Some people don’t care about fashion. They roll out of bed with their messy hair and throw on a T-shirt or hoodie—whatever’s lying around. They don’t like the “game” of figuring out what’s in style and what isn’t, so they opt out of the game. Except they can’t. Nobody can. Opting out of the game is another move in the game. Not caring about fashion is a
The problem with these "everything is a status game, even things that claim /appear not to be" takes is they are unfalsifiable, so can be dismissed out of hand.
Also, we know that people differ in their degree of awareness of social cues and emotional signalling, as shown by conditions like Aspergers. So people likely truly *do* genuinely vary in their degree of signalling. Someone who disregards their appearance may well be just less socially aware and/or interested. Most offices have a few Aspergers type guys doing IT or something quantitative who dress badly and don't comb their hair. We can't prove it either way, but I strongly suspect that on no level (conscious or otherwise) is that some kind of power play move trying to show that they're above social conventions about appearance. It's all just less perceptible and salient to them. The "everything is status" takes try to sound like they're cutting through the BS but they are really just cheap and unfalsifiable cynicism.
Thanks, Patstick. I disagree the claim is unfalsifiable. For instance, this paper (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/268226488.pdf) makes a very clear set of predictions about under which conditions people will send "buried signals" (e.g. differences in social rewards for different levels of burying, specific probabilities of detection, etc.). See also Hoffman and Yoeli's book "Hidden Games" for empirical work driven by this approach. I also like Daniel Sznycer's work on pride and shame, which shows these emotions are tailored to social rewards. You make a good point about autistic people. It's plausible they are an exception to the rule. Indeed, it would be surprising if people with clinical deficits in social awareness had no deficits in social awareness. The point I'm making is about the general population, but maybe I should have made that clearer.
Thanks for the reply and links for further reading.
My point around Aspergers is less that they are a special class apart that are exceptions to the rule, but that we're all on the social awareness /salience spectrum somewhere. We also vary within ourselves as individuals over time, too, as different situations are more or less triggering for social competition.
There's also the question of confounding variables to explain choices. If you are a banker and wear a cheap Casio watch while your colleagues all wear Rolexes, it could be that you are signalling that you are too cool for the bling status game (i.e. Still playing a status game, just with a different strategy). Or it might just be that your frugality /economic rationalism prevails for any number of reasons. Maybe you are just less socially competitive. Maybe you have a gambling problem and the cost of a Rolex would be painful. Maybe you grew up in poverty and fear returning to it. Or maybe you are making a big show of your unpretentious nature. We can't know either way. But the fact of saving tens of thousands of pounds has to have some bearing on whether we assume the motivation is just status. The "everything is status" theory just doesn't seem plausible here.
Having said all this, I do think a large amount of ostensibly virtuous and non competitive behaviour is status driven.
Yea this all makes sense. I’m not saying status is the only motivation for what we do—I’m just saying that motivation is almost never absent. The motivation to look good, or at least not look too bad, is humming along in the background constantly, often unconsciously, and we often underestimate it or pretend it’s not there, for (ironically) status-driven reasons.
Butting in to say that I believe we can make 'grand' claims like this from the theory of evolution: we can say that species typical, universally evolved adaptations for status signalling are likely present in every human - or at least, they were 'intended' to be, without disability or brain injury to responsible mechanisms.
So with that being said, people with asperger's signal all the time for social approval, and they signal often in inappropriate, crude and overt ways (like children before they are properly socialized - and autism is often characterized as developmental delay). Being extreme systemizers with low emotional self-awareness, they are often on the extreme of 'rationality signaling' - self-deceiving themselves about how logical they are, and making shows of disregarding status to show just how logical they are. I cannot say to have met another human that is not driven at least somewhat, consciously or unconsciously, by status-seeking drives.
Scientific skepticism is good, and I can't say to know what is in the head of every human. Obviously not every human can be tested. I also cannot say whether any human other than myself is conscious, or if they have hearts and lungs. Yet it is a very safe assumption that they are conscious and they have hearts and lungs, or at least they were 'intended to' have them by evolution. Scientific skepticism about the universality of status-seeking mechanisms is, to me, equivalent to the type of solipsism that is skeptical on whether all people truly have hearts and lungs until we have looked.
Maybe between Aspergers there are cues identifiable only by others on the spectrum. Aspergers also have motivations and need other people for survival, then we must assume they have some sort of signals.
>>Opting out of the game is another move in the game. Not caring about fashion is a fashion statement.
That might be true for urban people. But not in the countryside, where I live. People wear their work clothes in public. Not because it is a statement but because changing would be impractical. People wear yellow vests just to be visible in traffic. I sometimes pick my kids up with a bit of construction dust or soil on my clothes. I try not to, but that is still better than being late. Maybe urban environments are so controlled that people can always choose their looks and have the time to do so. But people who work with the physical world have less opportunity to choose - if they want to make statemtents, they need to get tattoos.
That’s a good point. Not saying signaling explains everything—there are certainly practical considerations. I would only add that doing the practically easiest thing is not an escape from the signaling game. People will still judge you for it, and make inferences about you for it, whether you like it or not. And they will make a different set of inferences and judgments if you do the practically harder thing. Either way, you’re getting judged. There’s no escape. That’s the deeper point.
Again: great insights! Question: Couldn’t it be a meaningful way to say that certain issues are being politicized negatively? Take, for instance, behavior genetics. By politicizing these findings, one might argue that behavior genetics is a partisan endeavor, only supported by those on the political right. However, if one refrains from politicizing behavior genetics, the focus shifts to recognizing the significance of genetic differences among individuals and prompts the question of how best to address these differences?
Thanks, Harald. Katheryn Harden tried to depoliticize behavioral genetics in her book, The Genetic Lottery, but it was mainly an attempt to repoliticize it in favor of the political left (e.g. if your success in life is due to your genes, then success is a matter of luck and we need to redistribute wealth). People like to claim they are depoliticizing things while they are secretly politicizing them in favor of their preferred side of the political aisle. It's another one of those social paradoxes: we rally support for our side by being impartial to both sides. So I don't think the field got politicized because of uppity signaly people who just care about politicizing everything. I think it got politicized because it is inherently political. To refrain from politicizing it is merely to politicize it in a different way--to take away a potential arrow in the quiver of one of the two political sides. People who aren't strongly loyal to either side would naturally prefer this outcome, but of course they would prefer that--it benefits them. The "grey tribe" gets stronger when the "red tribe" and "blue tribe" get weaker (per the Scott Alexander post). If there's a way to genuinely depoliticize things, it's to admit that we're all secretly tribal in our own way. But of course we don't like to admit that. Which is why I like to point it out. My two cents anyways.
The problem with these "everything is a status game, even things that claim /appear not to be" takes is they are unfalsifiable, so can be dismissed out of hand.
Also, we know that people differ in their degree of awareness of social cues and emotional signalling, as shown by conditions like Aspergers. So people likely truly *do* genuinely vary in their degree of signalling. Someone who disregards their appearance may well be just less socially aware and/or interested. Most offices have a few Aspergers type guys doing IT or something quantitative who dress badly and don't comb their hair. We can't prove it either way, but I strongly suspect that on no level (conscious or otherwise) is that some kind of power play move trying to show that they're above social conventions about appearance. It's all just less perceptible and salient to them. The "everything is status" takes try to sound like they're cutting through the BS but they are really just cheap and unfalsifiable cynicism.
Thanks, Patstick. I disagree the claim is unfalsifiable. For instance, this paper (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/268226488.pdf) makes a very clear set of predictions about under which conditions people will send "buried signals" (e.g. differences in social rewards for different levels of burying, specific probabilities of detection, etc.). See also Hoffman and Yoeli's book "Hidden Games" for empirical work driven by this approach. I also like Daniel Sznycer's work on pride and shame, which shows these emotions are tailored to social rewards. You make a good point about autistic people. It's plausible they are an exception to the rule. Indeed, it would be surprising if people with clinical deficits in social awareness had no deficits in social awareness. The point I'm making is about the general population, but maybe I should have made that clearer.
Thanks for the reply and links for further reading.
My point around Aspergers is less that they are a special class apart that are exceptions to the rule, but that we're all on the social awareness /salience spectrum somewhere. We also vary within ourselves as individuals over time, too, as different situations are more or less triggering for social competition.
There's also the question of confounding variables to explain choices. If you are a banker and wear a cheap Casio watch while your colleagues all wear Rolexes, it could be that you are signalling that you are too cool for the bling status game (i.e. Still playing a status game, just with a different strategy). Or it might just be that your frugality /economic rationalism prevails for any number of reasons. Maybe you are just less socially competitive. Maybe you have a gambling problem and the cost of a Rolex would be painful. Maybe you grew up in poverty and fear returning to it. Or maybe you are making a big show of your unpretentious nature. We can't know either way. But the fact of saving tens of thousands of pounds has to have some bearing on whether we assume the motivation is just status. The "everything is status" theory just doesn't seem plausible here.
Having said all this, I do think a large amount of ostensibly virtuous and non competitive behaviour is status driven.
Yea this all makes sense. I’m not saying status is the only motivation for what we do—I’m just saying that motivation is almost never absent. The motivation to look good, or at least not look too bad, is humming along in the background constantly, often unconsciously, and we often underestimate it or pretend it’s not there, for (ironically) status-driven reasons.
Butting in to say that I believe we can make 'grand' claims like this from the theory of evolution: we can say that species typical, universally evolved adaptations for status signalling are likely present in every human - or at least, they were 'intended' to be, without disability or brain injury to responsible mechanisms.
So with that being said, people with asperger's signal all the time for social approval, and they signal often in inappropriate, crude and overt ways (like children before they are properly socialized - and autism is often characterized as developmental delay). Being extreme systemizers with low emotional self-awareness, they are often on the extreme of 'rationality signaling' - self-deceiving themselves about how logical they are, and making shows of disregarding status to show just how logical they are. I cannot say to have met another human that is not driven at least somewhat, consciously or unconsciously, by status-seeking drives.
Scientific skepticism is good, and I can't say to know what is in the head of every human. Obviously not every human can be tested. I also cannot say whether any human other than myself is conscious, or if they have hearts and lungs. Yet it is a very safe assumption that they are conscious and they have hearts and lungs, or at least they were 'intended to' have them by evolution. Scientific skepticism about the universality of status-seeking mechanisms is, to me, equivalent to the type of solipsism that is skeptical on whether all people truly have hearts and lungs until we have looked.
Well put. Thanks.
Maybe between Aspergers there are cues identifiable only by others on the spectrum. Aspergers also have motivations and need other people for survival, then we must assume they have some sort of signals.
>>Opting out of the game is another move in the game. Not caring about fashion is a fashion statement.
That might be true for urban people. But not in the countryside, where I live. People wear their work clothes in public. Not because it is a statement but because changing would be impractical. People wear yellow vests just to be visible in traffic. I sometimes pick my kids up with a bit of construction dust or soil on my clothes. I try not to, but that is still better than being late. Maybe urban environments are so controlled that people can always choose their looks and have the time to do so. But people who work with the physical world have less opportunity to choose - if they want to make statemtents, they need to get tattoos.
That’s a good point. Not saying signaling explains everything—there are certainly practical considerations. I would only add that doing the practically easiest thing is not an escape from the signaling game. People will still judge you for it, and make inferences about you for it, whether you like it or not. And they will make a different set of inferences and judgments if you do the practically harder thing. Either way, you’re getting judged. There’s no escape. That’s the deeper point.
Yeah. Getting forcibly abducted from home is the only way to evade all accusations of signaling.
Again: great insights! Question: Couldn’t it be a meaningful way to say that certain issues are being politicized negatively? Take, for instance, behavior genetics. By politicizing these findings, one might argue that behavior genetics is a partisan endeavor, only supported by those on the political right. However, if one refrains from politicizing behavior genetics, the focus shifts to recognizing the significance of genetic differences among individuals and prompts the question of how best to address these differences?
Thanks, Harald. Katheryn Harden tried to depoliticize behavioral genetics in her book, The Genetic Lottery, but it was mainly an attempt to repoliticize it in favor of the political left (e.g. if your success in life is due to your genes, then success is a matter of luck and we need to redistribute wealth). People like to claim they are depoliticizing things while they are secretly politicizing them in favor of their preferred side of the political aisle. It's another one of those social paradoxes: we rally support for our side by being impartial to both sides. So I don't think the field got politicized because of uppity signaly people who just care about politicizing everything. I think it got politicized because it is inherently political. To refrain from politicizing it is merely to politicize it in a different way--to take away a potential arrow in the quiver of one of the two political sides. People who aren't strongly loyal to either side would naturally prefer this outcome, but of course they would prefer that--it benefits them. The "grey tribe" gets stronger when the "red tribe" and "blue tribe" get weaker (per the Scott Alexander post). If there's a way to genuinely depoliticize things, it's to admit that we're all secretly tribal in our own way. But of course we don't like to admit that. Which is why I like to point it out. My two cents anyways.
Maybe you can’t stop caring what others think, but you can fight it. You can stop making choices because what others think.
Is the same thing that happens with sugar. You can’t stop liking it, you evolve to love it. But you can stop eating it.