Most people think a lot about sex, and often in relation to the people around them. In some subcultures it is OK to say most such thoughts out loud, but most societies prudishly discourage sex talk, except in unusual circumstances. This avoids awkward situations, but also forces people to use weaker clues to infer folks' sexual interests.
Grant, it find it unlikely that people really only dislike hearing about their low status, rather than being low status, but I'm open to data on the subject. And why can't we say for any preference people have that they really only want to believe that their preference has been satisfied? That is, how does this argument apply with any extra force to status?I think it applies with extra force to status because there is no objective measure of status. That is, there is no scoreboard of status ranking everyone can see. Unless there are actual status competitions, people's internal ordinal status rankings (if they even have any; I'm not sure I do for a lot of people) can be totally mis-matched from reality ('reality' being whatever results would come of status competitions).
Status competitions seem to be considered especially rude or childish when they are among friends or peers. People who think they will loose status competitions obviously don't want to, and may leave their social group if they feel their status has been lowered. People who think they may win status competitions may not be so adverse to them, but they may not want to loose friends or colleagues who may stop associating with them if they are humiliated.
Coupled with status competitions being negative-sum for other reasons, I think status prudishness is very rational. In a more tribal environment where people couldn't simply go somewhere else and associate with another group of people, they may have made more since. If that environment a humiliated opponent had no choice but to remain in the tribe.
I don't have any empirical data, only the anecdotes I've observed.
Robin, agreed, but doesn't alter my point. In many cases a behavior is a status signal, then is taken up by all, but the low status do it less well (which was why it signaled status to begin with). e.g. cars show status as rich have them -> everyone gets them, but poor people still have shoddier ones. Gifts are another e.g. Similarly everyone in a culture must be prudish once it begins, but the high status do it better. Those who do it worse in a given culture aren't less prudish, they are less successful at demonstrating status under those conditions. Gossip skills aren't less useful, they've just got so good more people can't, or have better things to do than, participate. They become lower status, not less influenced by the ranking of those around them, or their own behavior.
Are you sure there are female societies which don't revolve around rumor-mongering? Even the male ones I know of seem to.
Are you arguing that the relative status of people who are close in status are determined by elites more than elsewhere, or that this detail of status competition has disappeared somewhat, leaving differences between larger groups (that elites might bother to differentiate between) to make up more of a person's status (without this kind of activity increasing)?
When you say 'delegate', do you mean in any conscious way or just by default?
Frelkins, if elites control the status of whole groups by any means that seems irrelevant to the issue of who determines status between closer people who share the same groups and would in other societies be participating in ranking one another, which is what I thought we were talking about - I may have misunderstood. Accidental status determiners also seem irrelevant here, as they would apply in all societies.
Most of us can effect some improvement in our status if we put in the effort. When a competent team psychiatrist was replaced by an arrogant and less competent one, the psychologist and I discovered after a few months that we were engaging in more status-enhancing behaviors, both within the team and in the hospital at large. These took both the positive form of volunteering for extra bits of work and the negative form of quietly dissing others. Recognising this change, we were able to discontinue it as unnecessary. We had reacted automatically to a perceived threat. We could both observe what strategies we believed would "work" for us, and that in itself became a year-long discussion.
I don't know what hanson or elkins meant about elites. Could you give concrete examples?
Here's a concrete example that doesn't seem to fit what either of you is saying: in the US college admission, especially to elite colleges is not transparent. It has to do with some simple numbers, but it also has to do with essays and interviews. The children of alumni are admitted to elite schools ("legacy admissions"), producing identical high status through a different channel.
This is compatible with KG's "elites don't know you." On the other hand, the importance of interviews means that skills for interviews and knowing what elites want to hear is more important than skills for gossip and knowing what your circle wants to hear.
"Most elites don't know you - how do they decide who to give status to? Probably the signals they see, which you do control"
This seems obtuse to me. Elites easily work through groups. Outgroups are quickly regulated and controlled through democracy. An individual can control only a few important status indicators. Others are your lucky or unlucky accident of birth, sadly. And the accidental ones tragically are often the most dominant in status issues.
Katja, social norms like prudishness apply to everyone in a culture; distinguish poor cultures from poor people in a culture. Higher status people quite often do not have all the say they want over the status of others.
1) Consider: why are people status prudish? Non-prudishness seems more common in low status groups, so perhaps being prudish about status demonstrates that you are high status. This makes sense because it shows you are powerful and knowledgeable about the required things enough to manipulate your position subtly. Then we aren't delegating, but making the costs of status (in effort to know the right info and behavior) higher, as we seem to continually do with the costs for status.
2) In all societies elites appear to have as much say as they want in status; part of having high status is the demonstration that you have power over other people's. If someone elite can be bothered intervening in your status it would probably override what your friends thought anyway, so any delegating we did to elites shouldn't make a difference. Elite influence just looks more proportionally if you aren't keeping up with subtly influencing your own status in the harsher competition.
3) Most elites don't know you - how do they decide who to give status to? Probably the signals they see, which you do control. Am I missing who you mean by elites here? I'd like more examples - in Australia you get into college purely based on a number derived academically - having gone to a good college offers status still, but it looks like people have a lot more say in their own if this matters proportionally more than in status non-prudish groups - if there any reason it is less likely to go this way?
Mikko, the examples you chose (treatment by other social group members, treatment by high status females, attractiveness of habitat) seem to me like they all have popularly known analogues in nonhuman animal species. It's weird that you seem to be ignorant of what I think is common knowledge. You also don't seem to be a domain expert discounting popular misconceptions due to superior information. So your posts on this topic seem a bit weird to me.
HA, depends on the definition of "similarity". Second type operates on symbols, and animals can't do that. First one is very similar to dominance hierarchy in other primates.
There are two different kind of status, although there is some interdependence between the two.
First one is similar to dominance hierarchy in animals. This type of status is visible only in social interactions and it is dynamic. Almost everything people do (words, body language, voice tonality) can viewed as a status transaction, mean to lower or raise somebody else's or your own status. This kind of status you can't "have" but you always "do". Even person who typically has high status may have down day, and be visibly less confrontative, and have lower position in dominance hierarchy than usual.
Second type is what people commonly mean by status: reputation, position, car, hotness of wife, money, etc. This kind of status you "have". This second type of status usually raises your self-confidence, which "leaks" to the first type of status. Also, this kind of high status etc. may influence other people to perceive you more socially dominant.
Nancy & everyone,Animal combat and contention are very interesting. The key reason why it is so often non-violent (or "slappy" rather than injurious) is much like what Nancy mentioned: when two parties duke it out, the real winner is often the third, fourth, and fifth (etc) competing parties, which benefit (at no cost) from the contenders' weakening or injuring each other.
Thus, if there are two competing ant colonies on a tiny island in a lake, it would probably behoove the larger one to totally destroy the smaller one, even if it suffers major casualties in doing so. On a large island with 80 competing colonies, the optimal level of aggression may be much lower.
Intergroup lethal violence in chimps usually involves three or more allies attacking one foe. At this ratio, the cost-benefit analysis changes radically, because two of the attackers can restrain the victim's limbs. Thus the attacking party faces little risk.
Most species of birds are more or less monogamous (with or without modest polygamy), and do not often engage in serious combat. A lot of the ritualized soft combats seen in various bird species, many of which don't include any bodily contact at all, seem to me like they may primarily be displays of reaction time (and muscle quickness). If I can see that a rival is 150 milliseconds faster than me, the odds in a mortal combat may then be 75/25 in his favor, and I would have a negative expected gain by fighting to the death rather than submitting. If the amount of territory or food I'm willing to cede grows large enough, he also has a negative expected gain by killing me, since he faces some risk of death or injury in the process of doing so. So it goes for birds. When the prize is immense, eg control of an entire harem, severe violence is much more common (elephant seals).
"Hopefully, I'm skeptical that the high status are the most effective resource administrators."
I share your skepticism that there's a perfect correlation (hence I used the term rent-seeking). My point was that one is probably working against a strong gradient in any human culture to build social consensus that larger resource administrators (effective or not) are lower status than smaller resource administrators.
Robin,
Grant, it find it unlikely that people really only dislike hearing about their low status, rather than being low status, but I'm open to data on the subject. And why can't we say for any preference people have that they really only want to believe that their preference has been satisfied? That is, how does this argument apply with any extra force to status?I think it applies with extra force to status because there is no objective measure of status. That is, there is no scoreboard of status ranking everyone can see. Unless there are actual status competitions, people's internal ordinal status rankings (if they even have any; I'm not sure I do for a lot of people) can be totally mis-matched from reality ('reality' being whatever results would come of status competitions).
Status competitions seem to be considered especially rude or childish when they are among friends or peers. People who think they will loose status competitions obviously don't want to, and may leave their social group if they feel their status has been lowered. People who think they may win status competitions may not be so adverse to them, but they may not want to loose friends or colleagues who may stop associating with them if they are humiliated.
Coupled with status competitions being negative-sum for other reasons, I think status prudishness is very rational. In a more tribal environment where people couldn't simply go somewhere else and associate with another group of people, they may have made more since. If that environment a humiliated opponent had no choice but to remain in the tribe.
I don't have any empirical data, only the anecdotes I've observed.
Robin, agreed, but doesn't alter my point. In many cases a behavior is a status signal, then is taken up by all, but the low status do it less well (which was why it signaled status to begin with). e.g. cars show status as rich have them -> everyone gets them, but poor people still have shoddier ones. Gifts are another e.g. Similarly everyone in a culture must be prudish once it begins, but the high status do it better. Those who do it worse in a given culture aren't less prudish, they are less successful at demonstrating status under those conditions. Gossip skills aren't less useful, they've just got so good more people can't, or have better things to do than, participate. They become lower status, not less influenced by the ranking of those around them, or their own behavior.
Are you sure there are female societies which don't revolve around rumor-mongering? Even the male ones I know of seem to.
Are you arguing that the relative status of people who are close in status are determined by elites more than elsewhere, or that this detail of status competition has disappeared somewhat, leaving differences between larger groups (that elites might bother to differentiate between) to make up more of a person's status (without this kind of activity increasing)?
When you say 'delegate', do you mean in any conscious way or just by default?
Frelkins, if elites control the status of whole groups by any means that seems irrelevant to the issue of who determines status between closer people who share the same groups and would in other societies be participating in ranking one another, which is what I thought we were talking about - I may have misunderstood. Accidental status determiners also seem irrelevant here, as they would apply in all societies.
"3) Most elites don't know you - how do they decide who to give status to?"
By default, perhaps? Elites know elites. If they don't know you, you're not elite.
Most of us can effect some improvement in our status if we put in the effort. When a competent team psychiatrist was replaced by an arrogant and less competent one, the psychologist and I discovered after a few months that we were engaging in more status-enhancing behaviors, both within the team and in the hospital at large. These took both the positive form of volunteering for extra bits of work and the negative form of quietly dissing others. Recognising this change, we were able to discontinue it as unnecessary. We had reacted automatically to a perceived threat. We could both observe what strategies we believed would "work" for us, and that in itself became a year-long discussion.
I don't know what hanson or elkins meant about elites. Could you give concrete examples?
Here's a concrete example that doesn't seem to fit what either of you is saying: in the US college admission, especially to elite colleges is not transparent. It has to do with some simple numbers, but it also has to do with essays and interviews. The children of alumni are admitted to elite schools ("legacy admissions"), producing identical high status through a different channel.
This is compatible with KG's "elites don't know you." On the other hand, the importance of interviews means that skills for interviews and knowing what elites want to hear is more important than skills for gossip and knowing what your circle wants to hear.
@Katja
"Most elites don't know you - how do they decide who to give status to? Probably the signals they see, which you do control"
This seems obtuse to me. Elites easily work through groups. Outgroups are quickly regulated and controlled through democracy. An individual can control only a few important status indicators. Others are your lucky or unlucky accident of birth, sadly. And the accidental ones tragically are often the most dominant in status issues.
Katja, social norms like prudishness apply to everyone in a culture; distinguish poor cultures from poor people in a culture. Higher status people quite often do not have all the say they want over the status of others.
Interesting, but I'm unconvinced.
1) Consider: why are people status prudish? Non-prudishness seems more common in low status groups, so perhaps being prudish about status demonstrates that you are high status. This makes sense because it shows you are powerful and knowledgeable about the required things enough to manipulate your position subtly. Then we aren't delegating, but making the costs of status (in effort to know the right info and behavior) higher, as we seem to continually do with the costs for status.
2) In all societies elites appear to have as much say as they want in status; part of having high status is the demonstration that you have power over other people's. If someone elite can be bothered intervening in your status it would probably override what your friends thought anyway, so any delegating we did to elites shouldn't make a difference. Elite influence just looks more proportionally if you aren't keeping up with subtly influencing your own status in the harsher competition.
3) Most elites don't know you - how do they decide who to give status to? Probably the signals they see, which you do control. Am I missing who you mean by elites here? I'd like more examples - in Australia you get into college purely based on a number derived academically - having gone to a good college offers status still, but it looks like people have a lot more say in their own if this matters proportionally more than in status non-prudish groups - if there any reason it is less likely to go this way?
Mikko, the examples you chose (treatment by other social group members, treatment by high status females, attractiveness of habitat) seem to me like they all have popularly known analogues in nonhuman animal species. It's weird that you seem to be ignorant of what I think is common knowledge. You also don't seem to be a domain expert discounting popular misconceptions due to superior information. So your posts on this topic seem a bit weird to me.
HA, depends on the definition of "similarity". Second type operates on symbols, and animals can't do that. First one is very similar to dominance hierarchy in other primates.
Mikko, in your formulation, why do you think the second type isn't similar to dominance hierarchy in animals?
There are two different kind of status, although there is some interdependence between the two.
First one is similar to dominance hierarchy in animals. This type of status is visible only in social interactions and it is dynamic. Almost everything people do (words, body language, voice tonality) can viewed as a status transaction, mean to lower or raise somebody else's or your own status. This kind of status you can't "have" but you always "do". Even person who typically has high status may have down day, and be visibly less confrontative, and have lower position in dominance hierarchy than usual.
Second type is what people commonly mean by status: reputation, position, car, hotness of wife, money, etc. This kind of status you "have". This second type of status usually raises your self-confidence, which "leaks" to the first type of status. Also, this kind of high status etc. may influence other people to perceive you more socially dominant.
... which is why male elephant seals are about 3 times as large as female elephant seals.
Nancy & everyone,Animal combat and contention are very interesting. The key reason why it is so often non-violent (or "slappy" rather than injurious) is much like what Nancy mentioned: when two parties duke it out, the real winner is often the third, fourth, and fifth (etc) competing parties, which benefit (at no cost) from the contenders' weakening or injuring each other.
Thus, if there are two competing ant colonies on a tiny island in a lake, it would probably behoove the larger one to totally destroy the smaller one, even if it suffers major casualties in doing so. On a large island with 80 competing colonies, the optimal level of aggression may be much lower.
Intergroup lethal violence in chimps usually involves three or more allies attacking one foe. At this ratio, the cost-benefit analysis changes radically, because two of the attackers can restrain the victim's limbs. Thus the attacking party faces little risk.
Most species of birds are more or less monogamous (with or without modest polygamy), and do not often engage in serious combat. A lot of the ritualized soft combats seen in various bird species, many of which don't include any bodily contact at all, seem to me like they may primarily be displays of reaction time (and muscle quickness). If I can see that a rival is 150 milliseconds faster than me, the odds in a mortal combat may then be 75/25 in his favor, and I would have a negative expected gain by fighting to the death rather than submitting. If the amount of territory or food I'm willing to cede grows large enough, he also has a negative expected gain by killing me, since he faces some risk of death or injury in the process of doing so. So it goes for birds. When the prize is immense, eg control of an entire harem, severe violence is much more common (elephant seals).
Nancy great criticism of a good comment by Russ. I encourage both of you to comment/critique on my blog, too.
"Hopefully, I'm skeptical that the high status are the most effective resource administrators."
I share your skepticism that there's a perfect correlation (hence I used the term rent-seeking). My point was that one is probably working against a strong gradient in any human culture to build social consensus that larger resource administrators (effective or not) are lower status than smaller resource administrators.