The other day, while parking my car outside the town post office, I realized I’m doing a poor job of “keeping up with the Joneses.” My vehicle doesn’t have four wheel disk brakes. As did the immaculate, huge, black SUV I pulled next to. Our small, pollen-covered, old wagon has a hole busted right through the plastic, rear bumper cover (from backing up too fast to hitch up our small, old boat), tears in the ceiling (from throwing surfboards in), only a cassette deck for music, and mechanical, roll-up windows. Sure, it is electric start, which means I don’t need to insert a mammoth key into the grill and crank. But it was built in a previous millennium. Seriously. Total book value of the car is somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple grand. Sure, the insurance costs less than a bucket of dirt, but who am I going to impress with that car?
Speaking of the boat, that, too, has seen better days. Though we bought it earlier this year. A fixer-upper. And I’ve fixed it up, mostly. Put some hours into the boat and the trailer and even into the small, eco-friendlier 4-stroke outboard. Got my hands dirty. Had to break into a new box of Band-Aids.
Like the wagon, our floating means of locomotion isn’t going to take first place in any parade.
So the Joneses, with their sparkling black SUV hauling an imaginary, big, fast, sparkling boat, have definitely passed me by. That’s assuming there is a destination that the quality of your possessions will get you to.
Am I ashamed of my blemished, hand-me-down car and boat? No. But I’d actually like to become more proud of them. Why? Because I frankly believe my values are better. If your car or boat gets you from here to there just fine, why is it somehow better that one cost ten times more than the other? Is the sparkle worth that much? I don’t think so.
Back to the parking lot. Post-realization of my trailing others in the “nice stuff” rat race, I remembered scientific studies that tell me in terms of happiness, those driving the fancy vehicles have nothing on me. In fact, they may be in my rear-view mirror.
Studies such as this one — Shopping for Happiness? Get a Massage, Forget the Flat-Screen TV — suggest that life satisfaction is tough to buy, if what you are buying is material alone.
Consumers found that satisfaction with “experiential purchases” — from massages to family vacations — starts high and increases over time. In contrast, spending money on material things feels good at first, but actually makes people less happy in the end.
And then there’s this: Money Only Makes You Happy If It Makes You Richer Than Your Neighbors and this: Materialistic People Liked Less by Peers Than ‘Experiential’ People.
So, can you buy happiness by spending on possessions? Only if you can out-spend your neighbors, it seems. So maybe. But then those neighbors might not think so highly of you.
Of course, the person stepping down from the Lincoln Navigator, Darth Vadar Edition, would probably just say I’m envious, and all this is just a way of rationalizing where I am versus where I would honestly jump to at the chance. While there may a smidgen of truth to that — for human beings can hold multiple sentiments simultaneously — I’m not so sure.
The pop psychology answer to why bullies will mercilessly pick on other kids — frequently those smaller than them and with few friends — is that deep down inside the bully feels bad about him or herself: alone and worthless. And maybe even wants to be loved by their victim. And so they lash out.
But no, that’s not the answer. First, the low self-esteem bit. Not true. In fact, if anything, the opposite is more likely the case. Second, bullies do have friends. And these friends often smile upon and reinforce the bullying. [for basic info, see Children Who Bully, put out by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services]
Now the findings of a new longitudinal study (tracking individuals over time) into bullying are helping to further clarify the picture. In the most recent issue of Child Development we learn of work conducted by researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Some of their findings include:
. . . most bullies are motivated by the pursuit of status and affection. [bold added; source]
Interestingly and quite relevantly, the previously mentioned government source listed “dominant” as one of the characteristics of the bully.
And this from the Dutch study:
bullies generally choose to gain status by dominating their victims. But at the same time, they try to reduce the chances that they’ll end up on the outs with other classmates by choosing as victims children who are weak and not well-liked by others. In short, even bullies care a lot about others’ affection and don’t want to lose it.
Interesting. Very interesting.
It seems to me that individuals will attempt to gain acceptance/affection and status — the later a social currency derived from the former — through the means available to them. For those children who lack skills in other areas (intellectual, athletic, pro-social) how else are they to climb the pedestal of social opinion and stay there?
Wait a minute! You might say. Bullies aren’t liked. While that is true if we add the qualifier “by many” or “by outsiders” or even “by society at large” the social group that ultimately matters is the one an individual “trades” in.
In a loosely related manner, I used to wonder why so-called “gangstas” dressed up in a way I considered ridiculous. Paints on the floor, looking like fools with their pants on the floor. Etc. But that perspective is one of an outsider. Gangstas dress as they do because it is looked upon favorably by their peers. And that’s what matters. Peers.
And who’d-a-thunk, even bullies care about what other people think, when we recognize that “other people” are their circle of peers, whatever size that circle may be.
Human beings do not chase one another around with hair raised and teeth bared. As other primates do. No, our means of persuasion are more subtle. And in addition to that — symbolic. But first, the subtlety. Margaret Powers has said this about the means of creation and maintenance of primate social organization:
“This infrastructure of social communication is revealed through posture, gesture, facial expression and vocal tone; and differently organized primate species should show differing patterns and social interaction.” (15)
Posture, gesture, facial expression and vocal tone . . . these are things human beings, too, can and do use to send signals to others. Sure beats having to chase and flee, but it is not as visible.
My suspicion is that coming from a large and informally stratified culture, we may perceive a hunter-gatherer culture to be more egalitarian than someone coming from a smaller, more egalitarian culture. In a sense, power relations can be like a poker game. There is so much more to it than the cards. But to someone unfamiliar with poker, little else seems significant. What’s in a mere glance? Sometimes a lot.
Writing about chimpanzee hierarchies, Robin Wright pointed out the relative difficulty of spotting the mechanics of hierarchical behavior:
“In fact, the female hierarchy is so subdued that it takes an experienced eye to discern it, whereas spotting a pompous, imperious alpha male is something a schoolchild can do.” (16)
What is subdued in chimpanzee social groups can be downright subliminal in human. What complicates the matter is that in addition to such things as posture, gesture, facial expression and vocal tone, human beings excel at symbolism. If we want to belittle a person, we don’t need to physically tower over them, or some distillation of that dynamic, we can instead flash a thumbs-down to them. We can say and write things about them. Bad things, in that they are belittling, and thus bad.
One of the strengths of symbolic behavior is that it can be less personal and more general. We can communicate messages about our status without needing to interact with others. We can be less personal. The corporate alpha male need not make impressive physical displays at a meeting or even intimidate and threaten other males. He may, instead, “innocently” draw attention to symbols of his relatively greater power, whether they be possessions, relationships, or signs of accomplishment. This is relatively innocent behavior due to the indirectness of it. The message is broadly broadcast so no other need take it too personally. But is it personal? Yes. For the messages are still about social standing. Where I am; where you are.
So, are humans by nature a peace-and-love species? The bonobo, close cousin to the chimpanzee, has been portrayed that way. But primatologist Allison Jolly, for one, is skeptical.
“When I look at a male bonobo, however, I see immensely powerful arms, with veins like weight-lifters’ snaking under the skin–a very different build from the females. That, and their powerful canines, suggest they are equipped to fight something, whether leopards or one another. I fear that, in Sarah Hrdy’s phrase, –the other shoe hasn’t dropped yet about bonobos.” Meanwhile, they offer a model of an exuberantly affiliative species.” (17)
Meanwhile. And humans? Are we one or the other? Are we egalitarian by nature or hierarchical by nature? Are we both? My interim answer: while we are certainly exuberantly affiliative, our nature is essentially hierarchical. We must, however, keep in mind the impressively variety of forms hierarchies can take, including the previously mentioned “inverse hierarchy” elucidated by Christopher Boehm.
Why do some groups of humans take on more formally hierarchical structures, others more seemingly egalitarian? We need look little further to the environments a social group functions within.
What about the environments? Stay tuned to my “Alpha” series of posts.
—
(15) Power, M. The Egalitarians: Human and Chimpanzee, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1991, p.189
(16) Wright, R., The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, Vintage, NY, 1995, p.246
(17) Jolly, A. Lucy’s Legacy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999, p.177
Our legal system is accused of favoring the rich. And there is some truth to this. But actually, the “rich” part is partially off-the-mark.
It is on-the-mark in this simple regard: wealthy people have more money, and money buys better legal representation. In this regard, yes, our legal system does present an uneven playing field. But in other regards, in the cases that wealthy individuals get off with a lesser charge/sentence, it is likely not the wealth that matters. The wealth isn’t the real issue. What is? Consider this research finding on a related aspect of the legal system by Scott Phillips, an associate professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver:
A defendant is much more likely to be sentenced to death if he or she kills a “high-status” victim. [source; bold mine]
It seems that jurors, juries, judges–and attorneys, too, no doubt–act with favoritism toward high status individuals. To some degree and with great variability among the groups. And in some circumstances more than others, of course. As a telling illustration of this, consider the contemporary practice of lawyers coaching low-status defendants to appear less low-status. Put on a suit, speak proper English, etc.
In other research by Phillips, he found further evidence that status matters:
[B]lack defendants were more likely to be sentenced to death than white defendants in Houston. The racial disparities revealed in the prior paper become even more acute after accounting for victim social status – black defendants were more apt to be sentenced to death despite being less apt to kill high status victims.
While our nation is no longer overtly racist (pretty much), racist feelings and attitudes lurk beneath the surface. This prejudice assigns to blacks lower status. Some times no amount of education and money (signs of status) can change whether or not a black person is looked down upon or not.
To me, this finding about the preferential treatment of those with high status makes perfect sense. We are primates and our behavior will reflect our evolutionary heritage. Sure, we can learn to be different, with a significant degree of success. But our untutored sentiments frequently differ little from those of other apes — animals that obviously treat low-status individuals and high-status individuals quite differently.
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