Living and Learning Through Status
It’s hard to overstate the importance of status. In fact, some scientists believe our lives depend on it. Research suggests that social status may be the most important factor1Marmot, M. (2004). The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects our Health and Longevity. New York, NY: Time Books, Henry Holt and Company, LLC affecting how long we live. Robert Sapolski’s research2Sapolski, R.M. (2002). A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons. shows that when it comes to our evolutionary cousins, primates, status is synonymous with longevity. Sapolski observed that higher status monkeys have lower baseline stress hormone levels and live healthier, longer lives.
Further research shows that levels of dopamine in the human brain increase when our perception of our own status increases. In another study,3Izumo, K., Saito, D., Sadato, N. (2008). Processing of Social and Monetary Rewards in the Human Striatum. Neuron, 58(2), 284-294. researchers concluded that the feeling of increased status is similar to that of winning a monetary jackpot. In contrast, social rejection4Eisenberger, N. i., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt, An fMRi study of social exclusion. Science, 302, 290-292. and the perception of a loss of status, was shown to activate the same areas of the brain associated with physical pain.
Utilizing the human need to feel included has another added virtue. Sites that leverage rewards of the tribe benefit from what Albert Bandura5A. Bandura, Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1986). called “social learning theory.” Bandura studied the power of modeling and ascribed special powers to our ability to learn from others. In particular, Bandura showed that people who observe someone rewarded for a particular behavior are more likely to alter their own beliefs and subsequent actions.
Notably, Bandura also showed that this technique works particularly well when people observe the behavior of people most like themselves or slightly more experienced6A. Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Self-Control (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1997) .This is exactly the kind of targeted demographic and interest-level segmentation that social media companies like Facebook and industry-specific sites like Stack Overflow selectively display.