Suppose you want to predict whether a given man will go hang out with friends or work more on a project. How does the idea of status seeking helps? When we already know that the human chose friends we say, yes of course, he get more status around his friend group by spending more time with them, improving their bonds and having good friends is a marker of status in its own right. Likewise, when we know that the man chose work, we can say that this is behaviour that leads towards promotion and more money and influence inside the company which is a marker of high status. But when we want to predict beforehand… I don’t think it really helps.
The concept of status helps us predict that any given person is likely to do one of the relatively few things that are likely to increase their status, and not one of the many more things that are neutral or likely to decrease status, even if it can’t by itself tell us exactly which status-raising thing they would do. Seems plenty useful to me.
It seems that a huge part of “human behaviour is explained by status seeking” is just post hoc proclaiming that whatever humans do is status seeking.
Suppose you want to predict whether a given man will go hang out with friends or work more on a project. How does the idea of status seeking helps? When we already know that the human chose friends we say, yes of course, he get more status around his friend group by spending more time with them, improving their bonds and having good friends is a marker of status in its own right. Likewise, when we know that the man chose work, we can say that this is behaviour that leads towards promotion and more money and influence inside the company which is a marker of high status. But when we want to predict beforehand… I don’t think it really helps.
The concept of status helps us predict that any given person is likely to do one of the relatively few things that are likely to increase their status, and not one of the many more things that are neutral or likely to decrease status, even if it can’t by itself tell us exactly which status-raising thing they would do. Seems plenty useful to me.