In economics, a good is anything that “satisfies human wants and provides utility.” This includes not just tangible goods like gold, grain, and real estate, but also services (housecleaning, dentistry, etc.) as well as abstract goods like love, health, and social status.
As an economic good, social status is a lot like health. They’re both intangible and highly personal. In proper economic terms, they are private goods – rivalrous and mostly excludable. And the fact that they’re hard to measure doesn’t make them any less valuable — in fact we spend trillions of dollars a year in their pursuit (though they often elude us).
But status differs from health in one very important respect: It can be transacted – spent as well as earned. It’s not a terminal good, but rather an intermediate good that helps us acquire other things of value. For example, I can trade some of my status for money, favors, sex, or information — and vice versa.
As an economic good, social status is a lot like health. They’re both intangible and highly personal. In proper economic terms, they are private goods – rivalrous and mostly excludable. And the fact that they’re hard to measure doesn’t make them any less valuable — in fact we spend trillions of dollars a year in their pursuit (though they often elude us).But status differs from health in one very important respect: It can be transacted – spent as well as earned. It’s not a terminal good, but rather an intermediate good that helps us acquire other things of value. For example, I can trade some of my status for money, favors, sex, or information — and vice versa.
Health, if it’s possible to spend at all (e.g. in pursuit of career success), is extremely illiquid. But as I will argue today, status is so liquid — so easy to transact, and in real time — that it plays a fundamental economic role in our day-to-day lives.
Before we dig into the transactional nature of social status, let’s ground ourselves, briefly, in its biology and sociology.
The biology of status
No one plays status games in Heaven. Why bother? Souls have no want for food, sex, or smartphones — and thanks to His omnipresence, God even takes the fun out competing for an audience with Him.
Meanwhile, here on Earth, we (embodied primates) engage in all manner of status games. It’s one of the ways we compete over access to scarce resources like food and mates. And it’s something we share with a lot of other social animals — chickens, dogs, chimps, etc.
Here are some of the concepts that govern the day-to-day biology of social status:
Before we dig into the transactional nature of social status, let’s ground ourselves, briefly, in its biology and sociology.
The biology of status
No one plays status games in Heaven. Why bother? Souls have no want for food, sex, or smartphones — and thanks to His omnipresence, God even takes the fun out competing for an audience with Him.
Meanwhile, here on Earth, we (embodied primates) engage in all manner of status games. It’s one of the ways we compete over access to scarce resources like food and mates. And it’s something we share with a lot of other social animals — chickens, dogs, chimps, etc.
Here are some of the concepts that govern the day-to-day biology of social status:
- Prestige vs. dominance. Joseph Henrich (of WEIRD fame) distinguishes two types of status. Prestige is the kind of status we get from being an impressive human specimen (think Meryl Streep), and it’s governed by our ‘approach’ instincts. Dominance, on the other hand, is the kind of status we get from being able to intimidate others (think Joseph Stalin), and is governed by fear and other ‘avoid’ instincts. Of course these two types of status aren’t mutually exclusive, but they’re analytically distinct strategies with different biological expressions.
- Fitness displays. In The Mating Mind, Geoffrey Miller argues that many of our most prized, socially-desirable qualities — athleticism, artistic skill, eloquence, intelligence, physical beauty — serve as fitness displays, i.e., advertisements for the quality of our genes. We are attracted, socially and sexually, to people with high skill and beauty, largely because these traits are honest signals of good genes. [1]
- Hormones. There are at least two hormones involved in processing social status: testosterone and cortisol. To grossly oversimplify, testosterone is the ‘aggression hormone’ while cortisol is the ‘stress hormone.’ In a recent paper (and also a great TED talk), Amy Cuddy et al. asked participants to adopt either a high-status pose or a low-status pose for ten minutes. The researchers then measured participants’ hormone levels and their willingness to take risks on games of chance (a behavior associated with feelings of power). Participants who took high-status poses showed increased testosterone and reduced cortisol levels, and took greater risks, relative to their counterparts who were asked to adopt low-status poses.
- Body language. Cuddy’s experiment also illustrates the role played by our bodies in mediating status. Specifically, we’re wired to interpret people’s use of space in terms of status — the more space you take up, the higher your status. Also relevant are postures of intimidation, submission, and vulnerability.
by Kevin Simler, Ribbonfarm | Read more:
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