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Receiving social approval for upholding conventions and disapproval for violating them has clear effects on our status position. To maintain normal status, we must meet group expectations, and if we fail to do so, we may fall to lower status.
As everyone follows these rules to some degree, they manifest as observable behavioral patterns associated with those groups.
And within status groups, the fact that individuals regulate their behavior to conform to conventions turns those conventions into social norms.
We learn conventions from our family and friends through the chameleon effect, where we unconsciously mimic our peers in body movements and speech.
This internalization means the origins of most conventions often get lost to the ages. We learn these rules as “the way things are done.”
“We dislike individuals from outside of our social group more if they mimic us.” The unwanted imitation of low-status outsiders makes us conscious of our internalized conventions, and as a result, we may move on to less “polluted” alternatives.
These internalized conventions are known in sociology as habitus, and they guide our talking, walking, dressing, and thinking, as well as how we judge what is good, correct, fun, and beautiful.
Once the social repetition of a convention lodges into our habitus, the practice will feel instinctive rather than arbitrary.
Evolutionary biologists often claim health is critical for choosing potential sexual partners. And yet the dominant aesthetic conventions of an era can push men toward women with ostensibly “unhealthy” appearances.
Conventions start as solutions to coordination problems but take on moral dimensions over time. Customs different from our own aren’t just unnatural but immoral.
Each status group contains a multitude of distinct conventions, which all interlock through a strong internal logic. The custom for brides to wear white offers a logical parallel to the custom for widows to wear black.
Paradigm describes these macro-conventions—the underlying beliefs of a group that set the overall rules for permissible actions, offer guideposts in times of uncertainty, and build the frameworks for understanding and explanation.
Popular music after 1964 has conformed to a “Beatles paradigm”; the critic Ian MacDonald writes, “The Beatles’ way of doing things changed the way things were done and, in so doing, changed the way we expect things to be done.”
Majorities commonly promote social norms that advantage themselves over minorities, and in internalizing these biased conventions, even the disadvantaged parties may come to accept them.
Even when conventions tend to be obviously unfair or clash against communal principles, challengers face social disapproval for choosing alternatives.
Everyone has his price: the benefits of conformity must be compared with the benefits to be obtained elsewhere, and there is bound to be some level of alternative benefits that will successfully tempt the individual into deviance.”
Since culture is based on arbitrary behaviors, individuals could always wander aimlessly from practice to practice. Conventions, whether conscious or internalized, explain why people instead cluster around the same patterns. And status is intertwined in the entire process.
Everything we point to as “culture”—customs, traditions, fashions, and fads—exists as conventions. And by looking at culture as conventions, we can already explain one part of the Grand Mystery of Culture: why humans repeatedly choose arbitrary practices over valid alternatives.
The expansion of car ownership did not, however, alleviate divisions in society. Instead, the simple convention that “wealthy people drive cars” expanded into multiple conventions where brand affiliations mapped to specific status tiers.
Stratification determines the social space we inhabit, and our family and closest friends tend to be at similar status levels. After spending time in the same community, we come to share the same habitus and lifestyle conventions.
At Los Angeles Airport, celebrities pay exorbitant amounts to embark through a special private terminal outside of the public eye named PS, where they are delivered onto the tarmac by a BMW 7 Series sedan.
Every convention can be placed on two hierarchies: (1) the tier within a single status group; and (2) the position between groups on the global status ranking.
An arbitrary practice may have no practical value over its alternatives, but once anchored in a convention, it offers status value and can improve our lives. This creates a constant trade-off between raw practicality and social approval.
Empirical research is beginning to find proof that extrinsic information such as status value not only motivates our choices but even alters how we experience pleasure.
As we move up the status hierarchy, we must adopt conventions with higher status value. This mostly involves buying more expensive goods. The rich can spend more, and the expensive items they buy become standard within their status tier.
Cultural capital is most easily acquired through spending years absorbing the tastes, language, behaviors, and preferences of high-status people. For those born wealthy, cultural capital is embodied and unconscious.
As an extension of status integrity, members of a status group tend to believe that individuals in each tier should consume at their proper level.
During times of broad economic growth, lower status tiers can suddenly afford to take part in higher-status conventions. This raises the standards for all of society.
the word “hipster” is “primarily a pejorative—an insult that belongs to the family of poseur, faker, phony, scenester, and hanger-on.” Everyone hates hipsters, even hipsters themselves.
But we should defend hipsters on this particular point. Simultaneous imitation and distinction aren’t hypocrisy—they’re universal human behaviors.
imitation and distinction act as complementary magnetic forces on our lifestyle choices, pushing us toward our perceived superiors and away from our perceived inferiors. And the power behind those forces is status.
Imitation is required for attaining normal status within a group, but there is an additional requirement: we must affirm our differences from rival groups.
By definition a higher position requires individual distinction. But personal difference also involves breaking norms, for which there may be sanctions. How do individuals negotiate these competing pressures? Many pursue the least controversial forms of individual distinction: namely, exceptional performance against the group’s agreed-upon status criteria.
Another low-risk form of individual distinction is emulation—the chasing of status value through the imitation of higher-status conventions.
But aspirants always have a built-in alibi for emulation: high-status people are successful, so their lifestyle choices, whether yoga, Gucci loafers, or paleo diets, must be the right way to live.
At its heart emulation is simply a form of imitation. True individual distinction requires eschewing convention to find new and unique behaviors.
High status in modern society thus requires satisfying an additional status criterion: to be distinct. Mindless imitation becomes a low-status act.
Emulation requires imitating the group above you, but for those at the top of the hierarchy, there should be no one to imitate. A good indication of having super-high status, then, is being able to get away with distinctive acts.
In theory, accomplishing this should be even easier than imitation. We can just follow our hearts and do whatever we want, no matter what others think.
But alas, unconventional acts are tolerated only for those who already have high status.
And so the higher our status, the more distinctive we can be, and the more distinctive we must be. By this same logic, middle-status people tend to be conservative.
Lower-status individuals, if already outside the realm of social approval, may also live more freely because they have nothing left to lose. But lower-status distinction is interpreted as mere rule breaking.
Individual distinction is risky—and often impossible to pull off when everyone is trying to achieve the same thing. We all face an additional challenge in pluralistic ignorance: the fact that we make our “different” choices without knowing everyone else’s next actions.
Distinction is difficult in modern society when we all share the same categories of self-definition: clothes, homes, cars, beverages. Pluralistic ignorance means even the boldest acts of individual distinction can end up looking like imitation.
In sum, we must distinguish ourselves to demonstrate individual difference for higher status, while concurrently imitating the conventions of our groups to retain normal status. There are no authoritative solutions to these contradictory requirements—only risk-management strategies.
The entire enterprises of language and culture exist only because we can so easily coordinate around arbitrary choices.
If status guides our behavior, we make many choices for nonrational reasons. And this leads to skepticism about status value as a genuine value. Status value is fleeting and out of our personal control.
The term “signaling” is used in both economics and zoology to describe when individuals communicate their high quality through specific clues in order to be selected by another party.
“Status enactment is always a plea, a petition, for status is given, never taken.”
Signaling is a communication process. We make a status claim to others through communicating certain signals, and then others perform a status appraisal by interpreting those signals.
