I’m going to use “CPP” to refer to “class, power, and prestige”.
I agree that CPP is by itself insufficient to predict consensus about a person’s status. However, consider the following. Suppose we put a group of strangers in a room, and one person (call them S) had an excellent ability to act as if they had high CPP. So S convinces the others that he/she is a fortune 500 CEO or a world-champion boxer or a Nobel laureate or something appropriate. I hypothesize that, all other things equal, group consensus will be that S has highest status and I further conjecture that this can be explained by the following evo-psych argument. Each person in the room has ancestors who were served well by gaining the favour of others with high CPP, and, on average, their assessments of who had high CPP were accurate enough to be useful. Therefore the strangers in the room are predisposed to trust their own assessments of who has high CPP and try to gain their favour, hence explaining the group’s consensus that S has high status.
Notice that the actual characteristics of S (i.e. his bank account balance, current job, physical prestige, past achievements, etc) is insufficient to predict his status among the group—rather it is his acting ability that provides the final causal link—yet the CPP characteristics plays a central explanatory role since their relationship to evolutionary fitness explains the predisposition of the group to react in a certain way to the excellent acting by S. In particular, CPP explains why S would have received lower status if he/she used his/her acting ability to, say, convince others that he had very long toenails, or that his digestive tract was unnaturally long—these things suggest no evolutionary fitness to those who gain the favour of S.
My point is that the factors at the end of the evo-psych explanation (CPP in this example, in reality I suspect there are more that we haven’t thought of) are distinct from those that provide the causal links along the way to group consensus on status (acting, or “signalling”, in this example, but in reality this part of the process is far more complex). So if status really is is an evo-psych phenomenon then we should expect to encounter two classes of variables along the way to understanding it. Let’s not get them confused.
A surefire way to provoke anger in people is to ‘cheat’ in status games. Claiming status that you do not really ‘deserve’ tends to trigger righteous fury. This is the main force that restricts the degree to which people claim status beyond their CPP in social interactions. In the modern world it is possible for people to get away with cheating at status games for much longer than it was for most of human history and the consequences of being found out are less fatal so it is adaptive to push further than it was in the past.
I’m going to use “CPP” to refer to “class, power, and prestige”.
I agree that CPP is by itself insufficient to predict consensus about a person’s status. However, consider the following. Suppose we put a group of strangers in a room, and one person (call them S) had an excellent ability to act as if they had high CPP. So S convinces the others that he/she is a fortune 500 CEO or a world-champion boxer or a Nobel laureate or something appropriate. I hypothesize that, all other things equal, group consensus will be that S has highest status and I further conjecture that this can be explained by the following evo-psych argument. Each person in the room has ancestors who were served well by gaining the favour of others with high CPP, and, on average, their assessments of who had high CPP were accurate enough to be useful. Therefore the strangers in the room are predisposed to trust their own assessments of who has high CPP and try to gain their favour, hence explaining the group’s consensus that S has high status.
Notice that the actual characteristics of S (i.e. his bank account balance, current job, physical prestige, past achievements, etc) is insufficient to predict his status among the group—rather it is his acting ability that provides the final causal link—yet the CPP characteristics plays a central explanatory role since their relationship to evolutionary fitness explains the predisposition of the group to react in a certain way to the excellent acting by S. In particular, CPP explains why S would have received lower status if he/she used his/her acting ability to, say, convince others that he had very long toenails, or that his digestive tract was unnaturally long—these things suggest no evolutionary fitness to those who gain the favour of S.
My point is that the factors at the end of the evo-psych explanation (CPP in this example, in reality I suspect there are more that we haven’t thought of) are distinct from those that provide the causal links along the way to group consensus on status (acting, or “signalling”, in this example, but in reality this part of the process is far more complex). So if status really is is an evo-psych phenomenon then we should expect to encounter two classes of variables along the way to understanding it. Let’s not get them confused.
A surefire way to provoke anger in people is to ‘cheat’ in status games. Claiming status that you do not really ‘deserve’ tends to trigger righteous fury. This is the main force that restricts the degree to which people claim status beyond their CPP in social interactions. In the modern world it is possible for people to get away with cheating at status games for much longer than it was for most of human history and the consequences of being found out are less fatal so it is adaptive to push further than it was in the past.
Actually, cheating in any social games angers people. Note that telling bad jokes provokes violence.
Did anyone else actually find the joke in the article really funny?
P.S. Don’t hurt me.
I found the joke funny the first time I heard it. When it was “What did the banana say to the elephant”!
Interesting. I’d argue that to a first approximation all social games are status games however.
Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s the case made by that researcher regarding the jokes, anyway.