Rob Henderson on Status-Seeking

a fundamental human motive, operating differently in males and females

Rob Henderson writes,

Our ancestors who had a strong desire to attain status left more children behind then those who did not. Their descendants (us), inherited this desire for respect, admiration, acceptance, and so on.

He notes cultural and gender differences in what raises status.

In America, you get status for being assertive. In more collectivist cultures, you get status for being a good listener. There’s an agency/communion distinction there. This also seems to be the case for the sexes as well. Men generally are rewarded more for being agentic, and women more for being communal. This isn’t to say, of course, that men don’t get status for being communal or women don’t get status for being agentic. But, on average, there are differences here.

He claims,'

To simplify, men compete with one another to appeal to lots of women. And women compete to be chosen by the highest quality men.

…Men compete over occupational prestige, income, physical strength, and physical attractiveness. These things all signal underlying qualities. Personality, ambition, ability to protect, and ability to acquire critical resources. These qualities were important in the ancestral environment, and today they might be expressed differently but the logic underlying them is the same.

…How tough a guy looked to men predicted his reported mating success better than how attractive he looked to women.

Henderson mentions studies that show that authenticity (being honest about what you care about) makes for strong relationships.

authentic people tend to mate with other authentic people, whereas deceptive individuals tend to attract deceptive partners. This is consistent with other research indicating that people with personality disorders—narcissistic, psychopathic, passive-aggressive, avoidant, sadistic, and so on—tend to enter relationships with one another.

He says that when men compete,

in a sense, women are outsourcing the cognitive burden of mate selection onto the men. The men organize some kind of contest, the women stand back and observe, and then choose the victor, or the men the other males decide is talented. This is likely why in mixed sex environments, men do a lot of talking. They’re partaking in a kind of verbal jousting with one another, a playful form of verbal combat, in an attempt to show off their wit, their sense of humor, their cleverness, and so on.

In Games People Play, one of the games that a woman will allegedly play is “Let’s You and Him Fight.”

How do women compete for status? Henderson writes,

Females often target their rivals’ fidelity and chastity, questioning their sexual past or low standards for sexual activity.

…They use rumors, gossip, innuendo, threats of friendship termination, and so on. Their competitions are less deadly, but also more prolonged. Women are generally less forgiving of their rivals and more likely to hold a grudge compared with men.

Men may be more team-oriented.

in the ancestral environment, men in a community had to compete with one another for romantic female partners and status within the group. However, there was a lot of tribal warfare against other groups as well. These societies would go to war in order to capture women as wives. So men learned to direct their aggressive impulses accordingly, depending on the context. There was not a lot of all-female cooperation to form teams to capture men as husbands. That just never happened, so far as we know. So women cooperating with one another against another team is an evolutionarily novel situation, which might explain these sex differences.

The topic of status competition is very important. The norms for status competition that evolve in different cultures have a significant influence on how those societies work. A society where men compete for prestige will be much more successful than a society where men compete on the basis of dominance. A society where male competition for mates is attenuated by norms of monogamy and equality will have more overall cohesion than a society where the most successful men get a huge share of mates and other men get none. See Joseph Henrich’s theory of the role of Christian marital norms in shaping Western culture.

This essay is part of a series on human interdependence.

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Sex and Status