The Status Game

How Social Position Governs Everything

Will Storr

• Éditeur: William Collins
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780008354657
• Sujet: Psicologia
• Sous-sujet: Psicologia sociale

There’s something humans desire even more than gold. It’s a fundamental drive that’s common to all humanity, cutting across race, gender, age and culture. Our need for it is such that exactly how much of it we possess dramatically effects not only our happiness and well-being but also our physical health.

It’sstatus, argues Will Storr. You can’t understand human behaviour without understanding The Status Game. This game, which we are all playing, is not only the secret of our success, but also of our most evil behaviour.

Everything is subordinate to status, and humans aren’t unique in our complicity with it. By reflecting on the various ways humans negotiate this game – through status hierarchies, values, myths and sacred markers, Storr gives readers a master class in this most malevolent of social mysteries.

1

The Life and Afterlife of Ben Gunn

AS HE RAISED a steel chair leg in the air and brought it down onto the head of his new friend, Ben’s life began. It was just after 7 p.m. on 9 April 1980 on a school playing field in Brecon, Wales. ‘My life started then,’ said Ben. ‘Everything before that is irrelevant.’

Ben was 14. His victim, Brian, was 11. Earlier that day, they’d escaped from their care home. In the grounds of an empty school they’d discovered a pile of broken furniture and had a play fight. When they were finished, Ben accidentally let slip a secret. He couldn’t believe what he’d said. If his confession was revealed he felt sure he’d be rejected by all of society, spat on in the street, rendered utterly worthless. ‘There was no thought process. I just knew I’d told him and he’d tell the world. I was overwhelmed by emotion. Within a second, I was hitting him with a chair leg because I knew I’d destroyed myself.’

Ben ran to a phone box and dialled 999: ‘I’ve killed a boy. I hit him with a stick and I think I strangled him.’ Brian was found with a piece of his skull missing. He died, three days later, at Cardiff Royal Infirmary. Ben only discovered he was dead when his solicitor told him, ‘Well, you know it’s going to be murder now. Did nobody tell you?’ When they sentenced him to an indefinite term at Her Majesty’s pleasure he was wearing his school uniform. They took him down before the judge had even finished his summing up: ‘You killed a boy without rhyme or reason. You brought his life to an end without any motive in circumstances which you know amounted to murder …’

In prison, they treated him as if he was worthless. During an early cell search, ‘they piled everything on the floor, all my clothes, bedding, everything I owned, then just marched out’. Ben was outraged. He refused to tidy up and slept on the floor for three nights. A direct order was issued. He still refused. They sent him to solitary confinement. There he sat alone in a cold cell. This was his world now. He was a child murderer, the lowest of the low. He had nothing. He was no one.

Ben attempted escapes. He tried to starve himself to death. At his first parole hearing, ten years into his sentence, he was denied release. They denied him again and again. Twelve years, fifteen years, twenty years and then twenty-five, Ben remained in prison. Then, in the summer of 2007, he fell in love with Alex, a visiting teacher. ‘He wore khaki and had a beard down to here,’ she told me. ‘He looked like a cross between Osama bin Laden and Rasputin, and carried this dirty water jug filled with coffee. I asked, “Who’s that?” They said, “That’s Ben Gunn. Keep out of his way.”’

But Alex and Ben began flirting. They had sex in a stationery cupboard. They’d communicate in secret, with Alex typing into Ben’s computer, so it looked as if she was helping with his classroom studies, but the words were of love and desire. They’d swap hundreds of Post-it notes and voice recordings on memory sticks. Ben would call her on a contraband mobile phone at 12 p.m., 4.30 p.m. and 9 p.m. every day.

By 2010, Ben had been in prison for thirty years, three times longer than his minimum tariff demanded. He should’ve been released decades ago. But every time an opportunity for parole came up, he managed to supply the prison service with a new reason to deny it. The MP Michael Gove, who’d been campaigning for his release, told The Times newspaper he thought there was, ‘perhaps a self-destructive element in his make-up, because the prison authorities always have a misdemeanour to report, some serious (never violent), some trite, to prevent parole being granted’. To encourage him out, Alex would paint him pictures of the things they’d be able to enjoy together on the outside: the cottage in the country, the fire in the winter, the cat. She couldn’t understand it: he could have her and everything else he wanted. All he had to do was behave. Why was he refusing?

Then one day Ben told her straight: ‘I want to stay.’

*  *  *

If life is as we imagine it, this doesn’t make sense. It was all there waiting for Ben: freedom, love and a beautiful cottage in the Cotswolds. This was a religious parable, a Hollywood ending, the archetypal story of heroic redemption. He’d atoned for his sins and here was his final destination, his glorious reward. But Ben didn’t want it. He preferred to stay in prison.

What had happened to make him cling to life inside? How had he rescued himself from the psychological depths of attempting suicide by starvation? When you take a human and strip them of all the esteem they desire, when you lock them in a dismal building with criminals and a prison staff that treats them with bullying contempt, how can they save themselves? How does a brain, with hundreds of thousands of years of evolution built into it, respond to such a situation?

It builds a life for itself. A characteristically human life.

Years earlier, Ben had started to study. He read up on zen Buddhism, military history, politics and physics. He gained a degree in politics and history, a master’s in peace and reconciliation, began a PhD in criminology and was appointed general secretary of the Association of Prisoners. ‘I became known as the subversive, the political animal, the jailhouse lawyer.’ He also became a vegan. ‘Not so much a moral thing as being a pain in the arse.’ (One lunchtime, to annoy him in return, the prison service presented him a meal of mashed potato and boiled potato with a baked potato on the side.)

Ben made a life for himself by playing a game he thought of as ‘resisting abuses of power’. He came to excel at it. In all his time inside, he only ever met one prison governor he considered knew the rules as well as he did. Ben would help other prisoners fight the system, sometimes tying officers up for months with densely argued appeals to the most trivial misdemeanour charges. He became notorious with the officials. The parole board declared him a ‘fully paid-up member of the awkward squad’. He was a success. ‘He was someone in prison,’ Alex told me.

‘And I knew that would change as soon as I got out,’ said Ben. ‘I’d go from being a medium fish in a small pond to being just another ex-con.’

To coax him out, Alex encouraged him to write a blog. The first post on PrisonerBen was published on the 31 August 2009. Readership grew to over 20,000. In 2011 it was nominated for a prestigious Orwell Prize. And, finally, Ben changed his mind. On 23 August 2012, aged 47, prisoner 12612 GUNN was released. Before he left, a member of the prison staff gave him a warning, ‘You’re going to lose what status you have in here.’

‘What did he mean by that?’ I asked.

‘As a lifer you have a particular place in the prison hierarchy and as a jailhouse lawyer, you do too,’ he said. ‘All these things give you status and I knew, as soon as I walked out, they’d be irrelevant.’

As far as I could tell, those officers had been right. Since his release, Ben had been struggling. Thin, pale, shaven headed, rolling narrow cigarettes and sitting in the sunny garden room of Alex’s Cotswolds cottage, he’d vividly described his collapse into despair. ‘On some unconscious level it was deeply disturbing being released. I was sitting on the floor for two weeks rocking back and forth. I could see where I was in prison. I knew who I was and what I wanted to be. Now I’m completely lost. I’m imploding.’ And yet when I enquired as to whether the officers were correct in predicting he’d suffer from a precipitous drop in status, he denied it.

When asked why we do the things we do, we rarely say, ‘It’s because of status. I really love it.’ It can be distasteful to think of it as any kind of motivating force, let alone a vital one. It contradicts the heroic story we like to tell of ourselves. When we pursue the great goals of our lives, we tend to focus on our happy ending. We want the qualification, the promotion, the milestone, the crown. If our need for status is so fundamental, this discomfort we feel towards it may seem surprising. But that’s the game. To admit to being motivated by improving our rank is to risk making others think less of us, which loses us rank. Even admitting it to ourselves can make us feel reduced. So our awareness of our desire for status eats itself. We readily recognise it in rivals and even use it as a method of insult – which, ironically, is status play: an attempt to downgrade others and thereby raise ourselves up.

Because it has a canny way of hiding itself like this, let’s drag our quarry from its guilty corner. Status isn’t about being liked or accepted: these are separate needs, associated with connection. When people defer to us, offer respect, admiration or praise, or allow us to influence them in some way, that’s status. It feels good. Feeling good about it is part of our human nature. It’s in our basic coding, our evolution, our DNA. And it doesn’t require a stupendous achievement like scoring a goal in the World Cup or blowing up the Death Star. We can feel the velvet touch of status repeatedly throughout the course of a single conversation or in the glance of a passing stranger.

Whenever we’re in the presence of humans, consciously or unconsciously, we’re being judged, measured. And their judgements matter. Wherever psychologists look, they find a remarkably powerful link between status and wellbeing. One study of more than sixty thousand people across 123 countries found people’s wellbeing ‘consistently depended on the degree to which people felt respected by others’. Attainment of status or its loss was ‘the strongest predictor of long-term positive and negative feelings’. Elsewhere, an extensive review of the scientific literature concluded that ‘the importance of status was observed across individuals who differed in culture, gender, age, and personality … the relevant evidence suggests that the desire for status is indeed fundamental’.

Ben’s story is a profound lesson in how to live. It shows us that it’s possible to survive everything being taken from us. We can become despised by society, classed a child murderer, and have a brutal force such as the prison service ranged against us. We can hit such depths of torment that we refuse to eat for forty-three days, starving until we feel our eyeballs drying out. And yet out of these circumstances of grotesque debasement, we can flourish. Ben built a life of meaning and purpose and he did it by plugging himself into a set of like-minded brains and playing a game in which the goal was to earn status. His rank as a lifer and jailhouse lawyer gave him deference and respect. He became useful to his co-players in their conflicts against the prison staff. He grew to be admired and valuable. He invested all the efforts of his days, months and years into the playing of this game. He created a world of meaning for himself. Then, after prison, he collapsed. When freedom means expulsion from the meaning you’ve spent your life making, then freedom is hell.

2

Getting Along, Getting Ahead

IF BEN CAN thrive in prison, we can hope to thrive too. There can’t be many of us who find ourselves as lacking in agency and opportunity as he did. How easy it should be! Open the door, step out of it, and there it is: the world in all its hustle and wonder. The story we’re often told is that, with sufficient application of self-belief and effort, we can do anything we want; be whoever we want.

But it’s not so easy. The world isn’t as it seems. On the other side of that door you won’t find a simple pathway to happiness you can march up heroically for seven or eight decades. Everyone out there is playing a game. That game has its own hidden rules, traps and shortcuts. And yet almost nobody alive is fully conscious of its form, despite being active daily participants. So let’s attempt to wake ourselves up to the great game. Let’s try to define more precisely what human life is and what it’s trying to be.

Humans are a species of great ape. We survive by belonging to highly co-operative groups that share labour. We’ve been living in settled communities for around five hundred generations. But we existed in mobile hunter-gatherer bands for far longer than this – at least one hundred thousand generations. Our brains remain programmed for this style of life. We are today as we’ve always been: tribal. 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.

If we’re to flourish, this approval and acclaim is critical. Researchers find that in the kinds of premodern communities our brains evolved in, ‘social status is a universal cue to the control of resources’, writes psychologist Professor David Buss. ‘Along with status comes better food, more abundant territory, superior health care.’ It leads to greater access to preferred mates and ‘bestows on children social opportunities’ that youngsters in lower ranking families miss out on. When researchers analysed 186 premodern societies around the world, they found men of higher status ‘invariably had greater wealth and more wives and provided better nourishment for their children’. This was, and remains, the secret of maximising our capacity for survival and reproduction: the higher we rise, the more likely we are to live, love and procreate. It’s the essence of human thriving. It’s the status game.

Evolution has programmed us to seek groups to join and then strive for rank within them. But, especially in the modern era, we’re not limited to one group. For those of us not in prison, a typical life involves the playing of multiple games. Wherever we connect with like-minded others, the game will be on: at work, online, on the sports field, at the volunteer centre, in the club, park or activist collective – even at home. The minimum requirement for play is connection. Before we can be rewarded with status, we must first be accepted into the group as a player.

Psychologists find that simply connecting with others and feeling accepted by them can be profoundly good for us. 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 ‘far 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. Failure to connect can even make us physically ill. Numerous studies find it’s possible to predict mortality by observing the extent to which someone has meaningful contact with others. One survey of nearly seven thousand residents of Alameda County in California found ‘the people most likely to survive to old age were those with solid face-to-face relationships’, writes psychologist Susan Pinker. Their social relationships, or lack of them, ‘predicted mortality, independently of how healthy, well-to-do, or physically fit’ they were.

Disconnection is a fearsome state for a social animal to find itself in. It’s a warning that its life is failing and its world has become hostile: where there’s no connection, there’s no protection. Isolation damages us so profoundly it can change who we are. It can force us into a ‘defensive crouch’, writes psychologist Professor John Cacioppo, in which we seek to fend off the threat of further rejection. Our perceptions of other people become warped. They start to appear ‘more critical, competitive, denigrating, or otherwise unwelcoming’. These faulty interpretations ‘quickly become expectations’. We can become scrappy, bitter and negative, a mindset that ‘leads to greater marital strife, more run-ins with neighbours, and more social problems overall’.

When this happens, we can become even more isolated and vulnerable to yet further varieties of antisocial behaviour. Rejected people are more likely to issue punishments and less likely to donate money or help strangers. They can engage in self-damaging habits. In one study, participants were told they were taste-testing chocolate chip cookies. Before the test began, they were asked to mingle with other tasters then choose two they’d like to work with. Some were told (falsely) that nobody had picked them; others that everyone had. The first group, who’d been socially rejected, went on to eat an average of nine cookies more than the non-rejected: nearly twice the number. Most of them even rated the taste of the cookies more highly, implying their rejection actually altered their perceptions of the sugary food.

When our lives begin to fail, then, our minds and bodies fail too: we can become sick, angry, antisocial and increasingly isolated. We are, writes Cacioppo, ‘creatures shaped by evolution to feel safe in company and endangered when unwillingly alone’. But connection itself doesn’t make for a successful life. We’re rarely content to linger on the lowest social rungs of our groups, likeable but useless. We desire worth, acclaim, to be of value. There’s an itch to move up. In the oft-quoted words of psychologist Professor Robert Hogan, humans are driven to ‘get along and get ahead’. Or, from the perspective of our current investigation, to be accepted into status games and to play well.

If rejection from the game can make us sad, angry and sick, the effects of failing to win status can be deadly. The epidemiologist Dr Michael Marmot has exposed the extraordinary power the status game has over our physical wellbeing. He spent decades analysing the health of members of the British civil service. ‘Britain was and is a stratified society’, he writes, ‘and no part of it is more exquisitely stratified.’ This made it ‘an ideal “laboratory” in which to discover how subtle differences in social ranking can lead to dramatic differences in health, in people who are neither very poor nor very rich’.

Marmot was surprised to discover precisely how high a civil servant climbed in the game of the civil service predicted their health outcomes and mortality rates. This was not, as you might reasonably assume, to do with the wealthier individuals leading healthier and more privileged lifestyles. This effect, which Marmot calls the ‘status syndrome’, was entirely independent: a wealthy smoker just one rung below the very top of the status game was more likely to fall ill, as a result of their habit, than the smoker one rung above them.

And these health differentials were extremely significant. W...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: The Life and Afterlife of Ben Gunn
• Chapter 2: Getting Along, Getting Ahead
• Chapter 3: An Imagined World of Symbols
• Chapter 4: An Imagined World of Rules
• Chapter 5: The Three Games
• Chapter 6: Prestige Games
• Chapter 7: Dominance Games
• Chapter 8: Male, Grandiose, Humiliated: The Game’s Most Lethal
• Chapter 9: Change the Rules, Change the Player
• Chapter 10: The Slot Machine for Status
• Chapter 11: The Flaw
• Chapter 12: The Universal Prejudice
• Chapter 13: Living the Dream
• Chapter 14: Subjugation, Revolution, Civilisation
• Chapter 15: Making a Player
• Chapter 16: Believing the Dream
• Chapter 17: Goldrush!
• Chapter 18: War Games
• Chapter 19: The Tyranny of the Cousins
• Chapter 20: Victims, Warriors, Witches
• Chapter 21: Lost in a Dream
• Chapter 22: Status Generating Machines
• Chapter 23: Annihilation Part Two
• Chapter 24: The Road Out of Hell
• Chapter 25: The Neoliberal Self
• Chapter 26: Fairness, Unfairness
• Chapter 27: When Dreams Collide
• Chapter 28: The Parable of the Communists
• Chapter 29: Seven Rules of the Status Game
• A Note On My Method
• Notes and Sources
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Also by Will Storr
• About the Publisher