People naturally feel a desire to do nice things for people who they perceive as high status. This is because people with lots of money/power/influence have an outsized ability to influence you (for good or bad), so it's often worthwhile to be in their good graces. This means it's good to be high-status for the benefits of people treating you better (and if you're high-status, then there's a second-order effect from your friends being high-status). Some people seek status instrumentally in this way, but it's also a feel-good in the same way as food or sex or comfort, so people also seek status just because it feels good.
Status signaling is somewhat different from other kinds of signaling since people's perception of your status is in itself a form of status.
Thanks for the reply.
This is because people with lots of money/power/influence have an outsized ability to influence you (for good or bad), so it's often worthwhile to be in their good graces.
I already mentioned that in the OP. But what about fashion? Why do people feel a desire to do nice things for people who follow the newest fashion?
They’re signalling to the normies, people who take the outward signs of a thing for the thing itself. Hence people wearing spectacles with flat glass to look more intelligent, buying degrees from degree mills to put fake letters after their name, name-dropping people who don’t know their name, putting on airs of importance, and so on.
The much-cited “Impro” is a manual for actors presenting the outward signs to an audience. It has nothing to with attaining to genuine respect for your qualities and accomplishments.
Behind all that is the idea of “status” as a D&D stat with no gears, you just compare it with a die roll for the GM to tell you, “Yes, your bluster overawed the guard, and he lets you pass.” And perhaps the GM makes a note that as soon as you’ve swept past, the guard gets on the speaking tube to summon reinforcements, because ultimately, the only causal force in fiction is the author’s decisions.
You can con people for a while with “signalling”, but we have a lot of words for people who have worn their pretence thin.
Thanks for the reply, but this feels like strawmanning and not particularly rational. I get the impression that you would rather feel superior to the "normies" than understand them.
You mean, my comment was a status grab? Wow, so was yours! And so is this one! Everything anyone says is a status grab! There is only status!
Sigh.
What? No, I did not mean to imply that your comment was a status grab.
May I ask what you mean by that "sigh"? Intuitively I interpret it as a passive-aggressive jab meaning something like "you are too stupid to understand me", but I might be wrong.
What? No, I did not mean to imply that your comment was a status grab.
That was how I read your "you would rather feel superior to the "normies" than understand them.
About the sigh, that was just an expression of exasperation, not at you specifically, but at the prevalence of people leaping to status explanations. The meta-problem I have with status explanations is that the move sucks all the oxygen out of the air. Someone says "status", and suddenly no-one can say anything that won't be interpreted as a status move, and it's impossible to get back to the object level.
I agree with your asking the original question about why signalling, to which my first comment gave my answer.
I recently adopted the use of status in my vocabulary as a kind of currency and ever since, most of human behaviour which had in prior times confounded me became immediately legible with explanation.
In many ways, I consider it be one the strongest human motivators (arguably even more so than money) with embedded circuity throughout almost all of our cognitive appliances.
Most of human behaviour is not rationally decided, it is emotionally motivated. Our emotional circuits are subject to evolutionary drift as a result of the delta in update speed between genetic and sociological systems.
Our emotional circuits prioritize survival in society where individualism gets you killed. Status is a proxy for dominance in negotiating co-operative behaviours and terms of a group. In my opinion, Higher status ~= more pull you have over collective actions.
Whether that pull is determined through fear, maligned proxies on proxies of worth, or genuine reciprocal capacity is irrelevant: status is the moniker that zero's out the 'why' and leaves you only with 'how much' someone is capable determining broader group norms or behaviour.
Therefore, being in favour with someone of high status, means you implicitly have control over tribe/group trajectories, which one can use to direct towards their own benefit (resource acquisition, sexual selection, terms of safety). Over time, high status individuals develop signalling mechanisms to identify each other as larger and larger groups coalesce. These are the norms you distinguished.
Status is not necessarily as rationally imperative in modern society, where one does not need a tribe to survive (only an income), but all of the old system's which made obtaining it so evolutionary advantageous have stuck around.
Despite this, obtaining power in modernity still requires it heavily. As your ability to gain favour with certain individuals becomes a proxy for that in continued capacity later on. Eliezer has a very good example of this in one of his writings as it pertains to startup investing, though I don't have it on hand. And, in my opinion, a signalling mechanism is an instance of this kind in microcosm.
Thanks. I have heard the evolutionary-psychology explanation before, but I struggle to understand how it works in terms of practical psychology.
Your explanation is very theoretical. I was more fishing for a phenomenological explanation - or at least a behaviorist explanation in detail.
I apologize for sounding dismissive, but you sound like someone who has read about how humans operate rather than someone who has experienced life as a human. I was hoping that someone more extroverted and more neurotypical than I could explain how status signalling (and especially fashion) feels when you are in the midst of it.
I was reading this old post by Scott Alexander: Right is the New Left. In it, Scott talks about status signalling and the urge to be "cool" and be seen as such. Reading the article, I realized that much of the experience that Scott describes is alien to me. I understand on a theoretical level that status-seeking is a big thing. But I have only a hazy sense of it in practice.
Now, I am highly introverted, so I do not interact with people that much. I also have Asperger, so even when I do interact with people, there may be much that goes over my head.
I do not remember ever having a very clear sense of what my status was in the various groups I have been in, nor who was considered high or low status. I have a sense of whether people like me. And I have a sense of whether people people value my work and my jokes. But those are just some of the obviously useful aspects of social interaction. As far as I understand, status also has zero-sum components which hinge on being up-to-date with fashion and memes. For example, Scott writes in his article:
I do not remember ever having done this, nor do I particularly remember having noticed other people doing it. I remember that my sister talked about how her friends were doing this kind of thing when we were teens, but I do not think I actively noticed it.
But most importantly, I do not understand why people do the above. If you successfully signal high-status fashion sense like in Scott's example... then what? What does that achieve? Do people treat you differently? If so, how?
And what is the difference between signalling status towards strangers and signalling status towards people who already know you?
Moreover: Assuming that people treat you differently because you signal fashion sense... to what extent are these people rationally acting on incentives, and to what extent are they just being irrational? I can understand that it is rational to treat people better if they appear to be rich and powerful (because they might reward or punish you), but it is not obvious to me that fashion sense is useful.
Thanks in advance!