Aside from what I take to be a slip-up (your postulate 3 should have {Alice, Bob, Carol} where it currently has {Alice, Carol, Dave}: yes, you’ve correctly described the purely-relative picture of status that I think Bucky had in mind.
I think there is some non-tautologous content associated with this sort of model—namely, the claim that actual status relations are well modelled by this sort of system. That’ll be true in so far as status governs the answers to questions like “if I have to pick one person to do a favour to, which will it be?” or “if Bob and Carol are in a fight, which of them do I expect to be in the right before I have any other information?” and false in so far as status governs the answers to questions like “if it’s Dave’s birthday and I’m buying him a present, how much time and money shall I put into it?” or “when Carol makes a statement, how inclined am I to believe it?”.
It feels to me—but I have no reason to take my feelings as authoritative—as if status is mostly relative but some of these “absolute” questions are influenced by status too. Think about celebrity endorsements for products (of the kind where the celebrity isn’t famous for being expert in a relevant domain): their point is that when people see a very high-status person using a particular brand of $thing and saying “$thing is great!” they’re more inclined to use $thing themselves, and I don’t think it’s plausible that this is driven by some kind of comparison of $famous_person and all the other people in the world who might not be endorsing $thing.
… But maybe this is still relative; maybe the influence I gain, if I become famous, over what brand of shirt or phone people buy, comes at the cost of other famous people’s influence. This would be true e.g. if everyone allocated a roughly fixed amount of attention to seeing what high-status other people are doing so as to copy it, so that when I become famous I’m competing for that attention with Bill Gates and Kanye West, and they get just a bit less of it. So maybe celebrity endorsements aren’t a good example of non-relative status effects after all.
Hmmm. Interestingly, I was ready to assent to this comment:
I think there is some non-tautologous content associated with this sort of model—namely, the claim that actual status relations are well modelled by this sort of system.
But, when I read your examples—
That’ll be true in so far as status governs the answers to questions like “if I have to pick one person to do a favour to, which will it be?” or “if Bob and Carol are in a fight, which of them do I expect to be in the right before I have any other information?”
… I started having doubts. I… am actually not sure whether the “purely relative” model of status relations gives sensible / useful / “correct” answers to either of these questions. (Especially the latter; I actually am very confused about why you would even claim the latter sort of question to be governed by a “purely relative” model of status… which suggests that I am totally misunderstanding you. What do you mean by “in the right”? I struggle to see an interpretation of that phrase which makes the sentence be true.)
Re: celebrity endorsements: I think that is much more complicated than can be represented by any model of “status”. I don’t think it’s a good example, not because it supports one side or another of the dichotomy we’re discussing, but because it’s nowhere near a “clean” enough case study.
First of all, to clarify, questions like those will never be governed purely by considerations of status, and in some cases other factors will matter much more. (Bob might be much higher-status than Carol but I might like Carol much better, or be hoping to persuade her to sleep with me or offer me a job or something.) But to whatever degree those questions’ answers are influenced by status it will be relative “zero-sum” status that matters, because those are relative zero-sum questions.
What I wrote makes it sound like I was suggesting that status is the only, or the dominant, thing determining the answers to those questions. My apologies for writing unclearly. (I think it was just unclarity—I don’t think I thought status was dominant in determining those answers. But it’s easy to forget one’s past states of mind.)
I don’t know whether that suffices to clear things up. In case it doesn’t, some more words about the “Bob and Carol in a fight” scenario: Suppose you see two acquaintances having an argument. Usually this indicates that at least one of them has been unreasonable somehow. Your initial assumption on seeing them cross at one another might be that Bob has been unreasonable to Carol, or that Carol has been unreasonable to Bob. (If you have a sufficiently well trained mind, you may be able to avoid such assumptions. I think many people can’t.) In the—admittedly unlikely—event that there are no other factors at all to favour one of those assumptions over the other, I am guessing (and it is only a guess) that on balance the higher-status person would tend to get the benefit of the doubt, and more people would jump to “Low-Status-Guy has done something stupid / creepy / offensive” than to the equivalent guess about High-Status-Guy.
I agree that celebrity endorsements are probably too complicated to be useful here. I picked on them because they initially seemed like they might be a nice example of non-relative status effects, but the more I thought about it the less convinced I was of that.
I don’t know whether that suffices to clear things up. In case it doesn’t, some more words about the “Bob and Carol in a fight” scenario: Suppose you see two acquaintances having an argument. Usually this indicates that at least one of them has been unreasonable somehow. Your initial assumption on seeing them cross at one another might be that Bob has been unreasonable to Carol, or that Carol has been unreasonable to Bob. (If you have a sufficiently well trained mind, you may be able to avoid such assumptions. I think many people can’t.) In the—admittedly unlikely—event that there are no other factors at all to favour one of those assumptions over the other, I am guessing (and it is only a guess) that on balance the higher-status person would tend to get the benefit of the doubt, and more people would jump to “Low-Status-Guy has done something stupid / creepy / offensive” than to the equivalent guess about High-Status-Guy.
Hmm. I understand your point now, yes. However, I have two objections.
First: supposing that Bob and Carol are both members of your informal social group, what you say (“on balance the higher-status person would tend to get the benefit of the doubt”) seems true. However, it seems to me that in such a case, the status model that would best predict who would get the benefit of the doubt, and how much, and when, would not be the “purely relative” model. I can easily think of many cases, from my actual experience, where two people disagree/argue, and neither or both of them get the benefit of the doubt, because they have equivalent/comparable social status (in a situation where, if one of them were arguing with someone of lower social status, they would have gotten the benefit of the doubt).
Second: supposing that Bob and Carol are, instead, members of a formal hierarchy (like at a workplace), then, it seems to me, many people will often give the lower-status (and lower-ranking) person the benefit of the doubt, and assume the higher-status (and higher-ranking) person is abusing power, being foolish, etc.[1]
Now, let me not accuse you of dogmatism, since you did add this caveat:
In the—admittedly unlikely—event that there are no other factors at all to favour one of those assumptions over the other …
I guess what I would say is, “no other factors at all” is something that happens so rarely that it’s hard to even discuss the scenario coherently. Maybe it never happens! What if other factors are always present? What if that’s necessarily true? I don’t claim this, but it’s not obvious to me how we’d establish otherwise…
[1] This is basically the entire premise of Dilbert, which is not exactly an obscure comic strip; and lest you think I am generalizing from fictional evidence, recall that Scott Adams famously gets regular letters from readers expressing shock at how accurately the strip portrays their actual, everyday office existence (despite that the strip includes trolls, talking animals, etc.). In any case, this is hardly an unfamiliar phenomenon to anyone who’s had to work in a good-sized organization.
I don’t think I understand your first objection. It seems to say that when there’s a dispute between A and B, and neither A nor B has higher status than the other, onlookers don’t give the benefit of the doubt to either … which is precisely what the relative-status model we’re talking about predicts should happen. How is this an objection?
On the second objection: I agree that many may assume that higher formal-hierarchy position makes a person more likely to be in the wrong. But status is not quite the same thing as position in a formal hierarchy, and I think it’s possible to have both “assume lower-status people have wronged higher-status people rather than the other way around” and “assume formal superiors have wronged formal inferiors rather than the other way around” as heuristics. Also … consider why people might have that latter heuristic. Presumably it’s because higher-ups not infrequently do abuse their authority. Which is to say, they wrong people lower down in the hierarchy and get away with it because of their position.
Of course “no other factors at all” is a vanishingly rare situation. My expectation is that status effects are frequently present but often not alone, and I focused on the situation where there are no other effects for the sake of clarity. When (as usual) there are other effects, the final outcome will result from combining all the effects; the specific effects of status will be hard to disentangle but I see no reason to expect them to vanish just because other things are also present.
I don’t think I understand your first objection. It seems to say that when there’s a dispute between A and B, and neither A nor B has higher status than the other, onlookers don’t give the benefit of the doubt to either … which is precisely what the relative-status model we’re talking about predicts should happen. How is this an objection?
It’s an objection because what you said was that people’s behavior in such a case is predicted by a status model in which it cannot be true that “neither A nor B has higher status than the other”. But I am saying that, empirically, this does happen in such cases, therefore the status model in question (what we’ve been calling the “purely relative” model) is inapplicable / not predictive.
Also … consider why people might have that latter heuristic. Presumably it’s because higher-ups not infrequently do abuse their authority. Which is to say, they wrong people lower down in the hierarchy and get away with it because of their position.
Indeed, but this is very different from third parties concluding that said higher-ups must be ethically / procedurally / etc. “in the right”! Anyway, I think we’ve gotten somewhat far afield in this branch of the conversation, and I am happy to let it drop (unless you think there’s more that’s worth saying, here).
On the second objection: […]
Most of what you say here is reasonable, but simply goes to the point that—as you say later—‘“no other factors at all” is a vanishingly rare situation’. I am not convinced that it’s possible to (a) assume a “purely relative” status model, (b) properly integrate other factors, (c) cleanly separate out the one from the other. It seems to me that a less rigid status model would generally be more predictive. (After all, it is not like we are measuring some objectively real thing, some quantity which corresponds to some clearly separable physical phenomenon! There is no “status” primitive, out in the world…) But I am open to seeing it done the former way.
I still don’t understand what you’re saying about that first objection. What’s this model in which it “cannot be true” that neither A nor B has higher status than the other?
If you’re saying that that can never happen in a “purely relative” system, then what I don’t understand is why you think that. If you’re saying something else, then what I don’t understand is what other thing you’re saying.
It seems to me that there’s no inconsistency at all between a “purely relative” system and equal or incomparable statuses. Equal status for A and B means that all status effects work the same way for A as for B (and in particular that if there’s some straightforward status-driven competition between A and B then, at least as far as status goes, they come out equal). Incomparable status would probably mean that there are different sorts of status effect, and some of them favour A and some favour B, such that in some situations A wins and in some B wins.
I don’t dispute (indeed, I insist on) the point that it’s vanishingly rare to have no other factors. And I bet you’re right that cleanly separating status effects from other effects is very difficult. It’s not clear to me that this is much of an objection to “purely relative” models of status in contrast to other models. I guess the way in which it might be is: what distinguishes a “purely relative” model is that all you are entitled to say about status is what you can determine from examining who wins in various “status contests”, and since pure status contests are very rare and disentangling the effects in impure status contests is hard you may not be able to tell much about who wins. That’s all true, but I think there are parallel objections to models of “non-relative” type: if it’s hard to tell whether A outranks B because status effects are inseparable from other confounding effects, I think that makes it just as hard to tell (e.g.) what numerical level of status should be assigned to A or to B.
In terms of how relative status works out in practice, I see it as affecting people’s first, instinctive reactions to many (probably most) social circumstances.
In an argument between Bob and Carol, who should I support?
If someone criticises me, how do I react?
If someone praises me, how good does it make me feel?
If I disagree with someone, how likely am I to fight my corner?
How do I react when someone takes something which I don’t feel they deserve?
Who do I want to spend time with?
Would this be a good person to date?
If Dave does this, should I do it too?
Other things will also affect these decisions such as liking the person or system 2 thinking—status is just one model of many required to explain human behaviour. These other models aren’t zero-sum. I personally find it helpful for predictive power to have a separate model for relative status:
What would Dave’s decision be if he only cared about relative status?
What would Dave’s decision be if he based it entirely on whether he likes me?
If Dave just thought about this logically what would he decide?
...
How do I put these answers together to predict Dave’s actions?
***
I’d argue that apparently absolute questions such as buying Dave a Birthday present would include relative status considerations as there’s a relative status between you and Dave to consider. This might or might not have a big effect on the final decision but it would probably change how you feel about spending time/money on Dave which could easily subconsciously move your actions one way or the other.
Certainly if you’re higher status than him you’d expect him to be more grateful than if he was higher status (within the status model alone).
I wouldn’t be surprised if the model were to be less predictive as the group gets large enough that people can’t keep track of everyone’s relative status or where someone’s status is far away from your own.
In that case I would model people as giving people a placeholder status. e.g. “so high that I don’t have to worry about precisely how high” for VIPs or “just assume roughly average status” when we encounter new people. At this point zero sum might break down.
Aside from what I take to be a slip-up (your postulate 3 should have {Alice, Bob, Carol} where it currently has {Alice, Carol, Dave}: yes, you’ve correctly described the purely-relative picture of status that I think Bucky had in mind.
I think there is some non-tautologous content associated with this sort of model—namely, the claim that actual status relations are well modelled by this sort of system. That’ll be true in so far as status governs the answers to questions like “if I have to pick one person to do a favour to, which will it be?” or “if Bob and Carol are in a fight, which of them do I expect to be in the right before I have any other information?” and false in so far as status governs the answers to questions like “if it’s Dave’s birthday and I’m buying him a present, how much time and money shall I put into it?” or “when Carol makes a statement, how inclined am I to believe it?”.
It feels to me—but I have no reason to take my feelings as authoritative—as if status is mostly relative but some of these “absolute” questions are influenced by status too. Think about celebrity endorsements for products (of the kind where the celebrity isn’t famous for being expert in a relevant domain): their point is that when people see a very high-status person using a particular brand of $thing and saying “$thing is great!” they’re more inclined to use $thing themselves, and I don’t think it’s plausible that this is driven by some kind of comparison of $famous_person and all the other people in the world who might not be endorsing $thing.
… But maybe this is still relative; maybe the influence I gain, if I become famous, over what brand of shirt or phone people buy, comes at the cost of other famous people’s influence. This would be true e.g. if everyone allocated a roughly fixed amount of attention to seeing what high-status other people are doing so as to copy it, so that when I become famous I’m competing for that attention with Bill Gates and Kanye West, and they get just a bit less of it. So maybe celebrity endorsements aren’t a good example of non-relative status effects after all.
Hmmm. Interestingly, I was ready to assent to this comment:
But, when I read your examples—
… I started having doubts. I… am actually not sure whether the “purely relative” model of status relations gives sensible / useful / “correct” answers to either of these questions. (Especially the latter; I actually am very confused about why you would even claim the latter sort of question to be governed by a “purely relative” model of status… which suggests that I am totally misunderstanding you. What do you mean by “in the right”? I struggle to see an interpretation of that phrase which makes the sentence be true.)
Re: celebrity endorsements: I think that is much more complicated than can be represented by any model of “status”. I don’t think it’s a good example, not because it supports one side or another of the dichotomy we’re discussing, but because it’s nowhere near a “clean” enough case study.
First of all, to clarify, questions like those will never be governed purely by considerations of status, and in some cases other factors will matter much more. (Bob might be much higher-status than Carol but I might like Carol much better, or be hoping to persuade her to sleep with me or offer me a job or something.) But to whatever degree those questions’ answers are influenced by status it will be relative “zero-sum” status that matters, because those are relative zero-sum questions.
What I wrote makes it sound like I was suggesting that status is the only, or the dominant, thing determining the answers to those questions. My apologies for writing unclearly. (I think it was just unclarity—I don’t think I thought status was dominant in determining those answers. But it’s easy to forget one’s past states of mind.)
I don’t know whether that suffices to clear things up. In case it doesn’t, some more words about the “Bob and Carol in a fight” scenario: Suppose you see two acquaintances having an argument. Usually this indicates that at least one of them has been unreasonable somehow. Your initial assumption on seeing them cross at one another might be that Bob has been unreasonable to Carol, or that Carol has been unreasonable to Bob. (If you have a sufficiently well trained mind, you may be able to avoid such assumptions. I think many people can’t.) In the—admittedly unlikely—event that there are no other factors at all to favour one of those assumptions over the other, I am guessing (and it is only a guess) that on balance the higher-status person would tend to get the benefit of the doubt, and more people would jump to “Low-Status-Guy has done something stupid / creepy / offensive” than to the equivalent guess about High-Status-Guy.
I agree that celebrity endorsements are probably too complicated to be useful here. I picked on them because they initially seemed like they might be a nice example of non-relative status effects, but the more I thought about it the less convinced I was of that.
Hmm. I understand your point now, yes. However, I have two objections.
First: supposing that Bob and Carol are both members of your informal social group, what you say (“on balance the higher-status person would tend to get the benefit of the doubt”) seems true. However, it seems to me that in such a case, the status model that would best predict who would get the benefit of the doubt, and how much, and when, would not be the “purely relative” model. I can easily think of many cases, from my actual experience, where two people disagree/argue, and neither or both of them get the benefit of the doubt, because they have equivalent/comparable social status (in a situation where, if one of them were arguing with someone of lower social status, they would have gotten the benefit of the doubt).
Second: supposing that Bob and Carol are, instead, members of a formal hierarchy (like at a workplace), then, it seems to me, many people will often give the lower-status (and lower-ranking) person the benefit of the doubt, and assume the higher-status (and higher-ranking) person is abusing power, being foolish, etc.[1]
Now, let me not accuse you of dogmatism, since you did add this caveat:
I guess what I would say is, “no other factors at all” is something that happens so rarely that it’s hard to even discuss the scenario coherently. Maybe it never happens! What if other factors are always present? What if that’s necessarily true? I don’t claim this, but it’s not obvious to me how we’d establish otherwise…
[1] This is basically the entire premise of Dilbert, which is not exactly an obscure comic strip; and lest you think I am generalizing from fictional evidence, recall that Scott Adams famously gets regular letters from readers expressing shock at how accurately the strip portrays their actual, everyday office existence (despite that the strip includes trolls, talking animals, etc.). In any case, this is hardly an unfamiliar phenomenon to anyone who’s had to work in a good-sized organization.
I don’t think I understand your first objection. It seems to say that when there’s a dispute between A and B, and neither A nor B has higher status than the other, onlookers don’t give the benefit of the doubt to either … which is precisely what the relative-status model we’re talking about predicts should happen. How is this an objection?
On the second objection: I agree that many may assume that higher formal-hierarchy position makes a person more likely to be in the wrong. But status is not quite the same thing as position in a formal hierarchy, and I think it’s possible to have both “assume lower-status people have wronged higher-status people rather than the other way around” and “assume formal superiors have wronged formal inferiors rather than the other way around” as heuristics. Also … consider why people might have that latter heuristic. Presumably it’s because higher-ups not infrequently do abuse their authority. Which is to say, they wrong people lower down in the hierarchy and get away with it because of their position.
Of course “no other factors at all” is a vanishingly rare situation. My expectation is that status effects are frequently present but often not alone, and I focused on the situation where there are no other effects for the sake of clarity. When (as usual) there are other effects, the final outcome will result from combining all the effects; the specific effects of status will be hard to disentangle but I see no reason to expect them to vanish just because other things are also present.
It’s an objection because what you said was that people’s behavior in such a case is predicted by a status model in which it cannot be true that “neither A nor B has higher status than the other”. But I am saying that, empirically, this does happen in such cases, therefore the status model in question (what we’ve been calling the “purely relative” model) is inapplicable / not predictive.
Indeed, but this is very different from third parties concluding that said higher-ups must be ethically / procedurally / etc. “in the right”! Anyway, I think we’ve gotten somewhat far afield in this branch of the conversation, and I am happy to let it drop (unless you think there’s more that’s worth saying, here).
Most of what you say here is reasonable, but simply goes to the point that—as you say later—‘“no other factors at all” is a vanishingly rare situation’. I am not convinced that it’s possible to (a) assume a “purely relative” status model, (b) properly integrate other factors, (c) cleanly separate out the one from the other. It seems to me that a less rigid status model would generally be more predictive. (After all, it is not like we are measuring some objectively real thing, some quantity which corresponds to some clearly separable physical phenomenon! There is no “status” primitive, out in the world…) But I am open to seeing it done the former way.
I still don’t understand what you’re saying about that first objection. What’s this model in which it “cannot be true” that neither A nor B has higher status than the other?
If you’re saying that that can never happen in a “purely relative” system, then what I don’t understand is why you think that. If you’re saying something else, then what I don’t understand is what other thing you’re saying.
It seems to me that there’s no inconsistency at all between a “purely relative” system and equal or incomparable statuses. Equal status for A and B means that all status effects work the same way for A as for B (and in particular that if there’s some straightforward status-driven competition between A and B then, at least as far as status goes, they come out equal). Incomparable status would probably mean that there are different sorts of status effect, and some of them favour A and some favour B, such that in some situations A wins and in some B wins.
I don’t dispute (indeed, I insist on) the point that it’s vanishingly rare to have no other factors. And I bet you’re right that cleanly separating status effects from other effects is very difficult. It’s not clear to me that this is much of an objection to “purely relative” models of status in contrast to other models. I guess the way in which it might be is: what distinguishes a “purely relative” model is that all you are entitled to say about status is what you can determine from examining who wins in various “status contests”, and since pure status contests are very rare and disentangling the effects in impure status contests is hard you may not be able to tell much about who wins. That’s all true, but I think there are parallel objections to models of “non-relative” type: if it’s hard to tell whether A outranks B because status effects are inseparable from other confounding effects, I think that makes it just as hard to tell (e.g.) what numerical level of status should be assigned to A or to B.
In terms of how relative status works out in practice, I see it as affecting people’s first, instinctive reactions to many (probably most) social circumstances.
In an argument between Bob and Carol, who should I support?
If someone criticises me, how do I react?
If someone praises me, how good does it make me feel?
If I disagree with someone, how likely am I to fight my corner?
How do I react when someone takes something which I don’t feel they deserve?
Who do I want to spend time with?
Would this be a good person to date?
If Dave does this, should I do it too?
Other things will also affect these decisions such as liking the person or system 2 thinking—status is just one model of many required to explain human behaviour. These other models aren’t zero-sum. I personally find it helpful for predictive power to have a separate model for relative status:
What would Dave’s decision be if he only cared about relative status?
What would Dave’s decision be if he based it entirely on whether he likes me?
If Dave just thought about this logically what would he decide?
...
How do I put these answers together to predict Dave’s actions?
***
I’d argue that apparently absolute questions such as buying Dave a Birthday present would include relative status considerations as there’s a relative status between you and Dave to consider. This might or might not have a big effect on the final decision but it would probably change how you feel about spending time/money on Dave which could easily subconsciously move your actions one way or the other.
Certainly if you’re higher status than him you’d expect him to be more grateful than if he was higher status (within the status model alone).
Right you are; edited.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the model were to be less predictive as the group gets large enough that people can’t keep track of everyone’s relative status or where someone’s status is far away from your own.
In that case I would model people as giving people a placeholder status. e.g. “so high that I don’t have to worry about precisely how high” for VIPs or “just assume roughly average status” when we encounter new people. At this point zero sum might break down.