There’s a concept in game design called the “burden of optimal play”. If there exists a way to powergame, someone will probably do it, and if that makes the game less fun for the people not powergaming, their recourse is to also powergame.
Most traditional RPGs weren’t necessarily envisioned as competitive games, but most of the actual game rules are concerned with combat, optimization, and attaining power or prowess, and so there’s a natural tendency to focus on those aspects of the game. To drive players to focus on something else, you have to make the rules of your game do something interesting in situations other than fantasy combat, magical attainment of power, or rogue-flavored skill rolls to surmount some other types of well-defined challenges. All of these things can make for a very interesting game world of a certain flavor, but in that game world, some kinds of players and characters will inevitably do much better than others, usually the ones that have some progression to a god-like power level using magic.
The flexibility afforded to the DM allows people to hypothetically run their game some other way, and many succeed, but the focal point of the game is defined by the focal point of the rules. They can decide to make their game center more around politics, romance, business, science, or whatever else, because they get to choose what happens in their world, but the use of an RPG system implies that the game world will be better at handling the situations the game has more rules, or more importantly, better-defined rules, for. The rules of a game are the tools with which players will build their experience, even in a more flexible game like an RPG.
A few friends of mine invented a system that I’m helping them develop and playtest. It’s somewhat rough at present, but the intent is to make rules that center more around information and social dynamics. In playtesting, people naturally gravitate toward situations the game’s rules are good at handling, so a lot more people are interested in being face characters than otherwise have been. Through some combination of the system and the person running the game, the rules will define what people naturally gravitate towards. This doesn’t surprise us when the person running the game is replaced by a computer that follows the rules exactly, and tends to be true to varying degrees based on the flexibility with which the rules are interpreted.
There’s definitely a cultural tendency among those educated in the arcane (Computer science, Math, Physics is a reasonable start for the vague cluster I’m describing) to be easily convinced of another person/group/tribe’s stupidity. I think it makes sense to view elitism as just another bias that screws with your ability to correctly understand the world that you are in.
More generally, a very typical “respect/value” algorithm I’ve seen many people apply:
-Define a valuable trait in extremely broad strokes. Usually one you think you’re at least “decent” on (Examples include “intelligence”, “popularity”, “attractiveness”, “success”, “iconoclasm”, etc.)
-Create a heuristic-based comparator function that you can apply to people quickly
-Respect/value people based on their position relative to you on your chosen continuum (Defined by your comparator)
This is at least common enough to note as an anti-pattern in social reasoning. When I fall into that pattern, I usually use “intelligence,” as I’m sure many in the “Techie/Programmer/Atheist/Science nerd”-cluster tribe I find myself most affiliated with also do.
I think it helps to taboo the idea of intelligence. Intelligence is pretty great, but it’s also a word with vastly disparate connotations, all of which are either too specific to be what people are actually talking about when they say the word, or too vague to be a useful measure to actually judge whether I like and find value in another person. I find that tabooing the idea of intelligence often will disrupt my “fast intelligence comparator” evaluation.
Once you don’t let yourself use your easy cached comparator, you can start trying to assess people without it. Trying to think of a person in terms of their competencies is a good exercise in respecting them more. For example: “This person is good at reading subtle emotional/social cues” or “This person is good at encoding complex ideas in accessible analogies” or “This person is good at quickly coming up with a rough solution to a problem.” As you can see, I get a more granular picture than “This person is smart” or “This person is dumb,” even if some of my assessments are still kind of vague (The process can be iterated over more taboos if you find it still problematic, but I find that one is usually enough to get decent results). This has allowed me to build deep, interesting, and valuable friendships with people who I might have otherwise dismissed as “idiots” or even the less obvious and therefore more insidious “not that interesting.”
This also works for another trap that single-dimensional heuristic-comparator reasoning can sometimes make one fall into: Respecting someone too much. I’ve found myself viewing someone as “vanishingly likely to be wrong” based on enough “greater-than” hits on my quick comparator, which introduces a huge blind spot into my reasoning about that person, things they say, etc. On top of that, being a sycophant and not challenging their ideas does them no service as a friend.
I’ve observed that this pattern is pretty common too, and that the people who fall into it are often not aware that they’re doing it (They don’t make the conscious decision not to question the person they respect too much, they just have overweighted that person’s opinion as a classifier for arbitrary facts about reality). Fortunately, the same tactic seems to work. Stop using “intelligence.” Try to pick up specific and granular weaknesses the person has (As a random side-note, this skill is pretty useful in any competitive environment as well). There’s a wealth of cognitive bias information on this site that can be valuably applied to other people in this context.
Even if you’re not interested in having friends or other kinds of warm fuzzy social relationships (I am, most people are, “cold rationalist” is a bad hollywood cliche, etc.), having a good model of other people, having a realistic, specific, and granular notion of people’s strengths, weaknesses, and personality/tendencies can help you to better reason about the world (Other humans aren’t perfect classifiers but many of them are better than you for specific purposes), better able to utilize people, and better able to navigate a social world, whether you consider yourself part of it or not.