Social Status: Down the Rabbit Hole

Keeps hyping up the descent into the deep deep rabbit hole: not to take away from this article, this was an interesting read, but really nothing life-altering here.

My life likely would have been much more stable had I grown up a very rural area with a predicable network of friends and family. Instead, I've explored various parts of American society and am left underwhelmed, primarily due to the primitive instincts described in this article.

Pretty good read, the idea of Prestige being separate from dominance explains a lot of behavior I've seen. One I find funny is watching subordinates of a a high level manager nod their heads whenever they receive eye contact (I am of course part of this too).

This is a great primer and a great read for any and all who have the time. It's also very well written, and I am paying public admiration to the author! Have some prestige, good sir, you've earned it for writing a really compelling and great piece.

That being said, I would gently, if pedantically, advise anyone interested in diving deeper down the rabbit hole to note that the author is very much writing a primer -- not the authoritative textbook. Human behavior may be "Platonically" reducible on the basis of one or more animal behavioral models, but if we're going to start mixing in a sprinkle and a dash of complex concepts like Game Theory, we complicate the task and perhaps confuse our purpose.

Zahavi's handicap principle of prestige signaling, for instance, makes a lot of intuitive sense when you see it applied to birds. Almost immediately we grok the natural political dynamics of it all, and we look for analogues in human society. And we usually look at (apparently) obvious analogues, such as the practice of conspicuous consumption as a wealth and status signal.

Seems pretty elegant, doesn't it? It's less costly for the rich guy to buy the ostentatious car, and he suffers no real penalty if his opening move in the social game is rejected -- so we should expect that very expensive "signal" cars are usually bought by the people who can not only afford to buy them, but indeed, can afford to expensively signal their ability to dispose of wealth on such big-ticket inessentials. If we apply the bird model in this case, we should not only expect this result, but indeed, we should count on it. "Honest" signals are costly, and in the animal kingdom, they're usually accurate because of that fact.

Same thing with people, right?

Right?

Turns out, nope, that's not really how it works. At all. The dude who buys the Lambo is more likely to be someone who can't afford it: he's often an insecure member of a (perceived or real) lower social class or out-group who wants to prove he's rich. Ironically, he sends an out-group signal to the in-group he wants to signal he's part of. So who is the display really for? The poor folks. They don't know any better. So our "rich man" in the Lamborghini is an upwardly mobile striver who wants to be the prestigious alpha of a less competitive social set.

So basically, our hypothetically aspirationally mobile millennial (he's a HAMM - why not?) is making a very costly investment in a signal that will directly bar his entry into the desired circle / lower his prestige, and which will maybe earn him the occasional (but certainly not net-beneficial) admiration of the poorer friends he grew up with. And he has so many less costly ways to do the latter, if indeed he even needs to invest towards status-building in that group in the first place. This is just one of many human-behavioral edge cases in which we learn a fun, frustrating lesson: humans are mostly rational decisionmakers...except when they're not, which is more of the time than we probably even realize. :)

I suppose you could boil all of this down back to the two principles of dominance and prestige, and I'm not going to bother attempting the mental gymnastics on either a formal logical basis or by way of a hunt-and-cite search engine scramble. I'll leave the debate to smarter and less presently occupied minds. :)

But to suffice to say this much: beware anyone who claims to be able to account for human behavior using a series of rules. Human behavior is fucking complex and operates on so many nested and situationally interdependent contextual variables that such general rules are almost never cleanly observed in the wild.

I would encourage those interested in Zahavi's (ingenious, nevertheless) theories to drink deeply of the more recent well of Israeli human insight -- that is to say, read some Tversky & Kahneman, and horrror in the heuristic shortcuts that usually override and make a complicated mess of our efforts at elegance.

The author hints at all of this in his footnotes, to give him due fairness. I am not taking issue with his post, so much as issuing a plea for further study if you really do want to keep chasing the white rabbit of human behavioral insight.

Oh brother.