Because not everyone we’d want to associate with are people who can mentally just up and decide to not be status signalling creatures. And thus we want to model how and why the status signalling happens, both to understand how to react normally as well as how we can act without falling into the same traps. Not to mention this is something just glossed over in everyday status signalling interactions; maybe we can optimize the situations.
Disclaimer: Hopefully I can close the gap, but if not, I’ll have to hope someone else gets what I’m talking about, because I’m not always the best at explaining signalling.
Humans are social animals. Part of our social behavior is making ourselves look like we’re ideal individuals, whether we’re conscious of it or not. Peer pressure helps force others to align with both our view of ideal (by making them act more how we want them to act) and reinforce our ideal-ness (because we’re making them agree, if submissively and possibly unconsciously, with our view).
Many people don’t understand this is what we’re doing, but are otherwise intelligent individuals with ideas or characteristics that we like. Thus, we want to understand the social behavior going on here so we can interact with this set of people better than if we just decided to not learn the behavior, as ignoring them would also be below par.
Edit: Jack got it better. I was writing from a pressurer’s standpoint for my explanation of why it happens, and then a pressuree’s for my answer to why we care, but that may have made it more confusing.
Because not everyone we’d want to associate with are people who can mentally just up and decide to not be status signalling creatures. And thus we want to model how and why the status signalling happens, both to understand how to react normally as well as how we can act without falling into the same traps. Not to mention this is something just glossed over in everyday status signalling interactions; maybe we can optimize the situations.
English, please?
EDIT: Is it a fancy way of saying that we give in to peer pressure to not look stuck up? Just a guess...
EDIT2: OK, Jack said it even shorter, but it looks like I sort of got it.
Disclaimer: Hopefully I can close the gap, but if not, I’ll have to hope someone else gets what I’m talking about, because I’m not always the best at explaining signalling.
Humans are social animals. Part of our social behavior is making ourselves look like we’re ideal individuals, whether we’re conscious of it or not. Peer pressure helps force others to align with both our view of ideal (by making them act more how we want them to act) and reinforce our ideal-ness (because we’re making them agree, if submissively and possibly unconsciously, with our view). Many people don’t understand this is what we’re doing, but are otherwise intelligent individuals with ideas or characteristics that we like. Thus, we want to understand the social behavior going on here so we can interact with this set of people better than if we just decided to not learn the behavior, as ignoring them would also be below par.
Edit: Jack got it better. I was writing from a pressurer’s standpoint for my explanation of why it happens, and then a pressuree’s for my answer to why we care, but that may have made it more confusing.