As far as I can tell, no one has quite as much status as you’re describing, but the best test would probably be to study major dictators, but not expect ordinary high status people to be on a continuum with them
In particular, displays of generosity are a common way of showing status.
Wearing comfortable clothes as a signal of status isn’t typical of all civilizations. For a counter-example, consider the Elizabethans.
As with standing up straight where you didn’t include a relaxed vertical posture, you’re leaving out the practical middle ground about conversation. There’s something other than “having a pleasant conversation” and dumping whatever nonsense comes into your head—it’s receiving and conveying information, possibly rather sharply.
You may be leaving out that people at the top have competitors—they can treat people with substantially lower status indifferently or cruelly, but they can’t get away with that forever with those who have a chance at gunning for the top, or who can chip away chunks of influence.
the best test would probably be to study major dictators
Following on my previous comment, I’m deeply puzzled by observations like this one. What warrants the assumption that dictators have high status?
There seems to be an 1-place interpretation of status and a 2-place interpretation, and lots of the observations on status that I come across here fail, as far as I can tell, to take that distinction into account.
The present post has clearly distinguished “status” as 2-place word: “the perceived degree to which others’ behavior can affect our well-being” implies that status is a relational quantity, “my status relative to yours”. There is a suggestion that it is symmetrical, i.e. “your status relative to mine” is the same quantity with opposite sign.
I suspect that it may be more complex than that; something like a 3-argument function, depending on not just the You and Me values, but also on some Situation value. Neither am I fully convinced it is symmetrical.
So, repeating my earlier call—where can I find a normative discussion of what people here are referring to when they say “status”? Preferably one that taboos the term itself, and explains it without bringing in the everyday connotations carried by the term.
Following on my previous comment, I’m deeply puzzled by observations like this one. What warrants the assumption that dictators have high status?
I am confused. The whole foundation of status in humans is our heritage as tribal animals, with tribal instincts that have similarities to plenty of species of mammal. It’s all about power, control and access to resources and mates. Dictators have that. They may not be the highest status, I’m not sure how to put the various forms of high status in a single scale. But to doubt that they have high status at all amounts to discarding most of the meaning of the term.
[status is] all about power, control and access to resources and mates
That’s what I mean by “the everyday connotations carried by the term”.
The OP’s hypothesis is that if I see someone acting selfishly, I will choose my behaviour toward them on the basis of my inferring from this selfishness a quantity the OP calls “status”. I don’t really understand this hypothesis.
Consider the following situation. I’m invited to dinner. I notice an individual at the table who’s grabbing food from everyone’s plates, including mine. That counts as selfish behaviour in my book. Nobody reacts in any other particular way to that individual’s behaviour; that is, their behaviour toward him is the same as toward each other, and only this individual differs from the others, in this particular respect only.
The OP’s prediction is that I would assign high status to that individual. My intuition is that I would consider them a little crazy, and interpret the others’ behaviour as tolerance (which, again intuitively, I would equate to the individual having low status).
By contrast, if you tell me that someone is a dictator, what I would expect based on that hypothesis is that others around him behave in particular ways: they will show deference, fear, eagerness to please them. That is because my understanding of dictators is that they will routinely have people around them shot or tortured if they displease them (and sometimes even if they don’t, just as a whim). The fact that the dictator has this strategy is entirely sufficient to explain his entourage’s behaviours towards him: “status” strikes me as a superfluous hypothesis.
I’m confessing my ignorance of what explanatory work the term “status” is supposed to achieve. No “countersignaling” (I should really say “dissembling” or something like it) on my part here, just honest confusion. Pointing me to an authoritative source could be a good start to my correcting this state of ignorance.
The fact that the dictator has this strategy is entirely sufficient to explain his entourage’s behaviours towards him: “status” strikes me as a superfluous hypothesis.
I’m confessing my ignorance of what explanatory work the term “status” is supposed to achieve.
If you are in the presence of a dictator, I do not recommend doing the following:
Maintain eye contact with him.
Correct him when he is wrong.
Interrupt him while he is speaking.
Wear flamboyant clothes that attract more attention than him.
Talk in a voice that is slow, deep and firm, brooking no interruption.
Standing tall, taking up space in a relaxed manner. For example, occupying all of a doorway, leaning on it slightly.
Sitting back on your chair, legs somewhat apart, hands hanging loosely drawing attention to your crotch.
Teasing women in a playful manner that makes them laugh, lower their eyes, and touch you.
(Um… what else is high status?) Catching and maintaining the attention of the audience by telling stories that emphasize your dominance and popularity.
Doing the above (high status) behaviors can, all else being equal, be expected to increase your chances of death. Status is a useful concept here because there is a whole category of things that can be described as ‘signalling high status’ that you are best not doing in the presence of a dictator. It is useful to use the descriptor status because it can then be used in other contexts. I can say “if you want to attract mates do high status things” and you may then know to do this whole bunch of things that you should not do in the presence of a high status threat (dictator).
If you ignore the concept of status you will end up one of:
Dead (in our culture: fired).
Not attracting mates.
Using the concept of status but not calling it by the name status. This includes ‘just knowing what you should do because your instincts tell you’.
Pointing me to an authoritative source could be a good start to my correcting this state of ignorance.
I’m not sure what kind of source you are interested in. OvercomingBias contains regular posts on the subject that include links. There are a multitude of books about status that range from academic to popularizations. The academic works show that authoritative sources find the status concept useful but are probably not of much use in describing what it does in practical terms. The other works that popularize social and evolutionary psychology are probably more relevant.
For instance, Wikipedia has a “social status” entry which defines it as “the honor or prestige attached to one’s position in society”.
That does not entail any particular behavior, so more narrowly I’d be interested in an authoritative source for what you call “high status behavior”. It seems to me that the list above contains items that have contextual interpretations: for instance, “flamboyant clothing” could be worn in the presence of a dictator, if you are, say, an entertainer.
Your assumptions about some of these items could be cultural: a Google search turned up the suggestion that “in many Middle Eastern cultures, intense eye contact [...] especially between men can mean I am telling you the truth”. Another example is the way you sit, with some cultural conventions strongly interpreting what others find trivial, such as sitting with the soles of your shoes showing.
(The same Google search is starting to suggest that the primary source for this list of supposed “high status behaviors” is Keith Johnstone’s 1979 book on improvisational theatre. Robin Hanson refers to the book. I’m also pretty sure I remember coming across a link to a gloss on this book while browsing an earlier conversation about “status” on LessWrong.)
(ETA: what I’m really interested in is teasing apart the concepts variously used here of “having high/low status”, versus “behavioral cues to one’s self-assessment of high/low status”, versus “game theoretic signalling” whereby one’s behavioral cues are less than fully honest as to one’s self-assessment. I’m unable to find these concepts pinned down with enough precision that I can reliably tell the difference between me being confused about them and other people being confused.)
This is a reply to you chain of concerns about status, not this comment in particular:
I like that you’re pushing for more rigor—in nearly every case that is a good thing. Your concerns do need to be addressed. But I’m a little confused about why the concept is so foreign to you. Status isn’t merely this theoretical concept used to explain behavior. At least for me it is a constant, pre-theoretical feature of social life. We should have a deep, well-defined theory of status but I don’t think we need to to say a lot of meaningful things about it. I believe I’m an authoritative source on the status signals of the groups I’m a part of (and some universal signals) in the same way I’m an authoritative source on the English language—it is a cultural practice I’m embedded in. I literally grew up with it (didn’t you have popular and unpopular kids in grade school?) You’re right that the status values for just about any behavior are highly dependent on context… it just the same way meaning can be in language. This is why it is often easy for someone from a different culture to screw up. Moreover, more subtle signals can often be read differently by different people (just as there is ambiguity in pragmatics).
I’m a little confused about why the concept is so foreign to you.
It hasn’t felt foreign before. It’s more like the recent posts about it, added to the comments on LW before that, have made me wake up to a confusion that was there before. Part of that is understandable, as LW is the first community I’ve come across where the notion is invoked that much.
Previously, my immediate association for the word “status” used to be in the sense of “project status”. In my professional community, referring to the term in its social acceptation was a daring excursion: for instance when I or a colleague observed that “a project status report is often about status, yes—the project manager’s status”. When I used it that way, I had a rather narrow sense in mind, specifically, the perceived position of someone in a group’s pecking order.
The LW discussions seem to invoke a much more general and pervasive meaning, which is what I’m coming to question; specifically because the “status” concept here seems to be used here to explain everything. Which is precisely what this site has been teaching me to see as a red flag.
I have my own everyday-life observations about status (for instance, a status hypothesis about schools and universities) that intersect with the topic of rationality, and that I might explore in a post sooner or later, but I have to pin down the concept first.
Perhaps this is just a “clack” on my part. I’d appreciate being pointed to any evidence of that.
If you ignore the concept of status you will end up one of: [...] Using the concept of status but not calling it by the name status. This includes ‘just knowing what you should do because your instincts tell you’.
Bravo. It’s possible to act in genuinely status-defying ways, but the vast majority of people who tell you they don’t care about status are just not good enough at self-analysis to realize the effect it has on them.
Yes, high status behavior can border on crazy (while being just short of it). I knew of a rich real estate guy who would walk around in “sports pants” that would be best described as ballet tights. At the same time I knew he was rather shrewd and well thought-out. “Peakocking” comes to mind.
As far as I can tell, no one has quite as much status as you’re describing, but the best test would probably be to study major dictators, but not expect ordinary high status people to be on a continuum with them
In particular, displays of generosity are a common way of showing status.
Wearing comfortable clothes as a signal of status isn’t typical of all civilizations. For a counter-example, consider the Elizabethans.
As with standing up straight where you didn’t include a relaxed vertical posture, you’re leaving out the practical middle ground about conversation. There’s something other than “having a pleasant conversation” and dumping whatever nonsense comes into your head—it’s receiving and conveying information, possibly rather sharply.
You may be leaving out that people at the top have competitors—they can treat people with substantially lower status indifferently or cruelly, but they can’t get away with that forever with those who have a chance at gunning for the top, or who can chip away chunks of influence.
Hitler was nice to his secretary. What do you suppose was going on there?
Following on my previous comment, I’m deeply puzzled by observations like this one. What warrants the assumption that dictators have high status?
There seems to be an 1-place interpretation of status and a 2-place interpretation, and lots of the observations on status that I come across here fail, as far as I can tell, to take that distinction into account.
The present post has clearly distinguished “status” as 2-place word: “the perceived degree to which others’ behavior can affect our well-being” implies that status is a relational quantity, “my status relative to yours”. There is a suggestion that it is symmetrical, i.e. “your status relative to mine” is the same quantity with opposite sign.
I suspect that it may be more complex than that; something like a 3-argument function, depending on not just the You and Me values, but also on some Situation value. Neither am I fully convinced it is symmetrical.
So, repeating my earlier call—where can I find a normative discussion of what people here are referring to when they say “status”? Preferably one that taboos the term itself, and explains it without bringing in the everyday connotations carried by the term.
I am confused. The whole foundation of status in humans is our heritage as tribal animals, with tribal instincts that have similarities to plenty of species of mammal. It’s all about power, control and access to resources and mates. Dictators have that. They may not be the highest status, I’m not sure how to put the various forms of high status in a single scale. But to doubt that they have high status at all amounts to discarding most of the meaning of the term.
That’s what I mean by “the everyday connotations carried by the term”.
The OP’s hypothesis is that if I see someone acting selfishly, I will choose my behaviour toward them on the basis of my inferring from this selfishness a quantity the OP calls “status”. I don’t really understand this hypothesis.
Consider the following situation. I’m invited to dinner. I notice an individual at the table who’s grabbing food from everyone’s plates, including mine. That counts as selfish behaviour in my book. Nobody reacts in any other particular way to that individual’s behaviour; that is, their behaviour toward him is the same as toward each other, and only this individual differs from the others, in this particular respect only.
The OP’s prediction is that I would assign high status to that individual. My intuition is that I would consider them a little crazy, and interpret the others’ behaviour as tolerance (which, again intuitively, I would equate to the individual having low status).
By contrast, if you tell me that someone is a dictator, what I would expect based on that hypothesis is that others around him behave in particular ways: they will show deference, fear, eagerness to please them. That is because my understanding of dictators is that they will routinely have people around them shot or tortured if they displease them (and sometimes even if they don’t, just as a whim). The fact that the dictator has this strategy is entirely sufficient to explain his entourage’s behaviours towards him: “status” strikes me as a superfluous hypothesis.
I’m confessing my ignorance of what explanatory work the term “status” is supposed to achieve. No “countersignaling” (I should really say “dissembling” or something like it) on my part here, just honest confusion. Pointing me to an authoritative source could be a good start to my correcting this state of ignorance.
If you are in the presence of a dictator, I do not recommend doing the following:
Maintain eye contact with him.
Correct him when he is wrong.
Interrupt him while he is speaking.
Wear flamboyant clothes that attract more attention than him.
Talk in a voice that is slow, deep and firm, brooking no interruption.
Standing tall, taking up space in a relaxed manner. For example, occupying all of a doorway, leaning on it slightly.
Sitting back on your chair, legs somewhat apart, hands hanging loosely drawing attention to your crotch.
Teasing women in a playful manner that makes them laugh, lower their eyes, and touch you.
(Um… what else is high status?) Catching and maintaining the attention of the audience by telling stories that emphasize your dominance and popularity.
Doing the above (high status) behaviors can, all else being equal, be expected to increase your chances of death. Status is a useful concept here because there is a whole category of things that can be described as ‘signalling high status’ that you are best not doing in the presence of a dictator. It is useful to use the descriptor status because it can then be used in other contexts. I can say “if you want to attract mates do high status things” and you may then know to do this whole bunch of things that you should not do in the presence of a high status threat (dictator).
If you ignore the concept of status you will end up one of:
Dead (in our culture: fired).
Not attracting mates.
Using the concept of status but not calling it by the name status. This includes ‘just knowing what you should do because your instincts tell you’.
I’m not sure what kind of source you are interested in. OvercomingBias contains regular posts on the subject that include links. There are a multitude of books about status that range from academic to popularizations. The academic works show that authoritative sources find the status concept useful but are probably not of much use in describing what it does in practical terms. The other works that popularize social and evolutionary psychology are probably more relevant.
For instance, Wikipedia has a “social status” entry which defines it as “the honor or prestige attached to one’s position in society”.
That does not entail any particular behavior, so more narrowly I’d be interested in an authoritative source for what you call “high status behavior”. It seems to me that the list above contains items that have contextual interpretations: for instance, “flamboyant clothing” could be worn in the presence of a dictator, if you are, say, an entertainer.
Your assumptions about some of these items could be cultural: a Google search turned up the suggestion that “in many Middle Eastern cultures, intense eye contact [...] especially between men can mean I am telling you the truth”. Another example is the way you sit, with some cultural conventions strongly interpreting what others find trivial, such as sitting with the soles of your shoes showing.
(The same Google search is starting to suggest that the primary source for this list of supposed “high status behaviors” is Keith Johnstone’s 1979 book on improvisational theatre. Robin Hanson refers to the book. I’m also pretty sure I remember coming across a link to a gloss on this book while browsing an earlier conversation about “status” on LessWrong.)
(ETA: what I’m really interested in is teasing apart the concepts variously used here of “having high/low status”, versus “behavioral cues to one’s self-assessment of high/low status”, versus “game theoretic signalling” whereby one’s behavioral cues are less than fully honest as to one’s self-assessment. I’m unable to find these concepts pinned down with enough precision that I can reliably tell the difference between me being confused about them and other people being confused.)
This is a reply to you chain of concerns about status, not this comment in particular:
I like that you’re pushing for more rigor—in nearly every case that is a good thing. Your concerns do need to be addressed. But I’m a little confused about why the concept is so foreign to you. Status isn’t merely this theoretical concept used to explain behavior. At least for me it is a constant, pre-theoretical feature of social life. We should have a deep, well-defined theory of status but I don’t think we need to to say a lot of meaningful things about it. I believe I’m an authoritative source on the status signals of the groups I’m a part of (and some universal signals) in the same way I’m an authoritative source on the English language—it is a cultural practice I’m embedded in. I literally grew up with it (didn’t you have popular and unpopular kids in grade school?) You’re right that the status values for just about any behavior are highly dependent on context… it just the same way meaning can be in language. This is why it is often easy for someone from a different culture to screw up. Moreover, more subtle signals can often be read differently by different people (just as there is ambiguity in pragmatics).
It hasn’t felt foreign before. It’s more like the recent posts about it, added to the comments on LW before that, have made me wake up to a confusion that was there before. Part of that is understandable, as LW is the first community I’ve come across where the notion is invoked that much.
Previously, my immediate association for the word “status” used to be in the sense of “project status”. In my professional community, referring to the term in its social acceptation was a daring excursion: for instance when I or a colleague observed that “a project status report is often about status, yes—the project manager’s status”. When I used it that way, I had a rather narrow sense in mind, specifically, the perceived position of someone in a group’s pecking order.
The LW discussions seem to invoke a much more general and pervasive meaning, which is what I’m coming to question; specifically because the “status” concept here seems to be used here to explain everything. Which is precisely what this site has been teaching me to see as a red flag.
I have my own everyday-life observations about status (for instance, a status hypothesis about schools and universities) that intersect with the topic of rationality, and that I might explore in a post sooner or later, but I have to pin down the concept first.
Perhaps this is just a “clack” on my part. I’d appreciate being pointed to any evidence of that.
No, I think you’re right in that it’s not being rigorously defined or used appropriately in some of the recent articles.
I agree, the abuse of the term has made me cringe at times.
Bravo. It’s possible to act in genuinely status-defying ways, but the vast majority of people who tell you they don’t care about status are just not good enough at self-analysis to realize the effect it has on them.
Yes, high status behavior can border on crazy (while being just short of it). I knew of a rich real estate guy who would walk around in “sports pants” that would be best described as ballet tights. At the same time I knew he was rather shrewd and well thought-out. “Peakocking” comes to mind.