I found myself disagreeing with a lot in the article.
For example, he defines status as social influence, then interprets a number of things as a loss of status, while in fact they are means of increasing influence. The most clear example is an apology. An apology can increase your influence. More generally, acting submissive to someone can greatly increase your influence over them.
A community is a group of people who agree on how to measure status among their members.
That is a useful idea, though I’d tweak it a little. Define a community by some shared set of measures of social status, but don’t claim a comprehensive consistency on social status between members. I go social dancing a lot. Dancing well increases your social status. We share that in common. But we all certainly don’t agree on a comprehensive measure of social status.
I found myself disagreeing with a lot in the article.
For example, he defines status as social influence, then interprets a number of things as a loss of status, while in fact they are means of increasing influence. The most clear example is an apology. An apology can increase your influence. More generally, acting submissive to someone can greatly increase your influence over them.
That is a useful idea, though I’d tweak it a little. Define a community by some shared set of measures of social status, but don’t claim a comprehensive consistency on social status between members. I go social dancing a lot. Dancing well increases your social status. We share that in common. But we all certainly don’t agree on a comprehensive measure of social status.