We Build Civilizations on Status. But We Barely Understand It.

“We see status virtually everywhere in social life, if we think to look for it,” writes Cecilia Ridgeway. “It suffuses everyday possessions, the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, the food brands we prefer, and the music we listen to.” And that’s only a partial list. Status influences the neighborhood we live in, the occupation we pursue, the friends we choose. It attaches itself to our race, gender, class and age. It shapes our interpersonal interactions. And, most of the time, it does all of this without us even realizing what’s happening. Ridgeway is a sociologist and professor emerita at Stanford who has spent her career studying what she calls the “deep story” of status. Her 2019 book “Status: Why Is It Everywhere? Why Does It Matter?” is the culmination of decades of research into what status is, how it actually works, and the myriad ways it shapes our world. We typically think of status as social vanity limited to elite institutions or the top percentages of the income ladder. But Ridgeway argues that the truth is closer to the opposite: Status is everywhere. It’s the water we all swim in. And the reason it’s everywhere is that it’s one of humanity’s oldest and most powerful social technologies — a technology that has built civilizations, inspired revolutions and spurred countless innovations while also reinforcing some of our world’s deepest inequalities and injustices. So this conversation is about making visible an often overlooked force that shapes so much of our world, our lives and even our sense of self. It also explores how status hierarchies emerge from “a fundamental tension in the human condition”; why sports, religion, fashion and meritocracy can all be considered forms of status “games”; how status games simultaneously help explain the advent of modern science and the pervasiveness of racial and gender stereotypes; why scholars increasingly view status as a “fundamental human motive”; why our society allocates higher status to investment bankers than teachers; how public policy can change our status beliefs; how elite-status signaling has shifted from wearing fancy clothes and driving expensive cars to reading The New Yorker and listening to NPR; how the internet has completely transformed our relationships with status; and much more. Mentioned: The Sum of Small Things by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett The Knowledge Machine by Michael Strevens The Status Game by Will Storr Book Recommendations: Envy Up, Scorn Down by Susan T. Fiske The Psychology of Social Status by Joey T. Cheng, Jessica L. Tracy, Cameron Anderson The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein VeblenThis episode is guest-hosted by Rogé Karma, the senior editor for “The Ezra Klein Show.” Rogé has been with the show since July 2019, when it was based at Vox. He works closely with Ezra on everything related to the show, from editing to interview prep to guest selection. At Vox, he also wrote articles and conducted interviews on topics ranging from policing and racial justice to democracy reform and the coronavirus. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. ​​“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud and Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is The Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:22Ezra Klein?

  Hey, it is Ezra, recording the last of these for a bit. My first show back will be Friday. I am excited to be back on the podcast. I had a really, really great time off and then managed to get COVID right at the end of it, but I'm feeling better. Today, behind the mic is Roji Karma, our senior editor. Again, I want to stress, it is not me behind the mic. I know we sound a little similar, but today is Roji, and he is talking to Cecilia Ridgway about a topic that has obsessed this show for a long time, actually, which is status and how to think about it and how to understand it. This one is really worth hearing.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  I've been working with the show for over three years now, but long before that, I was what one could call an Ezra Klein Show super fan. And the episodes that always hooked me, that always kept me coming back, were the ones with a framework, or a theory, or an idea, that just completely changed how I saw the world. The way I would often describe those episodes was that they were like putting on a special pair of glasses. A pair of glasses that allowed you to see things that were previously invisible to you. And once you begin seeing what those glasses allowed you to see, you couldn't stop seeing it. It would just show up everywhere.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  I had one of those moments recently when I picked up the book Status by Cecilia Ridgway. Ridgway is a sociologist and professor emerita at Stanford University, and she spent her entire career studying what she calls "the deep story of status," what it is, why it matters, how it works, and all the ways it shapes our world. And Ridgway's basic argument is that the way we typically think about status is all wrong. Status isn't just some social vanity, limited to elite institutions or the top percentages of the income ladder.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  It's a cultural system that is absolutely fundamental to how our society operates, one that permeates literally every aspect of our lives, from the office to the classroom to the dinner table. At the heart of Ridgway's theory and of this conversation is what she calls "the double-edged sword of status." On the one hand, status hierarchies are this truly brilliant social technology, a technology that's driven an immense amount of human ingenuity and progress. But on the other hand, they're the source of some of the deepest forms of inequality and injustice in our world.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  They simultaneously help explain both the advent of modern science and also the stubborn persistence of racial and gender and class stereotypes that pervade our society to this day. And yet, the way status works, the way it really works, is largely invisible to us. It's the water we swim in, it's all around us, but because we have such a hard time seeing it, we rarely interrogate it. And so this conversation is about trying to make the invisible visible.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  It's about putting on those glasses and maybe, just maybe, coming to see the world and your life a little differently. As always, the show email is [email protected].

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Cecilia Ridgway, welcome to the podcast.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Very glad to be here.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  You open your book with the line, quote, "We see status virtually everywhere in social life if we think to look for it," end quote. Talk me through that. What is status and where does it show up in our lives?

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Well, of course, the, um, the point is that it shows up really literally everywhere. But what status is, is basically the esteem that other people have for us, how we are seen by others, how we're evaluated, the worth they attribute to us in the situation. And of course, the worth they attribute to us in one situation might be different than what we experience in another situation. But that's an ongoing process as we go in and out of situations. People start talking. Pretty soon, you have a sense that, wow, this is the important person here. Maybe it's me, maybe it's somebody else. And things shake out that way. That's what status is. And yet, on the other hand, it's something

• 5:19Speaker 02

  we do all the time, but it's like the water we swim in. We don't see it. We're not thinking of it when we do it. Most of the time, sometimes we're very aware of it. You come in, you think, oh, no, I'm the low person on the totem pole here. I better be quiet. But other times, most of the time, it's just suddenly you're thinking and you get to the end of the, of an hour's conversation, you think, what just happened? Why is it that, you know, the conversation went on and somehow I was nowhere? Or what just happened that I ended up the center of attention? So that's what status is. And we forget how much it matters to us. And then, as I say in the book, it spreads past that. What I talked about is an interpersonal situation.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  But because we're always doing it, we're doing it while we're doing other things. And we import it into other things that we're doing. So it becomes part of how we act in the classroom, how we act at work. It even becomes part of the organizations we develop, say, at work or in politics to carry out other activities. So it essentially infuses itself in everything we do.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  So I want to make this a little bit more concrete. You brought up a few examples there. The classroom, the workplace. So let's say I'm one of your undergraduate students, or I'm working with you at your university. How tangibly does status influence and shape my day-to-day life?

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Well, for instance, if you are someone that comes from a social background that has higher status than somebody else, say, in the classroom. One kid comes from a rather well-off, upper-middle-class family. The other kid amongst those undergraduates is a first-gen kid, first generation, first one to go to college. All this is pretty new. You come in, you have that background, gives you a kind of initial confidence that emboldens the one who comes from that privileged background to think, "Well, I have great ideas here. I'll stick my hand right up and start talking." The other one says, "Ooh, I'm new here. I'm going to see what's happening before I say anything." So they hold back. The one speaks up, the other holds back.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Then the conversation goes in the direction of the one who spoke up. Pretty soon, everybody's talking about that person's idea. The kid who held back, their ideas aren't even heard or on the floor. Then things go on. Next thing you know, an hour later, the kid who just barely spoke up is on the fringes and just sort of in a support role in the peanut gallery. And the other one is the center of attention, their ideas are great, and everyone says, "What a great idea." And they've been evaluated as somehow the better person, and by better, I don't mean morally better, but more valuable, more interesting, having more to offer to the group setting there, like the smart one in the class, or something of that sort. Whereas the other kid might be every bit as smart, but wasn't in the center.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  Now, I don't mean to say, the way I told that story just now, it sounds like it's all on the individual. One person's confident, the other one's not, that's the problem. But the thing is, the kid is reading these social signals, both kids are, without thinking about it, reading the social signals that society is giving them in its cultural beliefs about people from the privileged background. They're coordinating on that mutual expectation that's built in. The key of status is it exists in other people's opinions of us. It's the extent to which people in our group or community think of us as a person of worth and with something to offer.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  So I want to make a distinction here because I think often when we're talking about status, it's operating as a stand-in for something like wealth or power, right? You use the example just now of class distinctions that end up getting layered into this. But it seems like what you're saying is that status is something that's actually very different. It's about who gets listened to. It's about who gets attention. It's its own sort of distinct phenomenon. But I think that raises the question, you know, what is it about status that really matters? Because sure, you know, we care about what other people think of us, whether they respect us. But at first glance, that doesn't seem nearly as important as the amount of money we have

• 9:38Speaker 01

  to secure our basic needs. It doesn't seem as important as the amount of actual power we have. And so status can at least appear pretty trivial in comparison to those other things. But you, in the book, you know, building on some of the research in the space, argue that status is, quote, "a fundamental human motive." So I was wondering if you could unpack that for me, right? Like, in what sense is status so fundamental? And what is the evidence for that?

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Well, I think it all goes back to the fact that whether we think about what human beings are, right? Whether we like it or not, we are fundamentally dependent on others to do the things that we want to kind of achieve the goals that we want and need in life. You know, we're a social species. We have to do things together, whether we want to or not. So we are obliged to cooperate and work with others to get the things we want. Status arises, I argue, out of the people's efforts to find a way to do things together and also deal with the inherent competitive tensions that develop when they do things together. Because, okay, we all have to get this done.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Now, we have to work together to get it done. Okay, fine. Now, how are we going to do this? First, immediately, it shows up, who's going to be in charge? Who has the good ideas? Whose information is going to be most valuable for all of us to succeed? I don't want you getting in the way if you don't have any good ideas. You should shut up, right? I want to listen to that other person. And yet, on the other hand, I'm thinking, what do you mean, I should shut up? I want to get out there and I want things done my way. I think I'm right. So the need to cooperate, whether we like it or not, drives us to have to find a way to coordinate our actions and work together. But doing that arises the competitive tensions of, on whose terms will we do this?

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Who will benefit from what we're doing? Who will get what in the spoils of what we achieve? Right? And that kind of balancing out between the need to stay coordinated and people's jockeying for position is the process that produces status hierarchies. And I've argued that status is a deep cultural norm that we have learned for how to manage this situation. So your ability to manage this, to play the game with others and to cooperate and be part of these groups and feel accepted and belonging is fundamental to your own sense of security, your sense of being accepted in a part of groups and society, a person of value and worth.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  That matters a lot to people. It matters to people, the evidence suggests, every bit as much as being rich, right? Or powerful. Sometimes it can matter more than being powerful. You know, to be powerful is not necessarily to be respected.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  And so I want to apply this to a real world situation, then. The baseline case that a lot of the studies of status dynamics use is the small group project. And I think that's a situation most people are familiar with, anyone who's been in school or in a workplace. So I wonder if you could walk me through one of those situations? Let's say we have a group of four that's given an assignment. And let's say, like in many of the studies we're talking about here that were done, you know, a couple decades ago, they're all white, male, college sophomores at Harvard. How do the status dynamics between them tend to form and play out? And how do they help the group navigate this tension we were just talking about?

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Well, yes, there are all those classic studies of the perfectly matched Harvard male sophomores. But what happens? So they have this vague problem and they're trying to figure out how to respond to it. And yet, on the other hand, they know it matters, right? This thing matters because they have a teacher watching them and they're going to get graded and all that. So, okay, gotta do something, gotta perform. They all kind of look at one another. And even if accidentally someone speaks up, but it probably won't be accidentally, because this is actually where personalities can come in, right? Some personalities, some people more extroverted or whatever, can't stand the tension of silence as long and jump in and say something. Somebody else then reacts to that. Then someone else reacts again.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  And what tends to happen is that in itself can lead to cascade. And the conversation will start going in a certain direction. What happens first tends to shape what happens next, so that everybody's suddenly reacting to one person's opinion, the person who's talking more, right? So the focus starts centralizing around one or two people. And usually, they find that the top person in those kind of groups, for instance, will end up occupying about 50% of the floor. And sometimes it can be as much as 70% of the floor, while the others are reacting primarily to that person's ideas. So it kind of falls into place without people realizing it. Partly, there's an element of random chance in there.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  But also, in these perfectly socially matched people, tendencies to speak up, tendencies to be extroverted, to act first, do play a role, right? Being assertive. And in our society, not all cultures value assertiveness, but our culture values assertiveness and takes it as a sign of competence. As I said, this is not a cultural universal, but it's true in our society.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  I want to put aside just for a second the question of the gap between sort of how we perceive competence, how we perceive who should be awarded status and the actual reality, because I think that's a complication we'll want to get into later. But I really do think what's so striking about that example you just gave, what's so striking about all of these studies, is that it's really clear that the participants are following almost like an invisible set of rules, right? They never talk about the rules they're following, but then time and time again, you see the same kinds of basic behaviors, right, the same kind of dynamics playing out. As you said, right, when someone speaks confidently and assertively,

• 15:48Speaker 01

  everyone just seems to know to reward that behavior with a certain amount of respect and deference, at least if their ideas seem good. And everyone seems to, you know, pretty quickly figure out their place in the group hierarchy and start changing their behaviors accordingly. And for us, right, this is the most banal of human interactions. But when you step back and think about it for a second, it's really weird, right? Like, it's almost like everyone is following a shared script that doesn't actually exist. So let's peel this back a layer. Help me see under the hood of that interaction. What are the implicit rules everyone in that group is following? And where do those rules come from?

• 16:31Speaker 02

  Well, as I said, I think there's one general implicit rule that we follow, which is that when we're in this situation, and in order to coordinate, first you have to say, what do we need a rule for? Well, everybody's looking at one another. We've got to do this, and I have to decide for myself. Who is everybody going to think has more to offer here? Do I have more to offer than that next person? Does that mean I should therefore jump in? Or do I think, wait a minute, I don't know anything about this. I'll wait a second and let them speak first and jump in. So I have to figure out how to behave, right? So I have to try to read the tea leaves, any social tea leaves in the person, to decide me or the other speak up, hold back, right? And each person is doing that.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  But what's the rule behind that? And the rule is that we should pay attention to, give prominence to, listen to the ideas of, and in that sense, respect and esteem those who are perceived in people in the group in proportion to their perceived contributions, the value of their contributions to what we're doing here together. And this, of course, all depends on what the group's doing, right? I mean, you could be planning a party, and then the party person is going to be the highest status. But so that's the basic rule that we developed. Now, I think my sense of that rule is it's a deeply learned cultural schema.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  That is a kind of social rule for doing something, a little bit like the rules that we use to play a common game. You know, the scissors-rock game or something. There's an implicit rule there about what beats what, right? And kids learn that from watching each other, and they pick it up. Well, I think in a similar way, we have this deep cultural rule that has existed for a long, long time in most human societies, and has passed on to others through their behavior. You watch it, you see it as a kid, what's going on with your parents, what's happening? You read it from other people's behavior. You infer it, and you don't know you know it, in the same way that you don't know you know the rules of grammar in your language, right? But you can speak grammatically.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  You know, you have to go to some class where someone teaches you, this is the rule of grammar, but you were doing it all alone. And it's the same with this, that it becomes this deep background cultural rule that we've learned to follow so that we can do this together. It's like a blueprint for figuring out these situations that our culture has invented and managed. If we depend on these situations to survive, it's not surprising that we would develop some basic plan for handling it.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  So I really like this idea of thinking about status as a sort of game, or really a set of games. And in the book, you make a really helpful distinction between two layers of rules. The first one is sort of the scaffolding, what you just talked about, that status should be allocated based on an individual's contribution to the group. And then there's a second layer you talk about too, which is that the particular beliefs about what characteristics or qualities should be considered status worthy. And I think that's where, you know, you get things like in a small group interaction, something like assertiveness or confidence. But maybe in a different situation, it's social class, or it's knowledge, or it's something else.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  And I think to sort of apply that to the analogy of games. One way I've thought about this is the first layer, right? This idea, this scaffolding layer is sort of like the console, right? It's the Xbox, if you will. We can call it the the status Xbox. And then there's all these specific games you can play on that console, each with their own rules and point systems for how you gain status in that game. So in our society, a big one is the wealth game, right? You earn status by having more money and by buying expensive things to show off. But there are a lot of other ones too, right? There's the meritocracy game, which is all about who can get into the best schools,

• 20:36Speaker 01

  get the best grades, score the most prestigious job. In a lot of elite spaces, there's what I think of as the knowledge game, which is all about who can cite the most interesting books, who has the most well-formed opinions, who knows the most obscure facts? And we can come back to that one because I think this the show is certainly part of that game. But I think you can think of a whole range of domains of life like this, right? Sports is a big one of these games. Being cool and trendy is another one. Religion can be thought of of this way. And if you think about it, you know, each of these games follows the same basic structure that you were just talking about. You accrue points by following some set of rules. And then those points cash out to a whole set of status rewards. You gain respect. People admire you.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  They are more likely to listen to you, to defer to your judgment. So I'm just wondering what you think of that metaphor? If it feels like an accurate way of framing the theory here?

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Well, I love that metaphor, frankly. I love it. It's one of the best ones I've heard. I have two reasons for loving it. One, I think it's very close to how I understand status. I mean, that is how I understand status. Second, my partner is a serious gamer, so I know all about this. It's always going on in the background. So, anyway, it's exactly that. And as we go on in life, we develop the games we specialize in, right? The games that we have special expertise in, where we play the status game. And you can, for instance, find yourself at some kind of mixing, a social gathering in your community, the neighborhood group, somebody has a block party, or you go someplace where you don't know everybody. And pretty quickly, people will ask, "What do you do? What are you thinking?"

• 22:14Speaker 02

  And you will usually try to find a way to introduce one of your games into the arena in order to position yourself, shall we say, in the conversation. And all these games have a core similar rule, that they follow this idea of how it is that you gain status in the situation, you gain esteem in the situation. But they deploy different sets of information, basically different standards of value. Like, okay, it's cool to be nerdy. It's cool to know this. It's cool to know about sports. It's cool to know about art. It's cool to know about politics. So those are like, as you say, the games that you play on your Xbox

• 22:56Speaker 02

  that have different currencies, if you will, that you engage in. But you're still a similar rule. You do the same kind of thing with that currency.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  At risk of having too much agreement here, I also want to bring in an objection that a listener might have at this point, which is, you know, if you ask people why they do a lot of these things, why they play a lot of these things we're calling games, they won't say it's because they're gunning for status. They'll say it's because, you know, they just think those trendy clothes look better. Or they just really enjoy reading and talking about books, or playing that sport. So I'm wondering how you tease apart what feels to us like the things we genuinely enjoy, or value, or believe in from the status competitions those same things can be a part of.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Well, I think there's a way in which the two things happen at the same time. And so teasing the part is indeed difficult. But I'm not saying people don't have a genuine, separate interest in, say, fashion, or books, or just sports. But the thing about status is it's so often going on while you're doing everything else in life. And so it goes on at the same time. Yes, you're reading the books. And when you're all by yourself, maybe all that's happening. But you can't wait to talk to your friends about them, to engage in some dialogue about them. And don't you think this person is a better novelist than that person? Or this is a more incisive political analysis in this book than in that one?

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Don't you think so? Or have you read that? No, I haven't read that. Or, well, you should read it. How can you not read that? And so on. You instantly find yourself back into the status game. And it doesn't have to be a vicious competition. It's that we're always, not always, but often, doing status at the same time we're doing these other activities that we may well love, do for pleasure. We may also, by the way, skipping the pleasure part, do them because we have to, right? They're part of the way we make our living, or how we manage our lives. But it's, the status ends up being everywhere because it infects all these things. Because so many of the things require coordination with others to do properly.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  And then, I think, as the example of some of these more pleasurable things, like reading books, we wouldn't strictly speaking have to share, right? And coordinate with others in order to read books. But you think that book is about a social life. It's about all these things. It doesn't make any sense if I can't talk to others about it.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I definitely want to come back to this messy space of how we disentangle our motivations around status. But I think this also gets to another one of these implicit rules that we haven't talked about yet, but which is really important, which is, if you want to gain status, you can't actually admit or act like you're trying to gain status. Can you just talk about that dynamic? Because I actually think that that's a really important piece of it.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  It really is an important piece of it. The thing about status, money, you can grab hold of it. You can be screwed. You can just pile up those coins and sit on them. And power, much the same, because you grab it and hold it, whether people like it or not. But status is not like that. Status is like a reputation. Other people have to give it to you, which means that in order to get status, you have to convince them that you have something to offer that is worthy of them giving you status. And they're not fools. They're looking to get a deal. If they're going to give you their attention and put you in a place of prominence, they want to have the sense

• 26:51Speaker 02

  that you really offer them something, something of value. You're interesting. You have something valuable for what we're doing here together. So I'll listen to you. In that sense, you have to look like you're focused on the group, right? And I say "look like" only to say that, of course, people fake this, right? Sometimes they're not faking it. Sometimes they really do care about the group. But it can be faked. But the reason why you can't just claim status, say, "I want it, give it to me," is people will say, "Why, right? In what sense have you deserved it from me?" And that's the trick of status, that you have to appear to be offering something to groups because it has to be given to you voluntarily by others.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  So we've been talking a lot about how these games work. But I want to zoom out for a minute here because I think the implications of thinking about status in this way, as this tool for helping us work together, are actually pretty huge. So when I was reading your book, Cecilia, I was reminded of another really incredible book, which is The Knowledge Machine by the philosopher of science, Michael Strevens. And the question at the heart of that book is, how did modern science come about? Because we tend to take it for granted, but modern science really is this miraculous achievement that has made so much of human progress possible, right? Everything from

• 28:48Speaker 01

  antibiotics to the technologies that improve our living standards, to mRNA vaccines. And his basic argument is that what makes science work is what he calls the iron rule, which is this implicit meta-rule that scientists all follow, that says the only way to settle disputes between different scientific theories is by collecting more data, by doing more experiments, by testing those theories against each other in rigorous ways, which almost sounds like banal to us today. But he points out that for thousands and thousands of years, there were tons of smart people around, but we made very little scientific and technological progress because there was no empirical way to settle disputes between different theories.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  And what changed is not that we invented some new technology or measurement tool, it's that we basically created a new point system. We made it so that if you wanted to become a top scientist, if you wanted the status that came with becoming the top of your field, it wasn't enough to just make observations and philosophize like a lot of pre-modern scientists did. You had to spend your time doing like the hard, often quite tedious work of collecting a lot of really fine-grained data. That's the only way to win the game. And it worked. It became this motivational machine for producing all of this knowledge. And as I was reading your book, I began to think of a lot of human progress as being

• 30:16Speaker 01

  driven by the creation of the right kind of status games. One way to think about capitalism... For all of its faults is as an attempt to channel individual status ambitions towards the improvement of collective living standards. When we say as a society that we're going to give you tons of money and therefore status for developing vaccines or producing electric vehicles at scale or creating a bunch of jobs, then we can really supercharge that behavior. You can think of meritocracy in this way. The founders very much thought of representative democracy as this mechanism for channeling ambition towards good governance. And we'll get to the obvious problems with all those examples in a minute because a lot of them don't live up to that standard.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  But I think the bigger point here is that we tend to think of status as this petty trivial thing, but it has this potential to be this brilliant social technology, not just for these small group interactions, but at a really macro scale. It's basically a way of saying, look, if you want the thing that matters most to you, then you have to prove you're of some value to the group. And that can be really powerful. And of course, it could also go the other way too, right? If you look at anything bad in the world, totalitarianism, violent cults, QAnon, a lot of that behavior is also driven by status. But I think the bigger point is that the way to think about status is really as this,

• 31:41Speaker 01

  almost this system that can either bring about the best or the worst in us. And which way it goes really hinges on the kind of games and point systems we create.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  I think it's absolutely right. The thing about status is it is this brilliant social technology. And I'm basically arguing that people developed it precisely for that reason. In other words, there is a kind of functional thing there to, we've got to figure out a better way to hunt or we're going to starve to death. And in order to figure out a better way to hunt, we have to learn how to coordinate and how to hunt together. And not always you have to go forward screaming with your spear, but we have to organize.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  It is a brilliant technology, but it is a double edged sword. You can use it for many good things, but it has this enormous power to go another direction and it does depend always on what you've said. What is the point system that they develop? The basic rule you're going to give to whoever seems to contribute the most of value according to the point system. Well, what's the point system, right? Well, as you said, in science, it was developing the idea that you would always collect data to test your theory. And by the way, a concomitant aspect of that is it doesn't matter how famous you've become as a scientist and how brilliant everyone thinks you are, you're Stephen Hawking.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  If there's data that says your argument doesn't hold up, you say, I was wrong. That's part of the status game and therefore you have to be willing to defer according to the rules as well as to claim status according to the rules. And see, of course, that's where things can go wrong, right? You can get blinded by your own needs and your own perceptual biases. I don't care about your stupid data, I must be right. And as you say, cults, which are classic examples of this, they convince everybody that the way they see things is right, is for the group, they are contributing to the group. It's, as I said, it's lightning, lightning in a bottle.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  And you use it in the right place and it's great, but it's got great potential to go the other way too. On the other hand, we can't get away from it. It's part of the fabric of our lives. So the best thing we can do is to try to be vigilant, right? And try to build those rules. It's only we collectively can do it, but this is the fraught condition of humanity, I think.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  And this is where I'm really conflicted because, you know, on the one hand, I think everyone will, most people will acknowledge, like, these cults, these, you know, authoritarian systems, like, they have terrible point systems. Most of us can agree on that. But when I look out at the world, even in the ways that sort of... Our major institutions and social structures allocate status. It doesn't seem like we're doing it in ways that solve our most important challenges. Right? When I think about our society, an investment banker has a lot more status than a teacher.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  An athlete or singer has a lot more status in many ways than even a Nobel Prize winning scientist. And so many of these games we play, right? Sports, fashion, buying yachts, right? They don't seem to serve any really important social purpose. And so it's one thing if it's, you know, we're getting most of our games right and a few of them are a little off, like on the margins. But if these hierarchies exist to help us solve these big collective problems, why does there such a divergence between the kinds of people and jobs and skills we imbue with status and those that would actually make our collective lives better?

• 35:37Speaker 01

  Like, why does it seem like in so many aspects of our lives, we're creating point systems that have really, really perverse and unhelpful consequences?

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Well, you know, this is, I wish I could solve this problem. It's a fundamental human problem, right? Life is deeply uncertain. What is it we're trying to do? What is it that we really value? And then secondly, we have to agree on that to do it together. You mentioned capitalism. I would say capitalism is fraught with status systems. But capitalism is also an emergent kind of system that develops and has its own, shall we say, externalities, right? Which can end up with people like investment bankers making more than teachers and unbelievably more than teachers, you know? One investment banker more than all the teachers in the country or something like that. And it has its own externalities.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  And it isn't just status that causes that to happen, I would say. But it is fraught with it. I mean, Babbel and, you know, theory of leisure class conspicuous consumption, that's all status. But I think this business of knowing what the best thing to do, what is the best system, right? People are always struggling towards this to try to understand. We can usually come up with things we would like to have, like we are pretty committed to having a reasonably egalitarian society where people all have reasonably good social welfare, given what's possible, and an economy that's productive enough to provide. But then we don't agree on how much inequality is okay.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  We don't agree on what counts as the most valuable contribution. People argue right now, for instance, on whether things like educational credentials are overvalued compared to skills and manual labor in terms of actually producing what makes our society work and be better off. You know, there's arguments about that. And so that's the problem, trying to agree on what would work and in a highly uncertain social situation. It didn't come with a map, you know? People didn't come with a map.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wasn't necessarily going to go here, but you know, now that we're talking about capitalism, it seems like, at least in American society, one of the sources of this constant divergence is the way that money has become arguably the most universal indicator of status. And not just in the sense that more money equals higher status, but almost in a moral sense, right? That the story we tell about money in this country is that it's a reflection of your social contribution, of your value to society. But to your point, that certainly isn't always or even usually the case. Our economy often rewards people for speculation, for polluting, for addicting us to things that are terrible for us.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  And so you end up in this place we're in right now, where a lot of the most talented people in our society are flocking to Wall Street to move money around, or Silicon Valley to try to get people to click on ads, because that's where all the money is, and by extension, where all the status is. And so this gap between economic value and social value really seems to be at the heart of a lot of these distortions. But when you look at other countries, it clearly doesn't have to be that way, right? Like, in countries like Singapore, public servants are paid extremely well, salaries that sometimes reach into the millions. And as a result, they've created this culture where smart, talented people, they go to work at a place like McKinsey so that they can then earn enough prestige to work in government.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Right? Finland has a similar approach with teaching. They attach a lot of social prestige to becoming a teacher. And as a result, their teaching master's programs are as competitive and prestigious as some of the Ivies in the US. I've even come to think of the Inflation Reduction Act this way, as trying not only to make it economically more feasible to decarbonize the US, but by really putting its thumb on the scale culturally, saying, you know, building this decarbonization infrastructure and technology is something valuable. It's something we want smart, young, talented people going into. So we're going to wrap it in not just money, but a level of status and importance.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  And so I'm really just, I'm guessing I'm just interested in all of your thoughts on that, on both the way status has become attached to wealth in often pretty unhealthy ways. And whether you think there are policy mechanisms that can be used to change the point system, to try to alter and create gains that better serve the public good.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Well, first, I think you're absolutely right about, especially in the United States, maybe many places in the world, but that money is a route to status. And in the United States, it's partly our self-made thing. Well, what does it mean to be self-made? In a way, it's, you know, the American dream. You go out, you work hard, you make money, you buy a house, you do all that sort of thing. There is this foundational sense that if you make money, it shows that you have it, that you must be smart. And, and so you're right, that it really makes us the ultimate, you know, capitalist, get out there and make money because it gets a status as well as money. And I would argue that often the status is as or more important in driving people because, you know, what can you do with all that money?

• 41:07Speaker 02

  And so, in a way, except flaunt it, and what does flaunting it mean? It means to gain status from it. So that's absolutely true. But then the other side about policy, can we then say, let's make these other things cool? Certainly, that's the effort, make green things cool. Instead of figuring out how to make people click on more websites, why not figure out these difficult problems of how we can solve carbon problems in our society? Wouldn't that be cool? Make, you know, young minds who are curious, say, wow, if I could do this, I'd be so cool. And set up a sort of virtuous status competition, if you will, to achieve these things. I think we can.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  I mean, that's sort of what happened, you know, in the Kennedy days, in which they set the goal of going to the moon, right? Then a certain crowd, a technical crowd, jumped on that, right? That before that had not particularly been working on these things. So jump, well, there are always some people working on it, but it was mostly in terms of military missiles, right? To jump on this idea of a peaceful manned space thing and make that cool. Well, to make these other things cool projects that people did together. I think we can do that, and policy clearly does it.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  So I agree with a lot of that. But this also gets to one of the critiques someone might have of this conversation, which is, we're both college educated. You're an academic at Stanford. I'm a journalist at the New York Times. And more broadly, we're both part of this Western culture, particularly this American culture that, to the point you just made, really tends to value and promote individual striving. So I think someone listening to this might be thinking, well, look, maybe you're the kind of people who really care about status. But maybe this conversation doesn't apply to everyone, especially to people across different cultures.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  And so I'm just wondering how you think about that critique? And how broadly applicable this idea of status as a cultural and social tool for organizing society actually is?

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Well, I think anthropologists and people of all sorts over the years have never found a human society that doesn't have a status hierarchy. Status appears to be a human universal. That does not mean that how they think about status will constitute status, right? What's the point system? It has anything to do with the point system that you have in a different society, right? Societies be profoundly different in what they value from people and what they care. But they still give some people more prominence than others. Sometimes they make big status distinctions and some societies are relatively egalitarian and relatively small status distinctions, but they still have some kind of status concerns. That's really everywhere.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  It isn't just us, but the way we think about it. We, for instance, are worship instrumental competence, some kind of competence of this and competence of that. And that's why I care about education, why that's such a status thing, independent of what it might do in any other way, in terms of actual skills it gives. Some societies greatly value what has been called by some status researchers virtue, which is basically the public sacrificing of yourself for the common good in some way. Someone who will give up everything themselves for the group, this kind of business of helping the group, but that in itself being a form of status.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  All groups need that, but you get more status for it in some societies than others. So, yeah, we are weird, all right, in terms of the point systems we use and the game we play, but the deepest game of status seems to be everywhere.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  So let's talk about how we actually end up with these specific status beliefs in the first place then, and also how we end up with some of these distortions we were talking about earlier. So can you just talk a little bit about what you call the status generalization process?

• 45:15Speaker 02

  Yes. When we have that problem of stepping into a room and figuring out, you know, wait a minute, do I speak up first here? Or should I listen to this person? Who's who? What are we doing? Well, when you do that who's who, what are you really saying? You're kind of thinking like, I'm looking at this person, I'm picking up cues on them. How does that help me locate them socially? What cultural beliefs, widely shared cultural beliefs, does that evoke in my mind? Stereotypes, I'm afraid, that evoke in my mind. And some classic things like race and gender and occupation and all that will evoke these cultural beliefs that have associated with its status beliefs, implications about people

• 45:57Speaker 02

  like this, in general, are presumed to be more vaguely, more worthy and more competent, more deserving of authority than people like that. So those cultural status beliefs are, we need those status beliefs. Why do we need them? Because as I'm going along, I need to come up with an assessment of who's going to be higher status in this group compared to me and others, that others are likely to support, right? How can I tell what others will accept if I behave this way? How others react? And it isn't just how I view it, but

• 46:39Speaker 02

  rather, how can I anticipate what they think, so that I can coordinate my behavior with that? So that's the problem. The problem is, in figuring out who's going to be better in this group, I have to grab hold of these cultural generalizations, these stereotypes that have status implications, which of course, we know are not necessarily all that accurate, right? But there they are. And grab hold of them, because I assume they're the roadmap that everybody's looking at. And it means that people, just because of their group identity alone, might be thought to be lesser in a situation, or greater than they really are, than what they can produce. And it biases the system. So it sort of moves away from

• 47:24Speaker 02

  its direct functional, who can contribute, towards

• 47:28Speaker 02

  Who is more privileged or who is less privileged and moves the system that way?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and to take an example of how this process could play out in the real world, what you're basically saying, as I understand it, is that it would be incredibly inefficient if every time we had to hire a new person or decide whose opinions to take seriously, if we had to make those determinations completely from scratch, right? That may have been fine when humans were living in these small tribes and small communities and everyone knew everyone, but there's just no way you can navigate in a big, complex society like that. And so as we've scaled up our societies to larger and larger levels, we've needed to

• 48:13Speaker 01

  develop these more general beliefs about status, like, you know, education equals competence. And that then becomes this almost shared social reality that we can all refer back to when going about our lives. But to your point, it also creates these massive distortions because almost by definition, these beliefs are going to be oversimplifications. But this also gets to another important part of this process, which is the role of status signaling. Because it's not like we're all, you know, walking around with a list of every single person's relevant status characteristics all the time.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  So instead, we have to rely on these often fairly subtle cues to figure out how to act, how to treat others. And so I was just wondering if you can talk a little bit about that, about the nature and function of these status cues and status signaling and how they play into this broader social process?

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Well, because a lot of it has to do with how, when you simply, as you say, you encounter someone and either encounter them, you can think about it simply about encountering face to face, but also in some mediated or digital way, but you just get a certain number of cues for them and you've got to act in real time. You have to, how to treat them, what to do, you know, time is moving on, right? You have to keep reacting. So you make quick implicit judgments and you do it by looking at obvious cues that are in front of you, whatever is put out. And of course, appearance, that's why social differences amongst people that can be indicated by appearance. Matter a lot. Well, of course, if it's a matter of appearance, then it also means

• 49:57Speaker 02

  that people, the actor themselves, can intentionally manipulate those appearance cues to give it. The clothing you wear, we will often, you can locate a person in terms of social class, maybe region or profession, in terms of the clothing they wear, right? You locate them. You can, their manner, do they have, have this, you can hold your body in a way that, of course, I'm an important person, and it radiates, right? Or you can hold your body in a way that, nobody sees me, no, I don't count for much. And that can be quite independent, right, of your actual social background. So people play the game, right?

• 50:38Speaker 02

  In other words, we know the game, and therefore, playing the game, we have to arm ourselves and try to present ourselves and position ourselves. So status signaling is, is how it's done.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  And I will say, I am someone who used to think of myself as someone who did not participate in this status signaling game. Because I think when people, you know, they think of status signaling, when they hear you talk about that, the first thing that comes to mind is sort of lavish displays of wealth, right? The fancy car, the big house, the expensive watch or handbag. And I think that's, that's certainly true. That's still a way that people signal, a very clear way. But the sociologist Elizabeth Currid-Halke had this fascinating book a few years ago called The Sum of Small Things, that we actually

• 51:33Speaker 01

  had her on the show to talk about back at Vox. And her argument is that the nature of elite status signaling has actually really shifted away from these forms of what you might think of as conspicuous consumption, to what she calls inconspicuous consumption.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Where the signal is more cultural capital than wealth. It's more about showing off your knowledge, your virtue, your social awareness. And I, you know, reading this book felt very called out because in her research, she finds that the things that elites currently do to signal status are they'll, they'll read the New Yorker, they'll buy local or fair trade goods, they'll listen to NPR or the Daily or maybe even the Ezra Klein Show. They'll be really environmentally conscious in semi-public ways. And what happens when you rock your New Yorker tote bag? Or you bring up the story you heard on NPR? Or, you know, you're out with a group and you decline to eat meat.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  You know, whether intentionally or not, you're sending a signal about the kind of person you are. And again, I think what's so, you know, to our point earlier, that may not be the intention at all, but it's still a really powerful signal about the kind of status you deserve.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  I think this is absolutely right. And it's certainly the case about contemporary elite culture. All the studies show that whereas traditionally elite culture coming out of the 19th century, the earliest 20th century was associated with kind of so-called high culture, old masters art and going to the symphony and all that kind of stuff. Not at all, not at all. Now, elite culture is about, as I said, small things and it's about being so-called omnivores that you, for instance, may listen to all kinds of obscure music and all kinds of music that some people might consider to be not elite at all, but you know about it and you have a background knowledge of that.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  And, and yet, on the other hand, you also do these certain key things. So it's a combination of I'm not afraid, I'm so confident in my position. It's a little like this, I don't have to show I'm working hard at it, I can do it easily. This is the cultural version of that. Right? I know so many things that I don't have to just have high status things because I know I'm high status. I can like, I of course can appreciate these things, low status things too. Right? It shows how broad and sophisticated I am. I can read The New Yorker, I can, as well, though I do these highly specialized things that are read in a certain elite situation. I know on college admissions, right,

• 54:20Speaker 02

  the growth of extracurricular activities and having to build up a resume of that sort to get into an elite college. It's not good enough to have good grades anymore. And I've seen some recent research by graduate students that, for instance, for working class kids, this is particularly important. If they can show this elite cultural thing, then they're thought, oh, they'll fit just fine, right, at this elite college. It helps their admissions. So it absolutely, but this is still another form, and you said this, really, it's still status competition. It's another form of conspicuous consumption. It's cool to act like you just do it out of natural talent. You don't actually work at it. You don't break a sweat.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think this really gets at this question that we were circling earlier about motivations. Because I'm someone who fits a lot of these traits. I'm vegan, I read The New Yorker, I listen to lots of fairly cerebral podcasts, I even work for one. And to me, it just feels like I do those things because I care about them. But I'm also aware, especially after reading your book, that that's probably not the only reason I'm attracted to these things. That these status beliefs have, at the very least, structured the choices that I've made. One way I've begun to think about it, and that I'd love to get your thoughts on, is the difference between what our conscious and unconscious

• 55:44Speaker 01

  minds are doing in these situations. The journalist Will Storr has this great book, The Status Game. And in it, he makes this distinction I've been thinking a lot about, which is that our conscious minds evolved to be storytellers, and our unconscious minds evolved to be game players. And that really feels true to me. You point to all this fascinating evidence in the book that our brains operate almost as status scorekeepers. Within seconds, we're able to weigh the relative importance of different status indicators and come up with this almost overall ranking that tells us how we should treat people. But all of

• 56:24Speaker 01

  that's happening below the surface. Most of it isn't even visible to us. All that we're often aware of at a conscious level is, you know, that job seems more interesting to me than that other job, or that one person is just more competent than that other person. And then our conscious minds come in and tell us this wonderful coherent story of why that's the case. But in reality, it has a lot more to do with these status cues and these signals and beliefs than we'd like to admit. And that disconnect feels like a really important piece of this to me. Because if it's true, then it's not simply that we're playing these status games on our own terms. They're playing us too.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  And being aware of how they're playing us seems really important to just navigating your life or understanding where your own motivations come from.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  Well, starting with your last point, I totally agree that being aware of these kinds of things is very important in terms of being self-aware, right, of this is important to navigating your own life. I agree. You don't have to get spooky about how unconscious it is, but it is implicit. It's in the background. You are completely unaware of it. And it's at that level that I think these status rules work, right? They are implicit and your mind is consciously focused on the real thing that's going on right now, right? But behind the scenes, more is going on. And as I said earlier, I think that your motivations for what the reason why you're doing the things, why you like the clothes you do, the why you like to listen to podcasts, is not merely status. Be fair to yourself,

• 58:01Speaker 02

  right? It's not merely status. But the fact that it is also status makes it easier to do, right? And maybe keeps you going at it in some way because... What is more important to our well-being and even our survival than how the groups that we belong to see us? I mean, sure, in our American view, we should think, "Well, that's not important. Nobody tells me who I am. I tell them who I am, they don't tell me." But we live in this world, and what happens? You know, we all went to high school, right? What happens? You know, when you fit or don't fit in various crowds, it eats at you, it makes you discouraged.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  So of course, your background unconscious mind is following this little rule and saying, "Danger, danger." When something pops up, or saying, "Ooh, that feels good. Ooh, that feels good, more of that." So you're moving along, and the status aspect is part of the background motivation.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  So I want to dig in here a little deeper into where these status beliefs come from in the first place, and to the point you really get at in the second half of the book, how they produce social inequality. So can you just tell me a little bit about status construction theory and what it says about the way inequalities come about and are justified?

• 59:51Speaker 02

  Sure. So the basic idea starts with the fact that people essentially need some form of status belief. I said this before, that in order to coordinate with other people, it's really helpful to have some general ideas of what kind of people are more likely to have what we value here in this situation than others, right? Just my private rules aren't good enough. They've got to be shared rules so we can coordinate on this. Well, if that's the situation, then one of the things that can happen, and I've done experiments in which you can make this happen, is that if you take some kind of difference, and in my experiments, I simply created a made-up difference between my participants in my studies.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  But then, what happens is I set up the situation so that one person in the group knows a little more about the task than the other and kind of jumps in and talks more. They don't actually really know more, but they say, act like they do. They say more and they jump in. And what happens is, just for the reasons I mentioned before, pretty quickly, that person ends up being more influential in the task. They're all working together to solve a problem. More influential and their ideas are more on the floor and it ends up that way. After just two experiences like that, they'll say, let's say that what happened in their group was the person in the other group always became, seemed to talk more and become more influential. After just two experiences like that then, people say, most people would say

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  that the person in the other response group is higher status, more competent and capable, but not as nice as people in my group. They're forming a belief about what most people would think, a status belief, right? And they did that after two occasions. You may say, well, that's a silly little experiment. But I did some other experiments in which I, they created those beliefs like that and then I asked them to come back to the lab three days later. And then, once again, they interact with somebody from the other group and I see how they treat them. And they treated the other person according to the status belief. In other words, it caused enough of a difference that they, when they had to encounter a person like that again,

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  they either acted assertively or deferred to them as it happened before, when their previous experiences. So that's how quickly people did this. It just popped up, right? So if that's the case, then think about all the things that can happen in society, all the kinds of things that can happen. One social group or people of a certain characteristic, for one reason or another, pure random reason. Get control of something. They get more valued resources of some sort that matters. You know, they land in the place where the crops grow better or they do something.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  And then that puts them in a position in their encounters with people from the other group to act more assertive, to do things of that sort. And then these status beliefs develop about them. So you can get any kind of control of resources. Even for instance, if you go back to looking at various evidence about the development of our status beliefs about gender in Western society. And of course, now you go, wait, we don't have, we don't know, right? But getting into the way back. But nevertheless, these status beliefs tend to be associated with societies in where there's bigger resource differences. And it usually seems to intensify with the control of resources. In other words, in small egalitarian, hunter and gatherer

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  societies, sometimes there are big gender differences and mostly they're not. But what happens is almost all the arguments about the development of gender beliefs are, which are, for instance, the constraints faced by lactating mothers and mobility and hunting and stuff like that, have to do with a situation where men had greater control over resources or over the interactions that would give rise to status beliefs of being diffusely more competent. Well, once you create status beliefs, then it doesn't, you know, being a lactating mother is not, can still be a disadvantage. It's mostly not a huge disadvantage, right? And there's no technical reason why it would have

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  to be a disadvantage with the right social arrangements. But nevertheless, the status belief is still out there. And it perpetuates the value of the social difference independent of the origins, what you might can say, the material origins of the status belief. So basically, people take some kind of material advantage and make it into a cultural advantage. And the cultural advantage, which is status, and this cultural advantage perpetuates that even when the material basis disappears. That's the problem.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  I think this is just such an important point because it completely reverses, it flips on its head, our traditional conception of how inequality forms, right? I think most of us, including me, tend to think that beliefs like racism and sexism are what lead to material inequalities between the races or sexes. But what you're arguing here is the opposite, that material inequality or some form of inequality actually precedes and even generates those ideologies through the vehicle of status beliefs, that we look out and we see these social inequalities in wealth or power

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  or access to knowledge, and then we create these stories retroactively based on those inequalities. But then, something you talk about in the book, and this feels like another really important part, is that these status beliefs become self fulfilling in a way, that they're obviously social fictions, but fictions that have this tendency to recreate and reshape reality in their image. So can you just talk about that, about the ways that even if these beliefs are objectively false, they end up almost making themselves true, both in the way that they act on the members of those marginalized groups and also on others?

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  Yes, and in fact, that's the key to how these beliefs create inequality, how they maintain the persistence of inequality, and particularly inequality based on these differences, right, on social differences. And the self fulfilling part is, well, then, once you've decided, hey, wait a minute, this person seems to know more than others, then you say, okay, if that's the case, then I'm going to listen to them, and then you make them the person who's more in charge. I mean, we saw it even in those experiments that I ran, right? Because when they came back three days later, if their experience had been that people in that other group seemed to be better at these kind of problems that we were giving

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  them, then they made that true in their new interaction with another person from the same group. They started deferring to them right at the beginning. So people act on it. They create expectations for the other based on these beliefs they had relative to their expectations for themselves, and they act on them. And then the rewards tend to get divided up, okay. And the people who are the more prominent ones tend to get more of the rewards and so more of the resources that are being passed around for this. Who gets the promotion? Who gets the raise? Who gets the good assignment? Who then gets the bigger salary that goes with that? And so on. So it becomes self fulfilling. That's how it maintains it.

• 1:07:38Speaker 02

  In other words, one group gets an advantage over another group, which allows them to create the circumstances that create status beliefs favoring them. They're not only more powerful, not only have their foot on the throat of the other group, but now it looks like, geez, somehow magically, they control things more than the other group. And that therefore they must be more competent or better than the status beliefs develop. Once the status beliefs develop, then those beliefs really are the cause of the ongoing social difference, right? So once you get the status beliefs, you're right that the beliefs create the inequality. But often it's some kind of inequality.

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  I use the example, it's easy to think about material resources, but it can be other kinds of things. Technology, right? Having guns when the other group doesn't have guns. Having medicine. Having something, you know, having some kind of technology or something that makes you appear like, wow, you know more than we do. Or real control, right? Right? Slavery, real physical control over people and their bodies can create these circumstances in which the controllers can be made to appear to somehow have more, right, than the people who are oppressed. And there's a kind of facts on the ground. It creates these cultural beliefs of superiority, inferiority. And then that perpetuates the material inequality.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  We've talked about a few of the ways that status is a double edged sword. But this feels like perhaps the most consequential. Which is, on the one hand, to our conversation earlier. Status is this incredibly powerful social technology that can really help us solve problems in ways that make us all better off, right? But on the other, it also creates these massive inequalities, completely unjustified inequalities that build and build and build on themselves.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  And so it seems to me like there are really two possible ways to respond to that conundrum, that double edged sword, right? One is you try to reduce the power of status as a driving force in society, as a way of making society more equal, right? I think you see this a lot in some of the more egalitarian hunter gatherer societies. They'll have these practices like insulting the meat where instead of celebrating the hunters who bring home the most food, they'll actually make fun and belittle them in order to sort of stomp out that status obsession before it spirals into inequality. And, you know, obviously the world is very different today, but I do think there are modern ways you could try to do that.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  You could, you know, one proposal I've thought about a lot is randomized college admissions, where everyone who meets a certain GPA and SAT score for a given school basically has their name put into a lottery and who gets in is determined at random. And, you know, there are plenty of sort of critiques about how you'd implement that and so on, but the idea is to try to lower the stakes of the college admissions status game. And so that feels like one path. But then there's this other path we were talking about earlier, which is you don't try to reduce the power of status, you try to harness it. You try to build structures and policies that channel this competition into socially beneficial ends.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  And I don't think these are necessarily mutually exclusive, but it definitely seems like the trade off you're making with the latter is you're going to have to accept some inequality and just sort of hope in the end it's at least going to be justified. And so I'm just wondering how you think about those two paths about, and more generally, this question of, you know, given this double edged sword, what's the right way or what's the best way for a society to respond?

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  I think you're right that there are these two paths and that I think you're also right, they're not mutually exclusive. Now, think about, although if you think about that randomized, because status does matter so much for your outcomes in life, think about the outrage that if you say, okay, you're going to go straight into a, we're going to put all the names in a, you know, it's going to be like the lottery night. We're going to pull out the balls and you're going to go to Harvard or not go to Harvard, right? Think about the outrage, right? All the kids, my, everybody in my family went to Harvard, all that, right? So you'd have to get people to agree that they're willing to do this, right? The most problematic aspects of status are these big,

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  general status beliefs about identity groups like gender and race and class and age and occupation, these big, broad ones. And to undermine those and reduce the range, if you change facts on the ground, people, like for instance, gender status beliefs have changed considerably and narrowed the difference, still there, but there are still key things, especially in leadership and so on. But those facts on the ground have visibly changed the beliefs, the status beliefs. You could do the same thing on race. You could do the same thing on a number of things. You can also undermine the consensuality of beliefs. That people start to mostly think, I don't know if that belief is really true.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  And you start to undermine the sense that most people hold it. Well, I don't know if most people think that anymore. Maybe they don't, right? And then you don't act on it in the same way. So that's another way. Another key thing is overlapping circles of status, right? If we undermine and change and reduce the gap implied by these big identity group things, then it won't be the situation anymore. That in one situation after another, the same people, same types of people, end up being the influential ones in one encounter after another. It can be different types of people become influential with different skills. So that you get overlapping circles where, yes, somebody may always be a little higher

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  status than another, but the types of people who are high status in this situation are different than the types of the ones that are high status in another situation. This business of valuing complex, different types of skills, right? If you talk about what's the point system, remember you said what science, the way science really did it and managed to harness status was by developing a particular type of rigorous point system. Well, point systems that value other types of skills, that value giving to the community, value skills at building things and doing things, rather than just cognitive skills

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  and educational skills, that value different types of things and change the, in Europe, for instance, working class skills are more valued in general than they are here. There isn't this big gap. If you're a skilled worker of some type, that that can be, you know, that's pretty good, right? Whereas recently, you know, in the, in the last sort of 50 years or so, that's lost status in American society, and part of our political problems come from that. So there are ways you can moderate this and create a more egalitarian society. It's worked, though, for the same reason that I started by saying, imagine the outrage if an elite college like Harvard decided it was going to randomly choose its people.

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  And I agree with you, that would be the fairest. In other words, there's going to be resistance. When people have a big status advantage, they're not going to say, fine, I give it up. But I think that, you know, I'm a believer in democracy. I think more and more people working together and cooperating on things pushes these things and increases our chances of reducing these differences. But if we don't It's a little bit like you talking about your conscious self and your unconscious self. If we don't maintain an awareness that we're playing the status game, whether we like to think we are or not, that if we're not aware of that, then we will not be able to develop these interruption things. We need to develop an equally automatic process of interrupting

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  them when they get, and trying to equalize them. So everybody gets, you know, everybody gets their status in some situations and nobody gets too much status in all situations.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  So I want to pick up on this really fascinating idea of overlapping circles. Because one of the biggest changes, I think, in all of our status competitions, in really all of our lives over the past 10 to 20 years, has been the rise of the internet. And as a result, sort of a massive proliferation of the number of status communities we have access to, right? In the pre-internet, pre-social media days, you were really limited in the number of places you could compete for status. You had your office, your church, maybe your

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  bowling league. But today, there's almost an infinite amount of different, you know, Reddit forums, there's Facebook groups, there's video games. And I find myself pretty conflicted about whether that's a good thing. Because to your point, on the one hand, it's really good, I think, to diversify the amount of status competitions you're in. If in the 1950s, you were a low-status individual in your community, you didn't have anywhere else to go, you were stuck in that position. And now there are tons of places you can

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  go, right? Like, I had a really hard time finning in in middle school, but then I became really good at Call of Duty. And that became my status community. But at the same time, if back in the, you know, 1950s, you were middle or high status in your community, you probably felt pretty good about yourself. But now, what the internet has also done is it's almost made our global status competitions more global. There are more people to compare yourself to. You know, there are more people to weigh your own status against, right? Like, I think of myself as a reasonably intelligent

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  person, but every time I go on Twitter, I feel terrible compared to all of these, you know, super smart journalists and wongs. And so I'm just wondering how you think about the role the internet has played in reshaping our relationship to status? Because I could, I really see it cutting in both directions.

• 1:18:29Speaker 02

  I do too, and I can't say I've got this figured out, right? But I think several things happen. First of all, you're right that it provides this access to another world of meaning in which you can gain status, which you might never, if you were stuck in that small town, these are your friends, whether you like them or not, right? And that's it. And according, and if you don't feel comfortable with their stand, with their point system, you're in trouble, right? So the internet is a huge asset to all of us for ways to reach beyond to other communities. So that's good. But that has a couple of consequences. One is what happens in those internet groups. What happens in those internet groups is the potential, right?

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  At first, you might just be in a community that you didn't know about, and you encounter a few people and you get good at Call of Duty, right? Well, then, fine, you can move up the status competition and that into a group of people who are experts in Call of Duty. And then, next thing you know, you're competing with people all over the world in Call of Duty. You're in the Olympics of Call of Duty, and you get into this huge, scary, winner-take-all status competition. So what used to be your little friendly, accepting group turns into this dangerous, potentially self-destructive competition. So. One of the things, status groups have to, when they're close to home, they work because, yes, you compete and you sometimes win,

• 1:19:58Speaker 02

  but even when you lose, you get at least something. You're acknowledged to be a credible member of the group, right? It requires a certain closeness connection between the top and the bottom in that situation for that to happen. But if that game then becomes a worldwide competition, a winner-take-all competition with everybody there, the top is very far from the bottom. And in that situation, the rewards that come back and come down to you at the bottom are almost nonexistent, but the punishment's still there. The negative evaluation is still there. So that's the problem when it expands to these huge competitions.

• 1:20:41Speaker 02

  But also, one of the effects of everybody being in different internet worlds is that in the extent to which it breaks down a shared audience in which you can cooperate, right? Can you make this group actually cooperate and do anything? Or is it just ranking? In other words, are you left only with the ranking? And not the ranking in order to do something? Ranking in order to accomplish something? Usually, what you're accomplishing can be simply playing Call of Duty and having a great time together. That's fine. But when the ranking in the Instagram group stops being that and it just starts to be Mean Girls, right? Then you break down that capacity to cooperate. So it seems like in the internet, it's easier to do that, right?

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  And so it makes it easier to get these, where it spirals into this kind of vicious competition.

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. The one other thing I worry about building off of that, with social media in particular, is actually the way it quantifies status, right? One of the things that I actually think is important about our current status system is that it's actually not that precise. So we talked about, you know, all of us have this inner scorekeeper. But there's no explicit ranking system that tells you exactly where you fall. And I think that actually allows for some much needed ambiguity, right? It allows us to think we're higher status than we are. Or to convince ourselves that maybe, you know, people think a little bit more highly of us than they do. It provides some wiggle room.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  But then social media takes this very fuzzy sort of status ranking system and quantifies it. It turns it into a number, like retweets or follower counts. And that also seems pretty damaging to me because even if we're all vaguely aware of our status, at least that ambiguity creates some space for us to tell a more positive story about ourselves. And once you quantify that status metric, then all of a sudden, it just becomes way easier to see where you actually fall. And that part of it, I think, also could just be really damaging.

• 1:22:49Speaker 02

  I think that's absolutely right. I mean, essentially, you get a status credit score, right?

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  And as you say, the ambiguity is key, and it's key in several ways. Because in real ongoing status, you belong to a group and you work with them over, you know, your colleagues working together on this program, work groups where you work in the office or school groups. Status hierarchies develop, but they're not locked in forever and ever and ever. There's some negotiation, wiggle room, things happen and things can change a little bit over the long haul. But these rigid rankings like that, as the internet is prone to create, do exactly what you say. They fix it in. And in fact, there's some research. I've been working recently, the Russell Sage Foundation, to edit a special issue on status in which a bunch of scholars, you know, contributed things.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  But there's one paper in there in which they simply look at what happens when status hierarchies, people are of the same rank, you know, one, two, three, four. But the status hierarchies get more rigid and those ranks get super clear, right? Like the credit score, right? They're not kind of vague and ambiguous. What it does is it means the distribution of resources gets more extreme. They become more unequal, right? And one of the key things is clarifying the ranks, making them very explicit. Explicit ranking systems can create those kinds of systems, numerical ranks.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  But it does, to your point, it does seem like our society is becoming more and more quantified, more and more based on rankings. There's that Black Mirror episode that always just, that still haunts me, where basically all of life becomes one big ranking system, where every interaction you have with someone, you give them a one to five stars, and it becomes a social credit score. And it's just terrifying, because it feels like in some ways, society is moving in that direction. But, you know, that's a conversation to continue another day. You know, we've been talking a lot about our social relationships with status, but I want to sort of end before Book Recs with our individual relationships with status, because you've been studying this for a long time.

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  So I was just wondering, you know, as someone who's been studying this for as long as you have, do you have any advice for individuals on how to have a better relationship with status? Or things that you've learned and applied in your own life that have helped you have a better relationship with it?

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  Well, one of the first things, I think, in your own life is always to keep perspective on the status ranking, right? You talk about when you suddenly are being compared to all these other people. Well, why, who, of course, there's a big world, of course, there are a lot of people, but you are yourself and you have your thing to offer, and you should be grateful for, you know, where you are. That can be very good. So, understand that all the status games do not define your self-worth, your own personal self-worth. But secondly, as you navigate the status world, keep in mind that you don't place all your eggs in one basket, right?

• 1:25:57Speaker 02

  Don't decide that I have to be the top of this, or I'm nothing. I have to be the top of that, or I'm nothing, right? I can do this, I can do that, I do several things. And I'm good enough, you know, in most of these things. And then, secondly, respect others, right? Respect others. Understand that they're all in this game too. And treat them with respect. If you want to be treated with respect, treat others with respect. It works. It works. So, that can help, because a lot of when you get really obsessed with status, it's because nobody treats you with, I don't get no respect, right? But if you respect others, they tend to respect you back. They do. And then that can, you know, that gets you through.

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  I think that's a really great note to end on. So as always, our final question on the Ezra Klein Show is, what are three books that have influenced you that you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:26:56Speaker 02

  So I think the first book that I would recommend, I'm thinking of recent books about status, and the first book I would recommend is "Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us" by Susan Fisk, which talks about how status beliefs shape your emotions, which shape behavior. And of course, that's very relevant to what's happening these days amongst us. I also thought about, just so people get a broad view of status and all the different ways that people think about status, there's a recent collection of people's perspectives on status, some of which I totally disagree with, but still worth thinking about, called "The Psychology of Social Status" by three people, it's actually three editors, Chang,

• 1:27:38Speaker 02

  Tracy, and Anderson. And then I had a lot of trouble after that. The third one, I can think of many, many books that are very readable. I thought about Thorsten Babelens, "The Theory of the Leisure Class," probably nobody will go back to that, but it's still quite a good read, actually, about conspicuous consumption. And then finally, a novel I've been thinking about that I read recently is "The Vanishing Half" by Britt Bennett. That's quite good, about how people change social identities, which brings a huge status difference. And what happens when someone, like two light-skinned African-American women, one passes and one as white and lives a life as a white person, and the other marries a dark-skinned person and lives a life as a black person.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  And your book is "Status: Why Is It Everywhere? Why Does It Matter?" It is truly excellent. I highly recommend people pick it up because there is so much in it that we weren't even able to get to here. Cecilia Ridgway, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

• 1:28:41Speaker 02

  Well, thanks a lot. I really appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun to talk about it. You ask great questions, so that's a good thing.

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  The Ezra Klein Show was produced by Annie Galvin and yours truly. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Carol Sabaro and Isaac Jones. Our audience strategy is by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristen Lynn and Kristina Samulewski.