Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

by W. David Marx

we call culture is always an aggregation of individual human behaviors, and if taste were the mere product of random idiosyncrasies and irrational psychologies, culture would display no patterns, only noise. The fact that preferences in these disparate fields follow a similar rhythm of change suggests there must be universal principles of human behavior at work—the presence of a “cultural gravity” nudging humans into the same collective behaviors at the same time.

Researchers at Princeton University found that we judge wealth levels through individuals’ clothing in as little as 130 milliseconds,

Over the last 150 years, however, psychologists and neuroscientists have warned us against attributing too much authenticity to our thoughts. Our brains are always engaged in rationalization: framing raw demands from our subconscious as well-grounded, logical requests.

Moreover, deep historical knowledge is necessary to demonstrate the fundamental conventionality of human behavior, as illustrated in the novelist L. P. Hartley’s famed quotation “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

As poet and playwright Jean Cocteau observes: “Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.”