I think there’s something about status competition that I’m still missing. [...] [F]rom a mechanistic perspective, what I wrote in §4.5.2 seems inadequate to explain status competition.
Agreed, and I think the reason is just that the thesis of this post is not correct. I also see several reasons for this other than status competition:
The central mechanism is equally applicable to objects (I predict generic person Y will have positive valence imagining a couch), but the conclusion doesn’t hold, so the mechanism already isn’t pure.
I just played with someone with this avatar:
If this were a real person, I would expect about half of all people to have a positively valenced reaction thinking about her. I don’t think this makes her high status.
Even if we preclude attractive females, I think you could have situations where a person is generically likeable enough that you expect people to have a positive valence reaction thinking about them, without making the person high status (e.g., a humble/helpful/smart student in a class (you could argue there’s too few people for this to apply, but status does exist in that setting)).
You used this example:
What about more complicated cases? Suppose most Democrats find thoughts of Barack Obama to be positive-valence, but simultaneously most Republicans find thoughts of him to be negative-valence, and this is all common knowledge. Then I might sum that up by saying “Barack Obama has high status among Democrats, but Republicans view him as pond scum”.
But I don’t think it works that way. I think Obama—or in general, powerful people—have high status even among people who dislike them. I guess this is sort of predicted by the model since Republicans might imagine that generic-democrat-Y has high-valenced thoughts about Obama? But then the model also predicts that the low-valenced thoughts of Republicans wrt Obama lower his status among Democrats, which I don’t think is true. So I feel like the model doesn’t output the correct prediction regardless of whether you sample Y over all people or just the ingroup.
(Am I conflating status with dominance? Possibly; I’ve never completely bought into the distinction, though I’m familiar with it. I think that’s only possible with this objection, though.)
Many movie or story characters fit the model criteria, and I don’t think this generally makes them high status. I also don’t think “they’re not real” is a good objection because I don’t think evolution can distinguish real and non-real people. Other mechanisms (e.g., sexual and romantic ones) seem to work on fictional people just fine.
Suppose the laws of a society heavily discriminate against group X but the vast majority of people in the society don’t. Imo this makes people of X low status, which the model doesn’t predict.
Doesn’t feel right under introspection; high status does not feel to me like other-people-will-feel-high-valence-thinking-about-this-person. (I consider myself hyper status sensitive, so this is a pretty strong argument for me.) E.g.:
Now, in this situation, I might say: “As far as I’m concerned, Tom Hanks has a high social status”, or “In my eyes, Tom Hanks has high social status.” This is an unusual use of the term “high social status”, but hopefully you can see the intuition that I’m pointing towards.
I don’t think I can. These seem like two distinct things to me. I think I can strongly like someone and still feel like not even I personally attribute them high status. It’s kind of interesting because I’ve tried telling myself this before (“In my book, {person I think deserves tons of recognition for what they’ve done} is high status!”), but it’s not actually true; I don’t think of them as high status even if I would like to.
My guess it that status simply isn’t derivative of valence but just its own thing. You mentioned the connection is obvious to you, but I don’t think I see why.
Agreed, and I think the reason is just that the thesis of this post is not correct. I also see several reasons for this other than status competition:
The central mechanism is equally applicable to objects (I predict generic person Y will have positive valence imagining a couch), but the conclusion doesn’t hold, so the mechanism already isn’t pure.
I just played with someone with this avatar:
If this were a real person, I would expect about half of all people to have a positively valenced reaction thinking about her. I don’t think this makes her high status.
Even if we preclude attractive females, I think you could have situations where a person is generically likeable enough that you expect people to have a positive valence reaction thinking about them, without making the person high status (e.g., a humble/helpful/smart student in a class (you could argue there’s too few people for this to apply, but status does exist in that setting)).
You used this example:
But I don’t think it works that way. I think Obama—or in general, powerful people—have high status even among people who dislike them. I guess this is sort of predicted by the model since Republicans might imagine that generic-democrat-Y has high-valenced thoughts about Obama? But then the model also predicts that the low-valenced thoughts of Republicans wrt Obama lower his status among Democrats, which I don’t think is true. So I feel like the model doesn’t output the correct prediction regardless of whether you sample Y over all people or just the ingroup.
(Am I conflating status with dominance? Possibly; I’ve never completely bought into the distinction, though I’m familiar with it. I think that’s only possible with this objection, though.)
Many movie or story characters fit the model criteria, and I don’t think this generally makes them high status. I also don’t think “they’re not real” is a good objection because I don’t think evolution can distinguish real and non-real people. Other mechanisms (e.g., sexual and romantic ones) seem to work on fictional people just fine.
Suppose the laws of a society heavily discriminate against group X but the vast majority of people in the society don’t. Imo this makes people of X low status, which the model doesn’t predict.
Doesn’t feel right under introspection; high status does not feel to me like other-people-will-feel-high-valence-thinking-about-this-person. (I consider myself hyper status sensitive, so this is a pretty strong argument for me.) E.g.:
I don’t think I can. These seem like two distinct things to me. I think I can strongly like someone and still feel like not even I personally attribute them high status. It’s kind of interesting because I’ve tried telling myself this before (“In my book, {person I think deserves tons of recognition for what they’ve done} is high status!”), but it’s not actually true; I don’t think of them as high status even if I would like to.
My guess it that status simply isn’t derivative of valence but just its own thing. You mentioned the connection is obvious to you, but I don’t think I see why.