One thing that Johnstone emphasizes, and which I was a bit surprised you didn't explicitly mention, is that status isn't something you have, it's something you do. For instance, the "status expert" teacher would alternatively raise and lower his own status in relation to that of the students, thereby maintaining an atmosphere that was maximally conductive to learning. The low and high status teachers tried to stuck into just one mode of status, regardless of what was most appropriate to the situation.
...I thought about these teachers a lot, but I couldn't understand the forces operating on us. I would now say that the incompetent teacher was a low-status player: he twitched, he made many unnecessary movements, he went red at the slightest annoyance, and he always seemed like an intruder in the classroom. The one who filled us with terror was a compulsive high-status player. The third was a status expert, raising and lowering his status with great skill. The pleasure attached to misbehaving comes partly from the status changes you make in your teacher. All those jokes on teacher are to make him drop in status. The third teacher could cope easily with any situation by changi
One component of the way I use the word "status" myself is one's perception of influence or importance within a group.
One's self-perceived influence reflects one's expectation regarding whether one will be treated with respect, listened to or ignored, taken seriously or patronized, appreciated or taken for granted, treated fairly or unfairly, and so on.
I think, that if you taboo "self-esteem", this is a good unpacking of the Status aspect of self-esteem. Prestige, wealth, and all those other things are simply inputs to one's expectations about how one will be treated -- which is why people can have those things and still not act like they have high status. Status in a behavioral sense is a set of emotion-backed high-level predictions about how others will treat us in response to our action.
Johnstone portrayed of status as being zero sum, but it wasn't a zero-sum game where each person always tried to maximise their status. Sometimes they'd lower it deliberately. And since he wasn't using it in the self-esteem sense, they might even be having fun while lowering it. So I think it could be a positive sum game in terms of utility while being zero sum in terms of (this type of) status.
This is an interesting subject for me as I kind of enjoy playful teasing but don't feel like I've really got the hang of doing it myself. Sometimes I manage it and then I'm half-surprised I managed it without upsetting the other person.
But it makes sense since this type of conversational status isn't the same as the status people get most worried about.
Thanks for the post. I feel that status is not difficult (for me) to assess in a group, but I appreciate your pointing out the lack of a solid and predictive definition.
I think that PJ Eby's comment has been closest so far, but that it could be more specific. My best definition so far is:
"The ability to determine the social interaction". (Excluding physical interactions, those having additional complexity). By "determine the interaction" I refer roughly to the ability to control the topic of conversation, and plans of the group.
Everything else discussed feeds into this, and this in turn often feeds into those same things. I.e. Having self-esteem or wealth may help you with this, and having this may help you gain self-esteem and wealth. Extrication is difficult.
At the same time, none of the other factors are required in all interactions. You may have someone who has very low self-esteem, at least generally, yet is the expert on the original Transformers show on a web forum, and has sway there (and acts confidently with sub-communications). You can have a wealthy and famous scientist, who in a group of "regular folks" is extremely diffident. Having t...
There is an interesting party game played with cards that for some reason I only remembered just now. Here is how I recall it.
You take a group of people and assign each of them a card from the deck, Ace high, deuces low. You give everyone a headband so that they can carry the card around on their foreheads, where others can see it but they can't. You have the group mill around talking to each other, instructing them to take into account the rank of the person they're talking to. After some time you ask people to pocket their cards, mill around some more, then line up in what they think is the order corresponding to their rank.
To the extent that this order reflects the card ranks, we can conclude that social interactions act as a carrier for information that allows people to sense a linear hierarchy. (I can't remember, when I played it, how close the match was.)
Thanks for writing this. I've noticed that it's tempting (and all too easy) to construct just-so stories explaining any behaviour in terms of whatever status we are already assuming the actor holds (one illustration of this: Eliezer's list of hypotheses for why high-status people seem stupider, versus thomblake's response listing some equally reasonable-sounding hypotheses for why high-status people seem smarter). And if we see someone behaving in a way that contradicts our perception of their status and some popular signaling hypothesis, we can call it countersignaling and have that feel like an explanation even though we failed to anticipate it. Hopefully, formalizing what we mean by "status" will be a good step toward making status/signaling hypotheses testable and falsifiable.
Another face of status is the concept of "social stimulus value," which basically means how positively others respond and evaluate you. Social stimulus value could be a measure of "bottom up" status granted by others, as opposed to "top down" status claimed by oneself, and it seems to be consistent.. The introduction to this study talks more about social stimulus value.
the Bonobo chimpanzee, where females...do not establish a dominance hierarchy among themselves
Where do you get these beliefs?
Status is one of those cases where it's easy to mix up concepts that're related by levels of indirection. A person's status is (A) the amount of power and accomplishment they have, (B) other peoples' perception of A, (C) their own perception of A and B, and (D) the signals they give off based on C. When people talk about status, they're referring to some subset of A,B,C,D. Except that B, C, and D are all based in psychology, which means that they can be severed from their nominal definitions by implementation details. But the relations between the definitions mean that usually, statements involving one also involve the others.
Stepping back to look at dominance theory as a whole, I found that they are not without problems. Pecking order may apply to chickens, but primates vary widely in social organization, lending little support to the thesis that dominance displays, dominance-submission behaviours and so on are as universal as Johnstone suggests and can therefore be thought to shed much light on the complex social organization of humans.
I'm just googling around but it looks like the default for multi-male, multi-female primate societies is a linear dominance hierarchy. The ...
I find I have a better grasp on the meaning of 'status' than I do on the meaning of 'self-esteem'. Status is clearly a complex phenomenon and somewhat hard to define but it is somewhat objectively visible (people can generally agree on who has high status and who has low status in a given situation). 'Self-esteem' seems a much woollier concept and more subjective. I found your overview of status quite interesting but you lost me a bit when you tried to explain 'status' (which I feel I have a pretty good 'I know it when I see it' understanding of) in terms of 'self-esteem' (which I don't feel I have a very good grasp of as a concept and am not sure I fully understand your usage of).
Thank you for identifying this collective lack of understanding. Before reading this I hadn't even realised that I didn't know what "status" really was.
I actually find the "social stratification" more compelling than the last two sections. I'm not sure that "self-esteem" is any more substantive than "status". In the case of the mountain climber and the teachers, "self-esteem" is recognised by others, so it's just not just something that one identifies in themself, it's also identified between people and (p...
I think an attempt to unpack what the LessWrong community means when it talks about "status" is highly useful, and am glad that Morendil started this discussion. I tend to agree with those who have said that that self-esteem might not be the most useful avenue of exploration and that we shouldn't discard the idea of dominance so quickly.
On a lighter note, I highly recommend to anyone who has not read it Class by Paul Fussell for its highly amusing, possibly somewhat offensive, now quite dated, but still recognizable description of the class struc...
As an aside I'm really surprised someone as well read as you could have not heard of Max Weber until now.
A few thoughts…
I take status to be an index of social efficacy.
Humans are social creatures and identify with social groups. If this is the source of status then it could be attained by dominating the group but it could also be attained by benefiting the group.
Because status is a group dynamic it is also relevant between groups. You could take this to mean that groups accord varying measures of status to other groups but also that high status in one group does not automatically translate into other groups. In this regards status is the esteem of a gro
Pending a new post Kaj Sotala and I are planning to collaborate on, add this blog post to the list of sources for interesting claims about status. (Through HN.)
Item: "status is regulated through dopamine levels". This may be a reference to this study.
An interesting find (for me) was learning how the study measured status: they used the "Barratt Simplified Measure of Social Status" as well as the "Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support".
The former is clearly a measure of what I called social class in the above: it i...
I think it is worth breaking down status into wealth, political power and popularity.
The last can be seen as zero sum in some situations. Consider a party there are N people you could try and talk to, but only time to speak to N/2. So you have to decide which half to talk to. If you had a strange mash up party of functional programmers and 16 year old girls. I doubt you would find a linear ordering of who people wanted to talk to. You would do better to separate it into two groups, and you might find orderings there.
People want to be talked to at parties/in general because it opens up more business/research opportunities.
These transactions, BTW, can be mediated even by relatively low-bandwidth interactions, such as text conversations. I find it fascinating how people can make each other feel various emotions just with words: anger, shame, pride. A forum such as Less Wrong isn't just a place for debate and argument, it is also very much a locus of social interaction. Keeping that in mind is important.
Sometimes I wish I could get that out of my mind. (*Mutters about the epistemic inefficiency of primate communication.*)
Sorry, status isn't about self-esteem. Status is about who you feel can beat you up and who you feel you can beat up. Two people meeting for the first time can instantly establish relative status by using body language that you'll find pretty hard to tie to self-esteem.
Virtually everyone could probably beat me up, including my little sister, and I find this irrelevant to my judgments of status.
The term "status" gets used on LessWrong a lot. Google finds 316 instances; the aggregate total for the phrases "low status" and "high status" (which suggest more precision than "status" by itself) is 170. By way of comparison, "many worlds", an important topic here, yields 164 instances.
We find the term used as an explanation, for instance, "to give offense is to imply that a person or group has or should have low status". In this community I would expect that a term used often, with authoritative connotations, and offered as an explanation could be tabooed readily, for instance when someone confused by this or that use asks for clarification: previous discussions of "high status" or "low status" behaviours seemed to flounder in the particular way that definitional arguments often do.
Somewhat to my surprise, there turned out not to be a commonly understood way of tabooing "status". Lacking a satisfactory unpacking of the "status" terms and how they should control anticipation, I decided to explore the topic on my own, and my intention here is to report back and provide a basis for further discussion.
The "Status" chapter of Keith Johnstone's 1979 book "Impro", previously discussed here and on OB, is often cited as a reference on the topic (follow this link for an excerpt); I'll refer to it throughout as simply "Johnstone". Also, I plan to entirely avoid the related but distinct concept of "signaling" in this post, reserving it for later examination.
My initial impression was that "status" had some relation to the theory of dominance hierarchies. Section 3 of Johnstone starts with:
Social animals have inbuilt rules which prevent them killing each other for food, mates, and so on. Such animals confront each other, and often fight, until a hierarchy is established, after which there is no fighting unless an attempt is made to change the ‘pecking order’. This system is found in animals as diverse as humans, chickens, and woodlice.
This reinforced an impression I had previously acquired: that the term "alpha male", often used in certain circles synonymously with "high status male", indicated an explicit link between the theoretical underpinnings of the term "status" and some sort of dominance theory.
However, substantiating this link turned out a more frustrating task than I had expected. For instance, I looked for primary sources I could turn to for a formal theoretical explanation of what explanatory work the term "alpha male" is supposed to carry out.
It seems that the term was originally coined by David Mech, who studied wolf packs in the 70's. Interestingly, Mech himself now claims the term was misunderstood and used improperly. Here is what David Mech says in a recent (2000) article:
The way in which alpha status has been viewed historically can be seen in studies in which an attempt is made to distinguish future alphas in litters of captive wolf pups [...] This view implies that rank is innate or formed early, and that some wolves are destined to rule the pack, while others are not.
Contrary to this view, I propose that all young wolves are potential breeders and that when they do breed they automatically become alphas (Mech 1970). [...] Thus, calling a wolf an alpha is usually no more appropriate than referring to a human parent or a doe deer as an alpha. Any parent is dominant to its young offspring, so "alpha" adds no information.
An informal survey of other literature suggests that "alpha male", referring specifically to the pack behaviour disowned by Mech, entered the popular vocabulary by way of dog trainer lore. My personal hunch is that it became entrenched thereafter because it had both a "sciencey" sound, and the appropriate connotations for people who adhered to certain views on gender relationships.
Stepping back to look at dominance theory as a whole, I found that they are not without problems. Pecking order may apply to chickens, but primates vary widely in social organization, lending little support to the thesis that dominance displays, dominance-submission behaviours and so on are as universal as Johnstone suggests and can therefore be thought to shed much light on the complex social organization of humans.
An often discussed example is the Bonobo chimpanzee, where females are dominant over males, and do not establish a dominance hierarchy among themselves, whereas males do; where the behaviours that tend to mediate social stratification is reconciliation rather than conflict, something that is also observed in other animal species, contrary to the prevailing view of dominance hierarchies.
This informal survey was interesting and turned up many surprises, but mostly it convinced me that dominance hierarchies were not a fruitful line of research if I was after a crisp meaning of "status" terms and explanations: either "status" was itself a muddle, or I needed to look for its underpinnings in other disciplines.
Early on in Johnstone there is an interesting discussion of status by way of his recollection of three very different school teachers. At various other points in the chapter he also refers to the stratification of human societies specifically, for instance when he discusses the master-servant relationship.
The teacher example was particularly interesting for me, because one of the uses I might have for status hypotheses is in investigating the Hansonian thesis "Schools aren't about education but about status", and what can possibly be done about that. But to think clearly about such issues one must, in the first place, clarify how the hypothesis "X is about status" controls anticipation about X!
I came across Max Weber (who I must say I hadn't heard of previously), described as one of the founders of modern sociology; and Weber's "three component theory of social stratification", which helped me quite a bit in making sense of some claims about status.
What I got from the Wikipedia summary is that Weber identifies three major dimensions of social stratification:
This list is interesting because of its predictive power: for instance, class and wealth tend to be properties of an individual that change slowly over time, and so when Johnstone refers to ways of elevating one's status within the short time span of a social interaction, we can predict that he isn't talking about class or wealth status.
Power status is more subject to sudden changes, but not usually as a result of informal social interactions: again, power status cannot be what is referred to in the phrase "high status behaviours". Power is very often positional, for instance getting elected President of a powerful country brings a lot of power suddenly, but requires vetting by an elaborate ritual. (Class status can often go hand in hand with power status, but that is not necessarily or systematically the case.)
Prestige status can be expected to depend on both long-term and short-term characteristics. Certain professions are seen as inherently prestigious, often independently of wealth: firemen, for instance. But within a given social stratum, defined by class and power, individuals can acquire prestige through their actions.This is applicable for wide ranges of group sizes. Scientists acquire prestige by working on important topics and publishing important results. Participants in an online community acquire prestige by posting influential articles which shape subsequent discussion, and so on.
But, while it struck me as conceivable to unpack terms like "high status behaviours" as referring to such changes in prestige status, it didn't seem entirely satisfactory. So I kept looking for clues.
Johnstone refers to status "the see-saw": he sees status transactions as a zero-sum game. To increase your status, he says, is necessarily to lower that of your interlocutor.
This seems at odds with seeing most references to status as meaning "prestige status", since you can acquire prestige without necessarily lower someone else's; also, you can acquire prestige without entering into an interactive social situation. (Think of how a mountaineer's prestige can rise upon the news that they have reached some difficult summit, ahead of their coming back to enjoy the attention.)
However, most of what Johnstone discusses seemed to make sense to me if analyzed instead as self-esteem transactions: interactive behaviour which raises or lowers another's self-esteem or yours.
There is lots of relevant theory to turn to. Some old and possibly discredited - I'm thinking here of "transactional analysis" which I came across years and years ago, which had the interesting concept of a "stroke", a behaviour whereby one raises another's self-esteem; this could also be relevant to analyzing the PUA theory of "negging". (Fun fact: TA is also the origin of the phrase "warm fuzzies".) Some newer and perhaps more solidly based on ev-psych, such as the recently mentioned sociometer theory.
Self-esteem is at any rate an important idea, whether or not we are clear on the underlying causal mechanisms. John Rawls notes that self-esteem is among the "primary social goods" (defined as "the things it is rational to want, whatever else you want", in other words the most widely applicable instrumental values that can help further a wide range of terminal values). It is very difficult to be luminous, to collaborate effectively or to conquer akrasia without some explicit attention to self-esteem.
So here, perhaps, is a fourth status component: the more temporary and more local "self-esteem status".
Where I part company with Johnstone is in seeing self-esteem transactions as a purely zero-sum game. And in fact his early discussion of the three teachers contradicts his own "see-saw" image, painting instead a quite different picture of "status".
He describes one of the teachers as a "low status player", one who couldn't keep discipline, twitched, went red at the slightest provocation: in other words, one with generally low self-esteem. The second he describes as a "compulsive high status player": he terrorized students, "stabbing people with his eyes", walked "with fixity of purpose". In my terms, this would be someone whose behaviours communicated low regard for others' self-esteem, but not necessarily high self-esteem. The third teacher he describes as "a status expert":
Much loved, never punished but kept excellent discipline, while remaining very human. He would joke with us, and then impose a mysterious stillness. In the street he looked upright, but relaxed, and he smiled easily.
To me, this looks like the description of someone with high self-esteem generally, who is able to temporarily affect his own and others' self-esteem, lowering (to establish authority) or raising (to encourage participation) as appropriate. When done expertly, this isn't manipulative, but rather a game of trust and rapport that people play in all social situations where safety and intimacy allow, and it feels like a positive sum game.
(These transactions, BTW, can be mediated even by relatively low-bandwidth interactions, such as text conversations. I find it fascinating how people can make each other feel various emotions just with words: anger, shame, pride. A forum such as Less Wrong isn't just a place for debate and argument, it is also very much a locus of social interaction. Keeping that in mind is important.)
Detailed analysis of how these transactions work, distilled into practical advice that people can use in everyday settings, is a worthwhile goal, and one that would also advance the cause of effective collaboration among people dedicated to thinking more clearly about the world they inhabit.
Let the discussion stick to that spirit.
