Status - is it what we think it is?

Applying the universally applicable anthropological technique reductio ad MMORPG, one surmises that the real question might be, "does 'group' mean what we think it means?"

Subject A is very funny and thus popular in guild chat - perhaps even the most popular guild member. Subject B is the official guild leader so others defer to her in certain matters. Subject C almost completely neglects guild chat, but he's a skilled and well-equipped cleric and thus always desired in small quest groups. Subject D is a wizard who isn't very good in small groups of in guild chat but her services are always in demand for high-end raids.

Who is the highest status? A meaningless question, in my opinion. What we're looking at is a a multidimensional thing that we're trying to force into a single ranking. No group is fixed, and no status hierarchy is single-variable-dependent.

The technical academic term for (1) Is prestige and (2) Is Dominance. Papers which distinguish the two are actually really interesting.

Being uncertain about one's status in a group seems to be much more taxing than being sure about one status even if one isn't at the top of the group.

A group of 10 males where nobody plays status games will often start to play status games when a single woman enters the group. There seems to be strong evolutionary pressure for competing for the favor of women.

A possible distinction between status and dominance: You are everybody's favourite sidekick. You don't dominate or control the group, nor do you want to, nor do you even voice any opinions about what the group should do. You find the idea of telling other people what to do to be unpleasant, and avoid doing so whenever you can. You would much rather be assigned complex tasks and then follow them through with diligence and pride. Everyone wants you in the group, they genuinely value your contribution, they care about your satisfaction with the project, and want you to be happy and well compensated.

By no means would I consider this role dominant, at least not in terms of controlling other people. (You might indeed be the decisive factor in the success of the group, or the least replaceable member). But it is certainly a high-status role; you are not deferred to but you are respected, and you are not treated as a replaceable cog. The president or boss knows your name, knows your family, and calls you first when something needs to be done.

I think many people aspire to this position and prefer it over a position of dominance.

A low-status person on this scale would be somebody ignored, disrespected, or treated as replaceable and irrelevant. You are unworthy of attention. When it is convenient others pretend you don't exist, and your needs, desires, and goals are ignored.

I think almost everyone desires high status by this measure. It is very different than dominance.

To me status is how seriously a person is taken by others. It is about influence (not zero-sum) rather than dominance (zero-sum). Status is an ad hominem shortcut that avoids Pascal's Mugging by giving low weight to the arguments put forth by low-status people. Often status is highly domain-dependent: for example, I would take Eliezer seriously on rationality, on fiction writing or on AI research, but not on MWI advocacy. In an extreme case you discussed before, a generally low-status person turns into a high-status one when credibly threatening someone with a bomb.

If you want a formal definition, I suppose you have to select

• a group of people,
• a member of the group (or maybe a non-member),
• a set of domains this group cares about,

and find a distribution of the prior given to the statements of this member in a given domain. If the distribution is localized enough, it makes sense to talk about that person's status in this domain for that group. If you find that for some person the distributions are similar across groups and/or domains, then you can talk about that person's status in a more general sense. In an extreme case, there are people whose opinion is taken as gospel on the wide variety of issues by diverse groups of people, e.g. Einstein on anything science-related. More examples: Reagan's quotes on anything policy-related among US conservatives, Krugman on politics/economics among US liberals, Kahneman on human thinking among LWers.

This definition allows one to actually calculate a person's status by polling group members for priors, implicitly or explicitly.

I just want to note here that Johnstone's book is amazing and I'm grateful to you for introducing me to it.

Very nice and illuminating conceptual analysis. Thanks!

These people who don't like to be in charge, what are they like, according to you and/or Johnstone? Less confident or just less ambitious? More commonly women, perhaps? I don't have a very clear model of their psychology.

Status isn't an end in itself. There are benefits associated with status. Higher status has more benefits. On the other hand, it takes a lot of effort to increase one's status and the enterprise is fraught with uncertainty. Playing the status game has its own opportunity costs and trade-offs.

At the high end, one runs into the Sword of Damocles. Being king has its perks, but it is a high-risk, high-stress position. There's always someone gunning for your spot, lying in wait to pounce when you show weakness. It's not even certain that the benefits of the position are worth the risks involved and the high chance of failure when pursuing it.

It seems to me that most people are willing to settle for a certain status depending on how good the benefits are and the difficulties involved in getting there. Once settled, they'd be fine with improving their status if it can be done cheaply, but may not think it worth expending a lot of effort.

Status isn't strictly zero sum. Some large subset of sexual status is. Also humans have many different concomitant status hierarchies.

The way status works looks analogous to the way Schelling points work: members of the group expect the other members to act a certain way towards member X, and also expect that everyone will expect everyone else to expect that, and so on. This is clearly how authority works (each grunt obeys the boss because he expects the other grants to obey and punish him if he doesn't, which is what all of them are thinking), and I suspect it might be a special case of the general case of status.

The value of strength, wealth, talent and etc. for high status would then go beyond their inherent usefulness in influencing people, by also acting as salient features that are more likely to become Schelling points. At the other end, each person would know not to ally with a coward because "nobody follows a coward", which would be a pretty natural Schelling point, but a similar behavior can arise if "it is known" that people born under the full moon are unlucky, and therefore nobody expects anyone else to follow someone born under a full moon...

This accords well, I believe, with the common observation that acting as one who expects to be assigned high status is an effective way to indeed be assigned high status.

Maybe I'm missing something, but the mystery of people wanting to be low status appears to vanish if we don't think of binary high/low status, but as a continuum going from highest to lowest status. Then we can see people not wanting to go for highest status (including, perhaps, because they don't think they can manage it), but that doesn't mean they want to be low status.

I find it useful to see status as "fuzzily ordinal", in that it's often possible to identify one or some higher status members of a group, one or some lower status members (or maybe "would-be members"), as well as some in the middle, even if it's not possible to order them precisely.

I really like Venkat's illustration of this in his Gervais Principle (as in "it's interesting and aesthetically pleasing", not necessarily as in "I have high confidence in its accuracy"), especially in this post.

See also the recent OB post Advice Shows Status

I tried to ask a very similar question, ended up at -4 with 3 answers...

http://lesswrong.com/lw/lta/is_status_really_that_simple/

I just don't think there are many features human social organization that can be usefully described by a one-dimensional array, the alleged left-right political divide perhaps being the canonical example. Take two books I have on my Kindle: Sirens of Titan and Influx. While one can truly say the latter is a vastly more terrible book than the former, it would be absurd to say they--and every other book I've read--should be placed in a stack that uniquely ranks then against one another. And it's not a matter of comparing apples and oranges--because you can compare apples and oranges--it's that the comparison is not scalar, perhaps not even mathematically representable at all.

In terms of status, know one knows what the word means. If we base it on influence, then some people who had the most lasting impacts where despised in their day. Additionally, people who wield power over others are generally resented if not loathed by subalterns. As with economics, with social science you can pretty much get the result you want by choosing the slice that yields the results closest to the answer you are looking for.

"Status" is a... multifaceted word with many different (but related) meanings in different contexts.

I think my crude definition of status would be "respect that you get by default before the specifics of the situation come into play". Or, in LW terms, the prior for respect due to this person before the evidence becomes apparent.

This continues to be a puzzling topic...

My most recent explicit thought about this had to to with teamwork: it's become a commonplace that "conflict in a team isn't actually bad", and I was thinking that conflict per se may not be counterproductive, but I would certainly view engaging in dominance contests as a waste of time all around.

When I coach teams I often consciously adopt (and advocate for others in a similar position) a "low posture" - a cluster of heuristics, really, such as "I'm happy to help the group work through a problem but I'm not the one who makes the decision", or "invest significant time in hearing people out".

There can also be a question of perspective: some people are determined to view the world through dominance-tinted glasses, others to see it in tints of warm fuzzy.

In most scientific fields status is defined as access (or entitlement) to resources (i.e.: food and females, mostly). Period. And they tend to take this measure very seriously and stick to it (it has many advantages, easy to measure, evolutionary central, etc.). Both your definitions are only two accidental aspects of having status. Presumably, if you have - and in order to have - higher access to resources you have to be respected, liked, and have influence over your group. I think the definition is elegant exactly because all the things we perceive as status have as major consequences/goals higher access to resources.

Moreover, I don't think it is the case people can have warm fuzzies for everyone they meet. There's a limited amount of warm fuzzies to be spent. Of course, you can hack the warm-fuzzy system by using such and such body language, just like you could hack mating strategies using PUA techniques before everyone knew about it. But that's a zero-sum game.

Different people are comfortable with different levels of status; there are a lot of studies confirming that. If you put a regular gorilla as leader of a group of silverbacks he will freak out, because his trachea is most certainly to be lying on the floor in a few seconds. For very similar reasons, I will freak out if you give me a Jiu-Jitsu black belt and threw me into a dojo. This does not mean that same said regular gorilla will not fight with everything he has to achieve a higher status within certain safety boundaries. People are comfortable with different levels of status, and their current level is not one of them, nor is one too high to be safe. Nobody can be happy. That is the nature of status. (Also, there are limited resources - or so your brain thinks - so it is important to make other people miserable as well.)