Sorry, status isn’t about self-esteem. Status is about who you feel can beat you up and who you feel you can beat up. Two people meeting for the first time can instantly establish relative status by using body language that you’ll find pretty hard to tie to self-esteem.
Yes. But if the topic of something you’re not good at comes up, what are you going to do? Various strategies:
a) Downplay the importance of the thing that you’re not good at. b) Change the subject. c) Make a joke about totally sucking at that thing (while keeping the literal subject the same, it changes the implicit subject to the social ability of making other people laugh). d) Mention a close relative, friend, or partner who’s really good at that thing (increasing status by affiliation).
I think I may even do e) which is to show enthusiastic appreciation for the thing I’m not good at, possibly sprinkled with demonstrating surprising knowledge of the thing I’m expected to not know about.
UPDATE: f) Riffing on ‘c’, liken yourself to a low status group. HT Barack Obama
g) Make an honest attempt at grasping the subject matter.
I’m not sure if this is what you intended e) to cover, but if I meet a topic I’m completely unfamiliar with, my first instinct isn’t to destroy the conversation.
I voted this up because it raises a useful background theory that many people might have lurking subconsciously in their head (and which they want not to be true and so they instinctively down vote to drive people who make the claim out of the community—the post was at −3 before I wrote this and voted it up).
(ETA: The comment being responded to appears to have been edited to be more abstract and less colorful. Other than adding this note, my text has not been correspondingly edited.)
In practice, I think this status formula is true in certain communities that assign prestige in certain ways but it is not true in others. Alicorn pointed out that it didn’t apply to her, but the point is worth making that it doesn’t apply to me for similar reasons. This is largely because because we are female, educated, and live in the first world. There are different communities that have different implicit bases for prestige… and some of them do work on physical violence and the treatment of females as something vaguely like chattel slaves and others operate only a few symbolic steps away from this model. (In these communities, you’ll notice that female status and its processes are largely ignored.)
Which situation makes you more conscious of status: when your Pokemon collection is smaller than Bob’s, or when Bob beats you up and takes your girlfriend? To really feel the concept, you have to be close to the monkey life.
Directly and simply, this is clearly not the basis of the status of:
Oprah Winfrey
Warren Buffet
Lady Gaga
Nelson Mandela
Stephanie Meyer
John Stewart
Robin Hanson (in the world and dramatically here)
Alicorn (primarily within this community, so far)
The people enmeshed in communities whose prestige works (for men) on this basis of capacity physical violence are tragic and deserve (where feasible) offers to help them up out of the poverty of “baseline monkeyhood”. The standards for women in such communities are different than for men (and frequently invisible to them), but they are similarly primitive and lead to women to spend the bulk of their lives thinking that their best years are behind them rather than in front of them.
Those communities tend to be “objectively” impoverished in terms of material, culture, and institutions… and they are hard to help in part because any attempt at giving them a hand “up” implies a standard of judgment that sees their current system for allocating prestige as defective and in need of repair (which poses an inherent ego threat to the people who currently “score high” within that framework and have substantial influence).
So, yeah, I think that the status formula that cousin_it succinctly spells out here is functionally true for a significant percentage of the humans on the planet—young impoverished males with few prospects for “upward mobility”. If adults flinch from recognizing this “head on” and then thinking about the implications it does the world a disservice.
I didn’t vote it down, but those that did voted it down because it is wrong. What you describe here I agree with. (At least I agree with the description of circumstance not necessarily the normative claims or predictions of emotional impact on those in question.) But for all ‘capacity to beat you up’ is highly relevant to status it is not the same thing, even in tribes where primitive status competition mechanisms are in place. Coalitions and rights to getting resources or mates without the tribe expelling you are too important even then.
I claim that “capacity to beat you up” is more relevant to status than self-esteem is. To understand the causality here, let’s do some counterfactual surgery on graphs. While you try to modify node A by sitting around for three months trying to raise your self-esteem, I modify node B by hitting the gym and taking boxing lessons for the same time. Then we meet and ascertain which node was more causally relevant!
Of course there’s no need to actually try this experiment because a lot of people have tried it already. For example, I can compare different versions of me at different times, before and after I learned to hold my own in a fight.
Coalitions, mate rights etc. are important, but they have causes too. The ultimate factor that determines your coalition-worthiness or mating-priority is often your projected chance of winning a conflict.
This doesn’t seem to cover all uses of “status” in the Johnstonian sense; one of his first examples is a small group of men and women competing over who has the most interesting and debilitating physical difficulties.
I’ll be pretty disappointed if our community accepts the idea that humiliating other people has less to do with status than comparing Pokemon collections. Which situation makes you more conscious of status: when your Pokemon collection is smaller than Bob’s, or when Bob beats you up and takes your girlfriend? To really feel the concept, you have to be close to the monkey life.
In particular, the fact that armies are typically controlled by older men (in rare situations, by older women, and in one unique situation (Joan of Arc) a young woman) implies that status among humans isn’t about who can personally beat up who.
Football players take orders from managers and team owners.
That sounds like an allusion to dominance hierarchy theory, which my informal survey suggests is a muddle. Do you have pointers to solid, recent research on dominance hierarchy theory that could plausibly apply to humans?
People do sometimes react strongly to things we think weird, like not having the bigger Pokemon collection.
Mrs X: “I had a nasty turn last week [...] I thought I should faint or something.”
Johnstone comments: “Mrs X is attempting to raise her status.”
My anaysis would be: Mrs X is fishing for a “stroke”, the way you’d fish for compliments. It is a ploy to manipulate others in her group into a particular self-esteem transation, namely commiseration. She expects something like “Oh, you poor thing. What happened, did you have to go to the hospital?”
Mrs Y: “You’re lucky to have been going to a cinema.”
Johnstone analyzes Mrs Y as “blocking” Mrs X, and I’d tend to agree—this move denies the request for a stroke. There’s a subtext, too, that Mrs X is something of a spoiled child: that she has an inflated estimation of herself.
I could go on to analyze the rest of the dialogue in that vein, but for me there’s little value in saying the same thing except using “self-esteem” instead of “status”, that’s just fighting over definitions.
More interesting is the idea that everything Johnstone refers to are fleeting components of status, whereas there are attested long-lasting components (class, power, prestige) and the connotations of the term “status” tend to conflate all these components.
I agree that status facts aren’t facts about self-esteem. But (1) only in a few communities is status about physical conflict. Obviously, this isn’t the relevant criterion for women or middle class and higher adults. (2) Status isn’t about self-esteem but the two affect each other in important ways. If people around you can detect low self-esteem it very often lowers your status. Moreover, having low status can lower your self-esteem. High status can raise self-esteem and high self-esteem can signal high status. This circular relationship means that status and self-esteem are (a) nearly coextensive so it isn’t surprising that we might confuse the two and (b) causally connected in a way that makes it worth our time to pay attention to self-esteem in exactly the way Morendil suggests.
One of Johnstone’s stories is about strangers passing in the street, so you might have a point there. At any rate it makes a good test case. (This could be a fun topic for empirical study. Station yourself with a video camera at a street corner, interview people afterwards with a psychometric instrument.)
On the other hand, based on what evidence can we confidently rule out ties to self-esteem? It seems to me, on the contrary, that a diffident person would reliably make way for a more confident person. And if two self-assured people are passing in the street, each with a strong policy of “let other people make way for me”, you’d get exactly the kind of dance we do see.
Hello -
I was web-browsing and came across your message about “status.” Without having time to read through all responses, I felt I’d send you this quick message to relate a sociological definition for the term. (I have taught the subject at a community college level, while still proceeding through graduate studies at a major university.)
Status, for sociologists, properly refers merely to one’s position in some social arrangement, which could either be a very clear-cut position (as in a bureaucracy) or a less clear-cut position that nevertheless has some sort of recognition by others who interact with the person. The terms “high status” and “low status” are in common popular use, but should more properly refer to high and low “prestige.” Prestige refers to the extent to which a person (or a category of persons) tends to receive favorable recognition from others, and this recognition may or may not be connected with the person’s status. For example, each U.S. president may automatically be granted great prestige by some persons, merely by virtue of having that particular status as president. But there are many cases where various persons have great prestige without necessarily occupying specific positions (having a particular status). There are many ways in which such apparent mismatch becomes rectified, as prestige tends to be supplemented by the granting of various honors that bestow particular statuses that reflect and formalize the prestigiousness of the person. Examples include honorary degrees or credentials, nominal leadership positions generated by new organizations dedicated to causes or values shared by the individual who is prestigious in that group.
It is true that the concepts of status and prestige (although confused by persons use of the phrase “high status”) are related to social stratification, and Max Weber was indeed an important early theorist in this subject (sociology being a pretty young discipline, writings of 100 years ago are considered early, or “classical,” in the field). Indeed, the more modern term, “socioeconomic status” (SES) is intended to reflect Weber’s multi-faceted approach to the subject of social stratification, in that the “three Ps” (property, prestige, power) that roughly correspond to Weber’s original terminology of class, status, party (economic, social, political) are, in the modern SES framework, given a simplified (but more easily measured) treatment as being composed of education, income, and occupation (the latter being considered one of the most important “statuses” when it comes to evaluating one’s position in a social stratification system, often conceived in terms of social class, whereupon similar phrases to the ones you mentioned, “high class” and “low class” are often heard, and many persons, who are unaware of the sociological endeavor to use specific words with specific meaning, tend to freely substitute one word for another and thus may refer to “high status” when they may actually mean something like “high class” or “high prestige.”) In SES, the “socio-” would be connected with education, the “economic” component would be connected with income, and the “status” component would be connected with one’s occupation. These three variables are imperfect indicators but have the virtue of being relatively easy to identify and measure. (The measurement of occupation, to make things even more confusing for those who haven’t taken a course in social stratification, tends to be on the basis of “occupational prestige”—I mention this only to give additional emphasis about the actual complexity of the subject, and thus the need for precision in the use of these words, when sociologists describe and write about the subjects.)
Note also that for Weber, “status” was closer to “prestige” than the modern sociological conception of the term’s meaning. A long process over the past century has been involved in the favoring of certain terms over others, in sociology, and indeed the introductory sociology textbooks and courses tend to spend a great deal of time distinguishing between common, lay uses of various terms, and the specific meanings that sociologists intend when they use the terms.
Does this help to clarify things at all? Part of the challenge of sociology is that, as with physics, there are many concepts that are really best understood in relation to other concepts (and thus the concepts get introduced to students in pairs or sets; e.g. mass is different from weight, although related to it; power has a specific meaning different from force or work, although the concepts are seen to be related to each other in very specific ways that requires diligent training and practice to understand), but unlike physical systems, the social systems that sociology deals with are often specific to the context of specific times and places (e.g. American society of the early 21st Century) and thus it is much harder to speak in terms of general, universal laws. Given the difficulty of quantifying sociological relationships, it turns out to be very important for sociologists to speak clearly and precisely (sometimes seeming, unfortunately, to do the opposite, when their writings are read by those who are not aware of the need for precise language and distinctions, and who are also unfamiliar with the “jargon” and precision being painstakingly used in those writings).
Feel free to ask me any follow up questions, if you like...
Thanks for posting this. It’s always interesting to see how what seem like obvious concepts actually have histories and are disputed.
Education, income, and occupation strikes me as a classification that’s destructively over-simplified. How does it handle power and respect relationships which are outside the mainstream? I’m thinking of children, street gangs, and terrorist groups. I don’t think it can even generate an adequate description of families. I’m going to file it under “prime example of drunk and lamp post fallacy”.
You might be interested in this description of how status is handled in the SCA—it argues that having a system of three types of honor (for service, research, and heavy fighting) contribute greatly to the success of the organization.
Sorry, status isn’t about self-esteem. Status is about who you feel can beat you up and who you feel you can beat up. Two people meeting for the first time can instantly establish relative status by using body language that you’ll find pretty hard to tie to self-esteem.
Virtually everyone could probably beat me up, including my little sister, and I find this irrelevant to my judgments of status.
Being dismissive of things you’re not good at is beneficial to your status.
If status was always about one particular skill or trait (for example, the ability to beat people up), this strategy wouldn’t work.
Status is relative to a group, and each group values different skills and traits. We gravitate towards groups where we have value.
But calling attention to things you’re not good at is bad for your status.
Yes. But if the topic of something you’re not good at comes up, what are you going to do? Various strategies:
a) Downplay the importance of the thing that you’re not good at.
b) Change the subject.
c) Make a joke about totally sucking at that thing (while keeping the literal subject the same, it changes the implicit subject to the social ability of making other people laugh).
d) Mention a close relative, friend, or partner who’s really good at that thing (increasing status by affiliation).
I think I may even do e) which is to show enthusiastic appreciation for the thing I’m not good at, possibly sprinkled with demonstrating surprising knowledge of the thing I’m expected to not know about.
UPDATE: f) Riffing on ‘c’, liken yourself to a low status group. HT Barack Obama
Are you serious? You missed
g) Make an honest attempt at grasping the subject matter.
I’m not sure if this is what you intended e) to cover, but if I meet a topic I’m completely unfamiliar with, my first instinct isn’t to destroy the conversation.
I voted this up because it raises a useful background theory that many people might have lurking subconsciously in their head (and which they want not to be true and so they instinctively down vote to drive people who make the claim out of the community—the post was at −3 before I wrote this and voted it up).
(ETA: The comment being responded to appears to have been edited to be more abstract and less colorful. Other than adding this note, my text has not been correspondingly edited.)
In practice, I think this status formula is true in certain communities that assign prestige in certain ways but it is not true in others. Alicorn pointed out that it didn’t apply to her, but the point is worth making that it doesn’t apply to me for similar reasons. This is largely because because we are female, educated, and live in the first world. There are different communities that have different implicit bases for prestige… and some of them do work on physical violence and the treatment of females as something vaguely like chattel slaves and others operate only a few symbolic steps away from this model. (In these communities, you’ll notice that female status and its processes are largely ignored.)
As cousin_it pointed out in a response to a different comment:
Directly and simply, this is clearly not the basis of the status of:
Oprah Winfrey
Warren Buffet
Lady Gaga
Nelson Mandela
Stephanie Meyer
John Stewart
Robin Hanson (in the world and dramatically here)
Alicorn (primarily within this community, so far)
The people enmeshed in communities whose prestige works (for men) on this basis of capacity physical violence are tragic and deserve (where feasible) offers to help them up out of the poverty of “baseline monkeyhood”. The standards for women in such communities are different than for men (and frequently invisible to them), but they are similarly primitive and lead to women to spend the bulk of their lives thinking that their best years are behind them rather than in front of them.
Those communities tend to be “objectively” impoverished in terms of material, culture, and institutions… and they are hard to help in part because any attempt at giving them a hand “up” implies a standard of judgment that sees their current system for allocating prestige as defective and in need of repair (which poses an inherent ego threat to the people who currently “score high” within that framework and have substantial influence).
So, yeah, I think that the status formula that cousin_it succinctly spells out here is functionally true for a significant percentage of the humans on the planet—young impoverished males with few prospects for “upward mobility”. If adults flinch from recognizing this “head on” and then thinking about the implications it does the world a disservice.
I didn’t vote it down, but those that did voted it down because it is wrong. What you describe here I agree with. (At least I agree with the description of circumstance not necessarily the normative claims or predictions of emotional impact on those in question.) But for all ‘capacity to beat you up’ is highly relevant to status it is not the same thing, even in tribes where primitive status competition mechanisms are in place. Coalitions and rights to getting resources or mates without the tribe expelling you are too important even then.
I claim that “capacity to beat you up” is more relevant to status than self-esteem is. To understand the causality here, let’s do some counterfactual surgery on graphs. While you try to modify node A by sitting around for three months trying to raise your self-esteem, I modify node B by hitting the gym and taking boxing lessons for the same time. Then we meet and ascertain which node was more causally relevant!
Of course there’s no need to actually try this experiment because a lot of people have tried it already. For example, I can compare different versions of me at different times, before and after I learned to hold my own in a fight.
Coalitions, mate rights etc. are important, but they have causes too. The ultimate factor that determines your coalition-worthiness or mating-priority is often your projected chance of winning a conflict.
This doesn’t seem to cover all uses of “status” in the Johnstonian sense; one of his first examples is a small group of men and women competing over who has the most interesting and debilitating physical difficulties.
I’ll be pretty disappointed if our community accepts the idea that humiliating other people has less to do with status than comparing Pokemon collections. Which situation makes you more conscious of status: when your Pokemon collection is smaller than Bob’s, or when Bob beats you up and takes your girlfriend? To really feel the concept, you have to be close to the monkey life.
This is true, but status still isn’t about who can beat up who.
In particular, the fact that armies are typically controlled by older men (in rare situations, by older women, and in one unique situation (Joan of Arc) a young woman) implies that status among humans isn’t about who can personally beat up who.
Football players take orders from managers and team owners.
That sounds like an allusion to dominance hierarchy theory, which my informal survey suggests is a muddle. Do you have pointers to solid, recent research on dominance hierarchy theory that could plausibly apply to humans?
People do sometimes react strongly to things we think weird, like not having the bigger Pokemon collection.
Well, there’s anecdotes.
Mrs X: “I had a nasty turn last week [...] I thought I should faint or something.”
Johnstone comments: “Mrs X is attempting to raise her status.”
My anaysis would be: Mrs X is fishing for a “stroke”, the way you’d fish for compliments. It is a ploy to manipulate others in her group into a particular self-esteem transation, namely commiseration. She expects something like “Oh, you poor thing. What happened, did you have to go to the hospital?”
Mrs Y: “You’re lucky to have been going to a cinema.”
Johnstone analyzes Mrs Y as “blocking” Mrs X, and I’d tend to agree—this move denies the request for a stroke. There’s a subtext, too, that Mrs X is something of a spoiled child: that she has an inflated estimation of herself.
I could go on to analyze the rest of the dialogue in that vein, but for me there’s little value in saying the same thing except using “self-esteem” instead of “status”, that’s just fighting over definitions.
More interesting is the idea that everything Johnstone refers to are fleeting components of status, whereas there are attested long-lasting components (class, power, prestige) and the connotations of the term “status” tend to conflate all these components.
Do you mean “physically capable of beating up (regardless of the consequences)” or “beat up and get away with” or something else?
I agree that status facts aren’t facts about self-esteem. But (1) only in a few communities is status about physical conflict. Obviously, this isn’t the relevant criterion for women or middle class and higher adults. (2) Status isn’t about self-esteem but the two affect each other in important ways. If people around you can detect low self-esteem it very often lowers your status. Moreover, having low status can lower your self-esteem. High status can raise self-esteem and high self-esteem can signal high status. This circular relationship means that status and self-esteem are (a) nearly coextensive so it isn’t surprising that we might confuse the two and (b) causally connected in a way that makes it worth our time to pay attention to self-esteem in exactly the way Morendil suggests.
One of Johnstone’s stories is about strangers passing in the street, so you might have a point there. At any rate it makes a good test case. (This could be a fun topic for empirical study. Station yourself with a video camera at a street corner, interview people afterwards with a psychometric instrument.)
On the other hand, based on what evidence can we confidently rule out ties to self-esteem? It seems to me, on the contrary, that a diffident person would reliably make way for a more confident person. And if two self-assured people are passing in the street, each with a strong policy of “let other people make way for me”, you’d get exactly the kind of dance we do see.
Hello - I was web-browsing and came across your message about “status.” Without having time to read through all responses, I felt I’d send you this quick message to relate a sociological definition for the term. (I have taught the subject at a community college level, while still proceeding through graduate studies at a major university.)
Status, for sociologists, properly refers merely to one’s position in some social arrangement, which could either be a very clear-cut position (as in a bureaucracy) or a less clear-cut position that nevertheless has some sort of recognition by others who interact with the person. The terms “high status” and “low status” are in common popular use, but should more properly refer to high and low “prestige.” Prestige refers to the extent to which a person (or a category of persons) tends to receive favorable recognition from others, and this recognition may or may not be connected with the person’s status. For example, each U.S. president may automatically be granted great prestige by some persons, merely by virtue of having that particular status as president. But there are many cases where various persons have great prestige without necessarily occupying specific positions (having a particular status). There are many ways in which such apparent mismatch becomes rectified, as prestige tends to be supplemented by the granting of various honors that bestow particular statuses that reflect and formalize the prestigiousness of the person. Examples include honorary degrees or credentials, nominal leadership positions generated by new organizations dedicated to causes or values shared by the individual who is prestigious in that group.
It is true that the concepts of status and prestige (although confused by persons use of the phrase “high status”) are related to social stratification, and Max Weber was indeed an important early theorist in this subject (sociology being a pretty young discipline, writings of 100 years ago are considered early, or “classical,” in the field). Indeed, the more modern term, “socioeconomic status” (SES) is intended to reflect Weber’s multi-faceted approach to the subject of social stratification, in that the “three Ps” (property, prestige, power) that roughly correspond to Weber’s original terminology of class, status, party (economic, social, political) are, in the modern SES framework, given a simplified (but more easily measured) treatment as being composed of education, income, and occupation (the latter being considered one of the most important “statuses” when it comes to evaluating one’s position in a social stratification system, often conceived in terms of social class, whereupon similar phrases to the ones you mentioned, “high class” and “low class” are often heard, and many persons, who are unaware of the sociological endeavor to use specific words with specific meaning, tend to freely substitute one word for another and thus may refer to “high status” when they may actually mean something like “high class” or “high prestige.”) In SES, the “socio-” would be connected with education, the “economic” component would be connected with income, and the “status” component would be connected with one’s occupation. These three variables are imperfect indicators but have the virtue of being relatively easy to identify and measure. (The measurement of occupation, to make things even more confusing for those who haven’t taken a course in social stratification, tends to be on the basis of “occupational prestige”—I mention this only to give additional emphasis about the actual complexity of the subject, and thus the need for precision in the use of these words, when sociologists describe and write about the subjects.)
Note also that for Weber, “status” was closer to “prestige” than the modern sociological conception of the term’s meaning. A long process over the past century has been involved in the favoring of certain terms over others, in sociology, and indeed the introductory sociology textbooks and courses tend to spend a great deal of time distinguishing between common, lay uses of various terms, and the specific meanings that sociologists intend when they use the terms.
Does this help to clarify things at all? Part of the challenge of sociology is that, as with physics, there are many concepts that are really best understood in relation to other concepts (and thus the concepts get introduced to students in pairs or sets; e.g. mass is different from weight, although related to it; power has a specific meaning different from force or work, although the concepts are seen to be related to each other in very specific ways that requires diligent training and practice to understand), but unlike physical systems, the social systems that sociology deals with are often specific to the context of specific times and places (e.g. American society of the early 21st Century) and thus it is much harder to speak in terms of general, universal laws. Given the difficulty of quantifying sociological relationships, it turns out to be very important for sociologists to speak clearly and precisely (sometimes seeming, unfortunately, to do the opposite, when their writings are read by those who are not aware of the need for precise language and distinctions, and who are also unfamiliar with the “jargon” and precision being painstakingly used in those writings).
Feel free to ask me any follow up questions, if you like...
Thanks! Mike
Thanks for posting this. It’s always interesting to see how what seem like obvious concepts actually have histories and are disputed.
Education, income, and occupation strikes me as a classification that’s destructively over-simplified. How does it handle power and respect relationships which are outside the mainstream? I’m thinking of children, street gangs, and terrorist groups. I don’t think it can even generate an adequate description of families. I’m going to file it under “prime example of drunk and lamp post fallacy”.
You might be interested in this description of how status is handled in the SCA—it argues that having a system of three types of honor (for service, research, and heavy fighting) contribute greatly to the success of the organization.