Status Games
every room is a leaderboard you didn't agree to enter
Grounded in the research on Wikipedia: Social status; Will Storr, 'The Status Game' (2021); Robert Sapolsky on primate dominance/prestige hierarchies
so what even is a status game?
Any social setting where people are silently ranking each other and competing to move up. Will Storr's 2021 book 'The Status Game' argues it's the hidden operating system of human behavior: you're wired to track your rank and feel real pain when it drops. The group chat, the gym, the comment section, your friend group, every dinner table. None of it is neutral. Everyone's keeping score, including you.
where's the actual science on this?
Primatologists like Robert Sapolsky showed status hierarchies are baked deep, your body literally tracks rank through stress hormones and serotonin. Sociologists split it three ways: dominance (force, fear), virtue (being seen as good), and success/competence (being genuinely skilled). Storr's the popularizer who packaged it, so treat the tidy framework as a useful lens, not hard law. But the underlying drive? Old, real, and not optional.