s a bribe that induces us into being useful, benefitting the interests of the tribe. It’s enabled us to master the art of co-operative living. We pursue goals, and tackle problems, as members of collaborative groups because we’re programmed to care deeply about what our co-players think of us: we revel in the reward of status they supply. When we strive to earn a good, prestigious reputation using either of the two available strategies – by being virtuous or successful – we progress. This is the secret of our success as a species and has enabled us to dominate the planet.

In each status game we play, we have a reputation. In its details, that reputation will be different within the mind of every player. We exist in varying degrees of depth and varying degrees of fairness in all these minds. Whenever others think of us, they’ll overwrite us with their own status information. Are we moral or immoral? Expert or useless? How do we look? How do we talk? What job do we do? Do we make them feel loved or hated? Fancied or repulsed? Pitied or admired? It’s this distorted and partial avatar we play at life with, not our whole self. Nobody ever truly knows us. They never will.

Whenever a person shows they’re valuable to their game, by being conspicuously virtuous or successful, it’s registered by their co-players. Subconsciously, they’ll see this person’s winning behaviour as a chance to win themselves. They’ll desire to learn from them, so they too can rise up in the rankings. This means being near to them as much as possible. As a reward for all their valuable time and knowledge, they offer them symbolic status: they lavish them with eye contact and defer to them in conversation; they might maintain a hunched, subservient posture; bare their teeth in submissive displays known as ‘fear grimaces’ in apes and ‘smiles’ in humans; fetch them food, drink or other gifts; walk behind them; hold doors open; seat them in a special location or use honorific titles to address them. The prestigious player will luxuriate in these signals of status. These people clearly think they’re marvellous. But as lovely as it feels, it’s often a trick, a strategy, a game plan.

Professor Joseph Henrich, a world expert in the psychology of status, writes that, ‘by age one infants use their own early cultural knowledge to figure out who tends to know things, and then use this information to focus learning, attention and memory’. The brain is coded to seek four main cues that, once detected, trigger their focus. Firstly, we look for the self-similarity cue. We make the assumption we’re most likely to learn useful lessons from people like us. 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. Sadly, it seems automatic. Even very young infants defer to strangers who share their mother’s dialect. Next we look for ‘skill cues’. Who, in our game, seems particularly able? Research suggests we start mimicking people who display competence at tasks at around 14 months. We also seek out ‘success cues’ – status symbols such as an experienced hunter’s necklace of teeth; a tribal chief’s larger hut; a PhD; a pair of Manolo Blahnik’s Lurums. Our desire to signal success in this way is the cause of the ‘conspicuous consumption’ that occurs across the world. The global luxury market is worth around $1.2 trillion per year, with $285 billion being spent on goods, much of it in Asia. Members of the Amazonian Tsimane’ tribe who earn more money than others burn up a greater percentage...

The English explorer Captain James Cook used prestige cues to compel his men to eat the sauerkraut that was an experimental remedy for scurvy, the disease known as ‘the plague of the Sea, and the Spoyle of Mariners’ that was responsible for roughly two million deaths of sailors between 1500 and 1800. In 1769, Cook set sail for the South Pacific with 7,860 pounds of the pungent fermented cabbage on board and ordered it be served only at the ‘Cabbin Table’ and not to the crew. This was a prestige cue. ‘The moment they see their superiors set a value upon it, it becomes the finest stuff in the world,’ Cook noted in his journal. Sure enough, the lower ranked players began requesting it. Before long, sauerkraut had to be rationed. The number of men that died from scurvy on that expedition was a record-breaking zero.

Essential to the operation of these status dynamics is influence. When we identify prestigious players our subconscious copy-flatter-conform programming is triggered and we allow them to alter our beliefs and behaviour. Status games run on powerlines of influence and deference that crackle up and down their hierarchy. This is why, of all the countless status symbols that exist in human life, influence is probably the most reliable. We often assume money or fancy possessions are the most certain symbols of a person’s rank, but the highest-status monk in the world may have less wealth, and fewer Hermès ties, than the most junior banker on Wall Street. Influence is different.

Influence is a useful signal in dominance games, in which it manifests as power, and also in the two prestige games where it’s willingly offered by co-players. Wherever you track trails of influence – of people deferring, altering their beliefs or behaviour to match those of the people above them – you’ll find status games being played and won. We frequently measure our own level of status by our capacity to influence. Our status detection systems monitor the extent to which others defer to us in the subtlest negotiations of behaviour, body language and tone. This is one reason we can take it so personally when our ideas, tastes or opinions are rejected. If human life was strictly rational, we’d be likely to feel blank when disagreed with, or perhaps worried a suboptimal decision was being made. We might even feel pleased about it, taking the disagreement as a signal of the group’s rigour. But when our attempts at influence fail – especially in public, especially in the witness of higher-status players – we can become preoccupied, livid, bitter and vengeful. When this happens, we often slip into a more primitive mode of play in which status is not earned in displays of usefulness, but grabbed in acts of dominance.

Whenever our sense of status is challenged, like this, we can easily slip into a different state of being. We employ primeval neural coding that was written millions of years ago, in the prehuman era of dominance. Whilst the prestige games of virtue and success have made us gentler and wiser animals, these superior modes of playing haven’t completely overwritten our bestial capacities. As psychologist Professor Dan McAdams writes, ‘the human expectation that social status can be seized through brute force and intimidation, that the strongest and the biggest and boldest will lord it over the rank and file, is very old, awesomely intuitive and deeply ingrained. Its younger rival – prestige – was never able to dislodge dominance from the human mind.’ The beast is still in us. It is our second self. Many of us shade between these states multiple times a day, often without realising we’re morphing from one self into another.

The critical difference between dominance and prestige is that we don’t give status freely to second-self players. Typically, dominant players take it from us. Psychologists describe dominance strategy as entailing the ‘induction of fear, through intimidation and coercion, to attain or maintain rank and influence’. They force deference from co-players by inducing ‘fear of their ability to inflict physical or psychological harm’ using ‘acts of aggression, coercion, threats, derogation, debasement, and manipulation’. Second-self players can use violence and the fear of it to claw their way up the rankings, then, but they can also exploit varieties of pain that are marked not by blood and bruises, but by tears, shame and despair.

For psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, ‘girls and boys are equally aggressive but their aggression is different. Boys’ aggression revolves around the threat of violence: “I will physically hurt you” … but girls’ aggression has always been relational: “I will destroy your reputation or your relationships”.’ Researchers argue female aggression tends to be ‘indirect’. Rather than assault an antagonist’s physical body, face-to-face, they’ll attack their avatar. They’ll attempt to secure their enemy’s ostracization, severing their connections to games, and use mockery, gossip and insult to strip them of status.

The logic of the status game dictates that humiliation (and to a lesser degree shame, which can be seen as the private experience of humiliation, the sense of being judged appalling by the imaginary audience in our heads) must be uniquely catastrophic. For psychologists Professor Raymond Bergner and Dr Walter Torres humiliation is an absolute purging of status and the ability to claim it. They propose four preconditions for an episode to count as humiliating. Firstly, we should believe, as most of us do, that we’re deserving of status. Secondly, humiliating incidents are public. Thirdly, the person doing the degrading must themselves have some modicum of status. And finally, the stinger: the ‘rejection of the status to claim status’. Or, from our perspective, rejection from the status game entirely.

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’.

Researchers find happiness isn’t closely linked to our socioeconomic status, which captures our rank compared with others across the whole of society, including class. It’s actually our smaller games that matter: ‘studies show that respect and admiration within one’s local group, but not socioeconomic status, predicts subjective well-being’.

He codified his theory in what he called the ‘Fogg Behaviour Model’. He taught the model at ‘Behavior Design Boot Camps’ and at the Stanford Persuasion Lab that Wired magazine called ‘a toll booth for entrepreneurs and product designers on their way to Facebook and Google’. The model said a person is compelled to act when three forces collide in a moment: motivation (we must want the thing); trigger (something must happen to trigger a desire to get more of it) and ability (it must be easy).

Research by organisational psychologist Professor Dennis Tourish found people in lower corporate ranks tend to ‘habitually exaggerate the extent to which they agree with the opinions and actions of higher-status people as a means of acquiring influence’ while critical views are mostly kept quiet. And then the flaw kicks in. Leaders, being human, are vulnerable to believing all this lovely status-boosting news. They often accept praise and agreement uncritically and fail to grow suspicious over the lack of bad news. Those who attempt to deliver it are often punished with a reputation for being difficult, overly negative or not ‘team players’. They can ultimately find their careers in jeopardy.

When pricked by status anxiety, we often look at our rival games – the corporations, the religions, the football clubs, the music tribes, the school cliques, the nations – and convince ourselves ours is somehow superior. Even if they’re above us in the hierarchy of games, we’ll tell stories that say we’d rather be where we are. Our game is the one: our football team, our company, our clique, our tribe, our religion. This grandiosity we feel for our games is highly conspicuous in sports. Even if a football team is low in the league, its supporters can spend much of their social time persuading each other that they’re actually somehow superior. They seek out canny arguments to devalue rivals, reframing losses as injustices or near-wins and reliving glories from the past. The more they convince each other, the more their dream thickens up and the more narcissistic they grow on behalf of their games. This is status play. It’s dishonest and it’s spiteful and it’s one of life’s great pleasures.

Whether they’re nations, religions or football supporters, status games are made out of people. In order to believe our games are superior, we must believe its players are also superior.

The ultimate purpose of all status games is control. They were designed by evolution to generate cooperation between humans; to force (in the case of dominance) or bribe (in the case of the prestige games of success and virtue) us to conform.

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. When a game’s status begins to slip, its players can be merciless.

The hidden rules of the status game have helped drive human history. Over hundreds and thousands of years our endless strivings have led to invasion, subjugation, revolution, oppression and civilisation. This should come as no surprise. After all, history is made by people and people are born to play.

IN MODERN WESTERN societies, we live inside a story that says, if we want it badly enough, we can do anything. Open the door, step outside, go for it. This cultural myth tells us to shoot for the moon. But the reality of shooting for the moon is that it requires years of training, millions of dollars, the support of a major space agency and a rocket. Without that, you’ll fall to earth and break your back. It takes a certain kind of person, with a certain kind of background, to successfully shoot for the moon. And you’re probably not it.

Three major forces conspire to push us in certain directions: genes, upbringing and peer group.

The persistence of irrationality is a puzzle. But the status game suggests an explanation. Humans aren’t heroes on wondrous journeys of progress, we’re players programmed for games. 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.

During the Stone Age, it didn’t matter if the stories we told about the world weren’t true. Faith in the myths and prejudices of our tribe served to bond us together, co-ordinate our behaviour and motivate us to fight harder against enemies. But in the twenty-first century environment, in which we exist side by side in multiple intertwined and overlapping groups, the human tendency to credulously accept the wild dreams of our game leads all too frequently to error, mistrust, division, aggression, hubris and catastrophe. And the tendency is strong.

In the places where status is won and lost, we can be vulnerable to believing almost anything.

If moral truth exists anywhere, it’s in our DNA: that ancient game-playing coding that evolved to nudge us into behaving co-operatively in hunter-gatherer groups. But these instructions – strive to appear virtuous; privilege your group over others – are few and vague and open to riotous differences in interpretation. All the rest is an act of shared imagination. It’s a dream we weave around a status game.

Our status games are embedded into our perception. We experience reality through them. So when we encounter someone playing a rival game, it can be disturbing. If they’re living by a conflicting set of rules and symbols, they’re implying our rules and symbols – our criteria for claiming status – are invalid, and our dream of reality is false. They’re a sentient repudiation of the value we’ve spent our lives earning. They insult us simply by being who they are. It should be no surprise, then, that encountering someone with conflicting beliefs can feel like an attack: status is a resource, and they’re taking it from us.

A game’s command over its players strengthens when it flips into a mode of war. Connections between players tighten.

This tightening up – the thickening of the connections between them – helped them coordinate faster in group tasks. Tighter games work better together: the dominion of the individual recedes, that of the group swells, and it becomes better able to defend itself from attack. But this super-cohesive war mode is also triggered when there’s status to win.

Cults are the tightest games of all. They maintain their power by being the sole significant source of connection and status for their players. Earning a place in a cult means actively following its belief system and adhering utterly to its game in thought and behaviour, allowing it to colonise your neural territory entirely. A true cult member has one active identity. Players attracted to them are often those who’ve failed at the games of conventional life. Alienated, injured and in need, their brains seek a game that seems to offer certainty, in which connection and status can be won by following an absolutely precise set of rules.

Centuries later, some of Machiavelli’s notions have been found to be true. One analysis concluded successful organisations ‘help keep their most talented employees from leaving by providing those individuals with high status’. When rewarded with status, workers identify more with their group, are more committed to it and come to view it more positively. Sociologist Professor Cecilia Ridgeway writes that there’s ‘overwhelming evidence’ status hierarchies operate in this way, by awarding esteem and influence ‘in exchange for a recipient’s perceived value for the group effort’. We reward players who help our games win. We raise them in rank. If they prove themselves sufficiently useful, we might even allow them to lead us for a while.