4.1 Post summary / Table of contents

Part of the Valence series.

(UPDATE JAN 2024: I think this post has some issues, and is at best just a small piece of the social status puzzle. I am now working on a new and hopefully-much-better longer post on social status phenomena in general.)

The previous three posts built a foundation about what valence is, and how it relates to thought in general. This post will now discuss how valence sheds light on the social world specifically, with a particular emphasis on social status.

• Section 4.2 presents my main thesis for this post: The core of social status involves a situation where Person X has beliefs about the valence felt by (a generic) Person Y when they think about Person Z. If this valence tends to be positive, then X will describe the situation by saying that Z has high status.
• Section 4.3 mentions “dual strategies theory”—the idea that prestige and dominance are two different social rankings. I am using “status” to mean specifically “prestige”, not “dominance”.
• Section 4.4 discusses our tendency to “mirror” people whom we respect, in their careers, beliefs, and so on.
• Section 4.5 proposes that we have an “innate status drive”, and speculates on how it works.
• Section 4.6 discusses other possible valence-related social innate drives, most of which I remain pretty uncertain about.
• Section 4.7 argues that my felt social status is different from my self-esteem, but that the former can have an outsized impact on the latter.
• Section 4.8 is a brief conclusion.

4.2 Main thesis: The core of social status involves a situation where Person X has beliefs about the valence felt by (a generic) Person Y when they think about Person Z

That’s a bit of a mouthful, but let’s walk through it step by step.

Start with the simpler (albeit noncentral) case where Person X = Person Y in the section heading. Even more specifically, let’s say Person X = Person Y = me, and Person Z = Tom Hanks.

So, as our first example, suppose my brain tends to assign a positive valence to thoughts of Tom Hanks. I might say “Tom Hanks is really great” or “I like Tom Hanks” or “I have a lot of respect for Tom Hanks”. My brain would apply the Halo Effect to him (see §3.4.4) and I’m more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to anything having to do with him (see §2.4.3).

Now, in this situation, I might say: “As far as I’m concerned, Tom Hanks has a high social status”, or “In my eyes, Tom Hanks has high social status.” This is an unusual use of the term “high social status”, but hopefully you can see the intuition that I’m pointing towards.

Next step: Suppose lots of people likewise assign positive valence to thoughts of Tom Hanks, including pretty much everyone who knows him, or knows of him, or interacts with him. And suppose that this fact is common knowledge. Then I would just say: “Tom Hanks has high social status”, without any caveats.

What about more complicated cases? Suppose most Democrats find thoughts of Barack Obama to be positive-valence, but simultaneously most Republicans find thoughts of him to be negative-valence, and this is all common knowledge. Then I might sum that up by saying “Barack Obama has high status among Democrats, but Republicans view him as pond scum”.

4.3 Terminological note: I’m using “status” to mean prestige, not dominance

In “dual strategies theory” (see Elephant in the Brain for a friendly introduction), there are two kinds of “status”, namely prestige and dominance. These correspond roughly to being “widely-respected” and “widely-feared” respectively.

I’m adopting a different terminology, where the word “status” is a synonym of “prestige” specifically. This seems to be how the word “status” is almost always used in practice, at least in my own social circles.

If I want to talk about dominance, I’ll just use the word “dominance”. If I want to talk about dominance and prestige lumped together, I guess I’ll say “dominance and prestige”, but I find that this combination rarely comes up in conversation anyway.

4.3.1 …But still, what about dominance?

Going back to the prestige-versus-dominance split of §4.3 above, I claim the distinction is pretty straightforward:

• If, when lots of people think of Person X, their brains tend to respond with positive valence, then that fact is related to X's social status / prestige (as above);
• If, when lots of people think of Person X, their brains tend to respond with fear of them (or awe, or something in that vicinity) then that fact is related to X's dominance.

That’s all I have to say on the topic of dominance.

4.4 Our tendency to mimic people we respect, in their careers, preferences, clothes, beliefs, etc.

I think there’s a general tendency wherein, if Person X whom I respect (i.e. who elicits high valence in my mind) is doing Thing Y, then I’ll be tempted to do Y too.

To explain this fact, we don’t need any specific innate mechanisms beyond the general concepts that I’ve already discussed in this series. Instead, I think it’s just the same thing as the phenomenon of §2.5.1: if different concepts “go together”, then TD learning will tend to push their respective valences towards each other. Thus, if the thought of Person X tends to evoke highly positive valence, and I often think about how Person X is doing Thing Y, then the valence that my brain assigns to Thing Y is liable to go up as well. And then, naturally (§2.4.3), I’m going to want to do Thing Y myself (or at least, I’ll think it’s a good thing to do in general, even if it’s not really a good fit for me personally).

More generally, if people you respect (assign high valence to) tend to have certain careers, clothes, personality traits, slang, beliefs, etc., then your brain is going to start assigning high valence to all those things, and thus also assign higher valence to any other people associated with those things, and also higher valence to the idea of getting those things for ourselves. (And we might say that those clothes, beliefs, etc. are high-status clothes, high-status beliefs, etc., at least in our eyes)

4.5 Innate status drive

4.5.1 I think status-seeking is an innate drive, not a learned strategy

For everything I’ve said so far in this post, there needn’t be anything special and specific in the brain underlying status per se. The same brain mechanisms that associate positive valence with the thought of a particular chair, can likewise associate positive valence with the thought of a particular person. And by the same token, we can have beliefs about how this mechanism is playing out in other people’s heads, again just like we can have beliefs about anything else that other people are thinking and feeling. No status-specific brain components are required for that.

But I do think there's something special and specific that the genome builds into the brain for status drive, i.e. a reflex that says: if I believe that other people (especially other people I respect) find thoughts of me to be high valence, then that belief is itself intrinsically rewarding to me.

Stepping back a bit: As I’ve mentioned in §2.5 and discussed in much more detail elsewhere, I think there’s a sharp and important distinction between “innate drives” versus the various products of within-lifetime learning. One way to tell them apart is that, if something is not a human cross-cultural universal, then it’s unlikely to be directly related to an innate drive. But the converse is not true: If something is a cross-cultural universal, then maybe it’s directly related to an innate drive, or an alternative possibility is that everyone has similar learning algorithms, and everyone has similar life experience (in certain respects), so maybe everyone winds up adopting the same habits. Let’s call that alternative possibility “convergent learning”.

Applying this general idea to status-seeking behavior, I believe that this kind of behavior is empirically a cross-cultural human universal. So two hypotheses would be: it’s a direct innate drive, or alternatively, it’s “convergent learning”—each person learns from life experience that lots of good things happen when they have high status.

Anyway, my strong belief is that it’s the former—a direct innate drive, not “convergent learning”. That belief comes from various sources, including how early in life status-seeking starts, how reliable it is, the person-to-person variability in how much people care about their status, and the general inability of people to not care about status, even in situations where it has no other downstream consequences.

Here’s another piece of evidence, maybe: I think some high-functioning sociopaths are (in many but not all respects) examples of what it looks like for a person to operate in the social world via pure learned strategy rather than innate social drives. How does their status-seeking behavior compare to normal? My impression is: they are substantially more open-minded to forgoing social status than normal. In particular, there’s a strategy of “getting other people to pity me”. This strategy seems to be a good way to extract favors from people, and high-functioning sociopaths famously use this strategy way more than most people.^[1] But this strategy seems to require a lack of status-seeking—being pitied is not exactly a high-status move! So maybe that’s another bit of evidence that status-seeking normally derives from an innate drive, not from within-lifetime learning of instrumentally-useful social strategies.

Incidentally, I find that, in the evolutionary psychology literature, there’s a widespread tendency to entirely ignore the possibility of “convergent learning”. So, I am in agreement with the mainstream that there’s an innate social status drive, but only because I think the mainstream got lucky.

4.5.2 How might an innate status drive work?

If I’m right, then how does that innate drive work? Neuroscientific details would be way out of scope (and I don’t know them anyway). But in broad strokes, I propose the following recipe:

• If I think a thought ${\Theta }_1$…
• …and the thought entails a different Person X thinking Thought ${\Theta }_2$ which is about me…
• …and if, in my thought ${\Theta }_1$, I imagine that Person X finds Thought ${\Theta }_2$ to have [positive / negative] valence…

…then my brain assigns [positive / negative] valence to Thought ${\Theta }_1$.

The slightly-more-detailed version would involve a mechanism that enables my brainstem to detect and react to transient empathetic simulations. In a post last year, I surmised that most human social innate drives, from schadenfreude to compassion, involve that kind of mechanism. But I didn’t have any good examples at the time. Well, the above status drive recipe is my first good example! Or so I hope—I still need to flesh it out into a more detailed model, like with nuts-and-bolts pseudocode along with how it’s implemented in neuroanatomy. (And then proving that hypothesis experimentally would be far harder still.)

Two more details:

First, I think the above recipe is oversimplified, and that one of the missing ingredients is the valence that I assign to Person X. For example, as a public blogger, sometimes I learn that some random teenager somewhere knows who I am and thinks fondly of me. If so, that’s great, and I would feel happy about that. But suppose instead that I learn that Taylor Swift knows who I am and thinks fondly of me. Then that would feel way way more exciting to me! (I’m a big fan.) I think explaining this contrast requires an extra ingredient in the innate drive recipe above.

Second, there might be an adaptation mechanism—if you have a lot of status, then thoughts of other people respecting you gradually lose some or most of their positive valence. Instead you get positive valence for thoughts of other people respecting you more than the baseline expectation.

4.6 Other valence-related social innate drives?

This section is pretty speculative, but here are some thoughts:

• Supposedly, status can contribute to sexual attraction. More specifically, the stereotype I’ve heard involves women being more attracted to high-status men, other things equal. I don’t know if that’s true, but if it is, I think it would have to be a specific innate mechanism installed into our brain by the genome. I don’t think it can be explained as an incidental side-effect of other stuff that I’ve talked about.
• I think there’s something about status competition that I’m still missing. From an evolutionary perspective, status competition is no mystery—for example, insofar as mating opportunities is a zero-sum game, a person should care about whether their status is higher or lower than other people’s, not just whether they are viewed positively or negatively on an absolute scale. But from a mechanistic perspective, what I wrote in §4.5.2 seems inadequate to explain status competition. For example, according to the §4.5.2 story, it seems perfectly possible for there to be an omni-prestigious society, wherein everybody thinks that everybody is great (i.e., everyone assigns positive valence to everyone), and everybody is happy about that. Right? But that doesn’t seem to happen—maybe some Buddhist monks have great respect for everybody, but normal people don’t. Here are some non-mutually-exclusive options for how the §4.5.2 status drive story might turn (approximately) zero-sum:
  • “Convergent learning” (§4.5.1)—For example, if I have high status, and other people have higher status, and therefore I can’t find mating opportunities, I could notice what’s happening (either implicitly through experience or explicitly through reason), and wind up wanting not just high status, but higher status than other people. I’m sure that kind of thing happens to some extent, although my current guess is that it’s not central.
  • Envy—I think there’s an innate mechanism in the brain for envy (although I don’t know how it works in detail, see here). I think this mechanism is generic, not specific to status-in-particular. But it would apply to status just like anything else. Thus, if I have positive status (people generally think well of me), but other people have even more positive status, that could leave me feeling miffed, thanks to plain old envy.
  • A finding-someone-to-blame drive—There seems to be an innate drive that somehow (directly or indirectly) makes people motivated to find someone to blame when things aren’t going well. I don’t know how such a drive works mechanistically in the brain, but if it exists, then one of its consequences would be that there’s a force ensuring that at least some salient people are low-status and reviled at any given time, contrary to the “omni-prestigious society” fantasy story above.
  • Something else I’m not thinking of.
• People seem to be averse to assigning a different valence to Concept X than their friends do. For example, if I think Zoe stinks, then I kinda want other people to think that too; likewise, if I think Marvel superhero movies are better/worse than DC superhero movies, then other things equal, I probably would prefer it if my close friends agree. Is this a separate innate drive? My current guess is no; I think it’s just an indirect partly-learned consequence of the main innate status drive I described above. The story would go like: If my friends dislike Marvel movies, and then my friends find out that I like Marvel movies, then my friends’ brains will now have an association between me and Marvel movies, and per §2.5.1 my friends’ brains will assign a marginally lower valence to me, and I anticipate all this from experience and intuition, and I don’t like it thanks to my innate status drive. Thus, if I like Marvel movies, then I want my friends to like Marvel movies too, and if they don’t, I might lie about it (or change my preferences via strategies parallel to §3.3) to fit in.
• In-group versus out-group dynamics could be related to the above bullet point. In particular, perhaps we should operationalize “in-group” as “the people who tend to have similar valence assignments as me, particularly on important and salient things & people”? Again, I’m not sure if that’s fundamental, versus an indirect consequence of something else. But it does seem to be part of the story. In particular, people seem to treat valence assignments as a major type of tribal / alliance signal (cf. applause lights, Simulacra Level 3, etc.)

4.7 My self-esteem (i.e., the valence I assign to “myself”) is not the same as my felt social status. But it is strongly affected by my felt social status

I have a self-concept too, and like all concepts, it has a valence; something like “how good or bad I feel about myself in general right now”. I don’t think this is the same as my felt social status—I think my felt social status comes from the indirect thing I described above, wherein I’m thinking about what other people are thinking about me.

But it is indirectly related to my felt social status. As mentioned above (§4.4), we tend to settle into the same valence assignments as our friends and in-group. For example, if my friends and in-group think that Marvel movies are great, I’m liable to wind up feeling that way too, other things equal. By the exact same mechanism, if my friends and in-group think that I suck as a person, then I’m liable to wind up feeling that way too, other things equal. The previous sentence is equivalent to: “If I feel like I have [high / low] social status, then I am liable to wind up with [positive / negative] self-esteem.”

4.8 Conclusion

I still have some lingering uncertainties, but the basic connection between social status and valence seems really obvious to me in hindsight—almost trivial—and thus I find it weird that I don’t recall ever seeing it in the literature, or really anywhere else. (Old Scott Alexander blog posts are closest.) Has anyone else? I’m very interested to hear your thoughts, ideas, references, counterexamples, and so on in the comments section.

The next post will be the last of the series, discussing how I think valence signals might shed light on certain aspects of mental health and personality.

Thanks to Seth Herd, Aysja Johnson, Justis Mills, Charlie Steiner, Adele Lopez, and Garrett Baker for critical comments on earlier drafts. 

1. ^{^}

   Source: Martha Stout’s book: “After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my patients tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, “How can I tell whom not to trust?” the answer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I will describe some sinister-sounding detail of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle giveaway. …None of those things is reliably present. Rather the best clue is, of all things, the pity play. …Pity from good people is carte blanche… Perhaps the most easily recognized example is the battered wife whose sociopathic husband beats her routinely and then sits at the kitchen table, head in his hands, moaning that he cannot control himself and that he is a poor wretch whom she must find it in her heart to forgive. There are countless other examples, a seemingly endless variety, some even more flagrant than the violent spouse and some almost subliminal.” Also, I’ve known two high-functioning sociopaths in my life (I think), and they were both very big into the “pity play”.