Peterson Academy | Rob Henderson | The Psychology of Social Status | Lecture 1 (Official)

A question that has long interested philosophers, psychologists: what motivates people? There are these these phrases: "follow the money." "Money is the root of all evil." "Money makes the world go around." But in this course, I'll be suggesting there's another overlooked incentive, and that is social status.

Status is interesting because it lives in the minds of other people. You don't get to decide how much status you have. I grew up in foster homes. I never even expected to go to college. My unusual life trajectory has naturally led me to become curious about what is status. Humans naturally pursue status with ferocity. Status undergirds so many of our decisions in life, often unknowingly. It's a resource as real as oxygen or water. We're chronically conflicted. We want to fit in and we want to stand out. We want status, but we also want to be accepted. We're constantly walking that sort of tightrope.

Good morning. Um, my name is Dr. Rob Henderson, and I'm the instructor for this course. So, these lectures will be based on ideas I've been researching and thinking about and developing for several years now. And of course, I'll be drawing on the work of many other brilliant researchers and scholars and their studies and their ideas.

Uh, I received my PhD in psychology from Cambridge University last year. And one of the benefits of taking a course with a recent PhD graduate is that most of the studies I cite throughout these lectures will be recent. Uh, this is the latest stuff, the most cutting-edge work. Um, if you take courses with some senior professors, often you'll find that many of the references and studies that they cite will tend to cluster around a certain point early on in their career. Those are the findings that made the strongest impression on them. Uh, and I'm no different. I just finished. But in this case, it's an advantage. Uh, much of the research I'll be discussing has been published after the wake of the replication crisis.

How many of you are familiar with the psychology replication crisis? Any? A few of you? Yeah. So that was quite a large disruption in several fields in psychology. Uh, but there have been many formal changes made that have improved the quality of research. Things like pre-registration, meaning you have to formally announce your hypothesis before you start the study instead of finding a significant result and then sort of ex post facto rationalizing, "Oh, this is the finding we predicted all along." Uh, larger sample sizes, better statistical methods, making the data publicly available so other researchers and statisticians can check the work. So, these are just a few of the changes that have been implemented over the last seven or eight years. Um, so broadly, I'm confident that the ideas I'll be presenting in these lectures are solid. It's not to say that all of them will unfailingly replicate, but I'm confident in these findings.

So we can, uh, yeah, get into the actual content of the course. So there's been a perennial question about what has what motivates people. So psychologists, philosophers, and theologians have long wondered, you know, what drives people. So here are some of the things we'll be discussing in lecture one. We'll be discussing social status, the evolutionary and developmental roots of the desire for status.

So here's Abraham Maslow, 20th-century psychologist. Some of you may be familiar with his hierarchy of needs, but here is how he defined status: "Reputation or prestige defined as respect or esteem from other people, recognition, attention, importance or appreciation." The philosopher Agnes Callard: "What is status? It's how much value other people accord you." This is a very simple definition. It's an intuitive definition, and this is probably the simplest way to remember what status is.

Status is interesting because it lives in the minds of other people. You don't get to decide how much status you have. You can't just say, "Hey, everyone, I have high status." And people will say, "Prove it." And they get to decide.

So why do we care about status? There's a neuroscientist I really like, Michael Gazzaniga, who says, "When you get up in the morning, you think about status. You think about where you are in relation to your peers." Um, so Gazzaniga is a neuroscientist. There's a lot of interesting work within neuroscience about what people think about when they have free time, when their mind starts to wander. So when you're not focused on a task immediately at hand, what areas of the brain are active? And neuroscientists call these areas of the brain, when your mind is wandering, the default mode network. And what they find is that the default mode network, the regions of the brain that are active, overlap with the regions of the brain that are active when people think about their social lives, when they think about themselves in relation to other people, when they think about other people and how they are evaluated. Um, and what this suggests is that when we have free time, when our mind starts to wander, what do we think about? We actually think about what Gazzaniga is talking about here. That's where our mind seems to naturally drift. Um, when you don't have any sort of external pressures or when you're not immediately focusing on something in front of you.

So, I mentioned we'll be talking about the evolutionary roots of psychology and our psychology. So, what is the field of evolutionary psychology? There's a nice definition here from the evolutionary psychology professor Tanya Reynolds, a recent definition. She defines evolutionary psychology as "examining how the mind has been shaped to solve recurring problems faced by human ancestors. It contends that natural selection has produced mental adaptations that enhanced our ancestors' ability to survive and reproduce." It's important to remember here, a lot of people will conflate environments when they say, "You know, this is what's advantageous for survival and reproduction." They think that it applies to the present moment, but it doesn't. Humans, you know, we evolve more slowly, or the environment evolves faster than we do, is one way to think about it.

So, the way that our minds and our bodies have been shaped, 300,000 years roughly of human evolution, this is roughly the sort of modern form of Homo sapiens. 300,000 years ago, we lived in mostly nomadic hunter-gatherer groups until about 10,000 years ago. And then with the agricultural revolution, we stayed in sort of stationary areas where we grew food and formed villages and cities and so forth. But for most of our history, we lived in these small nomadic groups as hunter-gatherers. And that's where our psychology evolved, in the Pleistocene, in the ancestral environment, which I'll be describing throughout this course. That's where our minds are adapted for.

So, one way to think about it is a common example is food. So, 20,000 years ago, if you had food, it was in your best interest to eat as much of it as possible because you don't know when you're going to see food again. I saw this documentary of these hunter-gatherers, I think somewhere in Central America, and they were just sort of, I think they were on a hunt, and then they saw a beehive. And they immediately stopped everything and like they grabbed that beehive and like they had little techniques down. It was amazing to see how they were able to sort of evade getting stung and take this beehive down, and they just gorged themselves on this honey. And that's what you should do if you're in an environment where calories are scarce. But now, in the modern environment with an abundance of food, this natural adaptation to eat when high calorically dense food is available is perhaps maladaptive with the rise of obesity and associated health issues.

Okay. So, keep that in mind as we go through this course. When I say this is a mental adaptation or we evolved to do XYZ, this is in the ancestral environment thousands of years ago, not in the modern environment of 2023. Okay.

So, why do humans care about status? Um, well, humans evolved to pursue status because it leads to reproductive benefits. So, reproductive benefits. This is the currency of evolution is offspring. And so a lot of the motivations that humans have are associated with the attainment of attracting romantic partners, survival, and reproduction, right? So, securing allies, territory, resources, mates, but ultimately the currency is offspring. Reproduction is actually what evolution cares about, not actually survival. Survival is only important within an evolutionary framework in so far as it allows you to live long enough to reproduce.

So, there are traits, for example, that will actually be detrimental for your survival, but if it enhances or aids you on your path to reproduction, then the trait will actually proliferate. And in contrast, if there's a trait that will enhance your survival but damage your reproductive prospects, then your genes will not spread, and the trait will not proliferate within the population. So, an example might be risk-taking. So, risk-taking is actually a trait that can be very damaging to your survival. If you take risks and it increases your odds of death, not good for survival. But if risk-taking increases your access to certain kinds of resources and ultimately impresses potential romantic partners, then you will find that this trait will spread, the genetic properties will spread throughout a population, and this will increase the likelihood of that person or those genes spreading.

So, in contrast, if you have someone who's very preoccupied with survival, they have no interest in mating whatsoever. All they want to do is live to be 100 years old, not interested in romance, not interested in anything. They just want to do all they can to survive and avoid any kind of risk. I mean, that's great for that individual person, but it's bad for their genes. And so we are the descendants of people who cared about reproduction, not necessarily the people who cared about survival. Our ancestors had to walk that tightrope, right? They wanted to live long enough to reproduce. And that's where we came from.

So, okay, we talked about that reproduction is what evolution cares about. We'll do things that enhance reproduction potential, not just at the expense of survival, but also at the expense of happiness. People will do things that are good for their genes but bad for themselves. We'll talk a bit more about this later. Um, but a lot of our emotions, guilt, shame, embarrassment, humiliation, these are terrible feelings, but they do serve an adaptive purpose. And for our ancestors, they served the purpose of modifying our behavior to increase our appeal to potential romantic partners and ultimately increase the odds of having offspring. Greed, shame, envy, these kinds of things. These feelings tend to peak at the age when we are most interested in mating. So, a lot of our most intense emotions will be clustered in our teens and our 20s. And you'll sort of find that across the lifespan, the intensity of emotions tends to dwindle. Emotions serve a critical role, which we'll discuss more later as well.

Okay. So, I mentioned earlier that people talk about money as the be-all and end-all of why people do what they do. And throughout this course, I'll be making the case that status is an important incentive as well. It's a resource as real as oxygen or water. And often, people will actually exchange material wealth for status.

So, an example of this: I read this article a couple of years ago in the New York Times about influencers paying for followers. Why would you do that, right? If money is what makes the world go round, you know, why would you pay for followers? I guess, you know, you can make the argument, "Oh, the followers, maybe you could sell something to them. It's an investment." I don't think that's what's going on, though. I think there's a lot of investment involved in sort of raising your social prominence. And follower count is a very visible metric. Also, like displaying your bank account and your money and that kind of thing. It's gobbledygook. Well, I mean, if someone posts online, "Here's how much money I have in my bank account," people would mock that person, right? Laugh at this person. But if you say, "Hey, I just got to a million followers. Everyone, thanks." That actually raises your status even more to sort of post that and to highlight that.

There's an example here that I like to give. I had this conversation a few years ago with a lecturer at Yale. He was a non-tenured lecturer, and he told me that he received an offer for a tenure-track position at a university somewhere in the Midwest. I want to say it was Indiana. It's probably wasn't, so I'll just say Indiana. And the job offered more money. It offered tenure. It offered job security. And that's kind of the dream job of most academics: to get a tenure-track job somewhere. And this person had a non-tenure-track, low-paying job at Yale. And I asked him, "Are you going to take this job?" And he said, "No, it's tempting, but no." I said, "Well, why not?" And he replied, "The name brand of Yale is just too valuable. Like, I'm not going to." And so this guy is choosing to live in more economically precarious circumstances simply because it probably impresses people more when he says, "I'm a lecturer at Yale," than, "I'm a junior professor at Indiana University." So, this is one reason why I think that status is so important for human behavior choices.

So, I mentioned before, status isn't only just one thing. There are two different forms of status. There are two facets here. So, there's dominance and there's prestige. Dominance is evolutionarily older. Prestige seems to be mostly prominent among humans. It's more pronounced among humans. You will see some rudimentary elements of prestige among chimpanzees and primates, but in the animal kingdom, dominance prevails. Among humans, it's a bit more complicated, as we'll see.

So, what is dominance? We'll talk about dominance first, the evolutionarily older form of dominance, or status, rather. So, dominance: it's associated with narcissism, aggression, disagreeableness. This is in humans specifically. And how dominance works is people instill fear in others through coercion, intimidation, being confrontational, sort of either using violence or the threat of violence to get people to do what you want. And so why do individuals obtain status? Because of what they can do to them. This is one way to them. So, they can inflict costs, pain, humiliation, disfigurement, the threat of violence, and so on. And so, in response to this, people are willing to sort of defer to a dominant individual. But as we'll see, this type of status, this route to social status, is unstable and often doesn't work out very well for the dominant individual.

So, here's an example. This is a recent example that I just read of what a dominant individual is. So, this is Comrade Duch. He was a commandant for the communists in Cambodia. And this is from a book called "The Lost Executioner" about what occurred in the communist revolution in Cambodia. It wasn't until he returned to the capital to work at Tol Sleng that he realized how terrible and terrifying his new boss could be. His new boss, Comrade Duch, said that Duch was hot-tempered and irrational, particularly with his staff. He became angry without thinking and ignored their reasons. He said he gave execution orders without hesitation. They lived in constant fear, ruled by the whims of an arbitrary boss. This regime only lasted about four years. They sort of speed-ran a communist revolution and destroyed their country after just a few years. So, that is an example of a dominant leader.

Prestige, on the other hand, is conferred to people for what they can do for you. So, dominance is inflicting costs. Prestige is conferring benefits. So, prestige is associated with stable self-esteem, social acceptance, conscientiousness. So, here's a picture of Stephen Hawking. He was a very high, he is still in the minds of many or most people, a high-status person, and he's not a dominant individual. He's a prestigious individual because of his achievements in physics and in science and in science communication.

It's freely conferred. So, dominance is when people try to grab status and force people to bend to their will. Prestige, on the other hand, is freely conferred. Someone does something impressive or important or prominent or beneficial, and we think of that person as having status. We confer this kind of prestige to them. So, what can they do? They can provide benefits, teach things, grant access to resources. And often, you'll receive a status boost from being associated with them. Right? So, if I saw Stephen Hawking, I might be like, "Hey, can we get a picture?" And then you post the picture online. So, even being around them, being in their circle, can elevate your status, even if you yourself haven't done much impressive, but it kind of communicates that, you know, like I'm impressive enough to be associated with this high-status, prestigious person that they would even want to be around me.

So, we'll return to dominance and talk about its origins. There's a discussion of dominance hierarchies. You'll see this in a lot of the animal research. You know, chimpanzees have a sort of an established social rank, a social hierarchy. They usually have an alpha chimp. He's not necessarily the strongest chimp, but he can be sort of physically aggressive. You'll seldom see the weakest chimp become the top of the hierarchy within a chimpanzee community. Chickens have literal pecking orders where chickens will peck one another, and then this chicken can peck that one but not that one. And they sort of break out and fight each other, and then very clearly an order will be established as to who can peck who. And the one who doesn't get pecked at all is the sort of the alpha chicken. So, yeah, wolves as well. Wolves will engage in these sort of ritualistic combat situations where often one wolf will submit to the victor and expose their neck to the dominant wolf. And this is sort of communicating that you've won. You could kill me if you want. And often the dominant wolf will actually not kill because they work in packs, but they have to fight each other to sort of suss out who's going to be the leader of this wolf pack.

So, dominance works on avoidance rather than approach motivations. So, the idea here is that we do what dominant people want because we want to avoid the costs that they might inflict. So, yes, they bargain by inflicting costs. This isn't to say, though, that the subordinates or those underneath the dominant will unfailingly do what the dominant wants. Subordinates can bargain as well by withholding benefits. And we'll talk about more of the dynamics of this later. But among animals, subordinates bargain. You know, they'll withhold grooming among apes. They'll maybe conceal food, they won't share. They'll relinquish cooperation when it's convenient and the costs are low. But at least among animals, and perhaps among human organizations as well, hierarchies are not necessarily a bad thing. A dominance hierarchy among humans usually looks pretty ugly. Among animals, it may be beneficial for them. Prestige hierarchies among humans tend to be quite functional and adaptive. But hierarchies in general, you know, there's a discussion, you know, should we all be equal? Should we have an egalitarian society with no hierarchies? There do seem to be some benefits to hierarchies, depending on what they're based on, prestige or dominance.

Among animals, hierarchies seem to keep the peace. So, there are some interesting studies with macaque monkeys, for example, where researchers have essentially played this game. They'll look at a community of monkeys and they'll knock out the top monkey, the alpha monkey. They'll remove him, and what tends to occur as a consequence is bloodshed. Immediately, with no leader, the monkeys start to tear one another apart. And what they're trying to do is basically figure out who's the toughest, who's going to take that top spot again. And then they have the new alpha monkey, and then the researchers take him out, see what happens. And they did this a few times. And what they basically concluded is that actually hierarchies are sources of information for the animals. You know, once the hierarchy is established, the animals know, okay, so that person's here, that person's on top, you know, this monkey.

Something similar seems to happen in prison systems as well. Often, when a leader in a prison gang leaves, there's a sort of an unstable situation within the prison system within that gang. And when newcomers arrive to prison as well, this is interesting. When a newcomer arrives, often one of the long-term inmates will challenge the newcomer to a fight because they want to know where this newcomer would stand. Often, what will happen, the new criminal will arrive, someone will pick a fight, and then the other inmates will start to cheer them on because they want to see what this new guy is made of. Where will he fit in this hierarchy? However, when two inmates who've been in prison for a long time are in the sort of early stages of a potential fight, the other inmates will often interfere. They already know who would win. They have this information already. So, they just want to break this up. They don't want to disrupt and destabilize the community. The hierarchy's already been established. These two don't need to fight if they've been here a long time and we already know.

Okay. So, hierarchies are sort of informational sources. Okay. So, high rank in a dominance hierarchy. There was an interesting study on chimps recently which found that, well, unsurprisingly, attaining high status in a dominance hierarchy is energetically costly. It's also stressful, was associated with elevated levels of glucocorticoids, which is a hormone associated with stress. And so, what these researchers suggest is that achieving dominance can increase a chimpanzee's odds of reproduction, but it will also potentially come at the cost of reducing their lifespan and increasing general negative emotion and stress. And so, we talked about this earlier, right? That sometimes traits will evolve that will increase the odds of reproduction at the expense of long-term survival. And so, yeah, these researchers suggest a cost of dominance rather than a stress of subordination approach. Maybe for longevity in these communities, it's better to be a subordinate, but for reproductive opportunities, it's better to be dominant, even though it can potentially inflict harm on you in these chimpanzee communities.

Okay. So, this is a great book from the personality psychologist Jessica Tracy. She's talking specifically here about humans. So, she says, "Dominant people pay for their less kindly road to status by incurring the dislike and even hatred of their fellow group members. And for many of us, this price is simply too high. We'd rather be low on the totem pole than be perceived as arrogant and domineering." And we'll talk a bit more about the potential hazards of seeking status via dominance later in the lecture.

Let's talk a bit about prestige, the other route to status. So, prestige seems to be uniquely human. I mentioned before that you can see rudimentary signs among chimpanzees and other apes, but it really is a prominent feature among humans. And based on admiration rather than submission. It's based on approach motivation rather than avoidance. So, with dominance, they achieve status because people want to avoid the costs that they may inflict on them. Prestigious individuals, we tend to want to approach them. We tend to seek them out. "Oh, this person is high status," and we want to become closer with them, mentioned before, because they can confer benefits. So, potentially, there's some kind of benefit that you could receive from being affiliated with them in some way. And we freely confer status to these individuals.

In the evolutionary or ancestral environment, humans attained this form of status, they've attained prestige, by being skillful and knowledgeable. So, whether in hunting or warfare or navigation or storytelling or identifying sources of potentially critical resources, tool-making, and so on. And that property of our psychology exists today where, I mean, there's this sort of interesting conflation now where we confer prestige to people who are knowledgeable, and sometimes people obtain prestige because they're not knowledgeable, but we assume that they have knowledge. You know, like this whole idea of "famous for being famous," where someone is very prominent, they're some kind of public figure, maybe because they can eat a lot of food on YouTube or something. But because they have millions and millions of subscribers, people will want their take on things. Like, "Oh, this guy can eat 10,000 calories in one meal. What do you think about what's going on in Russia and Ukraine?" Like somehow people will think, "Oh, like this guy, because he has so much social attention, he probably has some useful knowledge to share about other topics."

So, okay, more on prestige rank disparities. How do these emerge? I mentioned before: hunting, warfare, navigation, storytelling, and so on. And yeah, in hunter-gatherer communities, which consist of about 150 people, not everyone is equal on the socially valued traits. Not everyone is as talented as the others in hunting and warfare and so on. And so, these rank disparities tend to emerge based on what people are good at. And so, yeah, we mentioned exceptional knowledge, exceptional skills in valued domains. What's interesting, though, and we'll talk a bit more about this in a minute, is that even though people may attain high rank within these societies, often they'll downplay it. So, in hunter-gatherer communities that exist today that anthropologists and researchers have studied, sometimes there will be leaders and headmen and chiefs and big men and so on. And often what they find is that these socially prominent individuals will sort of downplay. They'll display a lot of humility, self-effacement. They don't want to attract negative attention or the potential envy of their peers. And we'll talk about envy more later too.

Okay. So, yeah, we got there. So, yeah, we'll talk about this transition from dominance to prestige. So, dominance among humans, dominance hierarchies tend to be unstable and often hazardous, both for the person who's attempting to achieve dominance but also for the others as well. The reason for this is documented in this terrific book, "Hierarchy in the Forest," by Christopher Boehm. I wrote a review for it on my Substack last year, I think it was. And so, what Boehm basically argues in this book, and this is sort of a landmark book, one of the most important books in the field of the study of hunter-gatherers, is that human communities in the ancestral environment and in existing hunter-gatherer communities today, the few that remain, they tend to be relatively egalitarian. They tend to have status-leveling mechanisms such that people are roughly equal in social status, that one person doesn't rise too high above the others.

The reasons he gives for this: there's been a transition in human evolution where pre-humans, our ancestors before we took on our modern form as Homo sapiens, our early ancestors were more like existing apes today, very dominance-oriented, chimpanzees and gorillas and so on. And even bonobos, a lot of people think they'll read about bonobos and how they're far more peaceful than chimpanzees, but if you compare bonobos to humans, bonobos too are actually far more violent than human beings are. Yes, they're like, you know, one-hundredth as violent as chimps, but chimpanzees are about 550 to a thousand times more violent than humans are to one another, to their own peers. And so, early humans, they were sort of dominance-oriented, and then as we transitioned into hunter-gatherer communities, there was this shift away from dominance. Humans didn't like dominance, and they found ways to create these mechanisms such that people would not rise too high in the status hierarchy. And how did this occur? This was basically through the slow and gradual elimination of bullies.

Christopher Boehm suggests three factors that led to egalitarian hunter-gatherer communities. Egalitarian meaning status equal. The invention of hunting weapons and the advent of large-game hunting. So, people could essentially, once the advent of toolmaking and weapons arose, people could inflict violence on others, on other human beings, with little cost to themselves. So, often, if you watch nature documentary videos or something, or even in fights among humans, if multiple people gang up on one individual unarmed, the person can usually inflict a bit of damage on the others, even if they're ultimately defeated. But with the rise of arrows and spears and so on, people could kill another individual with little harm done to themselves. And this seems to have been first, these weapons were first used for hunting, and then transitioned into using them for warfare and for taking out members of one's own community. And then the development of a large brain and cognitive and linguistic capacities. So, conspiracies, rumors, gossip, innuendo, and so on. People could form whisper networks. So, early humans could basically say, "So, the people who were killed in these communities tended to be bullies, what you would think of as a domineering, dominant alpha male type, someone who's trying to take all the food, maybe try to sleep with someone else's wife, try to take more resources than other people believe that they should." And so, the other, maybe physically smaller and less dominance-oriented males would basically conspire with one another and say, "Hey, this guy's a problem." And then they'd get their spears and take them out.

There's a story that I read about some hunter-gatherers a few months ago, I want to say it was actually in this book that we'll be talking about next, where basically, so there's a hunter-gatherer group. There was a bully, and he was kind of a risk-taker. The other guys, you know, they're out on a hunt, and they ask him, they dare him, and they say, "We bet you can't climb into the top of this tree and get that piece of fruit up there." And so the guy drops his weapons. And they didn't like this guy for the reasons I mentioned. He was kind of a bully. So he's like, "Oh yeah, I'll get that piece of fruit." Takes his weapons off, climbs up to the top of the tree, and when he comes down, the other guys picked up his weapons and stab him to death. And that's sort of how we became a bit more docile. And we'll talk about that now, but that's an example of the process that occurred.

And this gets us to the self-domestication hypothesis. So, this is Richard Wrangham's idea. Richard Wrangham is an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, a brilliant scholar. He wrote this excellent book, "The Goodness Paradox." So, I mentioned before that if you compare within-group physical aggression among chimpanzees to human hunter-gatherer communities, chimps are 150 to 550 times more likely than humans to inflict violence against their peers. So, these are people they live with, not some enemy or outgroup. This is among their own peer group. Chimps are far more brutal, and bonobos are also more violent as well.

So, we'll talk about the self-domestication hypothesis, which is roughly what I had mentioned before, that early humans were a bit more, say, wild, so to speak. There were more bullies and dominance-oriented individuals. Gradually, we sort of weeded them out, and a few, it's not to say that these traits completely disappeared from the population, but they're far less prominent and prevalent now. You're far less likely to see this kind of pervasive overt violence, especially within communities. People are far more docile and peaceful relative to our nearest evolutionary relatives.

And so, this is Wrangham's idea of coalitionary proactive aggression. This is what actually distinguishes humans from chimpanzees and bonobos and orangutans and so on. It's not tribalism. Other apes can be tribal too. They also form groups. You know, if you watch nature documentaries, you'll see chimpanzees go on a hunt against other chimpanzee groups if they're competing for resources or for females and so on. Wrangham makes this distinction between coalitionary proactive aggression and coalitionary reactive aggression.

So, talk about reactive aggression first. Reactive aggression is, an example of this would be, if one chimpanzee just goes up to another chimp and pushes him, the other chimp will immediately lose his mind and try to kill the one who just did that. They're extremely on this hair-trigger temperament, very quick, very impulsive, hot-tempered, sort of ready to throw down at all times. Coalitionary proactive aggression is what distinguishes humans. So, early humans, as I mentioned, through this process of self-domestication, we weeded out or eliminated those hot-tempered humans, primarily males, which led to us being sort of more docile among our peer groups. But this coalitionary proactive aggression, rather than being hot-tempered, it's sort of the reverse of that, where it's sort of associated with strategic, oriented, calm, rational planning.

Think about the way that humans carry out warfare, right? Like if someone attacks one group, the other group doesn't immediately just lose their mind and launch all the weapons and go after them. They sort of pause and step back and think, "Okay, what are we doing now? How can we best hurt that other group?" And this works at the individual level too. If you push one of your friends or something, they're not immediately going to try to kill you like a chimpanzee would, but if you do it enough times, they may start to slowly plan, "How can I get this guy back? You know, what can I do to this person?" So, it's associated more with a sort of a calm, deliberate, calculated planning. And this is what makes us unusual. And Wrangham claims that this gradual transition from weeding out the impulsive and temperamental males and this transition to us being a bit more docile and calm around our peers has also allowed us to be far more vicious to our outgroup. This sort of transition to planning, to strategy, to impulse control and so on. It's good for our ingroup, but terrible for our outgroup. We tamed ourselves to be kind to those closest to us, to our community, to our social circle. And it also allows us to sort of plan large-scale killings.

Wrangham, in this book, he says something along the lines of, I'm paraphrasing here, but you know, we talk about something like genocide as inhuman, but Wrangham says actually it's uniquely human. Only humans have ever carried out a genocide where they try to take out an entire population of humans. I should mention here that when I talk about ingroup and outgroup, we'll talk a bit more about it, not a lot in this course, but ingroup and outgroup, these are terms that vary. You know, your ingroup could be your sports team, for example. It could be your neighbors, your city, your state, your community. It could be your ethnic group, but not necessarily. As you'll see with sports teams and militaries, people of different ethnic groups can view themselves as part of the same team against an outgroup, even if the outgroup has members of their same shared ethnic background. And you see something like Russia, Ukraine, for example. These are two groups that are very similar in appearance and ancestry, and yet they're going to war with one another. So, ingroup and outgroup, these are not like they're not clearly defined, hard and fast terms. There's a lot of dynamics that underlie these ideas.

And I don't want to close you out with this idea here. I once heard a psychologist say that a psychopath is someone who treats their ingroup the way that ordinary people treat their outgroup. So, that sort of vicious, impulsive, callousness, this disregard for their feelings, this tendency to dehumanize them. So, psychopaths kind of view everyone this way, regardless of whether they're the same group or not. But ordinary people, when they think of outsiders, someone from the opposite sports team or the opposite political party or something along those lines, if things get too out of hand, we can start to think in that sort of psychopathic way of like, "They're actually not human. They don't feel. They're sort of unthinking, unfeeling," and we sort of tend to dehumanize them.

Okay. So, a bit more on prestige. I think prestige is more interesting than dominance too. There's a book here, "Very Important People," by the sociologist Ashley Mears. In this book, she kind of goes undercover as a model for nightclubs. I think this was in New York City. And what she says in her book: "Free things are a clear marker of status in the VIP world. Free entry, drinks, and dinner signal recognition of a person's social worth. I always said in nightlife, it's not what you can spend, it's what you get for free. That's real power." So, again, we'll talk more about the actual definition of power later. Just kind of using it in a more colloquial way here, but so, here she's sort of getting at this idea of prestige, right? It's freely conferred. Like, you're such a high-status person. You don't have to pay anything to get in. Come on in. You're sort of elevating the status of this nightclub just by your very presence. So, come on in.

And so, dominance is kind of, you know, it's archaic, old. Like I said, it's prevalent in the animal kingdom. And it makes intuitive sense that if you're going to get hurt for not doing this, then you're just not going to do this, or you're going to listen to this person if they could credibly inflict harm on you. But prestige requires a bit of foresight. You have to start to think ahead, like, "Oh, this person is high status. I'm going to approach them. I'm going to build a relationship with them." You have to think a bit more long-term about the rewards that you could receive from building this relationship with them. And this is why this is another reason why it's a bit more prominent among human beings because we have this capacity to think ahead in a way that other animals don't.

Yeah, so here's prestige. You know, I mentioned before, prestige conferring status freely. You know, we confer status because we want to, not because we have to. I mean, prestige is interesting, right? Like, how do these ads work? If you just put a brand name next to a hot celebrity, and somehow this works to get people to want to buy that more. So, prestige isn't, I mean, it can be used for other things. It can't, you know, besides fancy washes and sugar water, prestige can be used for noble ends as well.

So, there was an op-ed about 10, 11, no, 10 years ago, 2013, by Angelina Jolie. So, she wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about getting screened for breast cancer and how this probably saved her life. And so, some researchers actually looked at the impact of this op-ed and saw a massive increase in the number of women getting breast cancer screenings after this op-ed was published. And even after six months, there were still surprisingly high rates of women getting breast cancer screenings after this op-ed. It doesn't really, I mean, there's something interesting here, right? Because, you know, if a doctor writes an op-ed in the New York Times saying, "Hey, get a breast cancer screening." Ah, okay, fine. Doctor telling you. Angelina Jolie does it. Whoa. Angelina Jolie says to get breast cancer screening. Let me. And so, she used her prominence to raise awareness of this important issue. And, yeah, researchers dubbed this the "Angelina Effect." So, this is how prestige works. Just by the fact that she's sort of prominent and high status and sort of at the apex of this social ladder, that we're far more willing to listen to what she has to say. Even this issue affected her personally, but it's not as if she has special medical expertise in this. And yet, people were willing to listen.

So, okay, status is not power, right? So, we've been talking a bit about status. I've mentioned power a couple of times, but they're not the same thing. Power has a very specific definition in psychological research. What is power? It's control over access to resources. So, if someone can control whether you receive a paycheck, or control whether you can enter a nightclub, or can control whether you receive a promotion or not, that's power. It's not the same thing as status. Just because someone can control whether you receive a promotion, it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to confer any kind of prestige to them. Dominance is a tricky question there, but the person clearly has power. Status is something separate from that.

Power seems to be a novel development in human evolution, simply because, as I said before, hunter-gatherer communities are primarily egalitarian. There's not any one individual who wields sort of immense outsized power. There can be, like I said, big men and chiefs and so on. They wield a bit more social influence, but it's not as if they can control who gets to eat or not, or who gets to have a wife or not. There's not any one individual who has that level of power in a small-scale human society. Where status is something that has existed for a long time. And so, yeah, this quote from Mao Zedong: "Power grows from the barrel of a gun." And I think this gets at this idea, you know, like power is something that you need, like you need sort of immense resources and a very serious, credible threat.

In order to control access. So power sort of relies on the on force or the threat of force, um, you know, if if someone tries to control access to resources and he doesn't have violence to back it up, then people will just take take the resource from them.

Um, and so power is something that that is uh that is novel. So status is not power. Olympic athletes, here's an example. So you gold medalists, this is Michael Phelps. Um, he has high status. You know, he's prestige. He's reached uh sort of the pinnacle of of of uh his sport. Uh, but he doesn't have power, right? Like Michael Phelps doesn't get to decide, you know, who gets to eat or who gets money, who gets promotion, anything like that, right? We confer a lot of a lot of status to him.

And so nightclub bouncers, I used this this example earlier. So, you know, you're not necessarily going to think that, you know, a nightclub bouncer is the most sort of impressive or prominent or important person in the world. Uh, but they do get to decide whether you get to the nightclub. They have high power and low status.

Um, yeah, I'll tell you, uh, yeah, I'll tell you this story. Um, so I was enlisted in the Air Force, uh, you know, years ago, years and years ago. And um when I arrived at my first duty station, uh you have to go through this uh sort of orientation, this sort of first-term airman's orientation. And the the classroom had uh they had to have a class leader who reported to the instructor and sort of, you know, told them what was going on with the class. And um so most of us, you know, we were relatively new, had one or two stripes. you know, in the military, there's like a very visible uh ranking hierarchy where as you move up, they literally sew a stripe on, you know, your sleeve and like add another one and you can see like, oh, this guy, you know, has high status um and and power as well. Um, and actually more power than than status uh as the story will illustrate.

So, so we had this guy who was our class leader, he had three stripes, the rest of us had one or two. And although he had power, you know, he could, you know, he he could potentially issue sort of disciplinary measures or uh potentially get us, you know, maybe demoted. He probably couldn't get us kicked out. He didn't have that level of power, but he did have control over resources, whether you'd um uh uh sort of like where where you would go next, how your how your day would go, uh potentially um your um you know, the the the direction of your your career. So, he had this kind of power, but he didn't have status because none of us respected him. He was kind of a goofball. Um, he wasn't, you know, especially competent. He wasn't in like really good physical shape or anything. He was just kind of a goofy dude who stayed in long enough to, you know, he was in a bit longer than us and had three stripes. And so if you've ever had like a boss who you listen to simply because they sign your paychecks, but you don't respect the boss, then you'll kind of understand that you don't really confer status to your boss, but you understand that they have some kind of power over you. Um because they control, you know, what your income looks like.

So sex differences in desire for power. We'll talk more about sex differences later, but I think this is like a kind of an interesting finding that um you know who desires uh you know status or power more. So you can see that um I mean I'll basically just spell it out. I mean this is uh men want power more than more than women do. So you see here um let's see. So the darker bars are men. So who wants more power? So men um compared to women. And then status. You see that that uh women want uh uh status. Yeah. More more than is that right? Yeah. More than men do. So so so surprisingly enough. So so that might be an interesting finding that women want status more than men do until you think you know women are a bit more you we'll talk about personality traits later but women tend to be more agreeable. Most status today relies on prestige of being sort of well-liked, well-resected, sort of um uh associated with stable self-esteem and those kinds of things. um more affiliated or more associated with women than men, but you know having control over resources, that's something that men seem to be more interested in than than women.

Um, and I think there's something interesting here too about about affiliation. So status as I said lives in the minds of other people. You sort of have to be good at building relationships especially in the sort of the prestige route, the prestige-oriented status seeeking. Whereas power power is about resources, having resources, access to resources and so on. And in a way, if you have lots of power, you don't need relationships, right? Like you can have like a you live live on a resort and have access to all these resources. You know, you never really need to rely on anyone or have relationships with anyone uh if you don't want. Um, and I think that that style of life, I mean, it probably doesn't appeal to many people, but if it does, it probably appeals more more to men than than to women to sort of, you know, retire on a on a resort and not have to deal with people.

Um, we'll talk more about about sex differences later. Uh, also important here that um that uh in terms of uh status and power, men seem to want it in in in equal amounts. That's also a notable finding as well. But the main finding I want to focus on here is that men want want power more than women do.

Um, okay. So we'll talk a bit about now the developmental origins. So we've been talking about sort of the evolution of status thus far. We'll talk about the developmental origins. It seems that young children understand what social status is. This is a sort of a question you know is if something is you know roughly speaking nature or nurture is it innate is it social learning?

Um, I had a professor once uh an undergrad who a developmental psychology professor who said if you want to understand the mature form of an organism it helps to understand its history. And this was you know part of part of his case for for studying children and infants and their psychology.

Um, and so there are, yeah, there's there's there's there there's a a large body of work sort of testing whether, you know, young children, preschool age children, do they understand what status is? How do they respond to status? Um, research indicates, for example, that 5-year-old children are selective copers. So if you compare how likely they are to imitate a headteer versus someone who is equally familiar, same age and gender, maybe a lower ranking teacher within the school system, children are more likely to to imitate the headteer. Children seem to sort of observe and see, oh, the other teachers are responding to this headteer and so therefore maybe I should should pay extra close attention to the headteer as well and they're more likely to imitate them.

Uh, imitation is actually um imitation is essentially like a like an acknowledgement that someone has high status if you're willing to do what they do. Um, imitation was advantageous. We're sort of high fidelity imitators, humans. Uh, and this was adaptive in the the ancestral environment. So, you'll find uh, you know, for example, that um, you know, if someone is especially good at toolm, you'll see the others sort of follow along. If someone's good at navigation, they'll imitate that as well. But then we sort of overlearn this and if you you know if a humans learn that you know there's a there's a guy who's really good at navigation but then you know there the person is also going fishing they're more likely to copy that person's fishing methods too. We sort of overextend uh that person's uh skill set and think that they're good at other things as well.

Um, and we you can see you can see this pattern uh today as well. Um, we also, uh, there's also research indicating that 5-year-olds, if you ask them to sort of evaluate status based on imitation patterns, they assume that someone who imitates another is lower in status. So, they don't just assume that someone who's being imitated is high status, but they also seem to understand that the person who's doing the imitating is actually uh probably lower in the status hierarchy than that than that person who's sort of setting the the the behavioral norms and the standards uh in the environment.

Um, and so, so those are 5-year-olds, you know, kindergarten, preschool aged. Uh, but there's also work on on infants as well. I mean, I I'm really glad. So, I spent a lot of time uh when I was an undergrad research assistant working at at Yale and Stanford. Uh, you know, I started out uh in in uh in infant labs and child labs. And it was really great experience to sort of learn like how do you test an infant in psychological research. You know with humans it's not you put them in a brain scanner or you can have them do behavioral studies look at their preferences. But with you know this sort of a blob you know I I once heard I heard Michaela Peterson on a podcast describe a baby as a wet noodle with a heavy head. And that's kind of that's kind of what a baby is. You know it's just sort of this this lump of lump of dough. But researchers have found clever ways to test you know what goes on in the minds of an infant. And one of the most widely used um experimental approaches um is looking time studies. So essentially this is I mean this is intuitive that you'll habituate to something if you see it repeatedly. Uh when a novel um a novel object appears in your visual field, you'll stare at it. You'll see what is that thing?

Um, and then after a while you'll lose interest. And so babies are like this too where something novel appears, something unexpected appears, they'll look at it for a long time and if they sort of habituate and it, you know, is is is it lingers for a while or it continues to sort of flash and reappear, babies will think, okay, they get they get bored, they so so you can see here, you know, like the looking time at first they'll look for a long time and then it'll kind of dwindle, but then if there's a novel display, something new, it'll, you know, they'll sort of look at it a bit more and then it'll kind of dwindle again.

Um, and so researchers have used this to see like well what what do what do babies expect to happen in the world? You know, like do they have an intuitive understanding of say physics and what you find is that if you show a baby like you know like a rubber toy sitting on a table you know so what they do is like they have the baby in like this high chair and then there's like a you know there's sort of a curtain stage you know little one in front of them and they open the curtain and then they see like a little rubber toy on a table. How long does it look at this before they start to get bored?

Um, and so they see a toy sitting on a table and maybe they'll look for a few seconds and then they start to wander around. But if researchers sort of rig this visual field so that they open the curtain and there's a rubber toy that appears to be floating in midair, it's not sitting on anything. You know, they sort of rig the contraption. So it's like it looks like it's floating. Babies look at it a lot longer than if the toy is sitting on a table. And what this suggests is that babies do have an intuitive understanding of how material objects in the world work. They have this sort of intuitive folk physics. you know, they think like objects can't just float in midair like that. What's going on here? And so it's as if they're asking themselves like how is this possible? What's going on? You know, if they close the curtain and open it again, they'll still continue to stare at it for a long time before they start to lose interest. Whereas if they see the toy sort of, you know, they open and close the curtain and it's still on the table, they're like, all right, can we move on? Yeah.

So, all right. So, that's sort of how how they test infants, their expectations of how the world should work. And if they look longer at something, this suggests this is novel or unexpected. and therefore um they they come into the world with expectations. So so now that we've sort of laid out how how the looking time studies work um I'll walk you through this this slide.

Um, when researchers basically what they do is that you know for for this study on on whether infants understand status. you know, it's this is kind of a a tricky thing to do, you know, to to set up a a scenario in which babies can sort of follow along, you know, follow a story and then see what their expectations are. But basically, what they find is that um when they show infants, so so ignore ignore ignore this for now, but we'll just look at this right here. In the absence of information, babies expect resources to be equally distributed. And what does this mean? So what they do is they find they they show babies two puppets and then the researchers will uh distribute some some treats. They'll distribute some resources to them, some treats, and then they'll they'll they'll test how long they look at this distribution of treats. And in one condition, they'll have uh equal treats, right? So they'll show each each puppet gets five treats. And then in another condition, they'll show a baby's uh situation in which maybe one puppet gets five treats and he only gets one. In the second case, one in which one puppet gets way more treats than the other, babies look longer at that.

Um, suggesting that they actually expect equal to redistribution of of the treats in the absence of other information, right? All they're seeing are puppets and treats. And if they look longer at the unequal distribution, this is something novel and expected. It's as if they're asking themselves, hey, why did that puppy or yeah, why did this puppy get more than that one? That's not fair.

Um, whereas in the other condition, when the treats are equally distributed, they don't look that long. They're thinking, "Yeah, they get they get an equal amount. That makes sense." So, so that's in the absence of information. But upon learning, so we're looking here now, upon learning who has status in a hierarchy, it seems that infants expect higher status individuals to receive more resources.

Uh, and so they they actually used, this is actually funny, it's kind of a more of a dominance framework, but what they did is um so first uh the infants, they see um uh uh kind of a small stage. There's a little box and then there's this, you know, this this this high pink chair with pink or magenta. So, they see a chair and a box and then they see two puppets come onto the stage and they're fighting over the big nice shiny pink chair, have a little battle, they battle it out for a minute, and then one puppet wins, you know, wins. He gets to sit in this shiny chair and then the other puppet, the subordinate, the loser, gets to sit on the box. So they watch this and then the next thing they see is distribution of resources. So in one condition the the both puppets the the sort of the the winner and the loser receive an equal amount of treats and in another condition the winner receives more treats than the loser. Babies look longer when the treats are equally distributed. It's as if they're asking themselves, hey that puppet got the nicer chair. Shouldn't he get more resources? Shouldn't he get more treats?

Uh, so they're looking longer at this confused. They expect the winner to receive more. Uh, and when the winner does receive more, they don't look that long, presumably because they expect, oh, like the victor should get more of the the spoils, so to speak.

So, this seems to be um this seems to capture something about about how we enter the world. This this expectations about status appears to be to some extent intrinsic.

Um, but both of these findings I think are important where in the absence of information if you know nothing else the sort of the default is resources should be equitably distributed right we don't know anything about anyone else we start from the point of everyone should have an equal share but then once we sort of gather information about who has status within the hierarchy uh infants seems to think okay well you know maybe researchers shouldn't be necessarily equally distributed but uh should be distributed based on based on the sort of status um concerns.

So we'll talk a bit about uh sociometric status. Now sociometric status is um yeah sociometric status is basically the way that we think about about prestige, respect and admiration from our peers. To me, one of the most interesting findings over the last must have been 10 or 12 years now is that sociometric status is a stronger predictor than socioeconomic status for happiness and well-being and self-esteem.

Um, and and this is within developed countries, for example, this in first world or modern countries. um suggesting that once you reach sort of a minimal level of basic material and physical needs, what really seems to contribute to the way we feel about ourselves uh is how much other people like us.

Um, there was an interesting study uh more recently showing that people with high socric status were actually envied more than the economically rich. And they asked people, you know, here's a person with high social esteem, you know, they're sort of well regarded, well-liked.

Um, and then here's, you know, here's a person who's who's very economically wealthy, high income, high earnings, assets, and so on. And people actually report, you know, in these studies feeling a bit more envy toward the high socioeconomic status person.

So, it seems like we intuitively kind of understand this that um, you know, that that's that's what we were sort of really after again once our basic material needs are met. I haven't seen these studies done in sort of developing countries or in small scale societies in which sort of survival is an everyday concern but once it's not it seems that this uh social esteem is more more um pronounced in our in our minds.

Uh, okay so so I mentioned before modern stat is primarily based on on prestige and it can be sort of hijacked by advertisers by influencers.

Um, in the ancestral environment, prestige was primarily conferred by useful knowledge and skills. Um, you know again hunting, navigation, warfare, uh toolm etc. Whereas today um you know if you obtain prominence for other reasons if you manage to gain whatever millions of subscribers or something um people will confer prestige to you even if what you do is not necessarily useful to your community.

Um, and so so again this um we we have to remember that a lot of the a lot of the um properties of our psychology evolved in a different environment and today can sort of be you know manipulated and hijacked and you know we have to be we have to we sort of have to understand that this is the environment that we're in now is extremely evolutionarily novel.

Um, but still right I mean I still think like oh prestige conferred for you know whatever being an influence or something that's still preferable to to dominance.

Um, dominance especially in human um societies that that route is tends to be tends to tends to be deadly.

Okay. So so now we'll talk about uh you know we mentioned before fundamental human motives. What does it mean to be fundamental in psychological research? There seem to be four key criteria for whether something is considered fundamental. sort of this basic primary need. So the first criteria shapes long-term health, adjustment, well-being, your health.

Um, does it contribute to those things? Uh, does this motive induce goal- directed behavior? Do you do you chase this do you pursue this um this this need this desire as an end in itself rather than as a means to to another kind of a kind of an end?

Um, oh, I'm sorry. That's that's the non- derivatives. So that's number three. Number two, induces a wide range of goal- directed behavior. It's fundamentally pleasant to to obtain it.

Um, and failure is fundamentally unpleasant. And then universal and observed across cultures and individuals. So that makes sense, right? Like if if it's fundamental, humans regardless of time and place should be uh uh pursuing it.

So status does shape health and well-being. Uh, it shapes your adjustment. People with high status feel better. They have higher self-esteem.

Um, there's a striking uh effect size. I mean we won't get into statistics in this course but basically I mean this is a a large uh effect size in in psychological research the relationship between subjective well-being and and sociometric status um strong predictor uh which which we which we touched on before.

Uh, people with high status have uh fewer health issues um less mental and physical illness. low status um in contrast is linked to sort of more depression, more anxiety, uh negative emotion and so on.

Um, prestige is good for your health. Uh, whereas dominance might be detrimental.

Um, as I mentioned before, uh dominance is associated with with stress and uh and so anyway, higher status equals higher self-esteem, higher health and so on. This is uh suggests that status is a fundamental uh human need. It does induce goal- directed behavior.

Uh, people uh are vigilant in the way that they monitor their their status in relation to their peers. Even if it's not a conscious, right? Like a lot of this stuff, you know, it's not it's not like a conscious like, oh, I'm I'm number three and he's number two. It's nothing like that. It's just sort of if you feel uh put down or belittled, you'll respond with negative emotion. And that's sort of your your implicit unconscious body responding to uh potential sort of falling down that at least momentarily that status ladder. And it'll sort of encourage you to either stop doing what you just did that led to that sort of embarrassment or shame and uh and encourage you uh to to sort of repair uh whatever it is that you've done uh and and then sort of seek uh the positive emotion that results from whether it's an apology or doing something that that uh um uh leads to sort of whatever reconciliation.

There's a there's a funny three pen study. This is like uh one of the early basic studies in uh social uh status um research where basically they found that uh you know they the these researchers monitored this like u a branch of a finance firm and you know there's all these vice presidents working there and at first they all had one pen on their this is in the 1950s by the way so it's like all guys all young men you know vice presidents and each guy had one pen on the desk and then one of the guys put two fountain pens on the desk and soon all the others put two fountain pens on the desk too. Then that guy put three, the other guys put three. And it was like suddenly this pen became this arbitrary marker. You know, do you have how many expensive pens do you keep on your desk and this became like a little a little game that they were playing to see who could sort of reach the top despite the fact that they all had the same um the same official position within the firm? All vice presidents.

Um, so okay, preference for groups organizations. And so yeah, we we we tend to seek out affiliation with uh with uh social organizations that could potentially uh increase our status.

Um, and this this this can vary whether from from sports teams or clubs or or or universities.

Um, and we have strong uh reactions to to gain status. And again, this isn't uh these aren't like conscious calculated thoughts that we have. We just have these emotions. we feel pride, jubilation, honor. You know, you you sort of glow when uh you receive agilation and adoration from from other people.

Uh, and and when you don't, right, when people sort of disapprove of you or condemn you in some way, you respond with these negative emotions. And these emotions are are basically information uh and motivate you to shift your behavior.

Um, there's been some some interesting discussion around around fairness as well. uh that that people are are highly concerned with with fairness and specifically with regard to the distribution of material resources. Often what people really care about, it's not that they care about the the material resource in itself, but they care about they they claim they care about the fairness, but what they really care about is like do you respect me? Do you confer me enough status to treat me the way that I'd like to be treated?

So, for example, if you discover that other people at your uh at your job, other people with the same position as you are getting paid more than you, even if you live even if you have a comfortable salary, right? Like imagine you're still comfortable, you're still making a lot of money, but you discover your co-workers are making way more than you. You're going to say, "Hey, this is like this is uh there's something wrong here. This is unfair. Like what's going on?" And if your boss says, "Well, we're paying you a lot of money anyway. Just relax." You're going to respond with anger, right? This is not right. And that feeling that feeling is that sort of belittlement, right? Right? That sort of feeling that you're not being treated with the same level of status as the others despite the fact that you are earning a high wage just lower than the others.

Um, status is non- derivative. It feels good in and of itself.

Um, I mentioned before that people will forego material resources for status. They'll pay for social media followers and they'll forgo other kinds of material resources. They'll forego food, right? People will forego food to look attractive.

Um, they'll forego sleep, right? Like a physiological need. They'll stop sleeping because they want to work hard to get promoted and earn more money or to impress other people or work on their craft or their if they're an athlete, their sport. They'll literally damage their health at least temporarily uh to chase this sort of invisible uh resource. I I told the Yale lecturer story uh already.

Okay. Status is is universal.

Um, you'll find it cross-culturally, right? But I've been talking a bit about uh hunter gatherer communities uh the research from Christopher Bame and others Richard Rangham status it's called different things though you know a lot of people you know when I talk about status when I interviews and stuff they'll say like status I people people feel um almost offended by this like is it really just about status do people really care that much about status it feels like this cheap term status oh status pursued but there are other terms that other cultures use and and we use these terms as well to some degree and I somehow these These terms are, you know, like like like using the term um respect. If someone says uh I'm doing X because I want status, you'll think like really like a superficial shallow person and like you just want status. That's so you know so cheap, vulgar. But if he says I'm doing X because I want respect. Oh, they're basically synonyms, right? Like but for some reason respect carries these more respectful con connotations.

Um, others cult other cultures say things like face, they're chasing honor, esteem, right? Status is the term that we use in psychology.

Um, hunter gatherers, you know, we we've talked about, you know, what are the the qualities that lead hunter gatherers to to attain status. hunting. I mean, hunters like a lot of the research on on status has been done on hunting because, you know, it seems to be like a sort of a very well, first of all, it's dangerous. And I think that just sort of studying this dangerous activity is interesting for researchers, but then also um you know, this is like a very obvious uh and direct way for for hunters to to display all these qualities that uh confer status. So, hunters receive more respect, they have more sexual partners, they have more offspring. These are uh on on the the relatively few existing huntergather communities that that that remain. This is what researchers have found anthropologists.

Um, there's some interesting work on on big game hunting and status. So uh Robin Dunar and others you know they they've discussed this um other researchers about oh Chris Kristen Hawk this is uh the person who I think did some of the original research on this where they found that um in terms of return on investment big game hunting is actually probably unwise where hunter gatherers would probably be better off you killing rabbits and squirrels and raccoons and small game.

Um, they could catch more of them in a shorter amount of time and so on.

Uh, whereas it takes hours, sometimes days to track a big animal and take him down. And yes, you get more meat.

Uh, but in terms of like time spent versus calories received, it's actually uh not not not a wise strategy. But what Kristen Hawks and other anthropology just have suggested is that big game hunting is basically um a way to demonstrate athleticism, bravery, prowess, all of these things that are attractive in a potential romantic partner. And so the big game hunters uh you know they they partake in this on you know it's not to say that they don't do it for food. Of course they want the food, but there's also that added incentive. And the reason why it seems to be an unwise investment from a caloric perspective is is in part probably part probably because it's a wise perspective from a reproductive evolutionary perspective motivates them to do this impressive thing uh to take out a big animal. Yeah.

Overconfidence uh so overconfidence in some some regard is probably wise if you want to bolster your status sort of believing you can do something can often help uh you to actually do it. But the areas in which people are overconfident tend to be uh associated with the status domains or the domains that confer status in a given culture. So in more individualistic cultures uh you know especially uh in in the US people tend to overestimate their ability to lead. You know if you measure their actual sort of leadership ability and sort of their resume and their record of leadership versus what they say about their ability to lead there's a mismatch. people think that they're better leaders generally than they really are.

Um, in collectivistic societies, the ability to listen is highly valued. And if you ask people about their own ability to listen and then you ask their peers separately, how good is this person at listening? You'll often find this mismatch where people systematically overestimate this ability.

Um, and this suggests too that um that status is universal because the thing that's valued is the thing that they sort of overestimate themselves on.

Um, we're going to we're going to go a bit over.

Um, so so pain of pain of low status. So I've talked a bit about emotions and um how emotions basically feed into your knowledge, your feeling, how you know the our concerns about status aren't necessarily conscious, explicit, verbalized in our minds, but rather through how we feel.

Um, one of the most interesting uh like research models that that looks at how like social exclusion and sort of thwarting fundamental human needs can lead to uh you know losses in self-esteem and so on. It's this game called Cyberball.

Uh, it's a very simple game and I've used it in some of my own research.

Um, essentially uh you you sort of want to induce social discomfort in participants. You want to sort of get them to feel excluded. It's very simple game. So basically you have them play this ball tossing game, this digital ball tossing game. This is you, you as in the participant, and you're playing with two other players. It's actually part of a computer game, but you know, tell the participants, hey, you're playing with two other people uh in, you know, different locations and toss the ball back and forth. In one condition, uh you're included throughout the game.

Uh, so as a participant, you basically just toss this digital ball for about 2 minutes. kind of boring, just tossing the ball back and forth. You click your mouse, you click this guy, you can toss the ball to him, he toss it to you, maybe click this guy and so on. The other condition, basically, you are the player and you're tossed the ball one time and then for the remainder of the game, you just watch these two players toss the ball back and forth and you're just sitting there. And there's been some, you know, so I did my studies, a lot of these studies, I mean, you know, when I did this this study here, this was like during the lockdown, so I had to do this online.

Um, but researchers have done this in a lab setting where they bring people and sit them down on a computer. And when they are excluded from the game, often participants, they'll get visibly upset if they're not included in the game. Some of them will tap the computer screen as if this is going to alert them like, "Hey, what's going like, "Hey, I'm I'm here too."

Um, they get upset at being uh socially excluded.

Um, and after they play this game, we ask them, you know, we'll ask, you know, these these scales about, you know, your your self-esteem, your sense of control, your meaningfulness, your sense of belonging. We'll ask you all these questions. You find this massive effect size that people feel much worse about themselves even after playing the silly two-minute game. And we find this effect even when you control for personality traits. So, for example, um, uh, introverts, extroverts, disagreeable individuals, everyone feels upset when they're excluded from this ball tossing game. The origins of the this game, by the way, are interesting. So So the the the person who invented this this game, Kip Williams, in the early I want to say this was the early 2000s. The idea for Cyberball came to him when he was sitting in a park uh by himself and he says a Frisbee landed next to him. So he picks up the Frisbee, he's like, "Where'd this come from?" He sees two guys playing Frisbee with one another and he's like, "Oh." Tosses it back to them. He watches them toss the Frisbee to one another and then they toss the Frisbee back to him and now he's included in this game. So he tosses the Frisbee and after maybe one or two rounds of this, the two guys walk off and return to their game and he says, you know, I was sitting there in the park and I was like, "Hey, I thought we were part of this game." And he suddenly felt bad about himself. He didn't know these guys. They were complete strangers to him. Randomly, the Frisbee lands and he's momentarily included and then he's excluded. and he felt he said he felt surprisingly sharp emotions uh for for this you know kind of what you would expect like in an objective sense kind of a a silly trivial thing.

Um, and so this is this led him to invent Cyberball. But why do we feel so bad these sort of oneshot contact you know you're you're momentarily excluded in a silly game with strangers even in a computerized context where you don't even see the person. Well the reason seems to be that we we didn't we didn't meet strangers uh in the ancestral environment. human beings almost never had these oneshot encounters uh with another person.

Um, almost every single person a human would ever meet in a hunter gatherer smallcale society is someone that they would have iterated repeated interactions with over and over and they would be each interaction held high stakes in terms of reputational concerns.

Um, and so we still because you know that that was the environment in which our psychology evolved. We still have those properties in our mind today and we respond uh to each social encounter as if it holds immense consequences. You know like uh you you get a a coffee at the shop and the person says something impolite to you, you'll respond, you know, like oh like you know you that will kind of for some people that'll ruin their whole day. For a lot of people it will upset them for a few minutes uh even if you never see that person again.

Um, and in and in some cases this can be this can be helpful keeps us honest when we deal with strangers.

Because even though you know on on sort of an objective rational level I'm never going to see this person again uh you still sort of you still have the psychology of someone of of a human being who would feel that they would interact with this person again.

Um, it can be detrimental as well. You know, sometimes we have a bit too much um anxiety and other negative emotion for fleeting, inconsequential interactions with strangers. You know, I've I've worked with and talked to young guys who like they can't even order a pizza on the phone because they're so fearful of embarrassing themselves or saying the wrong thing when they order food.

Uh, and so for them, like they they always just order online.

That kind of social anxiety is uh obviously maladaptive.

Um, so thwarted status you know this kind of cyber ball game feeling excluded this is uh you know what's what some researchers they call it a strong situation.

So in social psychology there's this idea of situational strength. What a situational strength is um when a situation is strong people will respond to it the same way regardless of their individual traits regardless of personality and intelligence and impulse control and so on. And uh an example is is a is a red light. This is a strong situation. Regardless of your personality traits and all these other measures, almost everyone will stop at a red light regardless. It's strong. A yellow light is what's called a weak situation. There's no explicit protocol for how to respond to a yellow light.

So there's no explicit protocol for how to respond to a yellow light. So some people perhaps with less impulse control or lower on conscientiousness or something, they'll just speed right through. Other people will slow down. They'll even slow down perhaps a bit too early. And so in some cases, right, our individual differences tend to matter a lot. In other cases, when when the rules are clear and rigid, we'll respond in the same way. Being excluded seems to be a strong situation. So regardless, as I mentioned, regardless of personality, being excluded hurts sort of losses, thwarted status, sort of reduction in esteem. It seems to hurt everyone. Some people say, "I don't care what people think." most of the time that's nonsense.

Um, so psychological adaptations. So there have been some interesting um, uh, studies on this idea of uh, the psychological mechanism uh, in humans uh, called the sociometer. And this is basically belonging. Uh, it sort of monitors whether you belong in the environment.

Uh, this is pre-attentive. This is sort of unconscious the way that we monitor the environment.

Uh, you're not consciously thinking, do I belong? Am I accepted? Am I excluded? Am I excluded? Again, you just sort of respond in uh w with certain kinds of emotions if you are excluded versus if you uh are not. And it's it's simil it's relevant to status, but it doesn't actually monitor status. Belonging and status are are tightly linked, but they're not the same thing.

So the sociometer uh seems to monitor communion, how much you're getting along with other people, how much uh social acceptance you have, and you can belong even if you have low social status. But we'll we'll talk more about agency and communion in a minute.

Uh, and then there's so there's the hierometer. So the hierometer is about status. It tracks and regulates where you stand uh in a social hierarchy.

So this psychological mechanism is is again it's correlated with but distinct from status. um you can think of cases where you can be sort of low in belonging but but but high in in in status. People can sort of regard you uh or hold you in high regard um even if they don't necessarily uh uh accept you.

You can think of like lonely CEOs or something like that.

Um, and this is more preoccupied with agency. So we'll talk about agency and communion.

Um, high status identities. We'll we'll talk about that later. Okay. So here's yeah here's the sort of a a diagram of how hyerometer and sociometer works. Hyometer tracks status. Sociometer tracks inclusion. Hyometer is um basically tracked by how you feel about yourself, your self-esteem, but also with with narcissism. We'll talk a lot about narcissism later in another lecture. And these regulate assertiveness. Assertiveness meaning like you know are you going to put yourself out there to attain status.

Uh, and the sociometer is more about affili. So self-esteem, how you feel about yourself? tracks your belongingness and then this leads you to sort of uh uh build relationships with with other people.

Uh, and the the goal of of sociometer is actually to avoid exclusion. Okay.

So so yeah this is just the summary here.

Um, one monitors inclusion, one monitors status, one's communal in character, sociometer is comm uh communal in character, the hierometer is agentic in character. And in some cases uh people will sacrifice status to get along. uh and in other cases they'll sacrifice uh uh getting along uh in order to attain status. We're we're sort of chronically conflicted, you know, human beings. We want to fit in and we want to stand out at the same time. That's one way of of thinking about it. Okay.

So So I like this example. I don't know how many of you read The Great Gatsby or watched the the the movie from uh it was 10 years ago now, but Nick Carowway in the book um he states in the book that I graduated from New Haven in 1915 and Carowway is the narrator of this story and New Haven he's not talking I think there is a University of New Haven. I don't know if there was one in 1915 but he actually he went to Yale. Yale is located in New Haven but he says I went to New Haven. Right? He sort of downplays his educational pedigree. uh he wants you to know the reader as the narrator he wants you to know I'm a humble guy you know he comes from this sort of old money background he doesn't um he's not trying to impress you he's just trying to tell you a story he's communal he wants to get along and Gatsby on the other hand he is very quick to tell Nick Carowway in the story was brought up in America but educated at Oxford he tells him explicitly what his educational well fraudulent educational credentials are Gatsby actually he wasn't educated at Oxford um but Gatsby is chasing status he wants to be accepted that he's new money. He wants to be accepted by this um by this old money society. He wants the acceptance of Nick Carowway and ultimately uh you know to to to try to win Daisy back. And so he's agentic in character and he's going for an overt bid for status.

Um, so these are the two um well one researcher called him the the big two the cardinal axes among along which we chart the course of our lives. Communion is about getting along. Agency is about getting ahead. One is about belonging, the other is about status.

Um, so if you're high agency, high communion, yeah, directing, helpful. Uh, if you're if you're low agency, but high in communion, you're understanding and you're compliant. But these two um these two traits sort of govern our our social lives. We want status, but we also want to be accepted. Sometimes if you chase status too much, you can actually um you can actually lead people to to sort of dislike you or to en you or to abandon you. And so we're constantly walking that sort of tight rope.

Um, morality and competence are two traits that are associated. So morality is associated more with communion, with getting along. Competence is associated more with agency or or getting ahead. Collectively, these two traits, your moral character and your competence seem to um encompass the bulk of how we form our impressions of other people. We sort of implicitly ask ourselves, you know, is this person a capable person? And then uh how good of a person is this? Those are the two traits that that we seem to focus on the most when we meet a new person and form our impression of them.

Um, and moral character is actually uh the trait that people are the most concerned with when they meet a new person and try to determine of what type of individual they are.

Um, okay. So, we're reaching the end here.

Uh, I want to just briefly touch on insults as status injuries. Most insults that are directed at people other than appearance, right? Appearance is like an obvious one that people make fun of. But appearance aside, what do people where do people direct their insults? Mostly to their competence or to their morality or their sort of uh ability to get along or get ahead.

So, so male-directed insults, you know, here. So, so worthless, weak, poor, dumb, useless, scared.

This is directed at their competence. And then controlling self-absorbed, liar. These are directed at their moral character. And then for female directed insults as well, worthless, poor, needy, disgusting, annoying. These are kind of competence uh you know, insults directed at competence. And then scang, gold digger, shallow. These are the most common insults and they tend to be uh directed I mean these are sort of affiliated with with with moral character. These are the most common insults by the way. This was like a recent study 2021. These are the uh the most common not necessarily those words specifically, but those words and their synonyms. We're going to talk about psychopathy much more uh in this in this upcoming uh lecture.