I find I have a better grasp on the meaning of ‘status’ than I do on the meaning of ‘self-esteem’. Status is clearly a complex phenomenon and somewhat hard to define but it is somewhat objectively visible (people can generally agree on who has high status and who has low status in a given situation). ‘Self-esteem’ seems a much woollier concept and more subjective. I found your overview of status quite interesting but you lost me a bit when you tried to explain ‘status’ (which I feel I have a pretty good ‘I know it when I see it’ understanding of) in terms of ‘self-esteem’ (which I don’t feel I have a very good grasp of as a concept and am not sure I fully understand your usage of).
Here is a suggestion. I might agree that “people can generally agree on who has high status and who has low status in a given situation”. A useful question is, once you correct for class, power and prestige, do you expect that anything remains to be explained about people’s ability to agree on who has high status?
In other words, if we somehow accounted for all discernible hints of class, power and prestige, would you expect that people’s judgements of “X has higher status than Y here” would still be correlated with something?
If yes, what do you think that “something” would be?
Johnstone suggests that we would see correlations between such judgements and things like “moving your head while speaking”.
My hypothesis is that (barring pathological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease), if there is anything to Johnstone’s observations, moving your head while speaking should be correlated with positive answers to questions such as the following: “Do you think of yourself as a person of high value? Do you think you can achieve pretty much anything you set your mind to? Do you think you deserve to lead a happy, successful life?”, etc.
That is, I do not deny that Johnstone, by profession (and by admiration for Desmond Morris) a keen observer of the human animal, had insightful observations. I do think that “status” is a confusing term to use to label his observations, because it is too easily conflated with “class, power, prestige”.
Here is a suggestion. I might agree that “people can generally agree on who has high status and who has low status in a given situation”. A useful question is, once you correct for class, power and prestige, do you expect that anything remains to be explained about people’s ability to agree on who has high status?
I think my qualification about agreements on status in a given situation is important and somewhat independent of class, power and prestige. Wealth, class, power and prestige are all factors in status but within a given social situation where these are fairly evenly matched they are not the deciding factors in who comes out on top in any status games. In social situations where there is incomplete information about the relative levels of these things status moves are a complex game which are partly attempts to signal these qualities and figure out relative rankings.
I would expect that if you took a group of strangers and placed them in a social situation together you could find agreement within the group and from observers over what relative status was achieved that could not be fully explained by wealth, class, power or prestige.
It is interesting to observe people in situations where they do not have the pre-qualification of status normally granted by wealth, power, class or prestige. There’s a fairly run of the mill reality show on TV at the moment called Undercover Boss, the premise of which is that a CEO goes undercover at his own company and works entry-level jobs. I’ve caught a few episodes and found it quite interesting to observe how some of the participants seem to maintain status even without anyone knowing who they are while others cannot without the benefit of the external factors that usually grant them status.
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.
Just going undercover might not correct for all hints about class, to single out but one of the components—think Pygmalion and things like language, accent, body posture.
On the other hand, I suspect you’re partly right, to the extent that you could put people in an IRC chatroom, really stripping everyone of nearly all observable properties, and some of them would still come out as being “on top”. But that’s also grist for my mill: I’d expect those to be the more skilled at manipulating perceptions of self-esteem through subtle use of language.
I’m still struggling with exactly what you mean when you talk about ‘self-esteem’. You seem to be saying something like this:
There is a somewhat objective property called ‘status’ that we can observe people having more or less of in a given situation. Many social interactions serve to raise or lower relative status positions. There is a hidden variable called ‘self-esteem’ which is the thing that is actually being manipulated in social interactions and it is more fundamental than status.
Is that roughly what you are saying or am I misunderstanding?
By somewhat objective I pretty much just mean what I suggested earlier: you could ask a group of observers or participants in a social situation to rank people by status and there would be broad agreement. You indicated you might agree with that. I think this property would correlate with things like wealth, class, physical attractiveness, power and achievements but I don’t think they are sufficient on their own to explain it—there are other factors. I also think the issue is complicated by the fact that some of these ‘other factors’ are things that assist people in acquiring money, power and recognition for their achievements.
It seems like you might be using ‘self-esteem’ as a catch all term for the factors that explain status that are not covered by wealth, class, power and achievement. I don’t find that a useful application of the term. If you mean something narrower than that then I think you’re missing out on other important explanatory factors.
Not a catch-all, but a specific disposition, which would show up in, say, psychometric tests asking people questions such as the ones I mentioned above.
Again, I don’t really care whether we name a particular variable “status” or “self-esteem”—just so long as we’re not mistaking it for another variable (e.g. class, power, prestige), and “status” does have the unfortunate ambiguity with these others.
But my inquiry is more into how many variables are in play, what the causal relationships between them might be, and so on.
Well ‘status’ seems to me to be somewhat like ‘intelligence’ - most people have an intuitive conception of what it means and could rank order others in a way that would tend to match the rank ordering of other observers. It also correlates to some extent with a number of other traits such as wealth, power and prestige. It is not clear however to what extent a unitary g) exists for intelligence and similarly it is not clear whether a unitary ‘s’ might exist for status.
My understanding of ‘self-esteem’ is a factor that probably correlates with status but it is not clear which direction causation works. In other words reducing discussion of status to discussion of self-esteem is a bit like reducing discussion of intelligence to discussion of logic puzzles. Focusing too narrowly on this one factor ignores many other important factors that contribute to the broader idea of status.
Individual power in society is such a broad concept as to entirely encompass status. So you must have had some more specific meaning in mind. I’d guess you meant explicit organizational authority (I’m an airline security screener; I’m an assistant to the CEO).
If that’s what you meant, then what remains is less formal roles and precedents in established social groups, and in forming groups, physical attractiveness combined with (behavioral) signals of belief/confidence in a person’s chance to earn consent in controlling or at least being accepted by the group.
I don’t think that individual optimization power (ability to steer the future in regions which maximally advance that individual’s preferences, even when these outcomes are detrimental to other’s preferences) encompasses all of what is referred to as “status” in Johnstone. It doesn’t explain, for instance, why keeping your head in a fixed position while speaking should convey high status.
then what remains is less formal roles and precedents in established social groups
What do you make of the assertion that two strangers who’ve never met can assess each other’s status?
What do you make of the assertion that two strangers who’ve never met can assess each other’s status?
The question seems ill-posed. After all, how much influence they have over each other is negotiable. What they’ll be able to judge is only the observable status-bidding and status-associated signals.
Say they’re simultaneously interacting with some group—then they’d start to see what each others’ status is in that group only in the tautological sense that they’d see how much influence and deference they command.
You can guess the status of someone (in their own little tribe(s)) in much the same sense that you can guess their occupation, and based off comparable indicators.
Yeah, I guess I can predict a large part of it from just their physical appearance and their “out in public” mannerisms. But it’s only by seeing their actions+consequences in a context that I know their status there.
I find I have a better grasp on the meaning of ‘status’ than I do on the meaning of ‘self-esteem’. Status is clearly a complex phenomenon and somewhat hard to define but it is somewhat objectively visible (people can generally agree on who has high status and who has low status in a given situation). ‘Self-esteem’ seems a much woollier concept and more subjective. I found your overview of status quite interesting but you lost me a bit when you tried to explain ‘status’ (which I feel I have a pretty good ‘I know it when I see it’ understanding of) in terms of ‘self-esteem’ (which I don’t feel I have a very good grasp of as a concept and am not sure I fully understand your usage of).
Thanks, that’s useful feedback.
Here is a suggestion. I might agree that “people can generally agree on who has high status and who has low status in a given situation”. A useful question is, once you correct for class, power and prestige, do you expect that anything remains to be explained about people’s ability to agree on who has high status?
In other words, if we somehow accounted for all discernible hints of class, power and prestige, would you expect that people’s judgements of “X has higher status than Y here” would still be correlated with something?
If yes, what do you think that “something” would be?
Johnstone suggests that we would see correlations between such judgements and things like “moving your head while speaking”.
My hypothesis is that (barring pathological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease), if there is anything to Johnstone’s observations, moving your head while speaking should be correlated with positive answers to questions such as the following: “Do you think of yourself as a person of high value? Do you think you can achieve pretty much anything you set your mind to? Do you think you deserve to lead a happy, successful life?”, etc.
That is, I do not deny that Johnstone, by profession (and by admiration for Desmond Morris) a keen observer of the human animal, had insightful observations. I do think that “status” is a confusing term to use to label his observations, because it is too easily conflated with “class, power, prestige”.
I think my qualification about agreements on status in a given situation is important and somewhat independent of class, power and prestige. Wealth, class, power and prestige are all factors in status but within a given social situation where these are fairly evenly matched they are not the deciding factors in who comes out on top in any status games. In social situations where there is incomplete information about the relative levels of these things status moves are a complex game which are partly attempts to signal these qualities and figure out relative rankings.
I would expect that if you took a group of strangers and placed them in a social situation together you could find agreement within the group and from observers over what relative status was achieved that could not be fully explained by wealth, class, power or prestige.
It is interesting to observe people in situations where they do not have the pre-qualification of status normally granted by wealth, power, class or prestige. There’s a fairly run of the mill reality show on TV at the moment called Undercover Boss, the premise of which is that a CEO goes undercover at his own company and works entry-level jobs. I’ve caught a few episodes and found it quite interesting to observe how some of the participants seem to maintain status even without anyone knowing who they are while others cannot without the benefit of the external factors that usually grant them status.
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.
Just going undercover might not correct for all hints about class, to single out but one of the components—think Pygmalion and things like language, accent, body posture.
On the other hand, I suspect you’re partly right, to the extent that you could put people in an IRC chatroom, really stripping everyone of nearly all observable properties, and some of them would still come out as being “on top”. But that’s also grist for my mill: I’d expect those to be the more skilled at manipulating perceptions of self-esteem through subtle use of language.
I’m still struggling with exactly what you mean when you talk about ‘self-esteem’. You seem to be saying something like this:
There is a somewhat objective property called ‘status’ that we can observe people having more or less of in a given situation. Many social interactions serve to raise or lower relative status positions. There is a hidden variable called ‘self-esteem’ which is the thing that is actually being manipulated in social interactions and it is more fundamental than status.
Is that roughly what you are saying or am I misunderstanding?
That feels close, yes. I might quibble over the “somewhat objective”.
By somewhat objective I pretty much just mean what I suggested earlier: you could ask a group of observers or participants in a social situation to rank people by status and there would be broad agreement. You indicated you might agree with that. I think this property would correlate with things like wealth, class, physical attractiveness, power and achievements but I don’t think they are sufficient on their own to explain it—there are other factors. I also think the issue is complicated by the fact that some of these ‘other factors’ are things that assist people in acquiring money, power and recognition for their achievements.
It seems like you might be using ‘self-esteem’ as a catch all term for the factors that explain status that are not covered by wealth, class, power and achievement. I don’t find that a useful application of the term. If you mean something narrower than that then I think you’re missing out on other important explanatory factors.
Not a catch-all, but a specific disposition, which would show up in, say, psychometric tests asking people questions such as the ones I mentioned above.
Again, I don’t really care whether we name a particular variable “status” or “self-esteem”—just so long as we’re not mistaking it for another variable (e.g. class, power, prestige), and “status” does have the unfortunate ambiguity with these others.
But my inquiry is more into how many variables are in play, what the causal relationships between them might be, and so on.
Well ‘status’ seems to me to be somewhat like ‘intelligence’ - most people have an intuitive conception of what it means and could rank order others in a way that would tend to match the rank ordering of other observers. It also correlates to some extent with a number of other traits such as wealth, power and prestige. It is not clear however to what extent a unitary g) exists for intelligence and similarly it is not clear whether a unitary ‘s’ might exist for status.
My understanding of ‘self-esteem’ is a factor that probably correlates with status but it is not clear which direction causation works. In other words reducing discussion of status to discussion of self-esteem is a bit like reducing discussion of intelligence to discussion of logic puzzles. Focusing too narrowly on this one factor ignores many other important factors that contribute to the broader idea of status.
Individual power in society is such a broad concept as to entirely encompass status. So you must have had some more specific meaning in mind. I’d guess you meant explicit organizational authority (I’m an airline security screener; I’m an assistant to the CEO).
If that’s what you meant, then what remains is less formal roles and precedents in established social groups, and in forming groups, physical attractiveness combined with (behavioral) signals of belief/confidence in a person’s chance to earn consent in controlling or at least being accepted by the group.
Yep, positional power.
I don’t think that individual optimization power (ability to steer the future in regions which maximally advance that individual’s preferences, even when these outcomes are detrimental to other’s preferences) encompasses all of what is referred to as “status” in Johnstone. It doesn’t explain, for instance, why keeping your head in a fixed position while speaking should convey high status.
What do you make of the assertion that two strangers who’ve never met can assess each other’s status?
Agreed.
The question seems ill-posed. After all, how much influence they have over each other is negotiable. What they’ll be able to judge is only the observable status-bidding and status-associated signals.
Say they’re simultaneously interacting with some group—then they’d start to see what each others’ status is in that group only in the tautological sense that they’d see how much influence and deference they command.
You can guess the status of someone (in their own little tribe(s)) in much the same sense that you can guess their occupation, and based off comparable indicators.
Yeah, I guess I can predict a large part of it from just their physical appearance and their “out in public” mannerisms. But it’s only by seeing their actions+consequences in a context that I know their status there.