Maybe I’m missing something, but the mystery of people wanting to be low status appears to vanish if we don’t think of binary high/low status, but as a continuum going from highest to lowest status. Then we can see people not wanting to go for highest status (including, perhaps, because they don’t think they can manage it), but that doesn’t mean they want to be low status.
I find it useful to see status as “fuzzily ordinal”, in that it’s often possible to identify one or some higher status members of a group, one or some lower status members (or maybe “would-be members”), as well as some in the middle, even if it’s not possible to order them precisely.
I really like Venkat’s illustration of this in his Gervais Principle (as in “it’s interesting and aesthetically pleasing”, not necessarily as in “I have high confidence in its accuracy”), especially in this post.
Maybe I’m missing something, but the mystery of people wanting to be low status appears to vanish if we don’t think of binary high/low status, but as a continuum going from highest to lowest status. Then we can see people not wanting to go for highest status (including, perhaps, because they don’t think they can manage it), but that doesn’t mean they want to be low status.
I find it useful to see status as “fuzzily ordinal”, in that it’s often possible to identify one or some higher status members of a group, one or some lower status members (or maybe “would-be members”), as well as some in the middle, even if it’s not possible to order them precisely.
I really like Venkat’s illustration of this in his Gervais Principle (as in “it’s interesting and aesthetically pleasing”, not necessarily as in “I have high confidence in its accuracy”), especially in this post.