Status: The First Principle of Social Participation

With this essay, we begin the “society and economy” module. But we are not taking a macro view. Let us imagine that you are a participant.

Whether you are a fresh graduate, a seasoned workplace veteran, or someone who simply wants to enjoy family life, in today’s world you cannot shut the door and cultivate alone. You must enter the great formation of ordinary human affairs. You have to cooperate, form teams, trade, compete, and sometimes even fight. You need a little economic thinking, and you need to understand society.

This time, let us talk about a hidden indicator for observing society. It is hidden, but extremely important. I would call it the first principle of social participation: status.

When a group of people gather to chat and interact, if you cannot tell within five minutes who has higher status and who has lower status, you may not be a qualified primate.

Why should status be the first principle? Do people not most want money, power, safety, freedom, truth, and meaning? Those things are indeed more fundamental than status. But they usually become especially important only when you face yourself, or when you are in an extreme condition such as economic hardship. In everyday social participation, even if you do not directly notice it, you care about status almost unconsciously.

Consider a married couple arguing. At ten o’clock at night, the wife notices half a glass of milk left in the living room and two socks thrown on the floor, so she complains: “Can you not just pick these up?” The husband immediately fires back: “I’ve been exhausted all day. I finally calmed down a client. Why do I come home just to be scolded by you?” The wife gets angry: “Is this not your home too?”

Are they really arguing over who should do that tiny bit of housework? In fact, they are fighting over household authority. The wife wants the husband to share some housework to prove that she is not merely the person who does all the domestic labor. But what the husband hears is: “I have been out fighting monsters all day, and when I come home I do not even get the privilege a hero deserves. Am I just a laborer?”

Now look at the workplace. In a weekly meeting, a young product manager proposes: “We can connect this to an AI foundation model. Gemini 3 should be enough, and our efficiency will absolutely take off.” An old-school supervisor frowns: “Foundation models are uncontrollable. We have tried this before. It will not work.” The young person refuses to back down: “The fact that it did not work before does not mean it will not work now. If necessary we can use GPT-5.5. It can do anything.” The supervisor’s face darkens: “First understand the basic business logic before you come teach me how to do my job.”

Is this really a discussion of technical architecture? The two are fighting over the team’s right to explain reality.

Arguments over views, taste, efficiency, interests, and even justice are often status struggles underneath. Human motives in society are colored by the pursuit of status.

Status is society’s subjective valuation of you. It is the degree to which other people are willing to take your words seriously, and therefore include your interests in the community’s considerations. When I was young and naive, I believed that whether a statement was right or wrong was objective, and that who said it did not matter at all. Now I realize that who said it is often the only important factor determining whether the statement works.

To put it bluntly, status is where you rank in other people’s minds.

Status Is Granted by Others #

You may be surprised that social psychologists’ research on status has become popular only in the last decade or two. Perhaps people used to feel that this was an awkward topic and preferred not to discuss it. The current academic consensus [1] is that status is the degree to which a person is respected, admired, and voluntarily deferred to by others; the pursuit of status is an extremely basic human motive.

The key words are “others” and “voluntarily.” No matter how you pursue it, your status is not decided by you. It is decided by others. All the paradoxes and trouble begin here.

If you want money, at least you can save money. If you want a better body, at least you can exercise. Status alone cannot be obtained simply because you pursue it. Sometimes the harder you pursue it, the less you get.

And yet we really do care about status. The American psychologist Mark Leary proposed “sociometer theory” [2], which says that self-esteem is essentially a radar dashboard inside the brain. It constantly monitors our status and evaluates whether we are accepted by the group or at risk of being expelled.

The reading on this dashboard strongly affects how you feel about yourself.

For example, shame is not “I did something wrong.” It is “my price in other people’s minds has crashed.” Pride is not “I succeeded.” It is “my social valuation has been confirmed.” Anger is often not “my interests have been harmed.” It is “who gave you the right to downgrade my rating?”

If someone is anxious because their social rank is falling, it is very hard to persuade them to “just let it go.” Research has long shown that when people feel chronically unrecognized and valueless, their physiology can be pushed into a cortisol-filled chronic stress state that damages health indicators [3]. A low sense of social rank is also systematically associated with depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and self-harm risk [4].

This is why presidents and senior officials often look full of vitality while in office, only to see their bodies and spirits rapidly collapse once they step down. Many people say that “power is the best aphrodisiac,” but if you distinguish carefully, you will find that it is not power. It is status. Celebrities have no formal power, but as long as their status remains, they are full of energy. People say that a great man cannot be without power for a day and a small man cannot be without money for a day. In fact, one can survive without power or money. What one cannot bear losing is status.

Status Is a Local Ranking Board #

One especially interesting property is that status is always relative to the people around you. You do not care whether irrelevant people are above or below you. Status is about relative position, not absolute level.

Suppose your annual income is one million yuan. Nationally speaking, that is an extremely high income and can certainly be called affluent. But your happiness is determined less by absolute income than by your relative ranking among relatives, friends, and neighbors [5]. If everyone around you is wealthy and they talk only about assets you do not have, you may still feel anxious.

Academics call this the “local-ladder effect” [6]: a person’s sense of status comes from face-to-face small groups, from the respect and admiration inside the circles they care about.

So status is not a thermometer. It is a ranking board. This is why many people would rather be the head of a small group than the tail of a grand one. In fact, being the head of a small group is better for your growth, including the growth of your actual ability.

For example, imagine two middle-school students. The first student’s absolute math ability is 90 points, but he attends an ordinary school and ranks first in math year after year. The second student’s absolute ability is 95 points, but he is in the gifted class of a famous school, surrounded by top performers, and ranks in the lower middle. Which child is more likely to develop in a math-related field?

The answer is the first child. His advantageous status brings a strong self-suggestion: “I am a math genius.” This creates a positive feedback loop and motivates him to keep studying math. The second child is actually better at math, but his status is constantly being beaten down by math.

There is research evidence for this. A 2020 paper specifically examined “the importance of being top of the class” and found that whether a person later enters a particular field is not strongly related to their absolute level. What really matters is their ordinal rank among peers in class [7].

Platforms give you resources, but status narratives give you motivation. Your position on the status coordinate system determines how the world feels to you.

This is a cruel setting in human life. A struggle over coordinates is necessarily zero-sum. No matter how much technology advances or society grows richer, there is only one first-place position in a class.

Dominance and Prestige #

If your class ranking was not so good, here is a piece of good news: exam scores do not directly determine a person’s status in a group. Some top students know only how to study, and may not truly receive recognition from classmates and teachers. If they become merely test-taking machines, their room for development may be limited.

So how does one truly become a local person of influence?

Over the past two decades, evolutionary anthropologist Joseph Henrich and others have proposed a classic theory [8][9]: there are two very different routes to status, dominance and prestige.

Dominance-based status relies on power, resources, and fear. Think of senior officials, gang bosses, and domineering CEOs who display authority through heavy rewards and punishments. You listen because you are afraid.

Prestige-based status relies on ability, knowledge, and generosity. Others are willing to listen because your judgment is often correct, because they can learn real skills by following you, and because you frequently contribute to the group. People not only respect you sincerely; they also want to imitate you.

Prestige is a field of gravity. Dominance is a pressure cooker. Ideally, we should pursue prestige-based status.

Then why, if prestige is so good, are so many people obsessed with dominance? Because dominance has its own ecological niche. When the situation is dangerous, chaotic, and uncertain, people instinctively call for a “strongman” [10]. They want a commander who acts arbitrarily and overrides disagreement, believing that only dominance can solve problems efficiently.

So dominance can be understood as a wartime mode. Today we live in peace and feel uncomfortable with dominance. But for most of human history, people lived amid danger, chaos, and uncertainty, which made our dominance instinct significantly stronger than our prestige instinct. Sometimes a team is merely discussing a product requirement, and a leader insists on making it feel like a gang fight. Sometimes collaboration is all that is needed, and he turns it into a test of obedience. Some people think they are playing the iron-blooded commander, when in fact they are just suffocating office despots.

You had better overcome that dominance instinct and move toward prestige. A more fine-grained theory is this: when you want to improve your status, you need to consider two dimensions, competence and warmth [11]. Competence is your ability; warmth is your intention. Together they form a two-dimensional coordinate system.

High competence, high warmth: this is prestige-based status. People respect you, feel close to you, and voluntarily follow you.

High competence, low warmth: this is more or less dominance-based status. People envy you, but also guard against you. Your presence is a threat to others.

Low competence, high warmth: people think you are a good person, but do not trust you to get things done, so they will not give you much status.

Low competence, low warmth: such people are marginalized by society.

I especially want to remind you about the “high competence, low warmth” quadrant. Many smart people keep running into walls in society because they live there. Today they “dimensionality-reduce” one person; tomorrow they “crush” another person’s IQ. They win every debate, but in the long run, they are removed from the group chat.

Luxury goods also have low warmth [12]. At a team gathering, if you appear covered in luxury brands, the signal you send is: “I am more expensive than you.” This is indeed a status display, but it also builds a barrier between you and others. People will feel that you are cold and hard to approach.

Remember: you need to display ability, but even more, you need to display goodwill. Otherwise what you receive is defense, not prestige.

Do Not Short Other People’s Status #

Have you noticed? The status game has a strong second-order effect. The first-order effect is that everyone wants to pursue status. The second-order effect is that, on the receiving side, people dislike your dominance-based maneuvers.

But you often consider only the first order, not the second.

Some people boss their subordinates around and feel proud of themselves, unaware that danger is not far away. Some people cover themselves in glittering luxury, not knowing that in other people’s eyes the image looks cheap. Think again of those embarrassing social media posts you made when you were young.

In every social interaction, you care deeply about whether you are seen and whether your status is secure. But the other person also cares whether their status has been seen by you, and whether their status is secure with you. We must build this second-order thinking and fully consider other people’s feelings if we want to move smoothly through society.

The core principle is one sentence: never needlessly short other people’s status. You may do it unintentionally, but to the other person it can be a serious injury.

The marriage expert John M. Gottman long ago found that when trying to predict whether a couple may divorce from their interaction patterns, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling are all danger signals. But the most dangerous is contempt [13]. If one side already feels contempt for the other, the relationship is basically finished.

Contempt is a public execution of the other person’s status. Do not do this casually. You will find it very hard to be forgiven.

Not only should you avoid contempt, you should also avoid embarrassing people. That means you should not point out other people’s mistakes in public. If you want to correct someone, do it privately.

Let Status Be a Byproduct #

You might ask: I do not attack other people’s status, but what if someone attacks mine? You can display your status, but there is a more important piece of advice: do not fall into status hunger.

Status-hungry people are ugly. When someone offers a different opinion, they feel offended. They never miss a chance to suppress newcomers. They turn every action into a performance. They may desperately flatter superiors, or they may withdraw from social life altogether.

That is an extreme insecurity. Yet the paradox is that status hunger only makes people have less status.

You need to know that status is a byproduct. Status is other people’s valuation of you. That valuation may fluctuate, and it may be mistaken. It is not something you can decide.

What you can directly pursue is capability and contribution. You cannot grab status directly, but you can become someone worthy of having status.

China is a society of acquaintances, so the weight of face and status may be even greater. Some people joke that even Stephen Hawking, if he came to China, would have to stand up and toast the leader. In fact, it is not that extreme. But the reality is that even if he were Hawking, and no matter which country he was in, he would still need to respect other people’s status.

Because damaging status hurts people too much.

This is not vulgar worldliness. This is compassion.

Humble as I am, I can only explain these logics. Clever as you are, you will surely have deeper insight.

Notes #

[1] Anderson, Cameron, John Angus D. Hildreth, and Laura Howland. “Is the Desire for Status a Fundamental Human Motive? A Review of the Empirical Literature.” Psychological Bulletin 141, no. 3 (2015): 574-601.

[2] Leary, Mark R., Ellen S. Tambor, Sonja K. Terdal, and Deborah L. Downs. “Self-Esteem as an Interpersonal Monitor: The Sociometer Hypothesis.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 68, no. 3 (1995): 518-530.

[3] Zell, Ethan, Jason E. Strickhouser, and Zlatan Krizan. “Subjective Social Status and Health: A Meta-Analysis of Community and Society Ladders.” Health Psychology 37, no. 10 (2018): 979-987.

[4] Wetherall, Karen, Kathryn A. Robb, and Rory C. O’Connor. “Social Rank Theory of Depression: A Systematic Review of Self-Perceptions of Social Rank and Their Relationship with Depressive Symptoms and Suicide Risk.” Journal of Affective Disorders 246 (2019): 300-319.

[5] Tan, Jacinth J. X., Michael W. Kraus, Nichelle C. Carpenter, and Nancy E. Adler. “The Association Between Objective and Subjective Socioeconomic Status and Subjective Well-Being: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Psychological Bulletin 146, no. 11 (2020): 970-1020.

[6] Anderson, Cameron, Michael W. Kraus, Adam D. Galinsky, and Dacher Keltner. “The Local-Ladder Effect: Social Status and Subjective Well-Being.” Psychological Science 23, no. 7 (2012): 764-771.

[7] Murphy, Richard, and Felix Weinhardt. “Top of the Class: The Importance of Ordinal Rank.” The Review of Economic Studies 87, no. 6 (2020): 2777-2826.

[8] Henrich, Joseph, and Francisco J. Gil-White. “The Evolution of Prestige: Freely Conferred Deference as a Mechanism for Enhancing the Benefits of Cultural Transmission.” Evolution and Human Behavior 22, no. 3 (2001): 165-196.

[9] Cheng, Joey T., Jessica L. Tracy, Tom Foulsham, Alan Kingstone, and Joseph Henrich. “Two Ways to the Top: Evidence That Dominance and Prestige Are Distinct Yet Viable Avenues to Social Rank and Influence.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 104, no. 1 (2013): 103-125.

[10] Kakkar, Hemant, and Niro Sivanathan. “When the Appeal of a Dominant Leader Is Greater Than a Prestige Leader.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 26 (2017): 6734-6739.

[11] Fiske, Susan T., Amy J. C. Cuddy, and Peter Glick. “Universal Dimensions of Social Cognition: Warmth and Competence.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 2 (2007): 77-83.

[12] Cannon, Christopher, and Derek D. Rucker. “The Dark Side of Luxury: Social Costs of Luxury Consumption.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 45, no. 5 (2019): 767-779.

[13] Gottman, John Mordechai. 1994. What Predicts Divorce? The Relationship Between Marital Processes and Marital Outcomes. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.