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

by Will Storr

Status is what researchers call an ‘ultimate’ rather than a ‘proximate’ drive: it’s a kind of mother-motivation, a deep evolutionary cause of many other downstream beliefs and behaviours that’s been favoured by selection and is written into the design of our brains.

Wherever psychologists look, they find a remarkably powerful link between status and wellbeing. One study of more than sixty thousand people across 123 countries found people’s wellbeing ‘consistently depended on the degree to which people felt respected by others’. Attainment of status or its loss was ‘the strongest predictor of long-term positive and negative feelings’.

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.

‘Along with status comes better food, more abundant territory, superior health care.’ It leads to greater access to preferred mates and ‘bestows on children social opportunities’ that youngsters in lower ranking families miss out on. When researchers analysed 186 premodern societies around the world, they found men of higher status ‘invariably had greater wealth and more wives and provided better nourishment for their children’.

connect. A wide range of research finds people with depression tend to belong to ‘far fewer’ groups than the rest of the population. Studies across time suggest the more a depressed person identifies with their group – the more of their own sense of self they invest in it – the more their symptoms lift.

Numerous studies find it’s possible to predict mortality by observing the extent to which someone has meaningful contact with others. One survey of nearly seven thousand residents of Alameda County in California found ‘the people most likely to survive to old age were those with solid face-to-face relationships’, writes psychologist Susan Pinker.

In the oft-quoted words of psychologist Professor Robert Hogan, humans are driven to ‘get along and get ahead’.

Workers ‘at the bottom of the office hierarchy have, at ages forty to sixty-four, four times the risk of death of the administrators at the top of the hierarchy’. This remained true with every step you took up or down the game. The lower you dropped, the worse your health and the earlier your death. ‘The group second from the top has higher mortality than those above them in the ranking.’

When we feel chronically deprived of it, or disconnected from the game, our minds and bodies can turn against us. To our brains, status is a resource as real as oxygen or water. When we lose it, we break.

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.

Our eyes, for instance, are able to pick up less than one ten-trillionth of the available light spectrum.

The human brain is specialised for the games we evolved to play. Neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith writes that it ‘represents the world as a reward space’. It’s coded to discover ‘the valuable things in the world and what actions we need to take to get them … everything around me exerts a push or a pull because my brain has learned to attach value to them’. As we’ve learned, humans value connection and status. In order to earn the resources essential for our survival and reproduction, we seek to bond with our co-players; in order to secure more of those resources we seek rank.

We do it, in part, by assigning values to objects. A Cartier watch is worth this much status; a Casio watch is worth that. These ‘status symbols’ tell us, and our co-players, how we’re performing. We pay obsessive attention to them. We need to: unlike in a computer game, there’s no definitive scoreboard in human life.

When all the vice presidents at a US corporation were issued with single-pen desk sets, ‘one vice president shortly moved to a two-pen set, and within four days all vice presidents had worked their way up to three-pen sets’.

In the luxury attire game, the general rule is the larger the logo, the lower the status and therefore price.

One analysis found ‘an increase in logo size of one point on a seven-point scale translates to a $122.26 price decrease for Gucci handbags and a $26.27 price decrease for Louis Vuitton handbags’. The logo on Bottega Veneta’s $2,500 Hobo bag isn’t visible. They put it on the inside.

when participants were shown photos of people wearing ‘rich’ or ‘poor’ clothes, they automatically assumed those in wealthier looking outfits were significantly more competent and of higher status. This effect remained when they were warned upfront of the potential bias, when they were informed the clothing was definitely irrelevant and when they were told all the people worked in sales at a ‘mid-size firm in the Midwest’ and earned around US$80,000. It even remained when the participants were paid money to make an accurate guess.

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).

We’re used to thinking of money and power as principal motivating forces of life. But studies suggest that, unlike status, the desire for power over others is not fundamental in humans. Unlike status, it doesn’t strongly predict wellbeing. Moreover, unlike status, the desire for power is quenchable. ‘After acquiring a moderate amount of power, most people become less interested in gaining even more,’ writes sociologist Professor Cecilia Ridgeway. ‘But not so status.’

Studies show a majority of employees would accept a higher-status job title over a pay rise: one survey of 1,500 UK office workers had around 70 per cent choosing status over money, with creative assistants preferring ‘chief imagination officer’ and file clerks opting for ‘data storage specialists’. Those data storage specialists were onto something. Assuming we have enough money to live, it seems relative status makes us happier than raw cash.

one study using data from twelve thousand British adults concluding ‘the ranked position of an individual’s income predicts general life satisfaction, whereas absolute income and reference income have no effect’.

The effect is strong: ‘An increase in neighbours’ earnings and a similarly sized decrease in own income each have roughly about the same negative effect on well-being.’

Between 1965 and 1990 the US economy grew by a healthy 1.7 per cent a year, whilst Japan saw an impressive annual jump of 4.1 per cent. In both nations, happiness barely budged.

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.

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.

In one study, 86 per cent of Australians rated their job performance as ‘above average’; in another, 96 per cent of Americans described themselves as ‘special’.

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.

Our shift from playing dominance games to reputation games led to our being incredibly tolerant when dealing with members of our own group, compared to our primate relatives. Physical aggression between humans happens at a frequency of less than one per cent compared to chimpanzees and bonobos. Chimpanzee troops have been found to be ‘several hundred to a thousand times’ more aggressive than even the most violent human societies.

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.

Studies comparing infant humans to chimpanzees show both species copy a prestigious individual’s actions, such as when they skilfully retrieve a treat with a stick – but only humans copy all the actions. Chimpanzees judiciously identify and edit out any pointless parts of the procedure, copying only what’s necessary to get the treat. Humans copy everything.

Hundreds of thousands lost their lives to these contests that were often triggered by the pettiest of status slights. A typical duellist would ‘prefer to die by a bullet or stab wound than allow unfavourable ideas about him to remain lodged in the mind’, writes Alain de Botton, who records a man in Paris being killed after describing his rival’s apartment as ‘tasteless’, a man in Florence dying after accusing his cousin of ‘not understanding Dante’ and a duel over possession of an Angora cat.

They’re overwhelmingly the perpetrators of murder, and comprise most of their victims, with around 90 per cent of global homicides being committed by males, and 70 per cent being their targets. In the majority of cases, killers are unemployed, unmarried, poorly educated and under 30. Their sense of status is fragile. In most places, the leading reasons given for killing are ‘status-driven’, writes conflict researcher Dr Mike Martin, ‘the result of altercations over trivial disputes’.

Humiliation has been described by researchers as ‘the nuclear bomb of the emotions’ and has been shown to cause major depressions, suicidal states, psychosis, extreme rage and severe anxiety, ‘including ones characteristic of post-traumatic stress disorder’. Criminal violence expert Professor James Gilligan describes the experience of humiliation as an ‘annihilation of the self’.

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’.

CrossFitters don’t have to compete with each other (although they can if they wish), but instead push themselves to beat their own previous bests. Crucially, they do this surrounded by their fellow CrossFitters who track each others’ progress and cheer each other on. At CrossFit, status is not jealously guarded by individuals fighting over a zero-sum place on a single leader board, but lavished at any player who strives.

CrossFitters have ‘higher levels of social bonding and community belonging’ than traditional gym users. A 2021 paper found them to be highly motivated by the ‘social capital’ and ‘camaraderie’ their sessions provide, with one respondent explaining they ‘complement each other on achievements and all those types of things. I like the fact that if one person is struggling to finish their workout or having a bad day or it’s just a tough workout for them, then you’ve got people cheering them on all the time.’

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’.

Sociologist Professor Cecilia Ridgeway describes experiments that tried to locate the point at which our need for status, once acquired, stabilises. ‘There was no point at which preference for higher status levelled off,’ she writes. The researchers thought one reason the desire for status is ‘never really satiated’ is because ‘it can never really be possessed by the individual once and for all. Since it is esteem given by others, it can always, at least theoretically, be taken away.’ So we keep wanting more. And more and more and more.

odds. A team led by psychologist Professor Michael Norton contacted over two thousand people whose net worth started at one million dollars and rose to an awful lot more. They were asked to rate their happiness on a ten-point scale, then say how much cash they’d need to be perfectly happy. ‘All the way up the income-wealth spectrum,’ Norton reported, ‘basically everyone says two or three times as much.’

Tellingly Tourish has found the most successful leaders are usually those with the ‘least compliant’ followers.

On the contrary, writes the psychologist Professor Paul Bloom, ‘egalitarian lifestyles of the hunter-gatherers exist because the individuals care a lot about status. Individuals in these societies end up roughly equal because everyone is struggling to ensure that nobody gets too much power over him or her.’

When neuroscientists had participants read about someone popular, rich and smart, they saw brain regions involved in the perception of pain become activated. When they read of this invented person suffering a demotion, their pleasure systems flared

Surprisingly, what made the most difference to their behaviour wasn’t the level of inequality in their game, but whether or not the inequality was visible. 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.

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.

least in the developed world, the games we join in adolescence usually take the form of a clique or peer group – a set of people with whom we can comfortably play. This begins to happen in adolescence partly as a result of alterations to a region of the brain that makes us much more sensitive to the judgements of others. We start to desire the reward of social approval and dread rejection. This sudden sensitivity to reputation makes teenagers highly prone to self-consciousness and embarrassment.

When psychologists study how people’s religious, political and social identities affect their beliefs, they find that the more educated, numerate and intelligent they are, the more likely they are to endorse the fringe ideas of their groups.

When neuroscientist Professor Sarah Gimbel presented forty people with evidence their strongly held political beliefs were wrong, the response she observed in their brains was ‘very similar to what would happen if, say, you were walking through the forest and came across a bear’.

As psychologists Professors Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam write: ‘People do great wrong, not because they are unaware of what they are doing but because they consider it to be right. This is possible because they actively identify with groups whose ideology justifies and condones the oppression and destruction of others.’ Elsewhere anthropologists Professors Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai find that ‘when people hurt or kill someone, they usually do so because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent’. When the victim is ‘perceived as a potential threat or contaminant to the in-group’, such acts are seen as ‘morally praiseworthy’.

For political psychologist Dr Lilliana Mason, part of the reason we continually attempt at warring for victory is that ‘people are compelled to think of their groups as better than others. Without that, they themselves feel inferior.’ At a ‘very primal level’ players are motivated ‘to view the world through a competitive lens, with importance placed on their own group’s superiority’. Humans love to become superior: to win. Researchers find groups tend to prefer the simple fact of winning against other groups even if it means fewer benefits for its players.

8-month-olds prefer to play with a puppet they’ve seen punishing a transgressor in a puppet show. Children start enforcing rules spontaneously at around age 3. A study into the reasons schoolchildren, aged between 5 and 7, reject playmates found a tendency to do so when their behaviour became a threat to the status of themselves or their clique.