Status Game by Will Storr

Status Game by Will Storr is one of the best non-fiction books that I’ve read in years. It’s the perfect mix of taking established scientific literature and pairing the concepts with stories, examples, and a structured flow to explain how the world is the way it is.

After reading the book, I started to see the ideas everywhere. And, unlike some ideas that reduce nuance and complexity in the world, the book’s idea provide a toolset to start to dig into the crazy complexity of 8 billion humans all trying to get along on Earth.

The book’s idea is if humans are social beings and exist in social groups…how exactly does that work in practice?

Well, our social groups work in the following steps –

Like ants, wolves, dolphins, etc, we organize ourselves in a hierarchy of status within our group.
But unlike ants, wolves, dolphins, etc, humans have this insane ability to constantly create infinite groups to be a part of – in real-time and with stories.
Individuals strive for status within groups…but also strive for status of our groups versus other groups.
We’ve also created multiple “Games” to play to achieve status within a group, which leads to the ability to give & receive infinite status “points”

All these combinations and possibilities allow humans to collaborate at insane scales, across time, groups, and projects…while keeping the peace.

But they also explain when human relationships go deadly wrong and what triggers so much awfulness among humans.

I had lots of takeaways, but the most useful was simply the list of games we play to achieve status. They are all obvious (almost all of us are taught these from birth), but it was interesting to read the sociological studies with each.

We have instincts that compel us to seek connection with coalitions of others. Once we’ve been accepted into a group, we strive to achieve their approval and acclaim. We do this with these games –

Prestige Games

These games create wealth, peace, and happiness. These are the games that every parent wants their child to focus on. When we all play useful games with prestige, everyone wins, but they are very hard to play, because it’s not obvious that they work in the short-term.

Ability – get status points by doing actually doing the valuable thing
Virtue – get status by enforcing the rules and keeping everyone together
Influence – get status by giving status points to fellow players

Dominance Games

These games work in the short-term…but they fall apart after a while. These are zero-sum games that are easy to learn and grasp…and everyone knows how to play from birth.

Abuse (physical, emotional, relational) – get status by pushing fellow players down
Resources – get status with bribes and showing off

Humiliation Games

These games are the “nuclear bomb” of human relationships. You get status by socially killing fellow players and/or destroying the game. This is the throw the chess board on the floor and call the other player a cheater option. It works every time and leads to resentment and conflict every time.

Exclusion – get status by getting fellow players booted out of the game
Punishment – get status by getting fellow players to punish or sabotage players or the game itself

How To Play Life Well

Practice warmth, sincerity, and competence – indicate a willingness for fair play
Make small moments of prestige – compliments & thank yous are free!
Play a hierarchy of games – don’t build your entire identity around one game
Reduce your moral sphere – or, as Jesus said, “judge not, lest you be judged”
Foster a trade-off mindset – be more specific & nuanced than “good vs. bad”
Be different – create your own games & try new ones! Meet new people, join more groups, constantly try new skills
Never forget you’re dreaming – you will always be stuck inside your own head, and that’s OK…because you’re brain is weird and off-kilter like everyone else

Random Quotes from the Book

But equally revealing is how our minds and bodies react when we fail to connect. A wide range of research finds people with depression tend to belong to fewer groups than the rest of the population. Studies across time suggest the more a depressed person identifies with their group-the more of their own sense of self they invest in it – the more their symptoms lift.
On how critical status is to our health.

Of course, it’s not a perfect signal of status; someone low-ranking could influence others with gossip, flattery or lies. But it is an immediate and predictable result of it. Even in small-scale societies, a person’s status is commonly expressed in their capacity to influence: they ‘tend to be more prominent in group discussions, to make their opinions known and their suggestions clear, and to articulate the consensus once it is determined’. The outsized influence that high-status players exert can also be measured in how much they talk. One study of premodern societies found top-ranking members spoke fifteen times more frequently than those at the bottom, and almost five times more than those one rank beneath them.
Hilarious anecdote about how people present themselves.

Influence is a useful signal in dominance games, in which it manifests as power, and also in the two prestige games where it’s willingly offered by co-players. Wherever you track trails of influence – of people deferring, altering their beliefs or behaviour to match those of the people above them you’ll find status games being played and won. We frequently measure our own level of status by our capacity to influence. Our status detection systems monitor the extent to which others defer to us in the subtlest negotiations of behaviour, body language and tone.
Anecdote noting the importance of knowing what’s going on in a given social group.

This is one reason we can take it so personally when our ideas, tastes or opinions are rejected. If human life was strictly rational, we’d be likely to feel blank when disagreed with, or perhaps worried a suboptimal decision was being made. We might even feel pleased about it, taking the disagreement as a signal of the group’s rigour. But when our attempts at influence fail – especially in public, especially in the witness of higher-status players we can become preoccupied, livid, bitter and vengeful. When this happens, we often slip into a more primitive mode of play in which status is not earned in displays of usefulness, but grabbed in acts of dominance.
Reminder to keep it cool when feeling rejected – and push to go back to a prestige game

One study found dominance to be one of the most robust predictors of leader emergence, outperforming myriad others including conscientiousness and intelligence’. This is despite the fact that dominant-style leaders are usually less effective than the prestigious, being more likely to put their own interests before the group, less likely to seek advice and tending to respond to criticism with ‘ego defensive aggression’. They’re also overbearing, like to publicly credit themselves with the success of the group, tease and humiliate subordinates and are manipulative, compared to prestigious leaders who are more likely to be self-deprecating, tell jokes and publicly attribute success to the team. Tellingly, we’re especially prone to raising up dominant leaders when the status of our game is under threat. In studies, men and women have picked silhouettes of tall, bulky people with thin eyes and lips and a strong jawline as ideal leaders in times of war; in peacetime those with narrower frames were more popular
Leaders who lean toward prestige are *always better* but when we are scared or threatened, we go for raw dominance…much to our regret later.

Dominance behaviour is more likely to be triggered when the relative status of the protagonists is murky. If the hierarchy doesn’t clearly show who’s in charge, there’s a greater temptation to use aggression to secure supremacy. During the traffic stop, Turner appeared to believe her position as Port Authority Commissioner, attorney, friend of the mayor, associate of the Chief of Police, host of Yale and MIT PhD students and owner of three houses in Tenafly clearly symbolised her superiority. But to the police officers she was ‘just here as a ride’. This is true of purely verbal disputes and it’s true of those that turn physical. For sociologist Professor Roger Gould, the more ambiguous the relation is with respect to who should be expected to outrank whom, the more likely violence is.
Small talk and subtle social cues are important. Everyone can be important if we each can establish the game we’re playing. Give a first impression of warmth, sincerity, and competence to everyone you meet.

At least in the developed world, the games we join in adolescence usually take the form of a clique or peer group – a set of people with whom we can comfortably play. This begins to happen in adolescence partly as a result of alterations to a region of the brain that makes us much more sensitive to the judgements of others. We start to desire the reward of social approval and dread rejection. This sudden sensitivity to reputation makes teenagers highly prone to self- consciousness and embarrassment. Between the ages of 11 and 14. writes neuroscientist Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, they ‘become increasingly aware that others have the capacity to evaluate them. and as a result may overestimate the extent to which this actually occurs’.
This is why middle school is and always will be crazy – it’s when kids finally start playing status games.

As their brains continue to change, they begin to feel the presence of an imaginary audience’ of others, constantly watching and judging them, a feeling that ‘remains quite high even in adulthood’. Unlike younger people, teenagers are likely to take the evaluations of their peers to be a true indication of their self-worth-or lack of it. As their self-esteem shifts from being based on how they feel in the moment to how they imagine their peers are evaluating them, they begin to crave their approval. Their chase for status can become all consuming. ‘By the time we are thirteen,’ writes psychologist Professor Mitch Prinstein, it seems as if there is nothing more important to us than this type of popularity. We talk about who has it. We strategise how to get it. We are devastated when we lose it. We even do things we know are wrong, immoral, illegal, or dangerous merely to obtain status, or to fiercely defend it.”
I loved this section on understanding what’s going on with young adults and how adults can guide them into successful ways to gain status.

We should be yet more suspicious when status, in that game, is earned by active belief in it. This is what happened during the Satanic Panic and it’s what Maranda Dynda experienced in the world of the vaccine deniers and it’s what drove the men of Pohnpei to devote their lives to the growing of massive yams. When people accept a core belief and act on it, as the price for earning connection and status, they allow themselves to become possessed. That belief is now a status symbol. As their hallucination of reality bends itself around it, they become its host and crusader, deranged and impossible to reason with. In short, their belief has become sacred.
Just because a game is popular and growing does not mean it’s worthwhile.

There are many definitions of what ‘sacred’ means, but from the perspective of this investigation, something is sacred when it becomes symbolic of our status game. As we’ve learned, the entire world as we experience it inside our brains is built out of symbols. This is the virtual interface on which we play the game of life. A Casio and a Cartier watch are both symbolic, signalling different volumes of status. But some phenomena can become symbolic not just of an amount of status, but of a status game itself. They might be flags, buildings, battle sites, uniforms, gang colours, ceremonies, books, songs, phrases, or the images, remains or birthplaces of elite players, living or dead. Leaders can become sacred. Perhaps the ultimate sacred symbol is the monotheistic God: the all-powerful creator and referee of his status game.
We all use taste games to signal the games we’re playing.

Beliefs can become sacred too. They frequently do. This is why our reasoning about our sacred beliefs can become so impaired. ‘When a group of people make something sacred,’ writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, they ‘lose the ability to think clearly about it. Beliefs are like my Mötley Crüe T-shirt, only infinitely more dangerous.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions” – it’s very hard to thoughtfully discuss harm generated by a game that a large group of people are good at.

Sacred symbols can be seen as physical carriers of our status: when someone attacks them, they attack our game and our co-playing kin;
This is why patriotism can quickly turn to nationalism. Also, why college football fans are so crazy.

Sociologist Professor Nicholas Chrataka writes, this finding ‘depresses me even more than the existence of xenophobia. We want a lot for our groups, of course, but of even greater importance is creating a yawning distance of victory between us and our rivals. What seems to be important to people is how much more members of one’s own group get compared to members of other groups, not how much one’s group has, he writes. Not only must one’s group have a lot, it must have more than other groups.”
While infinite status points can create peace because there is enough to go around…it can also mean that a group is never satisfied – see empires that just can’t stop.

This goes, too, for wars of belief. We don’t just seek to win arguments with our ideological foes, we seek domination, as the citizens of The Well showed in their treatment of Mark Ethan Smith. They couldn’t ignore him because he was stealing status from them, for the same reason, Smith couldn’t ignore them. They couldn’t even bring themselves to use his preferred pronoun- an act that, symbolically, meant deference to his rules and symbols, thus defeat. So he responded with threats and de-grading abuse, they responded with insult, ostracization and censorship. They couldn’t simply live with one another’s claims to status. One party had to win.
There is no way to truly “conquer” another group’s game. You have to invent a new game to play together…or else there is conflict that no one wins. After World War II – that was America’s genius move. Instead of punishing Germany and Japan again, they were invited to get rich as part of the Free World – to play a bigger game together.

This is an inevitable, terrible consequence of the game of life we play. We’re wired to love being above. We continually seek to rearrange the world such that our game is on top, all the while telling self-serving stories about the immaculate virtue of our behaviour. The lesson many will find impossible to accept is this never believe groups who claim they just want ‘equality’ with rivals. No matter what they say, no matter what they believe, they don’t. They weave a marvellous dream of fairness for all, but the dream is a lie.
Again, the great human hack for peace is constantly create new games for different groupings of humans to play. Even if no one is truly “equal” – we can feel and act equal if we all have different games we’re playing. That’s sort of the American Dream – have a country big enough and free enough that everyone can create infinite games to all play together and feel equal doing them.

We seek rules and symbols by which to play a status game. When we find one that’s suitable, and that feels right, we’re vulnerable to absorbing its story, no matter how berserk. This is true of the Satan- hunters, the anti-vax mothers, the yam growers of Pohnpei, ISIS, the online mobbers and religious adherents world over. One Heaven’s Gate veteran of thirteen years told researchers, ‘We were protected. We didn’t like the rules of the world, so we created our own. It was a utopia.’ Brains want to know, who do I have to be to earn connection and status? Ti and Do wove a fantastic dream that offered precise instructions, telling them exactly who to change into. And so that’s what they did.
The meta-lesson of the book – simply being aware of how status seeking affects you can allow you to play better and be happier.

Institutions have their own games, that often prevent the mass quick spread of identity games in a free and democratic society. Judges get status from other judges, scientists get status from other scientists etc
Yes, yes, yes – this is why institutions have to grow alongside democracy. I saw this happen in real time in Iraq where the only real groups to play with were religious groups.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed Americans’ penchant for forming associations.
One of America’s genius hacks was creating a giant game of games where people were constantly creating groups.

There’s a critical warning in all this: tyrants often start by telling you what you already believe. When they arrive, they weave their irresistible self-serving dream, promising that you deserve more status, just as you’d always suspected, and pointing accusingly at those you’d already figured to be your enemies child abusers, big business, Communists, Jews. They make accusation and gossip; you become angry, enthusiastic and morally outraged. You begin to play. Once they’ve got you, they tighten up. Their beliefs become more extreme, more specific and are policed more severely; second-self tactics of dominance are widely deployed. The most tyrannical games – cults and fundamentalist political and religious movements insist on complete conformity in thought and deed; their dream of reality colonising your neural territory entirely, They seek to become a player’s sole source of status; no rival games are easily tolerated. On the scale of the nation, which requires other games to exist in forms such as universities, the media and state bureaucracies, all must become subservient: no matter where games take place, status is awarded for play that serves the tribe, whilst dreadful consequences await suspected deviants.
Be careful what games you choose to play. Forming your identity around a dangerous game will push you to make choices that you couldn’t imagine making.

In the West, success games first managed to overpower the old virtue games, and come to flower over a culture. This happened not as a result of strategy or guile, but of chance and unintended consequence. It’s a process that demonstrates how powerful the games we play for status can be in defining self, culture and history. Individuals want to know: who do I have to be to get along and get ahead? Those born in an environment of dominance, virtue and obedience to caste and kin will become those people and play those games. They’ll live the dream they’ve been woven. But at the start of the modern era, initially in the West, we began looking outside our kin groups for connection and status. We became interested in novel, useful ideas from foreign clans and continents. We began generating major status by studying, innovating and making correct predictions about reality, rewarding each other for discovering truth and making use of it. These success games became a goldrush that spread across Western Europe, the USA and then the rest of the world. They changed everything. They were our road out of hell.

And they might never have come about if it wasn’t for the Catholic Church’s weird preoccupation with incest. Over a period of more than a thousand years, starting in AD 305, the Church instituted a series of rule changes that combined to disable the old inward-looking virtue games, based on kin and extended family, and compel people to play in new ways. It banned: polygamous marriage, marriage to blood relatives including up to sixth cousins; marriage to in-laws, including that of uncles to nieces and men to stepmothers and step- daughters. It also suppressed forced marriages, encouraged newlyweds to set up their own households away from the extended family and promoted individual inheritance by will and testament, rather than the automatic handing-down of assets to the clan. It would take many centuries, but by the accident of its unholy obsession, it was to change the game forever. These rule alterations and their historical effects were discovered by Joseph Henrich, a Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology. He and his colleagues have produced an impressive constellation of evidence in support of them. Henrich argues these changes ‘systematically broke down the clans and kindreds of Europe into monogamous nuclear families’. People were forced to seek status outside their kin networks and play with strangers. Learning to ‘navigate a world with few inherited ties’ meant developing a novel psychology, and so the coding of their game-playing machines was rewritten. They made games for themselves in which ‘success and respect’ depended on ‘honing one’s own special attributes; attracting friends, mates, and business partners with these attributes and then sustaining relationships with them’. Crucially, Henrich’s research. shows the Catholics’ new rules were causative in changing who we were: the longer a population lived by them, the looser their kinship groups and the more they became outward-looking, nonconformist, trusting of outsiders, self-focussed and individualistic.
Fascinating perspective.

The neoliberal dreamworld glisters with such symbols. Success cues might’ve started in ropes of teeth around a hunter’s neck, but in twenty-first-century Westernised cultures, they’re everywhere maddened by them, we sweat and spend and hurry to keep up. We strive to improve, to bend our personalities into a certain shape, to become a better, different person. But where does it come from, the contemporary ideal of self? We see this perfect human all around us, beaming with flawless teeth from advertising, film, television, media and the internet. Young, agreeable, visibly fit, self-starting productive, popular, globally-minded, stylish, self-confident, extrovert, busy. Who is it, this person we feel so pressured to punch ourselves into becoming? It’s the player best equipped to win status in the game we’re in. It’s the neoliberal hero, the fantasy of an economy. And when we don’t measure up, we read these success symbols as signals of our failure. We’re individualists: believing it’s in our own power to win means believing that, when we don’t, it’s our fault and our fault alone. So we’re a loser, then: that’s who we are. We’ve been weighed on the new God’s scale and found wanting.

Psychologists have a name for people with a heightened sensitivity to signals of failure: perfectionist. There are various forms of perfectionism: ‘self-oriented perfectionists’ have excessively high standards and often push themselves harder and harder in order to win; ‘narcissistic perfectionists’ already believe they’re number one and experience anxiety when the world treats them as less; ‘neurotic perfectionists suffer low self-esteem and often believe with the next victory they’ll finally feel good enough. But there’s one species of perfectionism that’s especially sensitive to the neoliberal game: ‘social perfectionists’ feel the pressure to win comes from the people with whom they play. They’ll tend to agree with statements such as, ‘People expect nothing less than perfection from me’ and ‘Success means that I must work harder to please others.’ Social perfectionists are highly attuned to reputation and identity. They’ll easily think they’ve let their peers down by being a bad employee, a bad activist, a bad woman. An especially hazardous quality of social perfectionism is that it’s based on what we believe other people believe. It’s in that black gap between imagination and reality that the demons come.

Living the neoliberal dream, with its zero-sum, formal games and its galaxy of signals of failure, seems to be making us more perfectionistic. Further powerful evidence that altering the rules of our status games changes who we are can be found in a study of more than forty thousand students across the USA, Britain and Canada. Led by psychologist Dr Thomas Curran, the researchers discovered all the forms of perfectionism they looked at had risen between 1989 and 2016. Social perfectionism had grown the most. The extent to which people felt they had to ‘display perfection to secure approval had soared by 32 per cent. They concluded, ‘young people are perceiving that their social context is increasingly demanding, that others judge them more harshly, and that they are increasingly inclined to display perfection as a means of securing approval’. In speculating why, the authors pointed to neoliberalism. They noted the Western nations under study had ‘become more individualistic, materialistic, and socially antagonistic over this period, with young people now facing more competitive environments, more unrealistic expectations, and more anxious and controlling parents than generations before’. Both social perfectionism and materialistic goal-seeking have been linked to a witchbag of psychological maladies, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders and self-harm, rates of which have been climbing in recent years, especially in the young.
Our new digital world needs more game and markers of success.

The more an employer knows about a candidate’s competence, the weaker the prejudice seems to become.

Other studies support this. In one, the initial racial biases of group members were overcome by experimenters introducing ‘additional legitimate and unambiguous status information that is directly relevant to the group task and that advantages the actor over the others present’. A similar effect was found in a study in which white players who’d been sorted into a team with black players expressed a bias in favour of their team that ‘outweighed their initial racial bias’. Such research offers hope. Humans aren’t programmed to be racist but to be biased towards their groups. If we plug our desire for status too strongly into our racial identity, we’ll end up playing racial games. But we don’t have to do this. Humans want to win. They want their games to win. If their need for status is plugged into a success game, they’re often more interested in a player’s competence than the colour of their skin.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached and preached on this. We can and should keep refining our games and groups to include all. The games of winning the Space Race and winning a baseball World Series pushed right up against the games of racism and sexism – and continue to this day.

The parable of the Communists reveals the impossibility of ridding human existence of the game. The drive to get ahead will always assert itself. It’s in us. It’s who we are. The first decades of the Soviet Union find the status game in all its details: its irrepressibility; its capacity to raise violence; the grandiosity it inspires in winning players and leaders; the inevitability of elites; the flaw that makes people believe they’re always deserving of more status; the use of humiliation as the ultimate weapon; the horror of the cousins and their genius for tyranny; the ideological war games that rage across neural territories; our vulnerability to believing almost any dream of reality if our status depends on it; the capacity for that dream to pervert our perception of reality; the danger of active belief; esoteric language; zealous leaders who cast visions of heavenly status in future promised lands and target enemies to its rising; the anger and enthusiasm they inspire; the cycle of gossip, outrage, consensus and harsh punishment, the paranoia that can afflict leaders and the terrors it brings; the grim magic of toxic morality and its conjuring trick of making evil seem virtuous; the necessity of games to generate status if they’re to endure; the world-changing power of the status goldrush. The story idealists sometimes tell of humanity says we’re natural seekers of equality. This isn’t true. Utopians talk of injustice whilst building new hierarchies and placing themselves at the top. Such behaviour is in our nature. The urge for rank is ineradicable. It’s a secret goal of our lives, to win status for ourselves and our game and gain as much of it over you and you and you as we can. It’s how we make meaning. It’s how we make identity. It’s the worst of us, it’s the best of us and it’s the inescapable truth of us: for humans, equality will always be the impossible dream.
Status Games are a tool. It sounds devious and awful to even talk about them. But they can be used for good or evil. And ideally, we can lean into prestige games to make a more peaceful, happier, more just world for all.