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This means that every action we take—in conforming to convention—transcends the action itself and becomes a sign.
The ubiquity of status claims and appraisals transforms humans—even small children—into very efficient calculators of social position.
We don’t have to signal to everyone—only in times of information asymmetry. Our friends, family, and neighbors know us well and made conclusions about our status level long ago.
But in modernity—the epoch that the anthropologist Charles Lindholm defines as “the condition of living among strangers”—most of us need to constantly claim status upon interaction with unknown parties.
the highest-status individuals should have strong enough reputations to reduce the need for aggressive signaling. Boasting and bragging thus become an implicit sign of low status.
very high-status individuals should seem detached from active attempts to gain status. In fact, the most successful status claims should never appear to be status claims.
Cues are observable manifestations of our habitus, upbringing, and community affiliations, and because they can’t be easily controlled, they are much more effective for gauging status levels than signals.
Cues that place individuals as members of certain classes are also known as social shibboleths.
Cues can either bolster or betray signals, making them valuable to appraisers looking for a glimpse into the “real” individual.
The status-advantaged can often signal status with their cues alone, lessening the need to signal. The status-disadvantaged need more valuable signals to override their low-status cues.
Besides signals and cues, there is an important third category of information used in status appraisals: significant absences. Appraisers also look for what is missing. An absence can be a refusal to participate in a convention, or participation in a different one from what is expected.
But the fact that not doing things plays a role in status appraisals means no one can ever opt out of making status claims. Everything we do, say, and own—or choose not to do, say, or own—becomes a sign.
But now with modern society requiring constant signaling to strangers, the most effective status symbols are portable or transportable: luxurious cars, clothing, jewelry, accessories, and fragrances.
In semiotics, “symbol” is a technical term for a sign that requires preexisting knowledge to be interpreted.
The underlying object or behavior “transporting” the symbolic meanings is known as the sign-vehicle. Since we should avoid bragging about social position, successful status symbols rely on sign-vehicles that play a natural role in our daily lives.
The principle of detachment means all status symbols require alibis—reasons for adoption other than status seeking.
And yet, luxury goods never work as luxury goods based purely on functionality. They also must have status value.
The best proof of this can be found in the fact that luxury goods that are initially exclusive to a small segment of the population, such as nutmeg or air-conditioning, cease to be luxuries once they’re widely available—despite their quality improving over time.
In the past, only expensive tailored suit jackets came with working buttons on the sleeves, and so rich men would leave a button undone “accidentally” to show off this detail.
Well-to-do men who were familiar with this convention could read the signal of open cuff buttons and appraise the wearer as having high status.
Adam Smith noted the principle of associativity: “When two objects have frequently been seen together, the imagination requires a habit of passing easily from one to the other. If the first is to appear, we lay our account that the second is to follow.”
Status symbols, therefore, must have clear associations with high-status groups.
Cachet powers the often elusive concept “cool”; nothing can be cool without associations to particular groups of high-status individuals, namely, musicians, celebrities, and popular teens.
Status symbols gain value when associated with elites, but may also lose that value once associated with lower-status groups instead.
There must be a marked difference protected through barriers to imitation. In economics, these are called signaling costs—the cost it takes for an individual to acquire a certain signal.
Signaling costs are required to create and maintain the exclusion required for cachet. This tends to happen naturally: elites prefer conventions with high signaling costs, which gives their costly choices cachet.
There are five common signaling costs. The first and most obvious is money. Since wealth correlates to status position in capitalist society, most status symbols are expensive.
The second cost is time. A PhD signals experience because it takes years and years of education and validation from established professors.
The third cost is exclusive access. High-status people are granted access to restricted locations where they attend special events. There they acquire things unavailable to others.
The fourth cost is cultural capital—knowledge of conventions acquired through spending time among high-status people.
The final cost is norm breaking.
Using their leeway to be different, elites can more easily pay the costs of social disapproval.
In using symbols, status claims and appraisals potentially face the problems inherent in all communication—namely, that status appraisers may not perceive the signals nor interpret them as proper classifications of status ranking.
Even if appraisers can perceive a symbol, they must also know how to read it the intended way. This is the problem of interpretability.
Linguists speak of semantic drift: the slow change in words’ meanings over time. This principle also applies to cultural symbols, which can often come to mean the very opposite.
In order to get ahead of failures in perceptibility, interpretability, and ambiguity, we adopt certain techniques to ensure semiotic success. The first is choosing the most suitable status symbols for our appraisers.
The final and most important technique is redundancy, ensuring our signals and cues work together to tell a unified story of high status.
These communications problems are all minor, however, compared with an even bigger loophole in the entire status-signaling process: cheating.
We all emulate, but the principle of status integrity requires us to seek out, dislike, and even punish the most flagrant cheaters.
Our fear of being seen as cheaters makes us more likely to borrow status symbols from one status tier up and not higher.
In fact, this kind of bluffing—fake it till you make it—is now an accepted and celebrated way to get ahead in life. Signaling fraud can even boost the status claimer’s confidence levels.
Cheating, then, can lead us to a higher status tier, at which point we can prove ourselves worthy of staying there.
(And research shows that lower-income individuals believe “the game is rigged” and may be already skeptical that hard work is the key to life success.)
The best method to detect fakery is triangulation—considering all signals, cues, and significant absences together. Triangulation forces us to look beyond single status symbols and toward the entire package of symbols.
Where we become aware of our damaging cues, we hide them. Over time these choices made on behalf of our status goals form not just our signaling strategies but our tastes and identities.
For many centuries, Western elites followed the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s clear and authoritative definition: taste was “the faculty of estimating the beautiful.”
This use of taste is essentially a metaphor—equating our capacity to make proper aesthetic judgments with the deeply ingrained ability to detect flavor.
The modern age of cultural pluralism, however, precludes a single, authoritative standard for good taste.
With this, the definition of taste has shifted from “the proper identification of beauty” to a more neutral “propensity toward certain lifestyle choices.”
Standards of taste are always relative to the dominant conventions of the era and the society, and so the only way to make sense of taste is to analyze it as a social mechanism.
