Neurotypical humans all crave social status. The higher expected future compensation is a nice bonus, but it's the status that draws people to higher titles.
Useful social situations for artificially raising yous status:
1. Attracting a good looking girl.
2. Communicating to your boss that you will not be pushed around without resorting to words. I used this a lot (maybe a bit too much). But I never had to do shit work that I didnt want to do.
3. Communicating to others who are not in your reporting hierarchy, but still senior to you, that you "get it". IF this is coupled with actual execution capability then you'll gain a lot of credibility pretty fast.
And yes I do agree that if you want to learn something from someone then you do have to assume a slightly lower status.
But the most interesting insight is that status is something that you give to someone else and not something a person can create on their own. Ie, someone elses status requires your active participation.
This might sound odd, but there is some real health benefits in perceiving oneself as having high social status. A few of those are better immune system, successful aging, lower stress hormones, lower risk for illness and depression, faster recovery, and just general higher energy and confidence. It can have a very strong positive effect on ones social network. It is a very powerful and deeply biological aspect of life.
Looking at research and listening to experts in this fields, it is really fascinating how anything can be made into a value system for social status. Not only that but we can participate simultaneously in multiple social circles with completely different value systems, and as one researcher put it, we tend to channel most of our self worth based on the system where we are ranked highest.
Strangely, money seems like one of the hardest method but also one of the most effective method to achieve this.
I used to think social status only meant money. But now I am starting to realize it’s any perceived value that a person can provide in some group setting. For example at church the pastor or those more involved have status. At work, those making impacting decisions have status. When finding a mate, attractive (physically/confident/intelligent) people have more status.
When someone says they are not at your level, you do not have enough status to interact or compete with that person? You don’t have as much perceived valued, but what happens when a princess marries a commoner. Proving the point value is very individualized but at times shared by many.
Social status is related to how much your influence has on others.
From this lens, one can see why the untenured Yale professor is unwilling to move to an unknown university even though there is more money and security: the people you attract to work with you and invitations to fancy events are better by maximising prestige.
This point of view also explains why people are willing to take lower pay in exchange for higher prestige.
I think part of it can be explained or attributed to a life of people "catering" to you. Higher social class will in a lot of circles mean that a lot of people look up to you or wants to be your friend. One way of doing that is always giving the higher social status peer a lot of praise for anything he/she does.
If you always receive a lot of praise for anything you do, no matter the actual significance of it, then naturally your own perception of your skills inflates unproportionally to reality.
Broadly speaking, it comes from the value they provide to other humans, aka a person's value to society. At this point in human history, career is generally a proxy for this metric. E.g. doctors have high social value because they save other people's lives. Wealthy people have high social value because they have the potential to make those around them wealthier, etc.
This value derives from the average person's lack of the things that the other people provide. Suppose AI could provide all those things. Once AI becomes self-maintaining, the only value that humans could provide each other would be entirely social.
The same often applies at work though. Someone who is known as the top 'x' in their company/field gains social status among that peer group, if they're interested in that sort of thing. After all you spend a lot of time with work colleagues when you're at work.
Because social status (and the perceived security of that status) is very real and hugely important to a large % of people. Difficult to quantify, but absolutely a major driving force in real life. We all compare ourselves (to some extent) to those around us, no matter if we're working at McDonald's or as an executive at MegaCorp.
This is such a key insight. Coming from a lower-middle class background and working my way up in large corporations, the power of "status" slowly dawned on me. Some kid from a well-off background comes in and acts like he owns the place, and it works with 7 out of 10 people! Meanwhile a guy from a lower socioeconomic class comes in, works his arse off and hesitates asking for a raise because he's afraid of overstepping -- this guy gets looked down on or taken advantage of by 7 out of 10 people.
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