Controversial. Status games in conversation are zero-sum; you gain attention by taking it off someone else, and social dominance / ranking hierarchies are ordinal as far as I have observed—so moving up a rank involves moving someone else down a rank.
If I’m the 5th wealthiest person in my cohort and I move up to 4th, that means someone else moved from 4th to 5th; absolutely agreed. And as long as we don’t pay attention to anyone outside our cohort, that’s a zero-sum game; also agreed.
Of course, if I do look at the rest of the world, I might discover that in going from 5th to 4th in our cohort she also went from Nth to N+1000th in the world… in which case it’s less clearly zero-sum.
Similarly, if you join my conversation and end up getting most of the attention, I lose status within the conversation. If in the process the conversation becomes more interesting to others, I may gain status within the community
Of course, the same thing goes the other way… I can gain status locally while we both lose it globally. I can take over a conversation while making everyone dismiss me as a crank not worth listening to.
And I appreciate that recalibrating ranks to the local group is often useful; I don’t mean to say one should never do that. Merely that it’s worth being aware of both the local and the global context.
Status isn’t zero-sum.
Controversial. Status games in conversation are zero-sum; you gain attention by taking it off someone else, and social dominance / ranking hierarchies are ordinal as far as I have observed—so moving up a rank involves moving someone else down a rank.
If I’m the 5th wealthiest person in my cohort and I move up to 4th, that means someone else moved from 4th to 5th; absolutely agreed. And as long as we don’t pay attention to anyone outside our cohort, that’s a zero-sum game; also agreed.
Of course, if I do look at the rest of the world, I might discover that in going from 5th to 4th in our cohort she also went from Nth to N+1000th in the world… in which case it’s less clearly zero-sum.
Similarly, if you join my conversation and end up getting most of the attention, I lose status within the conversation. If in the process the conversation becomes more interesting to others, I may gain status within the community
Of course, the same thing goes the other way… I can gain status locally while we both lose it globally. I can take over a conversation while making everyone dismiss me as a crank not worth listening to.
And I appreciate that recalibrating ranks to the local group is often useful; I don’t mean to say one should never do that. Merely that it’s worth being aware of both the local and the global context.