The Status Game Lens: Get Along and Get Ahead
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Will Storr's model explains human motivation through two subconscious drives: to get along (bond into groups of like-minded people) and to get ahead (compete for status within and between those groups). Because we evolved as tribal apes, nature had to incentivise selfish creatures to be useful to the tribe, so it rewards two routes to status: virtue (generosity, courage, rule-following and rule-enforcing) and success (being a great hunter, honey-finder, storyteller). Crucially, we are not all competing on one ladder. Each game has its own symbolic tokens of status, like the plastic houses and hotels in Monopoly. Reading any situation through this lens explains why people behave as they do, why status feels like a negative when named, and why it also drives civilisation's best outcomes.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Ask what game is being played
In any group, identify the game its members are clumped into: a football team, a company, a religion, a political tribe, a creative scene. The game defines who you get along with and who you compete against.
Pro tip Groups compete with rival groups as well as internally, so identify both the in-group ladder and the rival group.
- 2
Name the game's criteria for claiming status
Each game has its own symbols and criteria. Storr's ghost-writing client claimed status through physical strength, banter, football and a history of extreme violence. Storr claimed it through books written, good reviews and paintings on the walls.
Pro tip Think of Monopoly's plastic houses and hotels: ask what the equivalent tokens are in this game.
- 3
Check whether status here is claimed via virtue or success
There are two ways of being valuable to a tribe: being virtuous (generous, courageous, a follower and enforcer of rules) or being successful (skilled, productive, excellent at a valued craft). Most games weight one more heavily.
Watch out Games that reward only virtue signalling with no success component can decay into rule-enforcement contests.
- 4
Notice you are not competing with everyone
Realise that people in other games are not on your ladder. Storr's alpha-male client was intimidating in his world, but nervous in a room of books and paintings where his criteria for claiming status suddenly did not count.
Pro tip When you feel inferior to someone, check whether they are even playing your game before letting the comparison land.
- 5
Stop moralising your own status motive
Accept that the drive is automatic and bodily. As soon as you are out in the world mixing with people, you are judging them and they are judging you. You do not need fully pure altruistic motives for the things you do to still actually be good.
Watch out The status frame feels cynical on first hearing. Storr's own reaction to Bruce Hood was 'oh come on, that's so cynical', and he agreed about 30 seconds later.
- 6
Point your status drive at things worth rewarding
Since status is the reward nature uses to make selfish animals selfless, choose games whose symbols correspond to real value. Moral superstars like Gandhi and Malala, or the inventors of the AstraZeneca vaccine, show status working at its best.
Pro tip Doing something good and kind is felt physically. You literally feel up. Use that automatic signal as feedback that you are playing a valuable game.
In the wild
Storr, a self-described nerdy book geek, was nervous about meeting a ghost-writing client with a working-class background, military history and a very alpha-male presence. He expected to be dismissed as a wimp in a cardigan. Instead the client was nervous too, enthusiastic and trusting, telling him to just make it a great book. When the client later came to Storr's house and saw the paintings and shelves of books, Storr realised the man would have felt slightly uncomfortable there, because his criteria for claiming status did not count in that room. Neither man was above the other. They were simply playing different status games with different symbolic tokens.
→ Storr's light-bulb moment: we are not all competing with each other, we are playing different games with different symbols of status.
Storr recounts Steve Jobs repeatedly meeting a Microsoft employee at parties, because their wives were friends. The man kept telling Jobs that Microsoft had solved computing, that they had a new touchscreen device with a stylus and were going to kill Apple. Jobs was livid at being talked to that way. After a set of expletives he declared they would show them how it was really done, and that it would be operated with a finger, not a stylus. That directive produced the iPhone, and then the iPad.
→ A world-changing product traced back to one status-obsessed man feeling belittled at a barbecue in California.
Ali Abdaal admits he can pretend he goes to the gym for health reasons, but everyone knows the real reason. Storr agrees and gives the media example: Men's Health is not really a health magazine, it is a sexy body magazine, an 'I want to look good naked' magazine. A genuinely health-focused version would celebrate entirely different things. The stated reason and the real reason diverge, which matches the JP Morgan line Abdaal quotes, that a man always has two reasons for doing something, the good reason and the real reason.
→ A quick test for spotting the status game hiding behind a socially acceptable justification.
Common mistakes
Treating all status seeking as bad
Abdaal's instinct was that his real reason for YouTube and podcasting is status motivated, and therefore bad. Storr's answer is that status is also what built civilisation, because it is the mechanism nature uses to reward people for being valuable, generous and courageous. Condemning the drive wholesale means missing that it produces both tyranny and Gandhi.
Assuming one universal status ladder
Believing everyone competes on the same scale produces needless intimidation and envy. Storr's client was terrifying in his physical world and out of place among books and paintings. Different games, different symbols, different winners.
Waiting for pure motives before acting
Demanding fully altruistic reasons before publishing, building or training paralyses useful work. As Abdaal puts it, we do not need fully pure altruistic motives for the things we do to still actually be good. The output can be valuable regardless of the drive beneath it.
From the transcript
“our you know our secret subconscious drive is to get along and get ahead”
“we're not all competing with each other we're playing different status games”
“how do you get these creatures that have a tendency towards selfishness to be selfless and to work for the benefit of the tribe where…”
From the episode
Snippet 16: How to Understand the Science of Social Status: Will Storr
Snippet 16