Status

00:00:00 I think we can get going I met nurses in the director of the center today's program on status was recommended to us and was organized by I should say and I'm gonna let Ann Marie introduce the participants the associate directors Jerry Horowitz would sit in at the meeting thank you welcome I guess we

00:00:39 shouldn't have programs and beautiful day so I'm gonna I'll tell you a little bit about what we're doing and and then I'll read Baez a recent New York Times article proclaimed status anxiety one of the defining preoccupations of our time but what are we really anxious about what in fact is status and why do we want it this helix discussion we'll

00:01:11 consider that complex question from a variety of different perspectives historical psychological sociological and biological together we hope to generate insights about what it is that so many of us pursue and think we want [Music] so when I read your BIOS if you'd raise your hand then people people will know who you are W Warner Burk PhD is a professor of psychology and education at

00:01:43 Teachers College Columbia University where has been since 1979 he teaches leadership and organization change and development his research focuses on learning agility multi radio feedback and leadership he has authored co-authored edited and co-edited 21 books and written over 200 articles and book chapters he has received several Lifetime Achievement Awards and NASA's Public Service Medal too many for for me for me to say here it's on the

00:02:15 website though James L fuller is a research fellow at Columbia University where he recently completed his PhD his doctoral research focused on the evolution and expansion of vocal signal repertoires focusing primarily on the communication system of blue monkeys dr. fuller began working on with wild primates in Kenya in 1995 and has since participated in behavioral and

00:02:45 conservation directed research in Uganda dr congo is that right okay Thailand and Cambodia in addition he has been a guest lecturer on the evolution and usage of communication systems in birds and mammals as well as the sensory systems of vertebrates David Levine's work [Music] encompasses theatre performance video and photography his performance and exhibition work have been presented by

00:03:16 the Brooklyn Museum creative time mama red cat the MCS Chicago MASS MoCA PS 122 and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and has been featured in art form frieze theater bombed a New Yorker and the New York Times his solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum some of the people all of the time was named one of the ten best exhibitions globally by the New York Times in 2018 he has also directed operas and plays at brickHouse the Atlantic Theatre Primary Stages and

00:03:47 Soho rep his essays and dramatic writing have been published in n plus-1 theater cabinet parkette and Triple Canopy he is the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in the 2013 Obie Award in addition to fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute the MacDowell Colony and the foundation for contemporary art best behavior and anthology of his critical writing be published by the 53 state press in

00:04:18 2019 he is professor of the practice of performing theater and media at Harvard University Darren McMann is a professor of history at Dartmouth College educated at the University of California Berkeley in mail when he received his PhD in 1998 mcmahon is the author of enemies of the Enlightenment happiness a history which

00:04:52 has been translated into 12 languages and was awarded best books of the year honors flight innumerable publications and divine fury a history of genius he is he has edited and co-edited many other books and has been a guest professor at many distinguished university he has received also major fellowships many of them McMahon is currently co-editor at the journal modern intellectual history and is at

00:05:24 work now on a book about the history of ideas of equality and is writing another about lighting and illumination in the Age of Enlightenment tyree chapeau had to cancel a couple of hours ago which leads me to say that we did make an effort to try to make the panel more diverse in every way as well as in terms of gender and ethnicity but were foiled by last-minute cancellations and

00:05:54 conflicting schedules etc thanks anne-marie I'm gonna go ahead and begin because this is gather news my fault or at least my idea Emery mentioned I've been working for the last couple years on a book about equality history of ideas of equality and status relates to that and I thought it might be fun to convene a group of people to talk about status in the way that we do at helix in

00:06:26 a kind of unhurried way moving toward wisdom status is a subject that touches on a whole number of different domains there's a class sociological literature on status mocks Faber and Thorstein Veblen and people like that in the 19th century thought a lot about it but it touches deeply on psychology on human biology and primatology anthropology as well as organizational development and and and marketing so I

00:06:57 thought wow this could be make for a really rich discussion we had the hardest time convening this group and Ann Marie's laughing we've gone back and forth for months and that's why you ended up with a group of you know white men of a certain age and we tried otherwise but this is what you get but it was curious and it led me to you know wonder why that's the case and you know one thing I think is that status is some subject that touches on a lot of different fields and yet there's not a

00:07:28 professor of status at a Columbia or a historian who studies status and so people might have been a little bit uncomfortable going outside there there are areas of expertise but I also think there's something about status and hierarchy that makes people uncomfortable I think that in this age and in a nominally democratic society whose founding idea or founding myth if you prefer is equality it makes us a

00:07:58 little little uncomfortable to talk about these things in fact there was a special issue of the journal a on a number of years ago that raised just this point a number of distinguished scholars who came to the conclusion that we've forgotten how to talk about hierarchy or or status and so I think no it's actually a timely discussion and despite whether or not we want to talk about it we think about it all the time whether consciously or not the the noted climatologist Franz Duval has pointed

00:08:29 out that below the radar of consciousness we communicate status every time we talk with someone Robert Sapolsky equally noted biologist and primatologist has pointed out that we are intensely interested in and adept at spotting rank difference and status our brains are incredibly good at and exquisitely attuned to detecting status and all social primates do this you know

00:08:59 body size we know eye contact we know posture and that's that's true of all social primates and then human beings in addition to that are registering things like status like perceived income and other cues that give them insight into status as the the great anthropologist and social psychologist Alan Fisk has pointed out you know what he calls Authority ranking

00:09:31 making distinctions about perceived status as one of the central ways that human beings interact there are others but that's one of the four in his view principal ways of interacting and for most people in most in most times in human history that wouldn't have been a surprise at all because until relatively recently broadly speaking the long eighteenth-century inequality was the norm and hierarchy was the way things were both economic

00:10:02 inequality but social political and legal meaning that status was a legal demarcation and a legal distinction there were different types of human beings or that was the line looking at the etymology of the word status is interesting in this respect and I'm I'll stop here just in a moment that the word status comes from the Latin it's just a declension of a Latin verbs stary which means to stand or to remain in place and

00:10:35 some of the oldest uses in English of the word status are actually reflect this link to the word stature so in 16th century English you could speak about the status of trees which just meant the height of trees or I found a line from the 17th century the height of a man is status which is interesting in a number of connections but the word is also closely related to the word state or the word estate right as in a core or

00:11:08 a particular rank of society so the French talk about the Third Estate or the three estates that prior to the end of the 18th century again legally demarcated one status you were a slave or a free person you were a peasant or an artisan and status then was a legal demarcation well since the 18th century beginning with the American Revolution the French Revolution Haitian Revolution we've

00:11:39 we've we've moved away from that type of thinking about status towards what the philosopher Jeremy Waldron is called a single status society in which we hold one another to all be equals by nature and yet clearly status hasn't gone away and if anything I think it's become more confusing and this again is reflected in the the definition so the only definition you'll find for status in a

00:12:09 in a kind of quasi modern way in the 18th century refers to this legality so here's an eighteenth-century definition from the OED the fact or position of belonging to a group which is subject to certain legal rights or limitations so it's the legal classification of a slave or of a child or what-have-you in the 19th century in the early 19th century that moves to being the rank position or standing of a thing especially with regard to its importance but it's no longer clear who determines

00:12:42 that importance and I think that's part of the the murkiness but all the interest of status as we as we think about it moving forward from the 19th century so with that and the perfect timing of the music let me open it up to the group to come in and we'll follow the conversation where it leads or I'll just keep talking I have it tell me a couple of thoughts about status a

00:13:14 pronounced status not status I don't know what the hell you're from there any case we do not own status we get statuses from other ppl so we have to really bear that in mind I don't determine whether I have status or not you come on I can do it to some extent but it's others that are going to declare it in my case in everybody's case so that's important to not lose

00:13:47 sight out I don't have that much control over it in many respects is whether or not other people think I have stays the other thought is that we desire status I think oh stop others do especially ice in academia that's for sure and then when we get it that's sort of different than what we expected just a very quick story I have a colleague she is the last

00:14:19 one of our particular group to not be a full professor so his past year she went up the full professor and made it unanimously and not a problem whatsoever and everybody supported and so on and so forth afterwards I've never seen anybody more depressed and she still I think to this day not quite over it but over in this particular case means feeling really

00:14:51 down then I discovered recently that psychologists called something like that a rival fallacy and that once we get there it's not what we thought and that's what she has said to me more than once it's just not quite what I thought it would be and so that a rival fallacy means in the broader sense now psychologists speaking we don't do

00:15:23 very well about predicting the future none of us in fact there's something called a planning fallacy can you do this by August the first of course I can and August first comes up and I have gotten nowhere you know I make that mistake all the time but I'm not unique many of us if not most I was do that so we don't we're not very good at figuring out what's going to happen we think we know what's going to happen but when it happens it rarely is the way we thought

00:15:55 it was going to be and that is particularly true apparently about achieving something that we desperately want and then when we get it it's just not quite what I thought it was gonna be now if you tell her I told this story your life will be in danger it's interesting as you were saying that as

00:16:27 both of you were speaking I was kept thinking well one of the challenges of this topic in general is the problem with the definition and what occurs to me is that there's very different uses or perspectives on the same concept and it's it's relative to the environment or the context in which we're discussing it so I think at the most basic levels one can say that one status could describe one's condition or position and therefore by definition it's relative to something else relative to another

00:16:59 individual relative to a some temporal component or something like that and so what that suggests Smee as this is not my field at all I can speak if you have say whatever I want yeah but what occurs to me is that what one might start by doing is is delineating different uses of the term or to describe different things and I think that in our society and human society and I imagine of greater interest to this

00:17:30 assemblage is its social status and what that means and and and I would say that we need a predictive framework you know as you said we don't know what to expect when we get there and things like that but I think the why we find status and a deference to position throughout cultures and throughout societies and to some degree across species is because we need a predictive framework to operate within our social structures if I don't know what to expect from you

00:18:02 behaviorally and you don't know what to expect for me behaviorally it's going to make for a very challenging social interaction and status and and a recognition and deference to that status so one might say that socially speaking status is really an agreement there's an agreement that if your status confers upon you certain responsibilities and access to resources you get that and I agree let you have that and vice versa so I think the the greater issue then

00:18:34 comes from how that status is acquired and I think we see in our society and presumably across societies across history I don't study humans I find humans very odd and very confusing and what if you were a psycho congratulations all of you anyway that I think that we have positions of status that carry with them a certain degree of responsibilities and access to resources

00:19:04 and and permissions that are intrinsic so one might say that I assumed I didn't measure everyone but my status as tallest person in this round table is unimpeachable and it's simply an intrinsic fact yeah well it's starting to change rapidly and it's irrelevant and so only if that position matters to anyone or has some relevance to some social context do should we start paying attention to it but there are intrinsic

00:19:36 care heuristics that simply are are part of the individual and then I would say on the polar opposite side of that would be the arbitrarily assigned status ranks so royalty you know people become monarchs with to some degree absolutely power through absolutely nothing than the the fortune of their birth and then there's that middle ground of talking about reaching the rank of full professor

00:20:06 which is earned by merit yet merit alone isn't sufficient it also requires some external judgment to to confer that so I think I've sort of lost the thread already I was hoping someone would interrupt me but the I think where we go with that is that to me social status within modern human culture is only as strong as the degree to which we agree to abide by it if the

00:20:40 person who is in charge is only in charge because people agree to listen to that person if we all stop listening to that person that person stops being in charge and so it really speaks to the question of how how status is achieved or acquired as well as how has it maintained and enforced James and I hate to tell you this but as you age you're gonna get shorter I'm that's good I look forward to writing this which means though that how we confer status is a real measure of our own scale of values

00:21:12 right so what what we take to be I mean one of the things that came out on David and if you want to come in but I think this is important is that there is a distinction a sharp one sometimes in less sharp at others to be drawn between status and power or status and wealth and Weber who I mentioned before his classic a sort of tripartite discussion of stratification in society distinguishes between class based on wealth and power by which he meant political or military power actual you

00:21:44 know ability to do things and then status or shhhhht and he called it which is something like prestige and he saw those as as distinct now I think you know there's clearly overlap but there are ways in which in in in various economies or regimes status and wealth or status and power have nothing to do with one another again we go back to academia right one can have great status in academia and be poor and have no power whatsoever in fact it often works that way you know everyone can

00:22:15 have great power and great wealth and have very low status I think of a particular example he comes to mind I won't mention him here but you know one can imagine that case to have wealth and power but have social judgment that's that's largely negative earlier one status principle for since the our Revolution and the French Revolution and

00:22:46 so I have this image things there being an attempt to equalize everything the quiet things down to make everyone on the level and then the system runs forward and it emerges again so I guess I'd like to know what are we what causes that what is then what are the factors that influence the re-emergence of a hierarchy let's say it involves status I have things to say about that but others do too I'm sure there's a biological component I would think someone here

00:23:17 Mike nothing in biology makes sense yeah I would say when when we find characteristics that appear to be universal and difficult to control through modern human social constructs it suggests that there must be some underlying biological Drive in that direction and and I think one other thing that I think if we hear to say the word status one more time it will lose all meaning and it had a little meaning

00:23:49 to me when we walked in here and now it's completely gone out the window that's good and to me there and also because I think of status is a very objective measurable defined as condition or state the state of things and therefore when we talk about it zero there is no there is I don't think equality and absence of status are connected with one another rank or hierarchy is perhaps the better way of thinking about but I know that

00:24:20 just linguistically we tend to conflate things but so in in non-human primates there is almost across species there is often seen some type of ranking and that ranking is ordered by researchers we observe things so we are trying to make sense of an observed pattern so the the fact that one might recognize the alpha male of a group of chimpanzees by his behavior and by the behavior that is

00:24:52 shown towards him and by his access to mates and his access to food resources that doesn't suggest that he has some sort of conferred upon him status or rank it's our way of measuring and describing a pattern whereas in human society if you were to grant me a rank right now I would be no different than I was a minute ago but suddenly I would

00:25:22 have power influence access to resources that I didn't have and yet I would not be any different so I think that one of the biggest differences that we see in in humans and non-humans is that the the ranking and the hierarchy and the differential access to resources that we see in nonhumans tends to be associated with some measurable attribute physical strength ability to form coalition's to some degree some cognitive ability or

00:25:52 cleverness and things like that but that's a but those are attributes that are relevant to that position whereas we have seen monarchs throughout the ages who have zero physical or cognitive capabilities that suggests they are better and to be in that position and yet they have been conferred upon it so I think that's I think again lost the thread sorry but I do think that what you were suggesting is that I think we have a built-in hardwired genetically predisposed hunger for hierarchy hunger

00:26:27 for recognition of rank differences that allow us to have a predictive framework so that we can interact and as we socially move forward and say no no no we should all be equal we shouldn't have status yet that hunger allows us or keeps driving us to say I see differences let's rank those differences as opposed to say you're different we're different but we don't we are not ranked in any sort of hierarchical or ordinal way and we can use any variety of

00:26:59 criteria to establish those differences and of course every society does write an ancient Mayan you know the the nobility had flat heads so you know having a less oval head was a sign of status I love to point out as somebody who loves books that you know in the early modern period books were very expensive and so books were a sign of prestige you had libraries the way that people now have art collections to confer wealth and status so the criteria

00:27:31 by which we make these distinctions change and it changes I think quite dramatically in in the 18th century where those distinctions go from being based upon quote-unquote blood to ostensibly at least being based on merit which becomes a new kind of standard to draw hierarchies a literal call obviously all kinds of problems with that I wanted to go back to something you said James and just to ask because where you went towards the end there

00:28:01 about the kind of genetic predisposition I mean it's it's clearly not irrelevant that that we share what 98.5 percent of our DNA with with bonobos and chimpanzees which both bonobos less so are intensely hierarchical creatures I think that that's something that we just need to kind of take in but you said something the effect that that a status hierarchy among chimpanzees and the identification of an alpha male doesn't confer status or status and I

00:28:35 suppose it depends what we mean but it certainly confers access to resources right and and on some level that's what status is right that exactly and I think that it gets circular and semantic to the point of becoming very uninteresting but to me in a very simplified way I think a big distinction is the directionality when I look at a group of let's say blue monkeys because that species that I study you do a lot when I

00:29:07 when I look at a group of blue monkeys I don't decide who's in charge and then confer upon them access to resources and access to deep does right the group of blue monkeys does it exists this is the great thing about being a very objective scientists you can always say I have no judgment I have no evaluation or so no no kind of value judgment simply observing patterns the pattern is that this animal has right of access to food

00:29:38 prior to the others this animal is given more deferential grooming things like that and so we we recognize behavior and from that behavior we organize things into some sort of right position whereas I think in in in human society it might go the opposite direction which is that we one might be interacting quite equally with one another and as soon as I mentioned the fact that I action to be actually in the Crown Prince of Monaco

00:30:08 behavior will change you so it has nothing to do with how the behaviors sort of naturally play out and how one acts in a certain way in that that the arbitrary and to some degree externally assigned rank or status changes behavior whereas I think when we look at at non-human species we don't actually know what's going on to white the fact that everyone who writes things says we know what's going on what

00:30:39 we can say is the patterns observed appear to function this way which is that there appears to be a hierarchy there appears that some animals enjoy a greater access to resources greater access to mates some animals receive more aggression other animals don't things like that and so that suggests that this hierarchy exists the question is how is it achieved how is it assigned how how does it come about where as and so that that's I would say that the the biggest difference is that

00:31:10 there is a directionality there look for it but yes like much more of a human response to whatever they could but it'd be interesting to figure that sort of thing out I would guess it's mostly unit we can respond to and announce me you've just become the Crown Prince of Monaco

00:31:41 so we're all gonna bow to you now no I mean that's a difference between that probably I mean I'm curious I don't want to go down the rabbit hole but but as is all right but I different thing Jane Goodall Christopher Bohm Fran's Duvall's would all argue that there's a kind of self-conscious politics in the group of higher primates right so that that status is on some level conferred and alliances are formed and whatnot I'm sensing you're skeptical to that but

00:32:13 that and that that's fine but sighs yeah I'm always skeptical of attributing human right cognitive patterns - I am actually sceptical of its attributing to other humans I can barely figure out how I think I let alone certainly don't want to assume how others think but I I'm very supportive of people whose work suggests certain types of thought processes but to me the behavioural

00:32:43 patterns alone are sufficient to understand some evolutionary trajectory I think that at the end of the day the as humans we very much we put so much emphasis on our intellect and so much emphasis on our cognitive abilities to plan and to plan seventeen steps ahead that we make assumptions that anything that has occurred must be the result of that sort of directed I would like to be full

00:33:14 professor so I'm gonna do this and then I'm going to do that and then I'm going to kiss up to my chair and then I'm going to publish that we have these things so when we see patterns and nonhumans the formation of coalition's and the more grooming to high-ranking individuals there's this assumption that it must be on some level through a conscious understanding that if I groom you more often you will be more likely to support me in an alliance later when we overthrow the alpha male and all of

00:33:45 those other things and it might be working that way but to me right whether there is a conscious awareness or not that pattern seems to be existing there's some mechanism for maintaining it I would ask I would bet but I don't know I would bet that that mechanism for maintaining those hierarchies is much less complicated than it is in human society no question and and I would bet that those the mechanisms that maintain those ranks are much more related to

00:34:19 physicality not necessarily just physical strength although that's a huge part of it but physicality in terms of access to food access to breeding grounds access to sleeping grounds all of the things that matter and we live in a society you talked about a lot of things that to me are less about status or rank as much as they are about symbols of that in that we have a you saw data symbols you talked about things that by definition were very familiar to

00:34:52 perhaps everyone in this room you know books there are you groups of people for whom books are not only not a symbol of high status they're a symbol of wasted effort though they're not anymore but I was talking about an earlier period live in history right but but that period of human history was also a relatively narrow part of global human culture there were times in places in which at the same time period within the 18th to 19th century in which groups large

00:35:24 groups of highly complex civilized societies did not place the same value on intellect or religion or money or food you know all of these things your society would honor people who have scars who you know contain them in battle right right so I think to kind of get to your point which is that I my sense is that if we see the same structural attempts to identify acknowledge maintain and obey this

00:35:56 ranking hierarchical system so that we can have a predictive framework that suggests it's more or less universal or it's somehow hardwired into our our DNA or how we interact I think then all that really changes is that you know this year it was shoes last year it was iPods and next year it'll be something else but the were the the at the end of the day it's the structure is the same we're just finding very different ways of doing it there are people in the

00:36:29 audience dying to ask questions but they're gonna have to hold off right a little bit longer and then we'll we'll come in I mean James and I could go back and forth all day I don't want to monopolize if other people want to come in the conversation one thing is willing is and we humans are the species that do that make status reads constantly humans in cities all right so part of its also yeah yeah and I'm I'm more

00:37:02 interested in I mean I believe more in the attribution of status and I do an actual status but I think that you know one thing you're suggesting is also the you know these like groups of like chicken see if they live in you know they live in like lambs or groups and that's you know says status attributions remain relatively I mean relatively stable throughout the lifetime of a particular groove right I mean I have a trivet of what I'm what it makes me I mean I pretty much agree with you that it doesn't make any sense to ascribe our

00:37:35 motivations or our patterns you know I doesn't make any sense to describe human impulses at all to anything but human if if even humans but I think also I would wonder you know if you if you're a city dweller you're reading situations like constantly like from you know from the moment you definitely need to step out the door to the moment you get home you know you're forced to make a million different reads and I wonder if it makes sense to think about status or the

00:38:05 activity of attributing status you know relative to symbols and all this kind of other things that you encounter like whether you know like say you know in a small town like in a small in Ana balsa kind of town like you know how static huh static wood has static with static saturations have been right in like an 18th century village you know in France and what that had been like and would that have been more would that have been based off a simpler set of attributes like and of course these things can

00:38:37 overlap right so you know the examples used of a janitor working in a large corporation you know on some measure low status position but that same janitor might be the captain of the softball team who in then in that realm has very high status and of course these things can overlap it at every measure and and and which goes to James point that when you scale up to human societies themes these things become

00:39:08 tremendously more complex because they're not just about resource acquisition which with primates is essentially the end of the story right where were we want all kinds of things in addition to that right include including well III think so we want recognition right we want admiration I mean I think this is on some level a basic human Drive and you know I'm an

00:39:40 18th century scholar and so I'm always going back to my 18th century thinkers and one of my favorite is jean-jacques Rousseau and Rousseau says that we have this propensity for what he calls I'm more pro quo for self-love that gets activated in certain situations and it really is the desire for recognition but that desire gets translated very quickly in not just the desire for recognition but the desire to put down others so

00:40:11 that our own desire to be recognized and if we think about this in a meritocracy it becomes very interesting becomes at the same time desire to put down others and so a competitive society in some ways or you know composed of people searching for recognition but at the same time creating losers and unless earth ants in the process and that that gets really complicated and problematic right yeah I would say that I don't

00:40:43 disagree that that in human culture and human society we want lots of things that don't relate directly to things like food and shelter and reproduction I would argue that that or I would at least posit that the idea that it's Universal suggests some biological underpinning and the biological underpinning would have to be Bill and not to keep reducing everything to sex and food but that's

00:41:14 how evolution works you know and and so the having the shiny object doesn't help you unless having that shiny object increases your probability of reproducing or having food long enough to survive so that you can reproduce so I I would say that the things that we do in our modern society we have poetry and and and art and fast cars and monstrosity large buildings and all of these things on some level I think that

00:41:45 the drive towards those things is related to the drive towards access to resources and so I think to get to your point about why is it that we constantly are seeking the positive feedback from others why do we want to be loved so much if we want to reduce that to some biologically explainable relevance that it would relate to Alliance formation

00:42:16 coalition formation and that sociality is odd we think of sociality as normal because as humans were social and we look around at the animals that we think are interesting and we they happen to be social but if you look across the animal kingdom it's actually a quite rare occurrence and it's kind it's very challenging to maintain because hanging out with a bunch of other animals that are doing the exact same thing you are and what the same stuff you do is going to create all sorts of opportunities for aggression and competition and disease

00:42:49 transfer no horrible things going wrong so to me I think sociality is a mechanism for allowing us to stay together and so things like a acknowledgement or recognition of hierarchical preferences and and status and things like that is is not so much of interest in and of itself as much as it's a tool because it without it we would all just be stabbing each other in the face and and wouldn't get any of the benefits of

00:43:19 social living okay as I say there's this implication that humans have sort of taken it to a new level and even as sort of David just mentioned there seems that perhaps you can be a difference between you know rural not city dweller type individuals where their status and a number of signs that they take to indicates that as maybe a little bit simpler and maybe I'm being maybe I just don't know what it's like to live there but I it seems to me it's compelling way to describe things whereas now in our sort of urban setting there are this

00:43:51 myriad different signals you might get that might confer status and it can actually be confusing it's I mean I'm thinking of the classic essay by Clifford Geertz the great anthropologist notes on the Balinese cockfight and he's an anthropologist in Bali observing a cockfight which is a major social event and he likens it to the complexity of watching a Shakespeare play and the reads that people are

00:44:22 making just like David is referring on the streets of Brooklyn where your son you know calculating this that or the other probably going back to resource acquisition Sachs certainly on the streets right are as complicated in that setting as they are on the streets of New York now I mean that's neither here nor there but it is interesting and again I think it's this this human pension the capacity to constantly judge status which I should say is not only just about I think you know we're pretending to think of the kind of

00:44:52 negative side but there's a way in which status is conferred frequently for social reasons for positive benefits right so you think of I was just reading actually a wonderful book shout out dr. kelmer's the power paradox who was that in psychology at Berkeley and he has a little section on status and he starts with the discussion of Inuits peoples who share share food share seals and great status conferred upon seal hunters

00:45:25 who bring more food to the group right status is conferred on professors who have you know 50 odd PhD students and and and act selflessly throughout their careers for the help of others status is conferred on people who give large amounts of time and resources to the matter what have you and so status is that positive social conferral that grants us as you say privilege in and and and access but

00:45:57 also does things to sort of support of values that reaffirmed the benefit of the group we like to have these kind of high status individuals because they help us right let me remind us too that I got a speak for psychology for him that in our introductory course in psychology we were taught that Maslow said that ego status is a fundamental need and that I do have the need for status we do have the need for us waging

00:46:30 our ego and so forth and it's a basic fundamental need it's a hierarchical one he said which by the way evidence does not support but never mind about that and evidence does support that we do have ego status kind of needs fundamental is that a cause of the the development of hierarchies or is that a explain and sighs mmm ask Abraham is that a school psychologist can never answer those kind of questions you know it's correlated

00:47:02 well it's interesting because if you take this notion that you cannot draw clear-cut conclusions about this from animal studies you don't know exactly what are the progenitors of our drive to status it leaves open the question because you don't again we don't think of monkeys whatsoever it seems to me is wanting to be told they're fantastic right that's not an issue where's you just finished saying I agree with you humans love to hear that so so

00:47:33 the question is well is that just our version of grew right which I think what Robin Dunbar sort of promotes that idea right it's a extension yeah yeah that's interesting I don't know okay the first thing that pops to mind as a as an analogy is that you know sugar from an evolutionary perspective you know sugar is killing humans right now it's it's going to be the death of a massive portion of our

00:48:04 population it is a biologically driven yeah desire and that biologically does driven desire has very simple to recognize evolutionary history you know that having a sweet tooth having a desire and a positive feedback from eating sweets is a great way to survive if you're in the if you're in the woods and you desire fruit more than others you're

00:48:34 going to go after fruit you're going to get that rapid carbohydrate rush you're going to get large amounts of energy you're going to survive longer breed more pass that on to your offspring so the idea that that the the desire for sugar the fact that sugar is a pleasant thing for humans is not good or bad it's it just makes sense the fact that current technology and social structure and access to resources has made it such that that biological underpinning is

00:49:05 being used to great detriment to all of us a society I think those can be looked at separately and as a related constant consequence so one might suggest that that this mmm biological drive for predictive framework if we're going to be interacting with individuals regularly there has to be some system for organizing us who's in charge who's not in charge how do we get to be in charge all of those things allows us to

00:49:36 get through the day without completely falling apart that basic biological underpinning sets the stage then for all sorts of horrible abuse but that's a set but I don't think that those two are in with one another just because humans are doing odd things with it doesn't mean that it's still not based on the same evolutionary foundation that we see in other species and I happen to this morning look at talk you gave on on false crowds along those lines and what

00:50:07 occurred to me and that was that that how one achieves status suggesting if you look at some non-human primate examples some some status especially in female oriented species their status tends to be a matrilineal it's and it's inherited so it's irrelevant whether you're limping and funny-looking if your mother was high-ranking you might be high-ranking but in many cases especially in multi male species the ranking of the male depends on how well

00:50:39 you form a coalition as well as how strong you are so you might be very strong but there's nothing you can do against seven so a coalition of seven is better than being strong so the ability to convince others that you matter and that's the thing at the end of the day it's not even saying that I have these attributes I have these capacities I have these skills that I will provide for all of you if if I convince you to say I'm interesting that might suggest to these other people that I might be

00:51:10 interesting and suddenly by the end of day everyone thinks I'm interesting regardless of the fact that I'm completely dull and so I think that the the notion of why false crowds exist and why why we tend to why people who are popular tend to get more popular like oh that movie did really well this weekend let's go see it next weekend you know there's this kind of disappear of coalition's and I think the manipulation of that is what we see in modern human society that is a use of some

00:51:42 underpinning and some underlying biological reality explain false crowds Oh it'sit's pretty tangential I mean I see what you're saying it's just you know I'm like like hired protesters or hired ralliers or hired entourages or you know hired political supporters I yeah hired political supporters you know I'm paying yeah thank you well it reminds me this very pregnant topic of

00:52:15 populism which is somewhat of an well you know what a rebellion against the elite and I have to say I have to relate you may have all seen this but you mentioned earlier Darren that people can notice the way people walk and their stature and her behavior but it was when I consider this absolutely hysterical video cars big furry hats it's like a

00:52:47 Charlie Chaplin shot for it looks like a monkey looking under like his behavior was so discordant of what you'd expect the president of major country would be doing because he just seemed to be interacting in a very different way interesting that that gives many of us a reason to be it gives many of us a reason to be sort of disparaging of him I think that's well deserved but for others as a signal that we want a rally

00:53:18 around him because he's the kind of guy that that I know are like I thought James said something really interesting about sugar and you know a kind of whole food industry that exploits that underlying basic kind of genetic or evolutionary drive the same of course is true with social media which is very much like the grooming you know the

00:53:48 likes that you get on Twitter or Facebook give you that dopamine rush that sugar does and that points the fact that you know there there are a lot of very clever people in our society who think about status more than you and they think about all the signaling that goes on and they think about how to signal it right and and you know in some ways tap into or draw on or one might in a harsher tone say exploit that capacity

00:54:20 that we have to make these fine grain distinctions all the time I mean in some ways that's what drives marketing right I have a friend who markets drinks sports drinks and he's very clever and I never knew that the marketing of sports drinks was so interesting we had a conversation but he told me what for what something that what four people in the industry is second nature that you know when you market today now you don't market a product you market a lifestyle

00:54:51 and the lifestyle is all about status signaling clearly yeah I think what's kind of I mean what I thought kind of exquisite about people right is that you are exquisite about how we do status is that you you can't you know you you can't be seen to be too thirsty right so you I mean but it's weird but that that idea of you know so if you're if you're

00:55:22 trying to get a lot of people to like you or if you're trying to you know within the arts if you're it would be poor form if we perform to advocate to for well it's okay if you get absolutely ferociously for yourself if you're like absolutely psychotic about it because that's that's intense so that's cool but otherwise you have to make it seem effortless right which is to say you know or like classic kind of you know like richer the third kind of you know

00:55:52 you whisper to somebody else to somebody else and you know then then it'll be by acclamation that's fun but you can't you know you can't so basically the ideas either the ideas you know kind of and maybe this is where we've got our understanding this maybe this is what we were modeling our understanding primase um but you know the idea is either you're like you want it so bad and you finally got it like a Britney Spears kind of model which would have been which would have been really just about physical vigor like you know or Lady Gaga even better like you just you

00:56:23 wanted it you wanted that you wanted it you fought for it you fought for it you fell for it so that's just physical strength alternately you know it just it just kind of it just kind of found you because you're magically divinely awesome right which would be which which would be kind of aristocratic you know you like you you were you're innately deserving like but you can't but the the kind of push and pull of luck you know again in a room like who seemed to be too thirsty or the way you'll you know the way really washed up

00:56:54 really like triply washed up kind of you know former celebrities you know generally their last rung that their last tragedy will almost always be read that's a desperate bid for attention just to say there's something very misleading very cruel and how we and how we do this because we we want clear status reads but we also really want to punish people for behaving as though they wanted too much right it's like cool in that respect you know or celebrity to it is cool you know I think

00:57:29 all of that to me draws a line between two different at least two if not 27 different ways of us ascribing and assigning these ranks or these these hierarchies or this sense of status or some privileged position within society and I think if you were to use the same way of dissecting the sports world I'm sure I don't pay that much attention to sports but I'm sure there are issues of

00:58:00 people who want it too much and we don't like their personalities but at the end of the day if you run faster than everyone else you win right as long as you didn't cheat and do other things like that and so it's it's about physical capacity that is not subjective hopefully not subjectively viewed if you run faster than everyone else in the race you are the winner you get the Hat and you are given the status of fastest runner whereas but you may not get the endorsements interestingly I mean that right to bring that but so within

00:58:31 context exactly and so when we shift into a different context the arts is almost by definition subjective and so the fact that you know van Gogh was not appreciated in his lifetime and now is appreciated the paintings didn't change so the the and the to some degree the way we measure things didn't change it's just the fashion changed the appreciation change and so that's where I think that that when status can be a saw if if status can be assigned simply

00:59:03 based on the subjective will of the crowds then that status is by definition tenuous and will shift the minute you say something we don't like you no longer have that status also but it's a blossom makes the situation's kind of ripe for exploitation yeah or you know or door just a million varieties in me tuning because you you know you can dangle no one knows how to get status I mean there's people who have authority and they can confer it but what it means

00:59:33 is you can you know you can you can you can dangle all kinds of promises that you will be able to like impart some status after you know after this or after that and no one's to say I mean this is this is this is I mean this is the avital Ronell thing this is you know in academia as well it's you know there's just dangling dangling dangling because it doesn't sit still because it's not it's not athletics you're not going honored you're not right like

01:00:05 which actually sort of circles back to what you were saying but almost in the reverse direction which is that I think as much as we've been talking about the individuals desire to achieve status I think there's also a really strong desire to assign status or recognized status and others and so it's sort of I as much as I want to achieve some high rank because I assume that that will make me feel better and be a better dancer and all the other

01:00:35 things that come with that there's also I want the person in charge and someone else to tell me how to dress and I want someone else to tell me which music to listen to and then we are and so in the same way that we're disappointed when we improve the status we also tend to be disappointed when someone else gets that status and so we want someone else to get it the next time then and there's this constant shifting of like I promise you all this now you've put me in charge

01:01:05 and either I'm not delivering or I am delivering and you say you don't want it anymore but at the end of the day now we have to change we it's a constantly shifting set of targets both for the the individual and that's what I think to me it just goes back to that status is an agreement it's a it's a it's a recognition of expectations of behavior and actions both on the part of the individual that we're focused on as the subject of the status as well as the individuals interacting with that person

01:01:36 and I think that reality I think is hardwired into us the mechanisms by which it's assigned and maintained I think are shifting and constantly shifting which is why culturally and historically what we see today and what we see 200 years from now or 200 years ago will look differently in terms of what the materials are but the structure and the patterns will probably always be the same several years ago three four years ago MoMA had this social network

01:02:12 analysis picture so speaking of that was done in the 1920s and 1930s and who among the artistic world was connecting with whom that's what social announced network is all about who relates with him according to what question you ask and so forth right smack in the middle of that social network analysis was who not Van Gogh Picasso and he was the most

01:02:44 high status person in the artists world he might argue based on a social network analysis that was just somewhat independent anyway it was fascinating yeah I bought a replica of it hanging over my office to really had me didn't that work mmm-hmm you know one of the people who couldn't be here today but would have liked to have been was a colleague of mine at Dartmouth who's a social psychologist and she's done

01:03:14 really Talya Wheatley is her name they're doing really interesting work on monitoring how groups interact in real time so an example is a orientation kind of cocktail reception for entering Tuck Business School people and you can watch and measure and this you know this kind of analysis right how much time who's getting the most time how quick the conversations are what not and this becomes a way and some some level of of

01:03:45 measuring this highly fluctuating thing that we call status when I was as you both were speaking I was thinking this has been David to that you know be really cool if you could have a stock market of status right anybody constantly moving around and you would drop two points today and go up two points or on then eventually fall off the chart altogether but that's what makes it so complicated to what there was there was an app that was I'm gonna that you know it did have to listen it they tried to launch it a few years ago where you could where you could

01:04:16 basically rate people on anything you wanted and rank the Chinese have have certain like social media metrics like this to where you but the idea was you're basically creating a market for a market for approval or mocking for seven or there's a black mirror episode about this that's really absolutely amazing it's one of the you agree I think it's one of the best ever yeah where everyone's constantly reading and give you 3 stars 3.5 stars the it's very lucky I gotta watch yeah I'm hearing this idea that the status sort of

01:04:47 crystal it's almost like a traffic controlling mechanism and it kind of crystallizes from that in some way does that resonate with the rest of you it allows us it facilitates human interaction right yeah it's one of the many mechanisms by which I don't want to be repetitive but I think there's a within a socially interacting group within any interacting group there has to be a measure of predictability and so

01:05:19 for me to approach you I need to be able to on some level weigh the probability that this is going to end poorly for one of us and and or and what the benefits are in things like that and so I think without anything else to go on we don't interact and so that that recognition of expectations and predictability is built into our social needs I think that I think one difference though is that or one thing that I notice when we're talking about humans and talking about

01:05:50 that sort of just shifting the stock of social status is that it it's it's so faith-based in that not sorry I mean to be alluding to religion meaning that it is founded in a belief that other people's opinions matter whereas if I am going to get behind the strongest chimp as long as my ability to assess physical

01:06:22 strength then it doesn't matter what others think I'm going to be backing the right chimp whereas if I want to be backing the person that's going to be in charge it's less about that individual and much and more it is about what other people are doing and bitcoin is a great example bitcoin is a phenomenally invent nonsensical idea that is now a billion dollar industry that if I say this is worth a billion dollars doesn't matter that I say that but if the rest of you say it then suddenly there's some value to it so in the same way that if if if

01:06:53 somebody says hey I'm very interesting online and then someone else says you're right and then ten more people do it suddenly we have it sort of feeds on itself but if people stop saying that then it stops being of value I'm just thinking out loud but it would be interesting to to think about the differences that happen when you make the scalar move from actual human interaction where status as I say

01:07:25 clearly an if group evolutionary sense would also confer value on people that did things benefit to the group or an whereas in a virtual network it's not clear that you get things by assigning status to others right and that that distorts in its own way I don't know David maybe you have thoughts about that but it's it's a different economy somewhat we haven't addressed this other

01:07:55 especially control we're everyone in the panel I'm not actually on the panel they're all white males the idea of privilege and and I was going to raise the interesting I think interesting observation that there are some cultures where the status really seems to be really baked into it like I'm thinking about the caste system in Hinduism and I guess the way I would view it not really not in the least but being an expert on that area but based a little bit on what

01:08:25 everyone's saying here my thinking is that that's a system that once it was once it got into place it was very much self-perpetuating it sort of maintained its own structure and maybe why it was so strict and and precise and how its persisted for so long right where's the systems we're thinking about in our current culture a lot more fluid in loose may even be creating some anxiety this because they are fluid and loose but privilege is another example of how people who do once they get into some

01:08:56 position of power work to maintain it so I was just wondering if people have thoughts about that yeah I think it's hugely important and again you know this makes for the murkiness in some ways a discussion in the post 18th century where we moved away in the West broadly conceived from that clearly stratified legally stratified society man you mentioned privilege I was you know loved to point out to my students that the the route of privilege is pre with slacks private law and so think of a

01:09:30 classically a state-ordered or not caste but an order of society like old regime France law was conferred by the crown to to pour to corporations according to who they were right so as a noble you had certain private laws right right to go to a different court and to to be exonerated from certain kinds of taxes and so on and so forth in the same way that the milliner's had as a core a body

01:10:03 a certain private law so privilege was all about this distinct laws right ostensibly we've we we hold to a view of the equality before the law and gotten rid of that kind of stratified society and yet at the same time I think because for reasons that we've started to talk about I mean there's no society you can't I think what's the number something like 50 you get 50 50 people together and communal sharing goes out the window and you get you get some kind of hierarchies and they're good hierarchies and they're

01:10:34 bad hierarchies right and the question is you know are the the hierarchies that are forming in 21st century America ones that we want that we're conferring for good reasons or ones that are more like the older kind that you're referring to that that are sedimented that have kind of structural support and underpinnings and I think it's a little bit of both only this is why no one

01:11:05 wanted to come to the panel right it's a lot well I think your point at least it touches on something I was thinking about it that if if hierarchical organization is just some natural reality it's going to happen or at least it's likely to happen and as you point out it's very difficult to avoid so even in times please interrupt you think goodness who knows where I was parently

01:11:37 the one universal about all organizations of all times and around the world is hard right and that Syrian right which suggested its might not even just be a biological reality it might even just be some sort of physical or and mathematics ists and I think there's also a big issue where again semantics when we talked about equality of equality when we talk about equality and in society I don't think anyone is suggesting that all individuals are the

01:12:08 same that's so equality and and similarities are not the same so we're really talking about equal access or equal treatment as opposed to you know the quality the person status in that that my condition of being a rapidly aging white male is different than someone else just condition of being a young Hispanic female so all of those things are relevant in some context but that's not what we're talking about inequality about trying to avoid

01:12:40 dissimilarities off track off topic your point was that to me it suggests that if these hierarchies are some naturally occurring system that there's going to be a hierarchy there's going to be a ranking but the mechanisms by which those hierarchies are maintained and the means by which one ascends to the higher ranks those things are changing who sets them and I would say it's

01:13:11 probably pretty obvious that the people who set them are the people in charge there are you know The Untouchables we're not saying you know what's great about this caste system is that the Brahmas are up here and we should know what the Brahmas were the one who were setting the caste system and so in the same ways that the at this point in in modern American history financial wealth is the the holy grail of status you know people who have lots of money are seen to be better than people who don't have lots of money regardless of other

01:13:43 qualities and characteristics and that status is set by your friend and marketing you know so your friend and marketing is trying to get me to buy things that I don't need and there's been ever-increasing inequality in terms of right that kanopolis of it because if we actually got to a point where there was even something getting remotely close to true social equality in terms of access to resources or access to individuals or how we're treated or our scene I think that would violate some

01:14:15 really deeply profound Drive within us and so I think that's why it takes a lot of meditation and and over shooting our our internal drives to do that because but I think that's it I think who sets it is the challenge in that the who sets what matters are the people that are thought to matter and then it just sits in circles on itself well it seems to be diffused but unfortunately the system the house seems to be right you're driving itself toward this sort of

01:14:45 financial inequality there's also the problem that the people at the bottom like the untouchables you mentioned suffer health-wise right the people at the lowest rung the underclass have more hypertension diabetes obesity etcetera and I think both the sense of injustice that some the top 0.1% have so much of the of the money and that the that the underclass are very ill drives some

01:15:17 policymakers to want to do something about it and it's pretty challenging those I think if take anything from our conversation today it's hard to say exactly well what is driving this right if we really had a great sense of it we might be able to do a better job of trying to fix it right now it's kind of been the bill above ham-fisted I think yeah I'm glad you raised this point about health and I think this also holds in the primate King kingdoms right that you know to be on the bottom of a hierarchy ain't good for you Sapolsky is very strong on this I think and it's true in human societies as well

01:15:49 it's complicated though in James you're talking about setting the hierarchy and I grant you that to some degree that happens that the brahmins you know control the rules but we'll go back to our point of departure and warner said that you know that the hierarchy rather status is not something that we give ourselves it's granted or it's conferred and I would you know bring Weber back into it and say you know there is a distinction between status and wealth I think that in our culture status and

01:16:21 wealth are closer together than they are in a lot of places and that's problematic but one can imagine I mean even even today one can imagine somebody of like I said at the beginning of immense wealth and power but not a lot of status not a lot of social approbation and so I think maybe you know what it takes then and what's so hard about this is it takes not only good laws right or sort of you know redistribution but a change of values right if we begin to value and reward

01:16:53 and grant status to people who do other things besides accumulate fortunes and dubious means that's that's a way to change as well and you know maybe that's maybe that's good and that's why it's contextual I think is that the there if that we make a general assumption that these hierarchies will exist and that there will be a ranking whether sort of organically or externally there will be some ranking in any context the what differs is what is what are those

01:17:26 rankings based on based on and if they are based on some really simplistic basic biological differences that we're just looking at physical strength and/or speed or agility or things like that in a much more complex technological society than those things no longer become as important and we look to other things and I think I think that your point is exactly right which is that we whoever we are I suppose that's all us so let's do something we get to decide what

01:17:58 matters and if we as a society say that it's not money and it's not stuff and it's not all these sort of superficial adornments but instead it's the degree to which you help others it's the degree to which you are a contributing member of social justice reform things like that the I think at the end of the day from a purely objective point of view we would see that the hierarchy would fall into place and whoever is the most

01:18:28 giving the most generous and the best social justice reform advocate will become the highest ranking individual and the greedy bastard will be at the bottom but that would require something some mechanism by which there is a a push for that to take place and I think that's the challenge is that at the moment because society attributes status and rank and power and and access to money or some elevated position in

01:19:02 society which tends to be relatively superficial but I don't mean to say humans are terrible but I just think we we tend to lean towards whatever is easiest then to change that would require either a massive groundswell from the the disenfranchised so much so that it could actually overturn the status quo or it is a decision based on those in power to say you know what let's shift this and instead of liking

01:19:32 people like me we're gonna like different types of people on that that seems difficult for a lot of people to do to actually sacrifice their own self-interest or their own position to change fines those musicians Wow there's a there's just to go back to the sort of commercial aspect of it in the marketing aspect of designing status systems I

01:20:08 wonder whether you know earlier when David when you were talking about what comes around to being coolness like being sufficiently or adequately nonchalant about your status helps but then you went on to say yes but there are some people who are really obviously driven we give them credit even though they don't they seem to be just driving too much and anyway I take from I agree with everything you said but I take from it that it's really quite a complex thing I mean it's not easy to say well that's a good thing and that's about it I'm reminded when Al Gore was made fun

01:20:40 of I think on Sunday Night Live this reminds me of for that comment of yours and apparently his handler said oh you got to be much cooler you know like it looked like you're more hip and he went and did that everyone immediately picked up and said you're just a big doofus you know now you're trying hard or we really we're now you're really lost status with us anyway if if there is this complexity to it I'm afraid what's happening with the people who market or handle a lot of the people who are seeking status politicians I'm thinking of in

01:21:10 particular the the the keywords and the things that they're told these track well are very simple a nice Isum if they're too simple and things like knowing when someone is likely to kiss up and kick down which is a really terrific phrase cap capturing that someone's striving too hard and it's really not a good decent person that sort of thing would be really useful to sort of highlight more than I think it is being highlighted now and of course this starts at the earliest age right it

01:21:42 starts with our children and you know that's why I remember I love the stories find a way into a book at some point but I went to junior high in California in the 1970s and the school was built on a hill and there were four levels and everyone had lockers on those four levels in the top lockers and bottom levels well there was a classic linear status higher in that junior high like you've never seen starting on D level and going to a level and all the cool popular sports people

01:22:12 were on D level top lockers and then grade below on the bottom Locker then what to see no all the way to the a though the people got beaten up and pushed around and whatnot my point is that kids and teens in particular are brutal right and in and they value status and often in the most crude way right maybe that's not giving them enough credit credit I think there are ways in which the teens push back in creative ways but there's a popular set and and that's often and then that gets exploited in social media in the as you say the crudest ways and then then we

01:22:43 create a whole society of people who are posturing for likes and dislikes in ways it may not be good for the society as a whole when open up if people have any questions is he happier to know dying to say something for a long time so don't you come up to the mic if you'd like well they honestly give a very expressive face monterrey yeah yeah that's where I went to college

01:23:15 so good freedom yeah it was okay there was a little Berklee left so uh yeah I think the structure has to change in order for new house stays that's a basic thing and and that's as far as what causes a revolution do you know chambers who wrote revolutionary change no but anyway that was very good that

01:23:50 takes a group of people that are so miserable and they see someplace else where the miserable people are able to make a change and that helps you know like that's what happened in the 19th century in Europe then being cool I think that was very interesting and you know people would say they act cool that it was going to come to them wondering what they have together or what what did you mean by that

01:24:20 and also what did you mean by referring to Avot oh no oh I know I mean I guess those trends there's I guess what I was trying to say is the you know it's it's sort of a this is a side comment that they were there was um there was a saying and like like among like sex workers and pornographic stars in the 80s you know when the porn

01:24:51 industry wasn't when a certain level of forints you really got started and they and they would say the difference between us and the other hollywood meaning you know meaning mainstream Hollywood the difference came to us and the other hollywood is we don't have to anyone to get a job and what they were trying to say was in is was it important right if you if you were a lot if you were reliable if you showed up on time if you were like drug and alcohol free you would always get work whereas in mainstream Hollywood

01:25:23 everything was based on these like you know on these deferred promises and vague you know the kind of vague I'll advance your career if you do X yeah oh yeah yada whereas the transactions were perfectly clear in the set in you know in the pornographic film industry like all you have to do is be a reliable employee and it was fun so the reason the reason I bring that up is that it you know the way the way being a graduate student you know or any kind of precarious faculty works in the u.s. right or the way being for instance you

01:25:57 know like the way of being the way being a sort of young employee especially you know a young female employee or you know in in the in the art world or in the movie business there's there's also the the imbalances that what you have to do to get ahead is so unclear and the metrics are so vague and they're so wrapped up in cultural capital so of like being with you know being the favorite graduate student like how many

01:26:29 how much dry-cleaning do I have to pick up for you even though it's technically not my job nor should it be if I want to get really good recommendations you know when I go on the market so there's a lot so that's that's so that that's what basically basically these culture industries really operate off of a lot of yeah a lot of promises and a lot of deferral it where and as you suggested Hollywood

01:27:05 and I was in Berkeley during the 60s when they integrated the schools there was no structure so all these cultures were threw together and nobody really knew how to behave it was very it's and I think that's what's happening today anyway thank you [Laughter] [Music] I'll just talk down with this we just

01:27:38 saw they the real Thomas Mann I spent decades actually in the field of marketing and I was struck by what mr. Burke said that you know there is a science to products and branding and all of that but the really and so therefore my own professional interest was in consumer choice why do people choose a product or you know anything that you can think of all that is conferred by

01:28:09 the consumer a brand doesn't have its own status you know it varies by person so I guess what I'm saying is don't take this as cynical but you know to a certain extent it is a scheme because branding science marketing science is very very advanced and so I asked the question why do people want to you know I mean we just walked right into it you could call us a first-world problem but it probably isn't even that why do

01:28:42 people want status why do they want prestige as its as its exemplified in the physical thing how you look the watch you wear is it a fast car that you drive and I don't know but how my question is how do we unbundle that and how do you stop this in a caring world if it shouldn't be so important but I don't really see a way to stop it I don't either but what's interesting

01:29:13 about what you're bringing up is the world of the future for psychology is neuroscience so in other words what happens that makes me feel emotionally somewhat differently and if it's got sure and it I'm gonna really feel great well that feeling then is what I want to repeat and that creates the cycle so the more that you could create that bit better so to speak Carolyn but there's also there's always a really interesting I mean this moment feels a little bit

01:29:45 like you know like the late sixties relative to brands and products which is to say you have these do these really lovely because it cuz it tracks with taking the marketing tracks to the technology right and there's the these moment the technology creates its own new evaluators of status you know so when you look at like when you look at big corporations you know trying you know like like stumbling and like amazing and hilarious way it's trying to do Twitter you know where like they'd like like like the Browns just went up discrediting themselves by again seeming

01:30:17 too eager to please and too thirsty and I you you want you end up with these little like you know like a moment where you can reset the hierarchies even if you can't actually undo hierarchy per se but where like they just they just can't read the situation properly you know what's interesting about what you bring up is what has just occurred in MSNBC I'm sure nobody in this room watches that channel fraud is there any other the Donny Deutsch show Oh Saturday night

01:30:50 now is applying but you're an expert in politics I don't know if it's ever been done quite that way more so I think there's going to be some interesting learning that can come from that at least uh I hope there will be it better be here I'm not gonna watch it he's a very smart guy very smart it has lots of experience in that and it does apply to that yeah politics guys yeah so a little worrisome by the way but something he said that

01:31:25 was worrisome in terms of neuroscience and and I don't know anything about neuroscience but my understanding is that we're getting closer and closer at the moment we're mapping but we still don't know what a thought is we know the absolute inspire or not beyond Oh we'll get there what you'll get there and my concern is that I don't see and I don't mean to be cynical because I think human history is full of extraordinary examples of humans doing extraordinarily positive good things I would say on

01:31:55 balance though when we look across the trajectory of human history I would say we're much more inclined towards shall we say unjust things or unpleasant things or marginalizing or oppressing because that tends to be the easier way to do it and that might be read sapiens also huh sorry you've read the books I pians as well I haven't read it I'm supposed to read it I'll use it next time yeah with it but my that's right I wanna let you have your question but the the point that I would make is that I think as we go forward as we learn more

01:32:27 about how the human brain works I don't think that necessarily is going to it will provide the opportunity to do all sorts of things my concern is that it will also provide the opportunity to manipulate but more so than than other and I don't mean to keep picking on marketing but but I am sure we're marketing lots of good things but on Avalon balance the the the economy is built on my buying things that I don't need and if I have a choice between two

01:32:59 things the marketers are going to try to convince me to buy one thing over the other and that's what it's all about as opposed to saying you know anyway please thank you for very provocative discussion first of all a disclaimer and I particularly thought about this yesterday while we were celebrating this tragedy on the beach in France I grew up in Germany under Hitler in the 1930s and I had a fantasy that if women were running the world maybe we wouldn't

01:33:31 go into these terrible Wars well the last 60 years have tested that hypothesis and I'm not sure that it stands up but in especially non-human primates there are some evidence that testosterone levels and ranking in their leadership hierarchy makes a great deal of difference apparently that is not true in females apparently female hormones don't correlate at all what is your reaction

01:34:05 to that and what does it presage for the future it's so there's a lot of parts of that to response to my I don't look at hormonal levels in the work that I do but I'm familiar with some of the research and absolutely right in baboons and a couple of other species where it's been tested there is a clear correlation between testosterone in male renting's when you look at higher I should add that there are plenty of species in

01:34:35 which there really isn't a good metric for ranking males because groups are you know male so if there's only one male on the group he doesn't have a rank he doesn't have a relative position to other males there's only a dichotomous there's a bit basically you're in charge of the group or you're not and and whereas in a lot of mixed male groups or multi-male groups we see this sort of somewhat linear hierarchy from top to bottom and in those species where it's been examined absolutely correctly that there is a correlation in that

01:35:06 testosterone levels track question which is interesting and a couple people have raised it is that it might not be the direction we think in that it made sense at first that all high levels of testosterone which are associated with aggression and now from one of a better term confidence and willingness to escalating things like that would predispose an individual to rising in the ranks but it actually seems to possibly go the other direction and that as rank increases testosterone increases and so the the the my limited

01:35:39 understanding is that the directionality is not necessarily clear but there's definitely an association female mammals also produce testosterone but they produce much much smaller levels it's associated with the same things as it is in males and sex driving things like that but other hormones tend in in biologically female individuals tend to drive the same sort of thing so cortisol sort of takes up some of the slack for testosterone in biologically female individuals so it gets complicated your

01:36:12 other point which I lost track of somewhere along the matriarchy also oh in in matriarchal groups rather than patriarchal groups or male dominators we had to take it outside of primates then and look at that female bonded groups in things like elephants have very clear matrilineal hierarchies and those hierarchies are respected behaviorally you see who gets to drink water first who leads the group outside of things

01:36:43 and who communicates with whom but the level of physical aggression is lower and and suggesting that and and I think that's the thing if we're looking for hope for the human species which it sounds like many of us are which is a weirdly cynical thing because to say we we hope for the best suggest that we think it's actually unlikely or at least we are up against some odds but I think that when we look for we look for models to look for

01:37:15 because that's the great thing about being human we might be equipped with some horribly complete set of genes and and grey matter but we have the capacity to mimic things and pretend to be certain things that I think one of the only sort of cogent ideas that came out of all this for me was that that we we recognize that this might be a natural propensity towards these hierarchies and this oppressive

01:37:46 marginalization structure but we have the capacity to want to do something different and that's the hard work we recognize that that that some egalitarian society where we all pick flowers and share one another's food is really really goes against so many of our basic internal drives but we have the capacity to do it and how can we do that and I think looking for a framework and a way of defining that so I think looking at matrilineal species and how they do it because it's not to say that aggression and violence isn't part of

01:38:18 that but there it's much more based on cooperative behavior and the risk is the same so in some cases if I violate the norms of hierarchy currently I risk physical pain and that's going to be my motivation but equally so even if there's no risk of physical pain if I risk rejection from the group I lose all the benefits from the group and that's a massively important component to my own survival and so I think shifting our our

01:38:50 whole definition of status our whole way the status is achieved it might be achieved by more cooperative sort of beneficial structures instead of violent aggressive ones and I think it's important to you know to go back to this point that status is culturally configured and so it does change right there is hope one can change what what is valued and what is not and you know there are enough people in this room lived long enough on the earth to know that that happens quite dramatically

01:39:20 in the space of a generation or two so you know I take some hope in that but at the same time I go back to your point James and I you know and Warner made it to that you know I mean saikal the nexus between psychology and marketing goes back to the early 20th century and trying to figure out how people feel and what makes them feel good or happy and work on happiness in another another hat it's a long quest and we're getting

01:39:51 closer and closer to figuring that out and I think that should worry us because it's not just about marketing is about politics - right and clearly that's all that that line has been obliterated and that that opens up all kinds of difficult questions but maybe that will be the next session right that's all right you write it all sorry I have a

01:40:23 way we can get the blood from them too by the way well I think that I've lost for any other questions I want to thank all the panelists for a really stimulating conversation I think you also all came out really pretty even so thanks again it was great

01:41:07 thank you

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