Some years ago, I started a new job in a newly created position within the company. I joined a team responsible for existing account management and new customer acquisition. One of my colleagues on the team was someone who had been working for the company for a long time. I believed that as a team we would work together to meet our targets and ensure that everything ran smoothly.
I would talk to him every day, share information, make plans, but with time I noticed that he was withholding information, and that I wasn’t copied into emails I felt I should have been. Things were getting tense between us at times. I didn’t understand what the problem was. I thought he was being unnecessarily difficult and sneaky.
Now, after reading Storr, I think I know. I think my colleague felt that his long-standing status within the company was being threatened by me. He probably thought that if we started doing better after I joined the team, and I could take credit for some of it, his own position would weaken.
That gap, between what somebody is doing and what I thought they were doing, is what Will Storr’s book is about.
The Status Game starts from a finding that reorganised how I read almost every social situation I have been in. Losing status damages people more reliably than being poor does.
Status is not vanity. The brain weights it at roughly the level of food and safety. Status wins release dopamine, status losses release cortisol and fire the same circuitry as physical injury. The body does not clearly distinguish between being punched and being publicly humiliated.
Which means you are never not playing. The only choice available is which game, and whether you are honest with yourself about being in one.
Three games, and most confusion is a scoring error
Dominance game, where standing is taken through fear.
Virtue game, where it comes from being seen as good.
Success game, where it comes from demonstrated competence.
Most rooms run a blend and one usually dominates. The games score differently, so a move that wins in one looks absurd in another.
Dominance moves look unhinged if you are marking a virtue game.
Virtue moves look sanctimonious if you are marking for success. A brilliant argument from an outsider loses to a mediocre argument from a member, because in a virtue game argument quality was never the currency.
This is also a tool for your own bad weeks. Being passed over is a success-game wound. Being talked about is a virtue-game wound. Being made to defer in front of other people is a dominance-game wound.
They feel almost identical from the inside and they need completely different responses, which is why people answer being talked about by producing more evidence of competence and get nowhere.
Before deciding somebody is unreasonable, work out which game they believe they are in. It is usually the whole explanation.
The game with no brakes
Of the three, the virtue game is the only one that doesn’t have a natural ceiling, and the reason is structural rather than moral.
In a dominance game the enforcer knows he is being a bully. In a virtue game the enforcer believes he is performing a service. That single difference removes the brakes, because cruelty that feels righteous does not trigger the hesitation that cruelty known to be cruelty does.
It escalates because members are not competing to be good. They are competing to be the most good, more rigorous than whoever is standing next to them. And unlike the other two games there is nothing outside the game to check it against.
A dominance game has a ceiling, since there can only be one at the top.
A success game has external verification, because the thing either works or it does not. Purity is self-referential, so the game can run indefinitely.
Then the expulsion mechanism closes it. Once somebody is accused, defending him contaminates you, so joining the pile-on becomes the safe move and also a status move in itself.
None of this requires bad people. That is the uncomfortable part. It runs alongside Jonathan Haidt’s argument that moral reasoning works as a press secretary rather than a judge, which I wrote about here.
I was never very political. There are politicians that I don’t much like or trust, but I’m definitely not anyone’s fanboy either. Since my late teenage years, I have always wanted to know why people identify so strongly with one political group or another, or even personally with individual politicians.
Early on I noticed that when you ask a question coloured with doubt, or ask for facts, people often react almost as if you had punched them in the face. Before they have even processed the question, they have already identified you as someone from the other tribe, and they treat your question as a personal attack on their very identity and as a threat to the group they belong to. They are not interested in defining the words being used, or in a normal conversation that leads towards the truth. They often get angry before the conversation has even started.
I have just read those few sentences back, and I noticed that I claimed to stand outside the game, which I am about to argue nobody stands outside of. This only proves that even knowing the mechanism does not stop us from being trapped by it.
The beliefs you cannot argue anyone out of
Every game has beliefs that function as membership credentials rather than as claims about the world. Storr calls them sacred values.
They are not held because they survived examination. They are held because holding them is what belonging requires, which is why evidence bounces off them. You think you are correcting a factual error. The other person is experiencing an attempt to remove them from their group. Those are different events and only one of them is happening.
The smaller version runs constantly and is easier to catch, because every group also enforces rules nobody wrote down and nobody agreed to.
My girlfriend has some kind of obsession with getting a clean glass every time she needs a sip of water, and she leaves the ones she has used in the last two hours all over the place. I even found one in the bathroom once. Now, every time I see a glass in some random place, I get a flash of irritation.
If anyone asked me why it irritates me, I’d say it only takes ten seconds to rinse a glass that is barely dirty, or at least to bring it back to the sink so the flat doesn’t look like a glass minefield.
That irritation is the enforcement mechanism firing. It is not a considered judgement, and the two are worth separating before acting on either. The ones that produce the strongest reaction when questioned are the ones most likely to be sacred rather than reasoned.
What happens when the game ends
This is the part of the book I expected least and have thought about most.
Losing your place in a game is not disappointment. It’s disorientation, because the structure that made things legible has gone. Storr argues that depression is partly the status alarm sounding with nothing to resolve it, and that job loss, public humiliation, exclusion and relationship breakdown track depressive episodes more closely than material hardship does.
What follows is the useful part. People thrown out of a game look for a replacement, and the fastest replacements on offer are the worst ones.
Extremist movements and cults recruit almost entirely from people in status transition, because the offer is immediate: a place, a role, and a narrative in which you see what others cannot.
Which inverts the usual order of explanation. When somebody’s beliefs turn extreme, look for the collapse before looking at the ideology. The ideology is often just the game they joined afterwards. That is a more generative account than arguing with the content, because it tells you what the person actually needs, and what they need is a game worth being in.
Choose the game before it chooses for you
Here is the claim that justifies the whole book.
You internalise a game’s rules as reality. Not as rules you have accepted, as the way things simply are. Which means the game you are embedded in quietly sets what you find meaningful, who you admire, and what you are prepared to give up. Change the game and all three change, and you never experience it as having changed your values.
For a long time, the status and money that other people seemed to have had a strong hold on me. In some circles, I felt I shouldn’t even speak, and my confidence level was near the floor. Recently, while talking with my partner about how much I was learning, and how many more complex ideas I could remember and discuss, I heard myself say that the material world seemed to matter less to me. I hadn’t set out to reject status. I’d noticed its pull weakening as learning became more important to me. That doesn’t mean I’ve stepped outside the game. It may mean that what counts as a worthwhile win is changing.
I think for me, being able to sit in a room with very smart people and exchange ideas with them freely is slowly becoming my status game.
Before committing years to a career, a circle or an online community, ask which game it actually runs on. Then ask whether winning that particular game is something you would be proud of having won. Those are two different questions and the second one is almost never asked in time.
You cannot opt out, so stop pretending that is the move
The standard response to all of this is to announce that you are not interested in status, as I did above.
That is itself a status move, and usually a transparent one. Declaring yourself above the game is a bid in the virtue game. So is conspicuous modesty, so is aggressive self-deprecation, and so is refusing to compete where you would probably lose while staying highly competitive where you win.
None of which is dishonest exactly. It is just not the exemption people think they are claiming. The useful position is the opposite one: assume you are playing, work out what for, and make the game a decision rather than something absorbed from whoever happened to be nearby when you were twenty.
Where it collides with what I already read
Storr sits almost too comfortably with Simler and Hanson, who argue that hidden self-interest drives most of what we do.
I wrote about them here.
Storr names the currency their hidden motives are denominated in, and the currency is status. Put together, the hidden driver is status and the hidden game is always a status game.
The collision is with how much that explains. A frame that accounts for politics, religion, business, families and history is doing a great deal of work, and frames that explain everything have a habit of explaining nothing in particular.
Storr is careful, and the biology is real. I am less sure the three categories are the only three, or that they stay separate in practice. A craftsman who takes pride in work done properly is in a success game, but the pride is moral as well as technical, and I cannot cleanly say where one ends.
What I am less convinced by
The opt-out argument cannot lose. If you claim status does not motivate you, that is a virtue-game bid. If you compete openly, that confirms it. If you withdraw, that is a move too.
No behaviour counts as evidence against the claim, and an argument that cannot be contradicted by anything is doing something other than describing the world. It may still be true. It is just not being tested.
Which of the three is running your workplace, or your family, and how confident are you that you are reading it correctly?
The study pack for this book
The seven-day behaviour test for this book is in the Status Game study pack and it starts where this essay does, by naming the three games you are most embedded in and writing down the sacred values of each. The pack is a twenty-page PDF of structured notes across ten blocks, the five ideas that survive if nothing else does, connections to four other books on the shelf, and 33 cards that also come as an Anki deck, a CSV, a printable self-test and a card sheet to cut up. £12.
If you want to see the standard before spending anything, the Doors of Perception pack is published here in full and free, nothing held back.
(The documentation piece on the book is here.)
Sources & Disclosure: The Status Game by Will Storr. Also referenced: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt and The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson. All linked inline above via Amazon Associates affiliate links.
This post contains affiliate links. If you buy through them I may earn a small commission, at no cost to you.
The reading and the arguments are mine. I write here to find out whether I have understood what I read, because explaining something is the cheapest way to discover whether you actually understood it or only recognised it.
AI is the other half of that. I argue with it, it pushes back, and what you are reading is what survived. English is not my first language, so it also helps me produce the clean version.
Nothing goes out that I could not defend if you asked.
I have a feeling that reducing the scope of social life to the status games is too restrictive in the sense that the whole consideration is only valid in borderline approximations where status games are the most prominent and other social behaviors may be neglected.
More realistic view would be to see status/identity conflicts may sporadically jump out here and there but the normal life usually runs without conflicts, especially inside of a small group where friendship and cooperation emerge quite naturally. Of course it depends on a group and environment.