Why does an authentic Rembrandt fetch hundreds of millions while a nearly identical painting by his most talented disciple goes for a tiny fraction of that price? What makes a restaurant “hot,” a neighbourhood “up-and-coming,” or a technology “the next big thing”? Why do people often choose the same seats in recurrent office meetings? Who is most likely to interrupt someone else mid-sentence? Why do big name lawyers earn so much? Why are health disparities so pronounced? And why, when someone gets a bit ahead in life, does the small advantage so often compound?
The answer to all these questions is social status—invisible hierarchies that influence every aspect of our lives, from our health to our personal relationships and careers to how we behave in social and work settings to the tastes and preferences we form. Without it, we’d be lost and paralyzed when faced with even the simplest decisions. But it comes at a steep cost: status works as a powerful amplifier, turning small initial advantages into insurmountable leads. Inequality is baked into its core.
In this interview I speak to one of the world’s foremost experts on social hierarchies, Toby E. Stuart. Professor Stuart is the Leo Helzel distinguished professor of business administration at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, and author of Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World. He is faculty director of the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program and faculty director of the Institute for Business Innovation; and distinguished teaching fellow. He previously has held named professorships at Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago.
Q: Why do we need status hierarchies?
[Toby Stuart]: “hiding in plain sight” is exactly how I think about status and its influence on our lives. Not always, of course—sometimes status is glaringly obvious, like with prestige brands where nothing is hidden and the logo says it all. But when it comes to social interaction and everyday life, that phrase is a perfect description.
And to explain why, I want to take us all the way back before bringing us up to the present. Originally—pre-human, even mammalian—we already see what are called dominance hierarchies in the animal kingdom. The basic idea is simple: if you don’t cooperate, things fall apart. Mammals work better in groups—whether for hunting, shelter, or whatever is needed to survive. But as soon as you have a group, you face an allocation problem: resources are finite, so how do you divide them? Dominance hierarchies emerge as a natural mechanism to keep a community functioning. They allocate resources in a way the group more or less agrees upon, though enforcement is often required. Without them, the group dissolves.
There’s even a belief—again, not my field, but among evolutionary biologists—that failing to recognise your place in the hierarchy is dangerous. Selection pressures favour those who can recognise status and understand their rank. That’s the legacy we’ve inherited as humans, and it brings us to the present.
What I argue in the book is that status still serves that purpose today. It’s still a key mechanism for allocating resources, but it also dramatically reduces the cognitive load we face in making decisions. I argue there are two huge categories of decisions: first, what we consume—very broadly, from what you read this morning to what social media you scroll, to what you choose to buy. And second, how we behave in groups. My argument is that status hierarchies help us navigate both of those categories of choices, which would otherwise be impossibly complex.
Q: How are people anointed to power in groups?
[Toby Stuart]: … the main currency a group has to give is status—or rank. In any social group, the group has the ability to hierarchically arrange people, and you can think of status as highly functional. One way you acquire it is by being very good at something, or working hard at something the group values. And that last part is key: it depends entirely on what the group values.
The group might be a street gang, where malicious behaviour is prized, and the most dangerous, aggressive member ends up with the highest status. Or the group might be a chess club, where the person who can think 12 moves ahead holds the highest status. Groups vary enormously in what they value, but what they all can give is rank, recognition, and deference.
That’s one piece of it. The other is what I call “anointment,” which I talk about a lot in the book. The term itself feels almost biblical—that’s probably my Catholic school background showing—and that’s part of why I love it. Anointment refers to these ritualistic events that can be major: in a biblical sense, you’re anointed by a king and all sorts of good things follow. In modern life, you’re anointed if you’re admitted to and graduate from a prestigious university—say, if you’re an Oxford grad, you’ve been anointed.
But anointment also happens on a much smaller scale, many times a day. For most of the book, you can just think back to middle school or the elementary school playground—it all plays out there. Micro-anointment is when you’re the not-cool kid (which I was), and one of the “chosen ones” comes over, sits with you for a bit, or says something kind. And that gets to a central idea in the book: status is kinetic. Those who have it can give it to those who don’t.
Q: How has social media impacted our social hierarchies?
[Toby Stuart]: I mean, social platforms are bizarrely distortive of how the social world works—soon to be topped by AI, which I think will be even more fundamentally, and even more bizarrely, distortive. What these platforms do is take local phenomena and turn them into global phenomena.
One example I use in the book is this: suppose you’re a really good musician—whatever your instrument—say you’re a great oboist. I’m in New York right now, looking out over Manhattan, so imagine you’re a great oboist in Manhattan, pre-digital era, pre-recording era. By definition, your greatness is local. You’re in New York, you’re playing the oboe in New York, maybe you travel a little, play in a few nearby cities, but that’s about the extent of your reach. And you can imagine there are oboists everywhere doing the same thing within their own geographic boundaries.
Then come the digital platforms—global digital platforms—and suddenly, if you want to hear an oboist, you can hop on Spotify or YouTube or Apple Music or whatever, and hear anyone in the world who’s recorded or live-streaming. That shift takes audiences that were once local and turns them global. It also puts the anointment dynamic on steroids, because now your potential reach is basically unlimited.
But there’s another effect too: it massively amplifies competition for attention. If you can rank oboists and there’s one who’s clearly the best in the world, anyone, anywhere, can access that person. So why would you listen to the third-best oboist who happens to live next door?
Q: How do social hierarchies create inequality?
[Toby Stuart]: …this idea goes way back in sociology—that status often has what’s called an accumulative advantage property. The way accumulative advantage works is that if you get just a little bit of a head start, you can end up racing far ahead.
Think about what that means for fairness and equality. Imagine a group of 100 people who are equally talented—or so close that the differences are almost negligible. They’re in some kind of competition, and someone wins the first round. That person gets a tiny lead, but now they’re recognised as the winner. When accumulative advantage kicks in, it’s like a rocket engine behind them, propelling them further and further ahead.
So you end up with very small differences in quality or merit that get amplified over careers or competitions, eventually becoming very large differences over time.
Q: How can our understanding of social hierarchies help us in business?
[Toby Stuart]: Yeah, so let’s take that in two directions. First, there’s the actual difficulty we have in predicting what will succeed—particularly in cultural markets like art, books, music, and film. Writing a book, for instance, is so thoroughly infused with the anointment dynamic that I’ve been tongue-in-cheek about it with the agents, the publisher, and the editor throughout the whole process.
In markets like books, art, music, and Hollywood, it’s extremely hard to predict which products will become runaway hits. There are many reasons for that, but we see it constantly. Hollywood is a great example: there are countless movies with enormous investments behind them—projects backed by seasoned industry professionals—where everyone was convinced they’d be massive hits, and then they completely belly flop. It happens all the time.
So what does that tell us? It tells us taste is hard to predict. It also tells us that the process by which cultural products are adopted is inherently unpredictable. And this is where status comes in. In the early days, if a high-status person embraces a product, it can have an enormous impact on its trajectory.
A fun example I use in the book is Robert Parker, widely regarded as the most influential wine critic by far. Wine is an especially interesting case because even experienced tasters often struggle to agree on what’s “great.” Experts frequently contradict themselves when evaluating wine—it’s a highly ambiguous product in terms of quality. But when Robert Parker loved a wine during his reign as the industry’s kingmaker, it could completely reshape the market. His endorsement could cause enormous swings in the value of a bottle, and he became so influential that winemakers actually tried to reverse-engineer his palate. In 1998, a high-90s score from Parker was worth an incredible amount in terms of price.
And that dynamic isn’t unique to wine. It’s how all these markets work: influential people adopt and endorse a product, which gives it an initial push. Then others adopt it, talk about it, share it with their friends—that’s a second push. Then a third influential person notices it, and you get this cumulative advantage spiral.
So on the one hand, you have these incredibly unpredictable markets; on the other hand, status dynamics are a big part of that unpredictability because the choices of influential people set products and services on their trajectories.
Q: What about an original Rembrandt, say… and a close approximation of it?
[Toby Stuart]: … so let’s drill down on that, because to me this is the quintessential status thought experiment. I just want to tweak one tiny part of how you put it—the product isn’t almost identical; it’s identical. And that’s where it gets really interesting.
The thought experiment goes like this: take any product and change the identity of the person or entity associated with it, and you fundamentally change how the world interprets and values that product. To be clear, the product itself is 100% identical—it hasn’t changed at all. What has changed is the identity, and in particular, the status of the person attached to it.
Art is especially fascinating on this point. Take the Rembrandt story. There’s a painting that the art world, up to now, attributes to the “circle of Rembrandt”—meaning it was likely painted by one of his disciples. Paintings by his disciples might be worth, say, 1/1000th—a tiny fraction—of what an actual Rembrandt is worth. But here’s the twist: in far more cases than you’d expect, we actually don’t know. We don’t know for sure whether a painting is a Rembrandt or by a disciple. Maybe in some future state of technology we’ll have a way to know definitively, but right now, it’s often ambiguous.
The painting I talk about in the book falls into that ambiguous category. The art world says it’s from the circle of Rembrandt. Then along comes a collector who claims, “No, I have reason to believe this is a Rembrandt.” That’s a $100 million swing in value. He acquires the painting for relatively little—well, a lot, but very little for a Rembrandt—and then works to persuade the art world it’s the real thing. If he succeeds, it becomes an astronomically successful investment. Honestly, it makes a good venture capital play look dull by comparison if you can find a non-Rembrandt and convince the world it’s a Rembrandt.
And you can take that thought experiment and apply it everywhere. Take the same bottle of wine and just change the label; people will value it differently. Take the same scientific paper and change the author’s name; people will judge it differently. Take the same résumé—literally identical job experience and credentials—and change the race, gender, or name attached; people will evaluate it differently.
The object itself hasn’t changed at all. What changes is the prestige we assign to the person associated with it.
Q: How do we hack our understanding of social hierarchy?
[Toby Stuart]: Yeah, so I love this. I love this whole line of thought and questioning, and it was honestly the biggest shocker to me. When you talk about art or wine or film, you sort of expect those to be status worlds. Or fashion—everyone knows those are driven by status. But what surprised me is that if anything, this is even more true in early-stage tech startups, and it’s very much true in science. These are domains we tend to think of as purely objective.
Like, what’s the most important scientific paper? Well, it’s the one with the most important discovery, right? Nothing to do with status. And what’s the best startup? It’s the one founded by the smartest team chasing the biggest market. We think these are objective things: business plans, P&Ls, projections, valuations—the kind of stuff you can measure.
But it turns out the startup world—if you get me started, I could talk about this forever because I live it daily running entrepreneurship programs at top business schools—is massively about getting the right imprimatur, the right stamp of approval. There are certain entities with outsized influence on a startup’s fate. One is Y Combinator, which has an insane impact.
Getting selected by Y Combinator is transformative. Imagine they’re admitting a batch of 20 companies, and there’s a tie for the 20th slot. Maybe they like one name better, or the meeting runs long and they literally flip a coin. They’ve got a thousand applicants for 20 spots, and it’s a razor-thin call between number 20 and 21. Now think about what happens next: the 20th company squeaks in, the 21st just misses, and their trajectories diverge dramatically. One gets the Y Combinator imprimatur; the other doesn’t.
That then cascades into who gets the top venture capitalists, who also have enormous influence. This is what I mean by accumulative advantage. If Sequoia or Andreessen Horowitz backs you, suddenly everything changes. If you’re fresh out of a Caltech PhD with four job offers, which one do you take? You go to the company with Sequoia money. Same for customers evaluating products—they gravitate toward the one with the high-status backers.
That’s how status compounds. Two companies start similar, but Y Combinator picks one, Sequoia backs it, and suddenly it’s in the lead. Everything changes in terms of resources. And in the end, these look like brilliant decisions by Y Combinator or Sequoia, but often it’s less about selecting “the best” and more what we call a treatment effect—the benefit of having the backing of a very high-status actor.
Q: Can we hack it as individuals too?
[Toby Stuart]: That’s a super interesting way to put it. So starting at a high level, the book argues there are essentially three ways to acquire status—three main sources of it. One is achieved status, one is ascribed status, and the third is kinetic or endorsed status.
The simplest way to answer that question is: be better than other people and earn high status through merit. That’s absolutely a legitimate source of status. If you’re really good at something, the system generally recognises your talent and says, “Okay, wow, you deserve esteem,” and you build off that.
Ascribed status, on the other hand, is what you get from characteristics handed to you in the grand birth lottery. It’s anything about you that you probably inherited but can’t really change—your gender, your race, your nationality. If you live in a stratified social system like a caste system, your caste counts here too. Family wealth and the opportunities that come with it fall into this category. These are ascribed in the sense that whatever you have—or don’t have—was random. You didn’t do anything to earn it; you just landed in that spot. A critical argument in the book is that in all societies, at all times, some people win that lottery and some lose it—and it really is a lottery. I happened to have been born a white male in the United States at a good time to be a white male in the United States, and I’ve benefited from that throughout my life and career.
The third way to get status is by building relationships with people who already have it and letting it rub off on you. When you talk about hacks, two of these three mechanisms are at least somewhat agentic—you have some control over them. You can earn status through merit, and you can earn it by building the right relationships. What you can’t do is change the ascribed characteristics you were born with, even though they affect your position in the status order.
I think you’re also alluding to another way we manage status, which is learning to play the part. The book argues that we all do this constantly, often so subtly we don’t even realise it. We get miffed if we believe we have a certain status and someone undercuts it—like, “What do you mean, why are you calling me by my first name? Why aren’t you using my title? Why are you interrupting me?” These are all status-related signals. We posture all the time—through how we dress, the language we use, whether we self-promote or ingratiate. All of these are ways to signal something about our own or someone else’s status, usually with the goal of getting a little bit ahead in the status competition.
Q: Can we inoculate ourselves against the need for social status?
[Toby Stuart]: Yeah, I mean that’s a really great pickup—and a great question. And I agree with you. I agree with the implications of your question 100%. If I have loss aversion, or if I’m overconfident, or whatever the heuristic is, and I recognise it, maybe I can behave in a way that makes me less loss averse and thereby maximises my utility to a greater extent. A lot of heuristics, if we could somehow reverse or counter them, might leave us better off. Not all of them in all circumstances, of course, but potentially. If we’re aware of them, we might be able to do something about them. And if we’re aware of the heuristics other people live by, we can certainly capitalise on them.
You can think of modern product marketing as basically operating on this implicit understanding that we’re all subject to these heuristics. Right? We’re deeply susceptible to the availability heuristic—we don’t have comprehensive recall of everything we know. So if marketers can get ultra-targeted with advertising, if they put a picture of a product in front of me right when I’m thinking about it, they’ve nailed me on the availability heuristic. They’ve manipulated me, and off I go. On both sides of that equation, heuristics play a huge role.
In the book, the way I mostly see this is in the argument that if you have high status, you should probably think a little more deeply about where it came from and whether you have any obligations to others as a result. If you accept the book’s arguments, one deeply implied point is that those at the top of the pecking order didn’t get there solely because they’re the absolute best in the world at what they do. There was a lot of luck and a lot of social processes that propelled them upward.
People often believe they earned their position entirely through their own achievements, but the book pushes back on that. There are ascribed status characteristics, kinetic status characteristics, and accumulative advantage processes. When you factor those in, most people who are super high status didn’t start out being dramatically better at something than everyone else.
That should lead to two reflections: first, you should probably have some humility about your social position. And second, you should be willing to give back—because you benefited from a system that’s at least somewhat unfair, and you should return the favour.
At the other end of the status hierarchy—and this is the much tougher issue—the book points to extensive evidence that being low status is even physically bad for you. It’s unhealthy. Being at the bottom of the pecking order creates anxiety, stress, and physical unwellness. It’s not an easy place to be, and it’s a far harder set of problems to address.