status denotes a position within a social hierarchy based on respect and perceived importance.

Knowing and participating in high-status lifestyle conventions—even certain greetings, subtle preferences, and nonverbal cues—is a critical part of gaining and maintaining high status. This particular knowledge is known as cultural capital, defined by the sociologists Michèle Lamont and Annette Lareau as “widely shared high status cultural signals

The term “signaling” is used in both economics and zoology to describe when individuals communicate their high quality through specific clues in order to be selected by another party.

President John Adams concluded, “The desire of the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger; and the neglect and contempt of the world as severe a pain as the gout or stone.”

Status symbols that lack credible alibis tend to fail:

semantic drift: the slow change in words’ meanings over time. This principle also applies to cultural symbols, which can often come to mean the very opposite.

The anthropologist Ruth Benedict explains, “The life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.”

Self-actualizing personalities, according to the psychologist Abraham Maslow, are “marked by simplicity and naturalness, and by lack of artificiality or straining for effect.”

Each status group contains a multitude of distinct conventions, which all interlock through a strong internal logic.