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In any organization, “low-status members are more likely to feel negative emotions like sadness and, when things go wrong for the group, self-blaming emotions like guilt or shame.”
All of this demand for higher esteem, however, inherently engenders social conflict: Status is a relative ranking, so not everyone can simultaneously achieve a high position. Status is zero-sum.
The anti-individualism of Pueblo society resulted in men never seeking leadership positions but only taking them after protracted coercion. Higher status positions often come with an increase in bothersome responsibilities—having to make difficult decisions for the group and behave as a role model.
By contrast, twenty-first-century pop stars, superstar athletes, and billionaires, who often make their fortunes on what would have been considered child’s play in earlier ages, face few social obligations and often enjoy carte blanche to commit manifold sins.
With a spotlight on their privileges and little attention to their dwindling responsibilities, celebrities inspire normal people to dream of high status without arousing much thought to its potential burdens.
Status hierarchies rank individuals on esteem and perceived importance. But individuals receive that esteem and importance when others believe they possess rare and valuable talents.
Older societies built their hierarchies around ascribed status, where individuals received their social ranking based on predetermined criteria, such as age, ethnic group, occupation, and gender.
Ascribed status runs counter to the modern belief that individuals should forge their own way in life and reap the subsequent rewards. Despite democratic ideals and “free” markets, ascribed status categories still linger in society.
The modern ideal is to organize society as a system of achieved status, where a higher position is based on personal achievements rather than immutable characteristics.
The promise of status rebirth was for many years a selling point for immigrating to the New World.
Today, achievements tend to be embodied in particular forms of capital. In the past, political capital—access to power—reigned supreme. This could take the form of tribal leadership, religious authority, or government position.
As meritocracy becomes more of a shared ideal, new forms of capital have emerged. Educational capital—university degrees and certifications—has become an important way to measure potential talent for taking on important social positions.
Occupational capital is the subsequent prestige attached to important and well-respected jobs, such as doctor, lawyer, or professor.
In capitalist society, economic capital—cash, wealth, and property—becomes the most obvious and potent ingredient for achieving high status.
Money is very flexible as an asset, converting easily into power over others through business ownership, political connections, donations, and bribes. The rich can also use their cash to secure top-status benefits that they may be otherwise denied.
Social capital—expansive networks of collegial relationships with elites—signals that an individual is treated as an equal within high-status groups.
Besides capital, we also have personal virtues that may improve our interactions with others.
While personal virtues can open the door to building more reliable forms of capital (and, for the most part, originate in aristocratic mores), they aren’t particularly rare or valuable in their own right.
To “be somebody” in today’s world requires accumulating significant amounts of capital, often across multiple criteria.
This clustering is called status congruence, and it works to stabilize the status rankings. An individual’s minor achievement in one area may not lead to a significant jump up the ladder; a multifront effort is required to prove greater importance.
At the same time, social mobility always appears to be possible, making us feel responsible for our own status.
There is one final ramification of achieved status we must also consider: we resent individuals who claim or receive high status without meeting the requisite status criteria.
The legitimacy of any hierarchy hinges on status integrity—a collective belief that the ranking of individuals is fair, and that they receive greater benefits for legitimate reasons.
Taking status integrity into account leads us to a central axiom for status desire: Individuals seek higher status—insofar as its pursuit doesn’t risk their current status level.
While the commonality of the human experience may lead to broad similarities in global status criteria, each society and group faces different goals and celebrates different values. And when they disagree on the proper criteria for forming the status hierarchy, they splinter.
Living in a 1950s America that cherished conformity, occupational success, and material possessions, Kerouac and his friends instead celebrated artistic talent, unorthodox morality, and peripatetic lifestyles.
Kerouac and his Beat friends are an example of a status group. Members of these groups share status beliefs about the value of certain status criteria.
Mainstream society functions as a macro status group, with the core status beliefs centered on the varieties of capital outlined in the previous section. Alternative status groups believe in criteria outside of traditional capital.
As much as we may identify most closely with a single status group, we are all members of many: family, school, workplace, clubs. And since the status criteria and beliefs may differ among them, we behave differently based on the context.
In extreme cases this code switching between groups’ competing demands can split us into multiple personalities.
But if we’re after status, a rational strategy would be to join a status group that appreciates the virtues and assets we happen to possess.
“People are more attracted to relationships, groups, and communities in which they would have reasonably high status rather than those in which they would be low status.”
From this perspective, membership in alternative status groups appears to be a clever strategy for oppressed and unprivileged individuals to maximize their status. But there is an obvious flaw in this approach: our most immediate community can only provide local status—the ranking inside the small group.
But even if we hide in an alternative status group, we can’t escape our global status—the general ranking within broader society.
To obtain more social benefits, marginalized status groups must find a way to move up the global hierarchy. This turns society into a battle among status groups.
The Beat poets used their success with literary critics and resonance with younger readers to convince many Americans of the inherent superiority of “madness” to conformity.
For every winner in status group battles, there must also be losers. The pioneering sociologist Max Weber found that dominant groups that tumble down the hierarchy develop particularly strong resentments: “The more they feel threatened, the greater is their bitterness.”
Status is an ordinal ranking, and so even if the economic pie expands and material benefits increase for much of society, this doesn’t equalize status in society. In fact, an overall increase in wealth only raises the bar for the capital required to gain status.
Four important principles emerge from the internal logic of status hierarchies: Status maximization: We desire high status and fear low status. Status achievement: We can modify our status through talents, contributions, possessions, and virtues. Status integrity: We should not claim more status than we deserve. Status mobility: We can choose to move ourselves to new social contexts that better value our talents, contributions, possessions, and virtues.
there is a more elementary requirement to gain status: conformity to group norms. There are expectations for members within every status group and tier to follow specific behaviors.
This reveals the first major intersection between status and culture: earning social approval requires not just making concrete contributions to the group’s goals but also following a particular set of arbitrary practices.
Arbitrariness is a critical part of the human experience, because we can eat, drink, dress, sing, dance, play, and think in a nearly infinite number of ways. And yet, once we settle on a particular behavior, we no longer see our decisions as arbitrary.
What makes us so attached to the arbitrary practices of our community in times when other choices are available? The answer is conventions—well-known, regular, accepted social behaviors that individuals follow and expect others to follow.
Conventions assist humans in coordinating around certain choices. Wherever we see people repeating a particular practice and rejecting its equally plausible alternative, there is likely a convention compelling everyone into making the same choice.
They manifest as customs, the tacit rules of a community. Customs can be so invisible within a group that we notice them only upon encountering alternative ways of life.
We are more cognizant of conventions when they take the form of norms and manners, because we may be reluctant to follow them. Meanwhile, traditions, like lederhosen and dirndl, are conventions anchored in historical precedence that serve as explicit symbols of the community.
Modern life is full of short-term conventions we call fads, such as Hula-Hoops and the Atkins diet. Fashions are conventions that appear in ornamental areas of life that change on a regular basis.
(1) they regulate our behavior; (2) they become internalized as habits; and (3) they change our perception of the world. And from whence do conventions draw their power? Status.
Moving the population to a new convention requires building new common knowledge.
Once established, conventions then draw an additional power from emotional responses to expectations.
