The reason I attach high plausibility to such explanations is simply that status is the primary preoccupation of humans as soon as their barest physical subsistence needs are met.
At the very least this seems to be privileging an extraversion hypothesis. You can only gain status by interacting in some way with other people, yet it is not uncommon for people to shun company and instead devote time to solitary occupations with scant status benefits.
Under your justification for favoring status explanations, the only reason anyone ever reads a book is to brag about it. This seems wrong, prima facie, as well as simplistic.
You can only gain status by interacting in some way with other people, yet it is not uncommon for people to shun company and instead devote time to solitary occupations with scant status benefits.
Under your justification for favoring status explanations, the only reason anyone ever reads a book is to brag about it. This seems wrong, prima facie, as well as simplistic.
Note that I also mentioned “satisfying some urge that originally evolved as instrumental to human status games” in my above statement. Today’s world is full of super-stimuli that powerfully resonate with ancestral urges even though they don’t actually lead towards the goals that these urges had originally evolved to promote, and are often even antithetical to these goals. Just like candy bars cheat the heuristic urges that evolved to identify nutritious and healthy food in the ancestral environment, it is reasonable to expect that solitary occupations with scant (or even negative) status benefits cheat the heuristic urges that originally evolved as useful in status games, or for furthering some other goal that they no longer achieve reliably in the modern environment.
You will probably agree that super-stimulation of status-seeking urges explains at least some non-beneficial solitary activities with high plausibility, for example when people neglect their real-life responsibilities by getting caught up in the thrill of virtual leadership and accomplishment provided by video-games. Of course, this by no means applies to all such activities; it is likely that the enjoyment found in some of them is rooted in urges that evolved for different reasons.
To address your above example, unless we assume some supernatural component of the human mind, I see no possible explanation of human book-reading except as a super-stimulus for some ancestral urges (whether status-related or not), unless of course it’s done not for enjoyment, but purely to acquire information necessary for other goals. While it’s far from being a complete explanation of human book-reading, it seems plausible to me that people sometimes enjoy books in part because it enhances their status signaling abilities in matters of erudition and taste. Also, it seems to me that stories super-stimulate the human urges for gossip, which are likely a device with an original status-related purpose, and all sorts of complex information may super-stimulate curiosity, whose evolution has likely been only partly status-based. These are of course just rough outlines of the complete truth, which we don’t yet know.
On the other hand, to get back to the original topic, when it comes to issues where actual power and prestige in human societies is at stake, in any case I’ve ever given much thought, the prominent role of widespread status-related beliefs and behaviors seems to me strikingly obvious and without any rival explanations that would be even remotely as plausible. The ability to account for such explanations by evolutionary theories additionally enhances their plausibility, as well as the fact that many deep and accurate insights into human nature by classical writers and philosophers can be faithfully retold in the more explicit modern language of status dynamics.
Note that I also mentioned “satisfying some urge that originally evolved as instrumental to human status games” in my above statement.
I just want to throw in a note that I don’t think human motivation is adequately explained by status alone—I would expand the list to SASS: Status, Affiliation, Safety, and Stimulation. (Where, as some folks here have pointed out, “Safety” might be more accurately described as stability, certainty, or control, rather than being purely about physical safety.)
Book-reading, in particular, is more likely to meet Safety/Stimulation needs than Status or Affiliation ones.… though you could maybe get those latter two from a book club or an academic setting.
I just want to throw in a note that I don’t think human motivation is adequately explained by status alone—I would expand the list to SASS: Status, Affiliation, Safety, and Stimulation.
I agree, but most complex and multi-faceted human behaviors are likely to be compelled by a mixture of these motives. My impression is that status features more often and more prominently that most people imagine, and its often masqueraded and rationalized by pretenses of other motivations.
Book-reading, in particular, is more likely to meet Safety/Stimulation needs than Status or Affiliation ones.… though you could maybe get those latter two from a book club or an academic setting.
My hypothesis is that super-stimulation of the same urges that cause people to enjoy gossip is responsible for a significant part (though by no means all) of human enjoyment of books and other ways of presenting stories. This would be a good example of super-stimulating an urge whose original evolution was to a large degree driven by status games, in a way that however has no direct relation to the present-day status games.
My impression is that status features more often and more prominently that most people imagine, and its often masqueraded and rationalized by pretenses of other motivations.
People just as routinely masquerade and rationalize the other three, actually.
However, that’s because their operation is fairly opaque to consciousness. We have built-in machinery for processing social signals relating to Status and Affiliation, and during our “impressionable” years, we learn to value the things that are associated with them, and come to treat them as terminal values in themselves.
IOW, SASS is how we learn to have non-SASS terminal values. So, when a person claims to be acting out of a non-SASS value, they’re not really lying. It’s just that they’re not usually aware of (i.e. have forgotten about) the triggers that shaped the acquisition of that value in the first place.
My hypothesis is that super-stimulation of the same urges that cause people to enjoy gossip is responsible for a significant part (though by no means all) of human enjoyment of books and other ways of presenting stories.
Plenty of other animals manage to be curious, needing actual stories. Also, some of us like to read things that aren’t gossip or stories.
Presumably one could test your hypothesis by finding out whether individuals lose interest in reading when they gain status; my personal experience suggests this is not the case, and that instead books compete with other forms of stimulation.
So, ISTM that even if curiosity (and certain templates for what to be curious about) were shaped by status competition, this doesn’t mean there is an operational connection between books and one’s self-perception of status.
To a certain extent, we could say that everything is about status, in the same way that every organ is a reproductive organ. But saying that everything is X, is the same as saying as nothing is X—it reduces your predictive power, rather than increasing it.
In retrospect, I probably should have put more care into the wording of my comments in this thread (which I wrote more quickly and with less proofreading than usual). Several people have understood my positions as more extreme than I honestly meant them to be, and I evidently failed in conveying some of the more subtle points I had in mind.
While I agree with most of your above comment, there seems to be a major misunderstanding here (probably due to my lack of clarity):
Presumably one could test your hypothesis by finding out whether individuals lose interest in reading when they gain status; my personal experience suggests this is not the case, and that instead books compete with other forms of stimulation.
Well, insofar as reading is a directly status-related activity, nothing I hypothesized predicts that, nor is it the case in reality. In fact, if you enjoy high status as an intellectual, you are required to read a lot constantly to maintain that status; having nothing much to say when you’re asked what you’ve read lately would be a major embarrassment. Of course, this is rarely by itself a very prominent motivation—people who achieve high intellectual status usually have more than enough interest in reading out of curiosity and professional needs—but I wouldn’t say it’s entirely negligible either, especially when it comes to trendy highbrow literature.
However, that’s not at all what I had in mind with my reading-as-gossip-super-stimulus hypothesis. What I had in mind there is that the appeal of certain genres of literature and other storytelling media might be in part due to the fact that they stimulate the same urges that make people enjoy gossip. Thanks to these media, besides the thin diet of mundane real-world gossip, you get to enjoy huge amounts of artificial gossip skillfully crafted to be super-interesting, albeit about people who are fictional (or at least remote and personally irrelevant).
This mechanism has nothing at all to do with one’s actual status and behaviors that influence it. The status connection here lies the fact that the gossip-enjoying urges had previously evolved under the influence of status dynamics, in which gossip is one of the key practical instruments. Their present stimulation with concentrated artificial gossip delivered via literature and other media no longer serves this function; it is merely stimulating an urge that evolved as an adaptation to a different environment.
Curiosity falls under the “stimulation” heading, as does skill acquisition for its own sake (e.g. video games).
To be fair, the SASS list is more a convenient set of categories, than it is an attempt to be a comprehensive and rigorously-proven classification system. However, it’s definitely “less wrong” than assuming everything is about status… yet not so unwieldy as the systems that claim 16 or more basic human drives.
The evolution of a desire for competence is an excellent question. Impulses such as curiosity and systemizing could be related to developing competence.
Systemizing could indeed be useful for your survival, and the survival of those around you, via tool-making, weapon-making, hunting/cooking techniques, etc… So systemizing could be a status-related adaptation.
Yet if your systemizing skills create a breakthrough (e.g. you design a useful tool), then your tribe may well accord you status, enhancing your survival and reproduction.
A desire for competence could also be useful for mating, because competence displays “good genes.” This is true of skills that don’t provide such obvious survival benefits, such as singing and dancing.
A desire for competence, and adaptations that facilitate its development (curiosity, systemizing), could well be useful for any combination of survival, reproduction, and status.
I see no possible explanation of human book-reading except as a super-stimulus for some ancestral urges (whether status-related or not)
There’s nothing “super” about a book: no corresponding “normal” stimulus that elicits a natural response, such that a book is an exaggerated version of it.
Book-reading is explained straightforwardly enough as satisfying curiosity, a trait we share with many species (think cats).
If reading a book sometimes trumps the quest for status, then the latter cannot be THE primary preoccupation of people beyond bare physical subsistence. You will at least need to retreat to “an important” preoccupation.
Now, if you were to explore this topic without jumping to conclusions, perhaps you’d recognize this one example as the start of a list, and would in an unbiased manner draw up a somewhat realistic list of the activities typical humans engage in, and sort them into “activities having a high status component” and “activities not primarily status-related”. Then we might form a better picture of “how important”.
There’s nothing “super” about a book: no corresponding “normal” stimulus that elicits a natural response, such that a book is an exaggerated version of it.
I disagree, for the reasons I’ve already discussed at length. You don’t seem to have read my above comment carefully, or perhaps my exposition was poor.
I did mention curiosity as one part of the motivation for reading books. Moreover, the curiosity explanation itself contradicts your above claim: a book, or a story told any other way, presents far more material (albeit fictional) for curiosity-satisfaction than is available from real-life events, and this material is intentionally and skillfully crafted to have great appeal in this regard, so it clearly does provide a super-stimulus for this particular urge.
Besides, as I also mentioned in my above post, there is also the human urge for gossip, which is pretty obviously related to status games, and is clearly super-stimulated by (at least some) books and other story-telling media. Finally, there is also the motivation of status seeking via demonstrating taste and erudition. All these, and possibly many other factors would probably feature in a complete theory of this particular human behavior.
If reading a book sometimes trumps the quest for status, then the latter cannot be THE primary preoccupation of people beyond bare physical subsistence. You will at least need to retreat to “an important” preoccupation
Again, you don’t seem to understand my point about the difference between: (1) human behaviors that actually enhance status, or promote goals that lead towards its enhancement, and (2) behaviors driven by urges that had originally evolved for status-seeking purposes in the ancestral environment, but which misfire in the modern environment—just like e.g. the human taste for sugar was a good nutritional heuristic in a sugar-poor environment, but leads us to bad nutritional choices in the present environment full of cheap sugar-rich super-stimuli.
Now, if you were to explore this topic without jumping to conclusions, perhaps you’d recognize this one example as the start of a list, and would in an unbiased manner draw up a somewhat realistic list of the activities typical humans engage in, and sort them into “activities having a high status component” and “activities not primarily status-related”. Then we might form a better picture of “how important”.
But as I explained above, you don’t seem to have understood my remarks about this example correctly. (I allow for the possibility that my writing was too bad to be understandable, of course.) I’ve explained the issue again now, and my conclusion is still that your example is incorrect. If you believe that my reasoning in this case is invalid, or if you have other examples that you believe refute my main thesis, I’d love to hear your arguments, but please make sure to address the substance of what I’ve written.
a book, or a story told any other way, presents far more material (albeit fictional) for curiosity-satisfaction than is available from real-life events, and this material is intentionally and skillfully crafted to have great appeal in this regard
I read mostly non-fiction books, mostly to satisfy my curiosity. A recent example was “Freakonomics”. That appears to defuse your argument...
so it clearly does provide a super-stimulus for this particular urge
I dispute that a book is a “superstimulus” in the same sense in which that term has predictive power when applied to herring gull parents, to the sexual arousal response in humans, or to the appeal of fast-food flavors. I am unwilling, more generally, to interpret the term “super-stimulus” broadly enough to encompass any case where a given behaviour is explained by an urge vaguely related to another urge that existed in the ancestral environment.
If books in general were superstimuli for some existing urge, then any book would elicit the hijacked response to that urge (and we would be able to make a book irresistible by exaggerating the relevant cues). Instead, I find myself discriminating quite sharply between “interesting” books and “boring” books. (For instance I can’t stand the sight of most “trade” books that are supposed to appeal to programmers, like “Functional Programming in a Nutshell”.)
if you have other examples that you believe refute my main thesis
Why do people knit? I’d say that the urges involved are mostly competence and caring, rather than status. Why do I learn how to solder, and take apart consumer electronics? Curiosity, not status.
The common theme is that caring, competence and curiosity did plausibly exist in the ancestral environment, so it isn’t necessary to invoke status when there is a clearer link to other drives. I’m OK with having status (properly understood) take its rightful place in a pantheon of inherited drives, but it drives me nuts to see it trotted out to explain everything.
For some reason, we seem to be talking past each other—you appear to be replying to an incomplete and exaggerated version of what I had in mind. I accept the possibility that this is because I expressed my ideas in a confusing and poorly worded manner, but whatever the reason, we seem to be stuck at this point.
Therefore, regarding the book-reading issue, I will try to restate a few key elements of my position briefly:
It was not my intention to set forth a complete theory of human motives for reading books, but merely to bring up several examples of motives that are, in my opinion, likely involved (sometimes exclusively) in a significant percentage of all instances of book-reading behaviors.
I did not claim, and it would indeed be absurd to claim, that all these motives, or even any particular one of them, play a role in every instance of book-reading behavior.
Neither did I claim, which would also be absurd, that these motives and their biological causes are present to the same extent across any given set of individuals. Consequently, neither do the reactions to any particular book necessarily have the same underlying motivation across any given set of individuals, even if they all happen to be positive (or in other respects behaviorally similar) for all members of that set.
Ultimately, the goal of discussing these examples was to demonstrate the difference between: (1) effective status-seeking behaviors, and (2) behaviors that just execute adaptations that originally evolved due to status-related reasons, but no longer serve status goals effectively in the modern environment. In particular, some instances of human book-reading behavior fall into one or both of these categories (which does not imply that even these particular instances don’t involve other, unrelated motivations too).
Maybe not only my writing, but also my reading comprehension has been poor, but in your replies, I honestly don’t see any objections that wouldn’t either implicitly agree with what I said or rest on the misunderstanding of some of the above points.
The common theme is that caring, competence and curiosity did plausibly exist in the ancestral environment, so it isn’t necessary to invoke status when there is a clearer link to other drives. I’m OK with having status (properly understood) take its rightful place in a pantheon of inherited drives, but it drives me nuts to see it trotted out to explain everything.
And this doesn’t contradict anything I had in mind, nor anything I’ve written, unless my writing has been really poor (which possibility I allow for).
That said, when it comes to human behaviors where much is at stake in terms of power, prestige, and wealth, I believe it’s hard to think of any in which status considerations don’t play a significant role. In particular, when it comest to the issue that started this discussion, I have yet to see anyone elaborate on any plausible-sounding explanation that wouldn’t revolve around status dynamics.
I accept the possibility that this is because I expressed my ideas in a confusing and poorly worded manner
Well: long-winded, maybe. Fine otherwise; I’d mention it less.
You wrote that beyond life or death “status is the primary preoccupation of humans”, I disagreed and in particular with “THE primary preoccupation”. You seem to now have appropriately qualified that initial statement; I’ll certainly agree, for my part, that some people sometimes read books for bragging rights.
I definitely agree that various forms of “status” play significant roles in human motivation. Given that all of our behaviour rests in one way or another in executing biological adaptations I have no contention with your thesis. I strongly suspect that what we call “status” is not one mechanism but several, so that in each case it pays to hug the query.
At the very least this seems to be privileging an extraversion hypothesis. You can only gain status by interacting in some way with other people, yet it is not uncommon for people to shun company and instead devote time to solitary occupations with scant status benefits.
Under your justification for favoring status explanations, the only reason anyone ever reads a book is to brag about it. This seems wrong, prima facie, as well as simplistic.
Morendil:
Note that I also mentioned “satisfying some urge that originally evolved as instrumental to human status games” in my above statement. Today’s world is full of super-stimuli that powerfully resonate with ancestral urges even though they don’t actually lead towards the goals that these urges had originally evolved to promote, and are often even antithetical to these goals. Just like candy bars cheat the heuristic urges that evolved to identify nutritious and healthy food in the ancestral environment, it is reasonable to expect that solitary occupations with scant (or even negative) status benefits cheat the heuristic urges that originally evolved as useful in status games, or for furthering some other goal that they no longer achieve reliably in the modern environment.
You will probably agree that super-stimulation of status-seeking urges explains at least some non-beneficial solitary activities with high plausibility, for example when people neglect their real-life responsibilities by getting caught up in the thrill of virtual leadership and accomplishment provided by video-games. Of course, this by no means applies to all such activities; it is likely that the enjoyment found in some of them is rooted in urges that evolved for different reasons.
To address your above example, unless we assume some supernatural component of the human mind, I see no possible explanation of human book-reading except as a super-stimulus for some ancestral urges (whether status-related or not), unless of course it’s done not for enjoyment, but purely to acquire information necessary for other goals. While it’s far from being a complete explanation of human book-reading, it seems plausible to me that people sometimes enjoy books in part because it enhances their status signaling abilities in matters of erudition and taste. Also, it seems to me that stories super-stimulate the human urges for gossip, which are likely a device with an original status-related purpose, and all sorts of complex information may super-stimulate curiosity, whose evolution has likely been only partly status-based. These are of course just rough outlines of the complete truth, which we don’t yet know.
On the other hand, to get back to the original topic, when it comes to issues where actual power and prestige in human societies is at stake, in any case I’ve ever given much thought, the prominent role of widespread status-related beliefs and behaviors seems to me strikingly obvious and without any rival explanations that would be even remotely as plausible. The ability to account for such explanations by evolutionary theories additionally enhances their plausibility, as well as the fact that many deep and accurate insights into human nature by classical writers and philosophers can be faithfully retold in the more explicit modern language of status dynamics.
I just want to throw in a note that I don’t think human motivation is adequately explained by status alone—I would expand the list to SASS: Status, Affiliation, Safety, and Stimulation. (Where, as some folks here have pointed out, “Safety” might be more accurately described as stability, certainty, or control, rather than being purely about physical safety.)
Book-reading, in particular, is more likely to meet Safety/Stimulation needs than Status or Affiliation ones.… though you could maybe get those latter two from a book club or an academic setting.
pjeby:
I agree, but most complex and multi-faceted human behaviors are likely to be compelled by a mixture of these motives. My impression is that status features more often and more prominently that most people imagine, and its often masqueraded and rationalized by pretenses of other motivations.
My hypothesis is that super-stimulation of the same urges that cause people to enjoy gossip is responsible for a significant part (though by no means all) of human enjoyment of books and other ways of presenting stories. This would be a good example of super-stimulating an urge whose original evolution was to a large degree driven by status games, in a way that however has no direct relation to the present-day status games.
People just as routinely masquerade and rationalize the other three, actually.
However, that’s because their operation is fairly opaque to consciousness. We have built-in machinery for processing social signals relating to Status and Affiliation, and during our “impressionable” years, we learn to value the things that are associated with them, and come to treat them as terminal values in themselves.
IOW, SASS is how we learn to have non-SASS terminal values. So, when a person claims to be acting out of a non-SASS value, they’re not really lying. It’s just that they’re not usually aware of (i.e. have forgotten about) the triggers that shaped the acquisition of that value in the first place.
Plenty of other animals manage to be curious, needing actual stories. Also, some of us like to read things that aren’t gossip or stories.
Presumably one could test your hypothesis by finding out whether individuals lose interest in reading when they gain status; my personal experience suggests this is not the case, and that instead books compete with other forms of stimulation.
So, ISTM that even if curiosity (and certain templates for what to be curious about) were shaped by status competition, this doesn’t mean there is an operational connection between books and one’s self-perception of status.
To a certain extent, we could say that everything is about status, in the same way that every organ is a reproductive organ. But saying that everything is X, is the same as saying as nothing is X—it reduces your predictive power, rather than increasing it.
In retrospect, I probably should have put more care into the wording of my comments in this thread (which I wrote more quickly and with less proofreading than usual). Several people have understood my positions as more extreme than I honestly meant them to be, and I evidently failed in conveying some of the more subtle points I had in mind.
While I agree with most of your above comment, there seems to be a major misunderstanding here (probably due to my lack of clarity):
Well, insofar as reading is a directly status-related activity, nothing I hypothesized predicts that, nor is it the case in reality. In fact, if you enjoy high status as an intellectual, you are required to read a lot constantly to maintain that status; having nothing much to say when you’re asked what you’ve read lately would be a major embarrassment. Of course, this is rarely by itself a very prominent motivation—people who achieve high intellectual status usually have more than enough interest in reading out of curiosity and professional needs—but I wouldn’t say it’s entirely negligible either, especially when it comes to trendy highbrow literature.
However, that’s not at all what I had in mind with my reading-as-gossip-super-stimulus hypothesis. What I had in mind there is that the appeal of certain genres of literature and other storytelling media might be in part due to the fact that they stimulate the same urges that make people enjoy gossip. Thanks to these media, besides the thin diet of mundane real-world gossip, you get to enjoy huge amounts of artificial gossip skillfully crafted to be super-interesting, albeit about people who are fictional (or at least remote and personally irrelevant).
This mechanism has nothing at all to do with one’s actual status and behaviors that influence it. The status connection here lies the fact that the gossip-enjoying urges had previously evolved under the influence of status dynamics, in which gossip is one of the key practical instruments. Their present stimulation with concentrated artificial gossip delivered via literature and other media no longer serves this function; it is merely stimulating an urge that evolved as an adaptation to a different environment.
So that list doesn’t include curiosity. Are you denying that curiosity is a significant drive? Or (say) competence?
Curiosity falls under the “stimulation” heading, as does skill acquisition for its own sake (e.g. video games).
To be fair, the SASS list is more a convenient set of categories, than it is an attempt to be a comprehensive and rigorously-proven classification system. However, it’s definitely “less wrong” than assuming everything is about status… yet not so unwieldy as the systems that claim 16 or more basic human drives.
That I can live with. :)
The evolution of a desire for competence is an excellent question. Impulses such as curiosity and systemizing could be related to developing competence.
Systemizing could indeed be useful for your survival, and the survival of those around you, via tool-making, weapon-making, hunting/cooking techniques, etc… So systemizing could be a status-related adaptation.
Yet if your systemizing skills create a breakthrough (e.g. you design a useful tool), then your tribe may well accord you status, enhancing your survival and reproduction.
A desire for competence could also be useful for mating, because competence displays “good genes.” This is true of skills that don’t provide such obvious survival benefits, such as singing and dancing.
A desire for competence, and adaptations that facilitate its development (curiosity, systemizing), could well be useful for any combination of survival, reproduction, and status.
There’s nothing “super” about a book: no corresponding “normal” stimulus that elicits a natural response, such that a book is an exaggerated version of it.
Book-reading is explained straightforwardly enough as satisfying curiosity, a trait we share with many species (think cats).
If reading a book sometimes trumps the quest for status, then the latter cannot be THE primary preoccupation of people beyond bare physical subsistence. You will at least need to retreat to “an important” preoccupation.
Now, if you were to explore this topic without jumping to conclusions, perhaps you’d recognize this one example as the start of a list, and would in an unbiased manner draw up a somewhat realistic list of the activities typical humans engage in, and sort them into “activities having a high status component” and “activities not primarily status-related”. Then we might form a better picture of “how important”.
Morendil:
I disagree, for the reasons I’ve already discussed at length. You don’t seem to have read my above comment carefully, or perhaps my exposition was poor.
I did mention curiosity as one part of the motivation for reading books. Moreover, the curiosity explanation itself contradicts your above claim: a book, or a story told any other way, presents far more material (albeit fictional) for curiosity-satisfaction than is available from real-life events, and this material is intentionally and skillfully crafted to have great appeal in this regard, so it clearly does provide a super-stimulus for this particular urge.
Besides, as I also mentioned in my above post, there is also the human urge for gossip, which is pretty obviously related to status games, and is clearly super-stimulated by (at least some) books and other story-telling media. Finally, there is also the motivation of status seeking via demonstrating taste and erudition. All these, and possibly many other factors would probably feature in a complete theory of this particular human behavior.
Again, you don’t seem to understand my point about the difference between: (1) human behaviors that actually enhance status, or promote goals that lead towards its enhancement, and (2) behaviors driven by urges that had originally evolved for status-seeking purposes in the ancestral environment, but which misfire in the modern environment—just like e.g. the human taste for sugar was a good nutritional heuristic in a sugar-poor environment, but leads us to bad nutritional choices in the present environment full of cheap sugar-rich super-stimuli.
But as I explained above, you don’t seem to have understood my remarks about this example correctly. (I allow for the possibility that my writing was too bad to be understandable, of course.) I’ve explained the issue again now, and my conclusion is still that your example is incorrect. If you believe that my reasoning in this case is invalid, or if you have other examples that you believe refute my main thesis, I’d love to hear your arguments, but please make sure to address the substance of what I’ve written.
I read mostly non-fiction books, mostly to satisfy my curiosity. A recent example was “Freakonomics”. That appears to defuse your argument...
I dispute that a book is a “superstimulus” in the same sense in which that term has predictive power when applied to herring gull parents, to the sexual arousal response in humans, or to the appeal of fast-food flavors. I am unwilling, more generally, to interpret the term “super-stimulus” broadly enough to encompass any case where a given behaviour is explained by an urge vaguely related to another urge that existed in the ancestral environment.
If books in general were superstimuli for some existing urge, then any book would elicit the hijacked response to that urge (and we would be able to make a book irresistible by exaggerating the relevant cues). Instead, I find myself discriminating quite sharply between “interesting” books and “boring” books. (For instance I can’t stand the sight of most “trade” books that are supposed to appeal to programmers, like “Functional Programming in a Nutshell”.)
Why do people knit? I’d say that the urges involved are mostly competence and caring, rather than status. Why do I learn how to solder, and take apart consumer electronics? Curiosity, not status.
The common theme is that caring, competence and curiosity did plausibly exist in the ancestral environment, so it isn’t necessary to invoke status when there is a clearer link to other drives. I’m OK with having status (properly understood) take its rightful place in a pantheon of inherited drives, but it drives me nuts to see it trotted out to explain everything.
For some reason, we seem to be talking past each other—you appear to be replying to an incomplete and exaggerated version of what I had in mind. I accept the possibility that this is because I expressed my ideas in a confusing and poorly worded manner, but whatever the reason, we seem to be stuck at this point.
Therefore, regarding the book-reading issue, I will try to restate a few key elements of my position briefly:
It was not my intention to set forth a complete theory of human motives for reading books, but merely to bring up several examples of motives that are, in my opinion, likely involved (sometimes exclusively) in a significant percentage of all instances of book-reading behaviors.
I did not claim, and it would indeed be absurd to claim, that all these motives, or even any particular one of them, play a role in every instance of book-reading behavior.
Neither did I claim, which would also be absurd, that these motives and their biological causes are present to the same extent across any given set of individuals. Consequently, neither do the reactions to any particular book necessarily have the same underlying motivation across any given set of individuals, even if they all happen to be positive (or in other respects behaviorally similar) for all members of that set.
Ultimately, the goal of discussing these examples was to demonstrate the difference between: (1) effective status-seeking behaviors, and (2) behaviors that just execute adaptations that originally evolved due to status-related reasons, but no longer serve status goals effectively in the modern environment. In particular, some instances of human book-reading behavior fall into one or both of these categories (which does not imply that even these particular instances don’t involve other, unrelated motivations too).
Maybe not only my writing, but also my reading comprehension has been poor, but in your replies, I honestly don’t see any objections that wouldn’t either implicitly agree with what I said or rest on the misunderstanding of some of the above points.
And this doesn’t contradict anything I had in mind, nor anything I’ve written, unless my writing has been really poor (which possibility I allow for).
That said, when it comes to human behaviors where much is at stake in terms of power, prestige, and wealth, I believe it’s hard to think of any in which status considerations don’t play a significant role. In particular, when it comest to the issue that started this discussion, I have yet to see anyone elaborate on any plausible-sounding explanation that wouldn’t revolve around status dynamics.
Well: long-winded, maybe. Fine otherwise; I’d mention it less.
You wrote that beyond life or death “status is the primary preoccupation of humans”, I disagreed and in particular with “THE primary preoccupation”. You seem to now have appropriately qualified that initial statement; I’ll certainly agree, for my part, that some people sometimes read books for bragging rights.
I definitely agree that various forms of “status” play significant roles in human motivation. Given that all of our behaviour rests in one way or another in executing biological adaptations I have no contention with your thesis. I strongly suspect that what we call “status” is not one mechanism but several, so that in each case it pays to hug the query.