Your place in the social hierarchy is a subtle, ever-changing thing

An exploration of our socially competitive existence

There’s no hiding the fact that we’re social creatures. It’s evident in everything we do, in our very composition and the fact that we have animated faces that unwittingly display our slightest feeling.

The face has, at this point, evolved to be a production for the “other,” for all those outside of us — a built-in, involuntary communication device. Your face involves an inordinate number of muscles that collectively orchestrate an emotional symphony that you can’t even see. It’s designed to evade you, betray you, and serve an inherently social function. You can’t fake a genuine smile. Our micro-expressions are so fleeting and so honest that they elude our conscious control. The whites of your eyes are large and distinct to ensure each eye’s line of focus is hopelessly conspicuous. Embarrassment manifests relentlessly as a cherry-red rush of blood to the cheeks. Whether we like it or not, the face is an engine for social intelligibility.

And, on the receiving end, our brains are calibrated to absorb each of these important and unintentional signals. Though, as far as we know, most visual perception takes place in the occipital lobe at the back of the brain, facial recognition appears to claim its very own space and serve its very own purpose a little farther forward in the temporal lobe.

From this biological starting point, we realize that we live in an undeniably socially-minded world. The mind seeks out other people, latches onto them, comes to understand the world through them. By this, I mean that we don’t merely sense other people and single-mindedly process the signals they give off — no, we do something much more elaborate, complex, and impressive. We integrate our perception of their perception into our own understanding of the world. Our experience of other people is the medium through which we process an otherwise unintelligible world.

We see this mostly clearly in how we arrive at collective value judgments and how easily influenced we are. As I’ve written before, our influenceable nature stems from a long evolutionary past, maintained through elaborate feedback loops of observation, relationship, reward, and connection. Knowing my own mind, I intuit how yours works and then extrapolate a whole world of information in your slightest twinge or glance. Multiply this feedback loop over the course of a lifetime, and you arrive at the effortlessly shared and social world we inhabit now.¹

But, underpinning and determining the outcome and power of each of these feedback loops is another, more consequential phenomenon of our uniquely social nature: our obsession with hierarchy.

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Unraveling our obsession with status

Interestingly, not everyone has the same capacity to influence us. Though we may perceive someone’s expression and understand intuitively what it means, we don’t integrate it into our own perception; it doesn’t necessarily convince us to feel the same as them or to behave in the same way.

In this way, one’s influential power ultimately comes down to another’s shockingly qualitative judgment of their rank in the eternal social hierarchy. If I’m impressive to you in any number of large or small ways, my perceptions and judgments suddenly carry much more weight. I’m more likely to activate your mimetic desire, to unconsciously mold your worldview according to my own idiosyncratic values — which, in turn, have been shaped by my own collection of authoritative influences. This is the unique power of the modern “influencer,” who, due to their large following and often exuberant personality, grips most tightly onto our minds and wields unprecedented influential power.

Importantly, though, there isn’t a single hierarchy — which is what makes one’s ranking an eternal, Sisyphean venture. While you emerge from any interaction with a semblance of a composite score, your place fluctuates dramatically based on the perceiver, the scale, the variable of interest in the given moment. We’re perpetually thrown into new contexts, new situations that demand different characteristics and reward different behaviors or traits. When searching for a partner, it’s often our attractiveness that defines us in relation to our competitors. When applying for a job, it’s perhaps our professional skill or expertise. But each of these situations and their accompanying social criteria is dependent on a whole array of subtexts and cultural norms and personal motivations. This is what makes the navigation of the social hierarchy a paradoxically subtle, and yet glaringly obvious and unavoidable, business.

To raise the stakes further, we’re naturally very sensitive to this system of social ranking. Having evolved from and alongside apes with their own elaborate systems of social dominance, we have a long history of caring deeply about who’s in charge, where the power lies, and how we happen to compare — as a matter of life and death.²

Even more fundamentally, though, our perceptual system tends toward contrast. We have an undeniable bias to see the difference between two things that appear to us at once. Though this is obviously true for our visual system (we must be able to effortlessly and immediately differentiate an object from its surroundings), it’s also true for our higher-order faculties, like the art of social comparison. We’re able to determine our place in the hierarchy only after we detect the differences between ourselves and the people around us. In this way, much of our perception, on both the micro and the macro levels, comes down to contrast. We rarely perceive something in isolation; it’s only through an intricate comparison process that our perception truly emerges.

One can tell us until they’re metaphorically blue in the face not to compare ourselves to others, but this is simply not how the human mind works. The brain is a tool of discernment and discrimination, a system refined for detecting contrast and difference. It does this automatically, unconsciously, within the few seconds it takes to see and process another person. No matter how much our conscious minds might like to, there’s no turning it off or turning away from it.

And yet, though we might be fated to detect existing differences between us, might the modern world exacerbate them? Never before have our differences been more quantified and pervasively visible. That’s not to say that, in the past, there were no differences. Quite the contrary: Global inequality has declined significantly over the course of human history, bringing us to the present moment’s shockingly benevolent distribution of resources. And yet, the differences that persist are relentlessly paraded before us. Social media has gamified the task of social ranking, allowing one’s place to be immediately identifiable in the number of followers they have or the total likes or views their content receives. As materialism tightens its grip on us, our possessions (or lack thereof) also quantify our status in hopelessly obvious and pernicious ways.³

It’s through this perpetually unfolding process of initial perception, status evaluation, and re-perception that we’re able to nail down our own personal understanding of hierarchy — the private sense of whether I should listen to this person, agree with them, absorb their judgment as my own, emulate them, want to be near them, want to become them.

What’s interesting, though, is that, despite the private and personal nature of this flash of intuition, we all know this to be a communal project — one that we are each invested in and collectively processing.

There’s a fascinating social psychological experiment in which participants are asked to wear a number on their forehead — a number they never get to see. Then they’re asked to mill around a group of other participants, each wearing their own unknown number, and try to pair off with the highest number they can. The experiment attempted to model the dating scene, in the sense that each person will try to find the highest-status individual they can, which naturally sorts people into a self-blind but remarkably predictable hierarchy. The “10’s” will joyfully select each other, while the “1’s” will contentedly settle for each other, knowing that they had few other options.

Though each person merely looked out for their own interest, the incentives aligned in such a way that a much more overarching hierarchy draped over everyone. Our personal status, though monumental to our first-person point of view, is just another node in the much larger human project of classification, order, structure, intelligibility, and predictability.

In this case, one’s social ranking came down to a number plastered on their forehead. But in most cases, our social ranking is a more ambiguous, shadowy process — one that we may actively participate in but still struggle to understand. It’s a product of our “social currency” in any given moment, lending us either the credibility and weight of status or the crushing anonymity of its absence.

Knowing our sensitivity to our own perceived status and social currency, some social psychologists have pointed out its particular effect on our self-esteem, which has since become known as the sociometer theory. Under this framework, our self-esteem operates like a thermometer, rising and falling in direct response to our perceived social acceptance. Though it’s disputed, the theory makes a compelling case for the notion that our behavior is often one big social feedback loop driving us toward the behaviors that align us with others and away from those that offend. The theory offers an obvious evolutionary advantage, but leaves us chaotically at the mercy of the public’s capricious and ill-formed judgment. How are we to ever truly know our place? By what standards should we let our own self-esteem be manipulated?

It’s here that we arrive at the present moment’s ever more haunting solution to our uncertain determinations of social ranking: the algorithm. In his new book on the frightening potential and scale of artificial intelligence, historian Yuval Noah Harari imagines a future of unfathomable algorithmic power — a world in which the calculation of our social status is relegated to machines with an unprecedented capacity for data crunching.

Unlike humans who form snap judgments based on just a handful of data points, this omnipresent algorithm would take in the full scope of our behavior and relate it effortlessly to those around us. Human estimation would always fall short of the algorithm’s ruthless calculation. Most hauntingly, there would be no way to dispute or even understand your own ranking; the system’s evaluation would be far too complex, subtle, and unintelligible for the human mind. As AI-powered algorithms and more explicit social credit systems gain traction around the world, this future may close in on us sooner than we might expect.

And though this all feels a bit dystopian and futuristic, much of this thought can be traced back to earlier writing on the alienation of being a single, perceivable self among many. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is known for his quote “Hell is other people,”⁴ which has become a rallying cry among introverts but really addresses the alienation at the heart of existing as an observable, objectifiable being. Knowing that our lives and actions and our very selves are on display, we inevitably act differently than in our private moments of solitude. The mere presence of another person alters how we behave, how we carry ourselves in the world.

In this way, other people — with everything their conscious presence entails — come to have immense power over us. We may restrain ourselves more or move in a different way, or even think entirely different thoughts. Just as we integrate another’s perception into our own appraisal of a moment or the world around us, we know that our own perception is just as likely to be integrated — so we’re careful to keep it contained, close to our chest, unwilling to give too much of ourselves away, or to be too ruthlessly objectified.⁵

It’s this phenomenon of observation and surveillance that prompted another French philosopher, Michel Foucault⁶, to write about the utter pervasiveness and subtlety of social power. His infamous panopticon metaphor is a testament to the power of that uncanny and paralyzing feeling of being watched. In essence, the prisoners who live under the all-seeing eye of the panopticon prison’s central surveillance tower are so terrified of getting caught that they simply don’t misbehave. After a while, there needn’t be any further proof of the surveillance; the mere threat of being watched is enough. The gaze becomes a prison of our own making.

The panopticon is just one manifestation of the ways in which social power is diffused and obeyed beyond the overt authority figure. Foucault wrote extensively about this phenomenon and ultimately came to understand the world through the unevenly distributed power that silently and tyrannically dictates our behavior. Though there are many infamous psychological experiments that chronicle our behavior in relation to authority⁷, it’s these subtler, more profound instances of observation, presence, and objectification that reveal our vulnerability to the other and their unrelenting gaze.

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To be clear, none of this is an endorsement of the statuses or hierarchies or judgmental gazes that govern much of our social lives, but it isn’t exactly a rejection of them, either. Like with all mental constructs that have persisted within us since the dawn of time, there is much value in knowing where we fall and being able to detect where others do, too. The human mind enjoys this false sense of order and certainty — and would fill in the gaps even if the institutions that quantify and display our differences collapsed.

We come with a great deal of default programming that drives us toward competition and comparison. And yet, in the midst of all this squabbling for attention and status, we fail to appreciate that we share these apparatuses of social detection and discernment. Our intuitive understanding of others is so sharp, so effortless that we forget it’s a testament to our shared perceptual faculties, that our differences are so noticeable precisely because we have so much else in common. We forget that our cognitive foundation is a shared one, endowing us collectively with both unprecedented social awareness and some tragic incentives that pull us apart.

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1. As the saying goes, I’m not who you think I am. I’m who I think you think I am…

2. More recently, this thinking has rematerialized in modern life as an obsession with classifying people as alpha or beta — or other various pseudoscientific systems that seek to crown some with dominance and others with inferiority.

3. For enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the modern world has become one big nightmare of possession, hierarchy, status, property, and comparison. Where we used to cohabitate and either get along or fight openly, we now have subtler systems of social ranking that depend on property and social influence. According to Rousseau, when humans left the prototypical “state of nature,” they abandoned material equality and cleaved communities into the “haves” and the “have nots.”

4. Taken from his existentialist play No Exit.

5. There is only so much we can control. As we saw earlier with faces, we’re at the mercy of a biological system equipped for detection, comprehension, and integration.

6. Enjoy my mispronunciation of Michel despite years of French lessons.

7. All of those classic introductory psychology ones, like the famous Stanley Milgram electric shock study.