Snippet 16: How to Understand the Science of Social Status: Will Storr
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Hey friends, welcome back to the Deep Dive Snippet. In this little clip, I'm speaking to Will Storr, the author of the book, The Status Game, which talks about how we can understand motivation through the lens of the social status games that we all play every day. I find this topic incredibly fascinating and I think it's so interesting how we all have these like underlying motivations for the things that we do, like the pursuit of money or career or wealth or fame or like

making YouTube channels or anything like that. And it's interesting just how much the desire for social status is a fundamental part of basically all of the things that we do. And that's the stuff that Will and I are talking about in this clip. So yeah, hope you enjoy it. Okay, let's talk about the status game. How did you become interested in the topic of...

the pursuit of social status? Well, so the heretics and then selfie and then the science of storytelling, those three books were all about that idea of the brain as a storyteller. They were all pursuing this one idea, which is the brain is,

Is this delusional machine, which, as I said before, remixes reality into this heroic story. We're in the middle of the world, the universe, everything revolves around us. We're amazing. You know, as long as we're psychologically healthy, we have all these, you know, crazy biases. So, you know, I started to think, OK, so if that's...

if that's what's really going on, if that's the kind of delusion we're in the middle of, if that's the kind of lie of the brain, what's the truth of the brain, what's actually going on kind of beneath the hood. And so this phrase that I read, I think it was a psychologist called, I think Robert Hoffman,

Hogan came up with this phrase that I used it in the selfie and the science of storytelling that, that, that our, you know, our secret subconscious drive is to get along and get ahead. And I thought that I always loved that because it's, it feels, it's so simple to understand. And the reason it's those things is because we're tribal, we're a tribal animal. We're, you know, we're, we're these apes that have mastered the art of cooperative living. You know, we, we, we, we, we,

we're driven to and so for those reasons we have these very strong subconscious urges to getting together in groups of people who are like-minded and you know pursue goals with them but also compete for status

with other members of that group, but also those groups compete for status with rival groups. And so that's tribal life. That's life in the tribe. That's why we organize, human life is organized like that because it was organized like that 20,000 years ago on the African Savannah. And I always find it's amazing that that's still human life today. Those groups are political groups, they're football teams, they're,

you know, cults, their religions, their corporations, that we, this is what we do. That's human social life. It's groupish and it's compete competition.

And so the status game is really a book about that get along and get ahead. That's what a game is. A game is you get along, you clump into a group of people that you're playing a game with, and then you start competing. How did the story kind of come together? Did you start off with the hypothesis that this is a thing and then find the stories and the examples and stuff to back it up? Or was it more investigative? What was the approach there? Yeah, it was...

So when I was researching selfie and selfie is about how the West West in the West were very individualistic and you know self-obsessed relatively speaking to the rest of the world and And so it was looking at kind of selfie culture that narcissistic selfie culture. That's a great title by the way. Yeah, it wasn't my I can't say I remember seeing it like I think in 2017 or something. Yeah Yeah

interesting book yeah good yeah um yeah and um and i i interviewed this guy called professor bruce heard he's a very well-known psychologist down at the university of bristol and it's put in my interview he said to me oh you know he said why do we do the things that we do so once we've got enough money to live and survive and we've got enough money for our families to survive everything is just about validation you didn't use the word status you use the word validation now that's why we write books that's why we pursue you know it's why i'm a scientist and yeah

And when he said that, my immediate response was, oh, come on, that's so cynical. It's such a ridiculous thing to say. And then I just sort of thought about it for another 30 seconds. And I just thought, I think he's right. I think he's right. I really do think he's right. And that just really stayed with me. And then I just started researching it. So I started looking at the science of kind of status. But then the light bulb moment for me was really...

the game part of it. Because if you just say it's all about status, that's half the story. The other half is the connection. Once we've connected, it's like connecting with other people. So once I sort of realized that... One of the light bulb moments for me was one of my ghostwriting clients actually. And he's a guy with a working class background who became very successful.

And he's very, very alpha male, like, you know, powerful, you know, military background, like for middle class, lower middle class, like book geek like me, quite intimidating. And, you know, when I first met him, it was a meeting at a publishing company. I was a bit nervous to be with him because I felt like,

As far as he's concerned, I'm this wimp, this little nerdy wimp, you know, with my little cardigan on. But I kind of felt he was a bit nervous to meet me. He was a bit uncomfortable meeting me. And that really made me sort of ask, what's going on there? And it was great because he was really nice and I was expecting him to be a bit...

Dismissive of me, but it was so nice, you know, and he was really enthusiastic to understand and his whole thing with me was just like mate I don't know what you do, but just do what you do. Yeah, just met is a great book and you know, he'd really trusted me. Yeah, and

And that was the big breakthrough for me because I realized that we have different ways of measuring status. Like his way of measuring status is with physical strength, banter, probably football, like talking about football. I don't know about that. That's his criteria for claiming status. And that's what he's proud of, you know, his physicality. Whereas my criteria for claiming status are things like books you've written and getting nice reviews in the Times or, you know,

fucking paintings on the walls, all those kinds of things. And that's when I suddenly realized we're not all competing with each other. We're playing different status games. So when he came around my house to work on my book and he saw the paintings on the walls and all the books on the shelves, even with the fact of his incredibly masculine life,

He probably would have felt a little bit intimidated and a little bit uncomfortable because he's in there He's in a different world now. Yeah, and his criteria for claiming status suddenly doesn't count. Yeah, and he you know And when I go into his world and I'm meeting with his very very masculine terrifying people I'm like, yeah, I mean everyone's really nice. So so you know, but but but

That was the breakthrough. We're playing different status games. And the thing to understand is that we're not all competing with each other. We're all playing little individual games. And each of these games has kind of symbolic ways of claiming status. So if you think about Monopoly, the way you symbolize status in Monopoly is those little plastic houses and hotels and the money. And that's how we play status games. So his symbolic...

claims to state is his physicality, his history of extreme violence, you know, his success, his huge successes in that physical world. And probably he's very proud of playing, I don't know, you can imagine football or whatever those things are.

Mine are completely different. And it was that understanding that really made me see the world in a different way to understand the status games that we all play and how they drive us and make us kind of different kinds of people. Yeah. Yeah. As I was listening to the audio book, I found myself thinking that it is very hard to get away from the fact, from the idea that seeking status is bad and that, you know,

Similar to the stuff they talk about in The Elephant in the Brain, that quote allegedly from JP Morgan that a man always has two reasons for doing something, the good reason and the real reason. And if I think of what's my real reason for being a YouTuber, for doing this podcast, for wanting to write a book, it's like, if I've got to be honest with myself, it is broadly status motivated. And I'm like, shit, this is bad. Shouldn't I have a more altruistic impact? And it's like, yeah, it's kind of nice teaching people. It's kind of fun talking to a camera, but really...

If I was doing it-- if I was talking to people and then hitting Delete rather than hitting Publish, suddenly that changes the equation. And so, OK, what's going on there?

Yeah, but what do you think about that that like when when when I guess when we think or when we point out the status thing It's all feels like a negative. He does feel like a negative and that was the journey I went on because it isn't I mean it can be a negative There's lots of negative in the book about the about the bad sides of the status game, but it's also What's made civilization? It's what is what makes us good people? You know the history of the status game again goes back to those tribes the tribes in which we evolved and

And so, you know, nature has to find a way of incentivizing us to be valuable people. You know, humans can be very selfish and self-interested and delusional and all those things. So how do you get these creatures that have a tendency towards selfishness to be selfless and to work for the benefit of the tribe?

Well, you incentivize them with status and status is this reward? So so so what happened was, you know, we were playing status games with our reputation We had a reputation in the tribe was you know, we and You'd get a good reputation you'd go up in the status game if you proved yourself to be valuable to the tribe and

And there's two ways of being valuable to the tribe. You can be virtuous, so you can be generous, courageous in battle, a follower of rules and an enforcer of rules, or you can be successful. So you can be valuable to the tribe by being a really great honey finder, a really great hunter, a really great storyteller, a really great sorcerer.

And so it's this reward that you get for being valuable, for being useful, for being kind and generous. And so that was true 10,000 years ago. It's still true today. It's if you think about, like, we're not used to seeing people like Gandhi and, you know, Malala as...

as celebrities, but they are. They are moral superstars. And that's good. It's good. That's good. That's humanity at its best, I think, is when we see valuable people like Gandhi or like...

the people who invented the AstraZeneca vaccine, you know, and we make celebrities of them. We're celebrating them as we're making them heroic. And so, you know, without that, we wouldn't have civilization. We wouldn't have the moral world as we know it because, you know, you can feel it with the moral status thing. When you do something good and kind, you feel it.

You feel it in your body. You go, ooh, you feel up. You literally feel physically up, you know? And when other people find out that you've done a nice thing, they go, oh, that's amazing. And that's an automatic response.

And that's brilliant. That's the best of the human animal. So I do think it's, I completely agree with you that we are used to, we are conditioned to seeing status as this negative thing. And it can be a very negative thing. But it's also the very, very best of who we are as a species. You know, in the book, I talk about things like the origin of the iPhone, for example. You know, when Steve Jobs, you know,

kept meeting this guy from Microsoft at these parties 'cause his wife was friends with his wife. And this guy would be, "Oh, we've solved computing. "We're gonna kill Apple. "We've got this new touchscreen device with a stylus." And Steve Jobs was just livid 'cause he was like, "How can you talk to me like that? "How can this Microsoft solve computing?"

He came in and apparently there was a set of expletives and he said right we're gonna show him how it's really done It's not a stylist with your finger make the thing with the finger and they made it and that was the iPhone and then became the iPad if you start off as the eye, yeah, so so so, you know, that's a great example of Somebody very Steve Jobs very interested in status unusually, you know obsessed with status and

And the iPhone for better or for worse has changed the world. And it began with just somebody feeling belittled at a barbecue in California.