Bullying is the best-known expression of proactive aggression. One bully in the PBS documentary In the Mix explains its function well when he says, “I’ve made fun of people when I am with my friends. I am not going to lie. The reason why I did that is to laugh—to make my group laugh. To put me on a higher pedestal. Even though I don’t do it on a constant basis, it does kind of boost you up a little bit.”
We conducted research involving two hundred tenth graders at an American high school and saw this behavior directly. Every participant in the study received rosters of all grade-mates to help them identify those peers high in status and, separately, those high in aggression. We asked them who hit, pushed, threatened, or physically intimidated their peers; who excluded, ostracized, or conspired to abandon others; and who spread rumors or threatened to end friendships as a form of retaliation. We also asked the adolescents whom they liked most and least among their classmates.
It was not hard for teens to pick out the mean boys and girls. Participants knew exactly who fit each description, and their reports were remarkably consistent. For each peer whom they described as aggressive, we asked our subjects to explain why they thought these individuals acted aggressively—out of frustration (reactive aggression) or to get something they wanted (proactive aggression). A little over a year later, we collected the same information again from the same group of adolescents.
The results from our research, and similar studies in the literature, demonstrated what Jane Goodall learned from watching chimpanzees: acting aggressively was one of the surest ways for teens to increase their status. But this was not true for every form of aggression. Those who were described as reactively aggressive had low status and were also less likable. But proactive uses of aggression had just the opposite effect: although the bullies were disliked, their use of proactive aggression was associated with increases in their status.
Do adults also use aggression to boost their status? Certainly. This type of behavior can take place at the individual level, like bad-mouthing a neighbor to make ourselves seem a little more worthy of attention, or in public, such as when Donald Trump’s poll numbers rose following every insult he lobbed at a reporter or opponent. Sometimes it is even global, as when a nation attacks a weaker foe to assert its dominant position. In each of these cases, the use of aggression is shortsighted, because while it may result in a temporary boost in status and offer a little jolt of social reward, it is not ultimately fulfilling the wishes that really matter.
POPULARITY PROBLEM #2:
Have We Granted Some of Our Peers Too Much Status?
On June 24, 2005, something took place on US television that captured the attention of news outlets all over the world.
It was a typical episode of the Today show, the cheerful morning news program, until host Matt Lauer introduced his next guest. Other than a prior incident involving Oprah, a buoyant couch, and an energetic discussion about his then-fiancée, Tom Cruise was known mostly for being a talented actor with a remarkable string of box-office blockbusters to his credit. But in this interview, Cruise was asked to share his opinions about mental health treatment options. For the latter half of his fifteen-minute interview, Cruise discussed his beliefs and those of the Church of Scientology about postpartum depression, the use of Ritalin to treat symptoms of ADHD, the history of psychiatry, and a fellow celebrity’s choice to seek mental health services when experiencing distress.
Of course, several other items were in the news that same day that might have garnered some attention. Norma McCorvey, the woman dubbed “Roe” in the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights case, was testifying before Congress; the Senate was close to approving comprehensive energy legislation; and partisan bickering regarding the United States’ response to 9/11 had reached a fever pitch. But the event that got the most coverage in the media was this interview with Tom Cruise. The story ran for several news cycles all over the world. Articles about it appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post up to a week later.
Did we all really care what Tom Cruise had to say about such serious issues simply because he has high status?
Several years later, television star Jenny McCarthy began appearing on talk shows to discuss her new book, in which she claimed that a vast medical conspiracy was covering up a link between vaccines and her son’s autism. To be fair, a parent’s coping strategies and search for meaning in the face of a child’s devastating diagnosis is perfectly understandable. McCarthy never claimed to be a scientist and freely admitted that the evidence supporting her beliefs came only from her “mommy instincts.” Just as we cannot blame Tom Cruise for offering his strongly held opinions about postpartum depression, we cannot fault Jenny McCarthy for trying to help parents as earnestly as she knew how.
But the fact that she was a celebrity did have an impact on the power of her opinions. In his book The Panic Virus, Seth Mnookin reports that Jenny McCarthy’s theories on autism “singlehandedly push[ed] vaccine skeptics into the mainstream.” She appeared on television for weeks—not on entertainment programs but on news shows. She sat on panels alongside physicians from the American Academy of Pediatrics, and journalists discussed her ideas as seriously as they did reports on scientific studies and a statement disputing the vaccine theory issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The public not only listened but even changed its opinions. The more McCarthy talked about her distrust of the medical community, the more parents began adopting the same skepticism, eventually making decisions against their own pediatricians’ advice. Mnookin reported that following McCarthy’s televised appearances, the number of parents declining vaccines for their children skyrocketed.
It’s one thing to enjoy watching celebrities when they entertain us. It’s another entirely when our fascination with these high-status figures begins to affect our own behavior, even irrationally.
But even this phenomenon can be explained by the changes that occur in our brains during adolescence. In modern society, celebrities are our highest-status peers—they have all the visibility and prestige we associate with status, based on qualities like attractiveness and excessive wealth. Of course we want to watch them. We care about their lives, their physical appearance, and their courtships and breakups just as intently as we paid attention to the popular teens in high school. Our obsession with status is biologically programmed, and if it seems juvenile to be concerned with such topics, or to consume celebrity-themed media, it is because they remind us of the time in our lives when our unrestrained cravings for social rewards first blossomed.
We are also biologically susceptible to conform to celebrities, simply because of their high status. Marketing executives have long relied on this predilection. The use of celebrities’ images or voices to encourage the sale of goods and services, for fund-raising efforts, and even for endorsements of political candidates has been a standard strategy for decades.
But the leverage of high status to capture our attention and change our behavior can go too far. It might occur when celebrities’ private lives are exposed in greater detail than we would ever want known about ourselves. Even then we continue to watch, effectively signaling the media that such stories will drive viewership. The death of Princess Diana while being pursued by paparazzi is the most notorious example of this. Exploiting high-status figures can also become excessive when celebrities are asked to weigh in on matters outside their expertise, such as during political campaigns or even in congressional hearings. The time may have come for us to stop and question what our exaltation of high status says about us as individuals and as a society.
POPULARITY PROBLEM #3:
Is Our Desire for Status Excessive?
In 2001, political scientist Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, a book based on his landmark essay that examined social changes in American life over the last four decades of the twentieth century. His research suggested that we are in a period of rapi
d change, one that seems to involve a shift toward placing an even higher value on status. Putnam found that the public’s conception of a “good life” evolved from a desire to contribute to society to a need for wealth and status. In 1975, 38 percent of respondents indicated that a good life would include “a lot of money”; by 1996, that number had risen to 63 percent. During the same period, the proportion of people who wanted a vacation home, more color TVs, and “really nice clothes” doubled or tripled. Meanwhile, aspirations for a good marriage, children, and feeling connected to others have slightly declined.
Similar results were obtained by Cornell University historian Joan Brumberg. Her research analyzed personal diaries from the past hundred years, examining private thoughts to reveal how desires have changed over the past century. Brumberg reports that young women in the 1890s resolved to take more interest in others and refrain from focusing only on themselves. Their goals were to contribute to society, build character, and develop mutually fulfilling relationships. Yet in diaries from the 1980s, 1990s, and probably today, young women record their intentions to do whatever is necessary to lose weight, find a new hairdo, or buy new clothes, makeup, and accessories—all, presumably, to attract more attention and approval from others.
Fame is in. Power, influence, and prestige are hot. Character, kindness, and community? Not so much.
What has made us so much more status-hungry? The answer involves a wide range of factors.
In 1943, Abraham Maslow proposed a hierarchy of needs, each of which would be fulfilled only after those lower on the list had been satisfied. First, we strive for basic survival requirements, like food, shelter, safety. Next, Maslow argues, we seek love and affection. We then pursue what Maslow called “esteem,” which is effectively equivalent to status—defined as a desire to have others admire and accept us. Does our increased yearning for status today reflect the conditions of an advanced society, where hunger and isolation are increasingly rare? To some extent that may be true. Certainly in some regions of the world, we have become more prosperous and interconnected (at least superficially) than we ever have been. If Maslow is correct, then striving to attain status could be good news, for according to his theory, once we have satisfied the need for “esteem,” we can then advance to the final stage of this needs hierarchy—self-actualization.
Another explanation for our rising need for status is that it simply reflects our increasingly individualistic culture. In Bowling Alone, Putnam extensively discusses Americans’ declining sense of community, which has been replaced by a norm of autonomy and self-reliance. At the turn of the twentieth century, Western society was based far more on cooperation and partnership than it is today. In the field of labor, especially in the industrial era, few tasks could be accomplished without a large assembly of partners working together. In the neighborhoods of the early 1900s, an egalitarian community ensured the safety and comfort of all. While a higher status may have conferred benefits in those contexts, allegiance to and cooperation with a group was nevertheless a necessary part of life.
Contrast this with our work and home lives today. There are far fewer jobs that require a community of workers to cooperate simultaneously to reach a goal. In fact, some of our jobs don’t even require us to be in the same building or time zone. In our domestic lives, many of us don’t know our neighbors. Most of our needs can now be met via a smartphone and an internet connection. In a culture where our sense of community is waning, and mutual reliance is less necessary, has our proclivity to share been supplanted by a desire to have more than others? Does individualism give rise to a craving for high status?
If this is true, we would expect the pursuit of status to be greater in individualistic societies than in collectivistic cultures, which emphasize group harmony more than personal rank. The communitarian worldview is more common in the Far East, and stands in stark contrast to the “me culture” that now characterizes most Western nations.
It’s a difference I couldn’t help but notice on a trip I took from New York to Japan years ago. As I rode the subway to New York’s Kennedy airport, I was surrounded by people who wore their individual differences like a badge of honor. Their clothes, their hairstyles, and their behavior all seemed to shout “Look at me!” The subway from Tokyo’s Narita airport was notably different, however. It was striking to see how similarly everyone dressed and behaved, particularly the adults. In a society that values communal accomplishments over individual ones, attempting to stand out may be not only unnecessary but downright disruptive. A few days later in Nara, the home of the Great Buddha temple, I stopped by a gift shop selling religious souvenirs. Each was customized with a personalized wish, and common choices translated to sentiments like “helping my family” and “contributing to society.” I couldn’t help but wonder what wishes would be top sellers in the United States.
We tested the cross-cultural relevance of status in my own lab by simultaneously examining the two forms of popularity, likability and status, in the United States and China. With graduate students Chris Sheppard and Sophie Choukas-Bradley, I analyzed data gathered from fifteen-year-olds in both countries. The data were collected by our colleague John Abela in two Chinese communities, one in urban Changsha and the other in rural Liuyang, while I gathered it Stateside using identical procedures. Over eight hundred adolescents in both countries were asked to identify the school peers they liked most and least, as well as the ones they thought had highest and lowest status. To our surprise, the concept of status did not translate well. In fact, there is no Mandarin word for “popularity” that has the same meaning among adolescents in Western nations, so we had to use phrases to describe likability and status that were recommended by native Chinese speakers and experts in the Mandarin language.
When we examined what these two samples of adolescents living over seventy-five hundred miles apart told us, our findings suggested that popularity may be at least partially rooted in culture. In the United States, status and likability were very distinct attributes—there was only modest overlap between those teenagers high in one quality and those high in the other. But in China, adolescents who had high status were often also those who were judged to be the most likable. In fact, in the United States, our results revealed that high status was associated with those who were highly aggressive. But in China, we found exactly the opposite—highly aggressive teens were low in status. In a culture that values community, status may not be all that important.
A third possible explanation for our increasing status obsession may be related to the mass media, but not exactly in the way you might think. Among scholars in communication studies, the media is referred to as a “super-peer,” given its commanding role in not just reflecting but establishing our values. It is the peer we read, watch, and heed. The media is not just the vehicle that gives us access to our high-status peers but is a high-status peer itself. Getting attention from this super-peer is a major sign of status and a guarantor of huge social rewards.
According to this theory, our increased desire for status reached a turning point in the 1980s, when the media became a peer that never slept. A society accustomed to interacting with a single daily newspaper and a few dozen radio and television programs suddenly found itself presented with thousands of options to receive content twenty-four hours a day. As the media’s power increased exponentially, it started to use every angle it could to make sure that its audience remained motivated to keep tuning in.
On June 1, 1980, CNN, the first twenty-four-hour news channel, debuted in the United States. Sociologists Joshua Gamson and Denis McQuail observed that this presented a challenge to producers needing to fill airtime, to ensure that viewers would stay engaged as long as possible. McQuail wrote that journalists were required to produce stories that were “supposed to be creative, novel, original, or unexpected [news], yet produced with extreme regularity and often against much more demanding schedules than apply to other industries.” To do so t
hey relied much more heavily on a reporting strategy that had worked in the past—stories reporting the news disguised as stories about people. Theories suggest that this shift in framing had a tremendous effect on our desire for status.
Profiling personal stories is a simple and effective way to add an emotional element to any unfolding event. If we are presented with a story about climate change’s effect on the polar ice caps, we might switch the channel. But if a teaser promises the tale of a family trying desperately to survive flooding in its hometown as a result of global warming, we are more likely to tune in. With the demand for twenty-four-hour content, the focus on “real people” went into overdrive, and soon, we, the public, became characters in the news more than ever before. For a few minutes anyone could be at the center of the media’s focus, the most “visible” person of the hour. What once seemed like a great distance between us and those who were revered as high-status individuals now suddenly seemed like not such an obstacle.
As the gap between us and our higher-ranking peers narrowed, we became even more obsessed with status. The public’s voyeuristic curiosity about the lifestyles of the rich and famous, the proliferation of tabloid “entertainment/news” programming, and the development of reality TV and social media may all be traced to the sudden accessibility of high status for virtually anyone. When we saw our peers achieve social rewards we once thought inconceivable, it became almost impossible to wish for anything else.
Today it seems as though members of the public have morphed from narrative devices used to tell the news to the news itself. We have witnessed the rise of celebrities whose fame seems to be based only on their status, so that what they do, say, and think is now newsworthy in itself. The concept even extends beyond the popularity of people and includes the value we now ascribe to the status of products and businesses in ways that have changed modern marketing and industry. Perhaps it’s time for us to reflect on whether we care a little too much about status, as it is frightening to think where we are headed.
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