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Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World de Toby Stuart

Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World

Autor Toby Stuart
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 9 oct 2025

A leading organizational theorist takes us deep into the realm of humanity’s most powerful invisible force—social status—and how it shapes everything from who we trust and what we value to which ideas and innovations change the world and who gets credit for their success.

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 neighborhood “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.

Through compelling examples from business, economics, literature, art, fashion, and beyond, Anointed demonstrates how status cascades through society, creating winners and losers in ways that often have little to do with merit. And how new technology offers a glimpse of a more equitable future.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9781668001875
ISBN-10: 166800187X
Pagini: 288
Dimensiuni: 140 x 213 x 25 mm
Greutate: 0.37 kg
Editura: Simon&Schuster
Colecția Simon & Schuster

Notă biografică

Toby E. Stuart is the Leo Helzel distinguished professor of business administration at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. 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. Stuart is the cofounder of a tech company and on multiple corporate boards. He has published dozens of academic papers on social status and social network dynamics. He was the long-time department editor for entrepreneurship and innovation at Management Science, and has been an editor at many prominent journals, including American Journal of Sociology and Administrative Science Quarterly.

Recenzii

"A fascinating exploration of status, and how small advantages end up compounding into vast inequalities. Anointed exposes the hidden hierarchies that govern everything from cultural fads to billion-dollar corporate mergers."—Jonah Berger, bestselling author of Contagious and The Catalyst
"A riveting read on the power of social status. Toby Stuart is an eminent scholar, and this book shows how the respect we seek for ourselves and bestow on others carries far more weight than we realize."—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and Hidden Potential
"A fun read, loaded with stories but deeply informed by the underlying social science."—Slightly Smarter
“An informative book exploring the many ways status affects daily life.”—Booklist
“In an era of digital platforms that amplify status-based rewards to unprecedented scale, a better understanding of these phenomena is essential.”—Science

 
"A lively, practical guide for how to think about and status, and a critique of how status structures reinforce inequality and sully our souls."—Bloomberg
"This is not a how-to book. So don’t expect tips and tricks on how to play the status game. But it does something even more valuable, it illuminates how often invisible hierarchies shape every aspect of our lives."—Forbes
"An informative and highly engaging exploration of an influential social status dynamic."—Kirkus

Descriere

A leading sociologist takes us deep into the world of social status and its undeniable influence on our daily lives -- explaining why some seem to rise effortlessly up the rungs of the social ladder while others struggle to get their footing, regardless of effort or merit.

Extras

Chapter 1: The Other Uncertainty Principle
1. The Other Uncertainty Principle
On September 7, 2021, NASA’s Perseverance rover, a metric ton of insanely ingenious robot created to scour the surface of Mars for evidence of ancient life, successfully drilled a hole into a rock. On Mars. Specifically, into the Jezero crater, a 3.9 billion-year-old lake bed. Perseverance extracted a small sample, which it gingerly tucked into a storage compartment in its own belly. Some years down the road, NASA plans to send another spacecraft to retrieve the sample and others, fly them back to Earth, and then examine them for the presence of microfossils that could prove the existence of past life on Mars. The ETA for the sample’s return voyage: 2033.

Let’s pause for a moment to marvel at Perseverance’s journey. Many of us feel groggy after a six-hundred-mile road trip. When the rover touched down in the crater in February 2021, it had traveled 292.5 million miles and then completed a final, dizzying, seven-minute-long parachute ride through the Martian atmosphere. Perseverance entered the atmosphere at a speed of 12,000 miles an hour and endured 2,500-degree temperatures on its final plunge. After all that, the rover landed exactly where and precisely when NASA’s mission team had planned. It hit a landing area of just a few square miles on a planetary body that itself flies through space at about 54,000 miles an hour while also rotating around its axis.

NASA pulled off such an amazing feat because, when it comes to understanding the physical world, human beings have become incredibly smart. We know the exact speeds and trajectories of planetary orbits, the precise moment of the minimum distance between Earth and Mars, the strength of the sun’s gravitational pull, the topology of the Martian surface. Our remarkable ability to understand the physical world and its natural laws has not only allowed us to send rockets to Mars; it’s also how we produce thumbnail-sized semiconductor chips that contain a trillion circuits and store gigabytes of data. It’s how we generated a full map of the human genome. It’s how we created cars that can do nearly everything except fly you to work—though soon enough they will do even that.1

Before we get too high on ourselves, I’ve got some sobering news: although we’re wizards at understanding the physical world, we’re demonstrably thickheaded when it comes to predicting the social world, and we’re often inept at choosing what to do when human judgments and interpersonal relationships are involved. Even when highly trained experts try to make predictions about areas they know well, they miss. Often. The Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson eloquently captured the difficulty of anticipating the future of human activity this way: “The worst historian has a clearer view of the period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we live. The obscurest epoch is to-day…”2

You would think experienced publishing professionals would be able to reliably spot the next massive bestseller. In fact, authors like J. K. Rowling and John Grisham withstood numerous rejections before finding success.3 In a tragic example, John Kennedy Toole ended his life after multiple publishers rejected his novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. When his mother submitted the manuscript posthumously, the book went on to sell millions of copies and win the Pulitzer Prize in literature. Or take the indie rock band R.E.M.’s biggest hit, “Losing My Religion.” As one critic wrote, “Nobody would expect a five-minute song with no chorus and a mandolin being the lead instrument to be played on the radio at all—much less become a worldwide number-one hit. It was just crazy. Anybody that says they saw that coming is lying to you.”4 The veteran producers and judges of talent-spotting television shows like American Idol or The Voice also make big mistakes, passing over musicians that later go on to win Grammy awards.5

In the venture capital industry, where firms amass fortunes for their partners and investors by sourcing and selecting the best investment opportunities, highly paid pros routinely pass over pitches from founders that create world-changing companies. At Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the VC industry’s most storied names, the list of cringe-worthy misses includes Google, Apple, Tesla, Airbnb, Intel, and FedEx. Visionary leaders, too, often get the future wrong.6 David Sarnoff, the longtime CEO of RCA, wrote an editorial in the New York Times in 1939 predicting, “TV will never be a serious competitor for radio because people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it.” And Steve Ballmer, the aforementioned CEO of Microsoft, once confidently declared, “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item.”7 Oops.

We routinely fail at predicting the future because of its inherent, oftentimes irreducible uncertainty. Which of the three pairs of shoes that you just tried on would you actually wear most often? Will the majority of cars produced in 2035 drive themselves? When, if ever, will we discover evidence that there is life on another planet? Will the stock market rise or fall next week, month, or year? Will a meaningful relationship begin for us or will one come to an end? If we’re being honest, the answer to so many interesting questions we might ask about the future is something along the lines of “Who the hell knows” or “That’s beyond my pay grade.” When it comes to the future, we face a sense of doubt that blocks or delays us from taking action—which is a good working definition of uncertainty, according to decision theorists.8 We always possess imperfect knowledge about what the future will look like. We also lack a full understanding of how our current-day choices will impact our futures.

Even when we’re not directly prognosticating about the future, uncertainty remains one of life’s most consequential and inescapable realities. You’ve heard, no doubt, of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the notion in quantum physics that we can know either the exact location of a tiny particle or its speed, but not both at the same time.9 I’d like to propose another uncertainty principle, one that applies to people, not electrons. This principle says that we’re confronted with uncertainty at practically every moment and in practically every dimension of our daily lives—that life, in essence, is a high-speed ride through clouds of maybes and what-ifs.

Uncertainty’s omnipresence can leave us not only scratching our heads but feeling like we’re standing knee-deep in mental quicksand. Fortunately, we’ve developed individual and collective approaches that help us get a grip. Foremost among them is the dynamic of anointment, which dramatically reduces the number of options at our disposal, making the act of choosing much easier. To understand why the workings of status pervade our decision-making processes, we must think about what they do for us. And one of the most important things they do is help us navigate a social world that otherwise would be far more mystifying, paralyzing, chaotic, and, frankly, dangerous than it already is.

The Other Uncertainty Principle

Uncertainty—defined as a sense of doubt that blocks or delays us from taking action—is one of the most consequential, inescapable, and potentially debilitating realities of social life.

Three Flavors of Uncertainty


The future looms as a generic source of uncertainty, but to grasp the extent of the complexity of choice, it helps to more deeply consider some specific realms in which most of us experience a pervasive sense of doubt. Three forms of uncertainty are perhaps most salient. One is uncertainty about what we should consume, broadly defined: what we purchase, read, watch, and so forth. The second is uncertainty about how other people appraise us, how to behave around them, and how their actions affect us. The third is uncertainty about how we, as members of a group, should allocate our collective resources.

As consumers, we’re kept off-balance by our imperfect understanding of the future: what we’ll want, how we’ll feel, what we’ll be able to afford, and so on. We also regularly hesitate to act because we are incapacitated by the proliferation of available choices. We all know how many varieties of tomato sauce or potato chips await us in the grocery aisle and how many smartphone cases there are on Amazon; how can we possibly evaluate all of them?

The profusion of choices is hardly limited to consumer products. In every moment of life, we must choose to be doing or thinking about one thing as opposed to something else. Even if you’re sitting in a prison cell, there is always something else you could be doing. I have just chosen to write this sentence, but there are more options than I can fathom for how I could have spent the last moment. And how I can spend the next. Our endless optionality leads in turn to limitless choice. Consider the options before you when you open your eyes in the morning: Check your phone? Turn on music? Shower? Eat breakfast? What’s for breakfast? Get dressed? What to wear? The gym? Well done; now which exercises? Straight to email?

Various internet sources estimate that an adult makes about 35,000 conscious decisions each day.10 As ludicrous as this number sounds, Cornell University researchers claim that we make 227 decisions each day about food alone.11 A list of options for how one might spend their first waking hour could fill this entire chapter, and we’d still only scratch the surface of possibility. Furthermore, say you decide to spend your hour reading. Now you’re faced with a different form of a consumption choice: What to read? Do you open a magazine, a book, Twitter, your email, Instagram, Reddit, the local newspaper, a national newspaper, Apple News, or whatever headlines Google serves up just for you? The options never end.

Psychologists inform us that one of the more difficult tasks of human consciousness is to filter out extraneous information and rule out countless options. If we attempt to consider all our options at all times, we would be instantly and always overwhelmed. We would spend all our time sorting through options and doing absolutely nothing else. These days, even if we shrank our options down to I’m going to spend the next six hours sitting on the sofa and scrolling on my phone, we’d have to confront the fact that there are more than 2 million apps in the Apple app store, at least a few billion websites we could choose to visit, and perhaps a trillion sections within them. Because human civilization has progressed so far, most of us need not spend our time seeing directly to our basic needs for food and shelter. Instead, depending of course on our circumstances, many of us can spend lots of time as we wish, grappling with this problem of infinite consumer choice.

Other factors make consumer decisions even trickier to resolve. As social scientists have observed, we can’t know in advance what to think of some goods and services. Should I try a scoop of avocado ice cream? I tasted it at a restaurant recently and regret the decision, but I couldn’t know that until I’d already tried it (which is why many ice cream parlors give out samples on tiny spoons). Ditto for haircuts: sure, the stylist’s plan to give me a buzz cut when I sit down in the chair sounds good, but seeing is believing.

These “experience goods,” as scholars call them, are challenging enough to evaluate, but a subset of goods and services, which we call “credence goods,” defy judgment even after we’ve experienced them. Was the lawyer you hired to resolve a legal matter a good one? Bad lawyers sometimes achieve good outcomes, and great attorneys occasionally end up with poor results. Even after knowing the outcome, we can’t necessarily discern the quality of our legal counsel, as the outcome could have hinged on any number of other factors. Likewise, did the real estate agent you chose to sell your house get you the best deal? When the auto mechanic informed you it was necessary to replace an expensive part in your vehicle, was it really? Is that piece of modern art you bought really any good? What is “good” in these realms is either so subjective or impossible for nonexperts to discern that most of us come away from consumption experiences struggling to understand their quality.

In addition to consumer decision-making, most of us struggle to make choices in a second realm: social behavior. Interacting with others in everyday contexts is one of the most inherently unpredictable acts we undertake. Minute to minute, we’re never completely certain how others, even close friends and family members, will respond to us. If we tell a raunchy joke, will our audience laugh or be offended? If we confide in someone, will that person keep our secret? If we attempt small talk with a stranger in a coffee shop, will they reciprocate? Likewise, we often misinterpret social discourse’s subtle hints, not least because of differences in communication styles, values, and cultural backgrounds. What did our colleague intend with a particular tone of voice or facial expression? Did they intend anything at all? And how should you respond? Mix in our nearly universal anxiety around being misunderstood, judged, or rejected in some way, and it’s easy to see how the uncertainty of social interaction becomes a challenge for many of us.

Moving from the individual to the group level, we encounter another, sometimes threatening form of uncertainty: lack of clarity about who gets what in society. Let’s say a group of people comes together to see to their collective survival. Lacking access to a grocery store or other modern amenities, they might hunt, farm, and build shelter together. One way or another, they will have to determine how to allocate scarce resources, such as food, and craft some government-like structure to formalize and enforce the rules. Without a clear system governing the distribution of resources, group members will compete among themselves. “I want the nice red apples from that tree,” one person will say. “No, I want them,” another will rejoin. Before you know it, the situation risks flaring out of control and the group has a WWE-style brawl on its hands. If disputes become physical, group members will run a constant risk of injury or worse. The group as a whole will become much less likely to survive.

One of the most influential and extreme depictions of what we might call resource allocation uncertainty was offered by the seventeenth-century British philosopher and distinguished pessimist Thomas Hobbes. Describing a hypothetical “state of nature” bereft of any government structure, Hobbes believed that humans would descend into perpetual conflict over the means of survival. There would be “no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”12 We see this kind of drama playing out in muted form on reality show competitions like The Bachelor and Survivor. Imagine that such a reality defined all of life but without the show’s producer ready to step in when the cat fighting escalated. Actually, any number of dystopian fictions about human life after the collapse of modern society have imagined it—and it makes for pretty sobering entertainment.

There also are many contexts in which the choice we wish to make hinges on decisions other people make. This is true of fads and fashions. When we attend a party, some of us would like to wear what everyone else does; some of us prefer to wear what no one else does; and others of us target a style that represents a moderate degree of distinctiveness from other attendees. But to choose our point on this spectrum, we need to resolve the uncertainty about what other people will wear. Likewise, in the early days of electric vehicles, would you have bought one? That probably depends on whether at the time you believed other people would purchase one. If many people made that choice, you’d be able to count on the availability of spare parts and service and a growing network of charging stations, but like many product or technology adoption decisions, if you misread what other people will choose to do, you’re likely to end up with an item you wish you hadn’t selected.

As we will soon see, anointment reduces all three forms of uncertainty.

Three Forms of Uncertainty

Consumer choice

Which among the vast options available do I select?

Behavioral choice

How do I behave in life’s diverse social situations?

Group resource allocation choice

Who gets what?

Uncertainty Trumps Reason


Given how pervasive uncertainty is, what might be a rational approach for grappling with it? How do we even begin to resolve the issue? Researchers in the field of decision theory have come up with frameworks for how we should proceed with decision-making under uncertainty. One three-step model has the pithy acronym RQP. First, you Reduce the number of options before you as much as you can by exhaustively gathering information to disqualify some choices. Second, you Quantify the remaining uncertainty by assigning probabilities to the options still under consideration. And third, you Plug the relevant quantities into a quantitative algorithm that takes into account your preferences and objectives.13 Simple, right? Ha.

Consider the first step: gathering information to reduce uncertainty. This seems reasonable, but, in real life, collecting more information doesn’t always get you very far. Information can be ambiguous, and searching for more of it can just amplify your confusion. Let’s say you’re interested in understanding the relationship between dietary changes and health. Is bacon and eggs a healthy breakfast, or are you better off going with quinoa and kale? Whole-grain toast or gluten-free? Full-fat or nonfat yogurt? Look hard enough and you’ll find reputable information that supports all views.

Likewise, if you’re planning the destination for your next overseas holiday, the deeper you dig into the details, the more convoluted your decisions may become. The cost of flights; the options for accommodations; the culinary and cultural experiences on offer; the nightlife and the availability of outdoor activities; the likelihood of good weather—it’s a lot to think about. You can find yourself swimming in detail, asking yourself question after question about which factors are most relevant, what is worth paying for, and so on.

Gathering more information can also increase uncertainty by surfacing new options, which can further overwhelm us. In one clever study to illustrate the point, the psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper persuaded a local supermarket to run an experiment: reduce the number of options presented to customers to six items and track how many customers made purchases. It turned out that a much greater percentage of shoppers bought jam when they had only a few options to choose from. Faced with additional choices, people get bogged down; with fewer choices, people are more likely to actually make one.14

Once we’ve searched exhaustively for information and disqualified some options, the rational model would then have us determine how likely each remaining option is to deliver our desired objective. Then, using a systematic approach, it would have us sort the options according to our preferences.

But in the real world many of us aren’t even exactly sure what we would prefer. When choosing a new home, do we care more about the location, the size of the backyard, the light, or the quality of the finishes? And even if we know what we care about now, do we know we will care about those same things five years into the future? We aren’t great at anticipating our own future preferences, and we often don’t behave consistently over time. When choosing a career path, do we value higher pay, greater schedule flexibility, or more meaningful work? A recent law school graduate might believe they want the prestige and salary of a big corporate firm, only to discover years later that they find the work unfulfilling. Parents agonize over school choices for their children, weighing academics against social environment against proximity to home, often second-guessing which of these priorities truly align with a child’s best interests. Even in smaller decisions, like choosing a gym membership, we struggle to predict whether we’ll prefer the convenience of a nearby basic facility or someplace that’s farther away from home but filled with better amenities. Of course, there’s an even more basic issue: the ambitious fitness goals we set in January rarely match our actual behaviors by March. Our tastes, interests, and follow-through in many things evolve in ways we just don’t foresee.

The Ultimate Shortcut


If strictly rational ways of coming to a decision in the face of uncertainty fail us, we have two other options: consign ourselves to being endlessly mired in decision mode or devise work-arounds. Humanity has consistently chosen the second route, embracing a set of strategies that Nobel Prize–winning economist Herbert A. Simon called “bounded rationality.” Rather than getting bogged down evaluating countless options, Simon argued that people instead employ simplifying rules of thumb to search for an option that, while imperfect, will do the job. We opt for “good enough” and move on, putting practical bounds on our rational decision-making.15 In fact, one theory of happiness posits that those who are quick to make good enough decisions, therefore avoiding the prodigious and relentless challenge of arriving at an optimal choice, are the most content.16

Bounded rationality aligns with research in psychology that affirms our tendency to use our cognitive resources sparingly when making decisions. To cope with the world’s complexity, our impressive but overmatched brains are programmed to behave in a miserly way. Rather than expend precious brainpower parsing out every last option, we invoke mental shortcuts, relying on biases and heuristics to simplify the world for us.

Maybe you’ve heard of the confirmation bias, whereby we embrace information that confirms what we already think and selectively ignore all the inconvenient facts that contradict our beliefs. This is one such shortcut. Likewise, you’ve undoubtedly deployed the representativeness heuristic, a cognitive shortcut that relies on (frequently harmful) stereotypes to quickly size things up. For example, we presume that someone wearing Hermès is rich.

These biases, along with many others, often contribute to inequity in our world, but their root cause is harmless enough: our brains’ inherent tendency to conserve cognitive resources and seek efficiency in the face of daunting complexity. Confronted with the Other Uncertainty Principle, our minds are always looking for ways to avoid getting swept into uncertainty’s labyrinth. A great deal of research in psychology suggests that stereotypes allow us to draw inferences quickly and move forward, albeit at the expense of accuracy. If we cross paths with a Canadian, many of us assume they’re going to be nice, and if we’re in an animated conversation with an Italian, we anticipate a flurry of hand gestures.

We also rely on personal habits to reduce uncertainty and make life more manageable. Once we develop a routine or a way of handling a task that seems efficient, we often stick to it out of habit. We use these routines to mindlessly plow through many of our daily activities, from brushing our teeth (Left to right? Lower, then upper?) to the way we towel off after showering. (For me: hair first, then face, left leg, right leg, chest, right arm, left arm, and back, then wrap around waist.) We might find a route home each day that we default to or a particular way we prefer our coffee served. Without even thinking about it, we make these same choices again and again. Rather than stopping and considering our many options every morning at the café, we fall back on a preset selection and move on.

Like biases, stereotypes, and habits, the process of anointment drastically simplifies the social world for us. Indeed, it is an unusually pervasive, powerful, and versatile mechanism for navigating uncertainty—so much so that we can plausibly think of it as (cue dramatic music) the Ultimate Shortcut. Confronted with an inscrutable set of options and a complex social landscape, status hierarchies simplify decision-making, usually on an unconscious basis. Anointment is often subtle, operating just below the surface. But if for some reason we suddenly lacked its presence in our lives, boy, would we feel it.

That Little Black Dress


To grasp anointment’s simplifying power, let’s revisit the three forms of uncertainty described above. We begin with consumer choice and, in particular, a dilemma that many face every day: deciding what to wear. If you have an overstuffed closet, or if you’ve ever perused rack after rack of shirts at a department store, you know this challenge.

As difficult as consumer choices might be, they would be a whole lot more challenging were it not for anointment’s invisible hand. Unbeknownst to us, anointment suppresses most of the variety available to us before we even consider our options, thus reducing the complexity of the choice. Think about how many color shades there are, how many types and patterns of fabric, how many ways of cutting a garment, of stitching it, of fitting it. The combinatorics are vast! And yet our closets only have so many hangers, the department store so many racks. Perhaps without us realizing it, the many middlemen of the fashion industry, informed and influenced by status, have already massively curated our fashion choices for us so that we can select within a much-narrowed range. That’s a big service the status hierarchy performs for us: it delimits and determines the options we consider in the first place.

Depending on your gender identity, you might have a little black dress, or “LBD,” that you trot out for cocktail parties or everyday occasions. How did this particular item land in your wardrobe?

No one wore form-hugging little black dresses until the mid 1920s when Coco Chanel’s eponymous fashion house popularized the style. By the time the LBD made its debut, Chanel had not only achieved considerable commercial success; she had also become a revered creative force in French fashion. She’d even begun to hobnob with the era’s prominent avant-garde artists, collaborating with them on projects and in some cases backing them financially.17

Chanel had been anointed by Parisian elites as a bold, stylish, forward-thinking designer. As such, it was a virtual certainty that her LBD would draw attention. In October 1926, the cover of Vogue featured a drawing of a woman in a simple, elegant black dress. The magazine labeled the design “Chanel’s Ford,” likening the dress to the Model T, which through innovations in mass production and reductions in customization became known for its low price point and its color: black. The LBD’s familiarity today belies how radical the design was in its time. Back then, black was reserved for servants or people in mourning. Haute couture typically featured bright colors.

Vogue predicted that the LBD would constitute a staple in women’s wardrobes, a “sort of uniform for all women of taste.” Sure enough, the dress appealed to women of different social classes and went on to become a timeless essential—nearly unheard-of in fashion circles. Its status reached further heights after Audrey Hepburn’s spectacular embodiment of Holly Golightly in the 1961 cinematic masterpiece Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Bedecked in Givenchy’s interpretation of the LBD, Hepburn’s outfit became the 1960s version of a viral fashion trend. With the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, Elizabeth Taylor, Victoria Beckham, and Kate Moss following suit, the little black dress earned its hanger in closets around the world.

If you have an LBD or any other garment in your closet today, you probably recognize that it’s not because you methodically considered the endless array of potential apparel options before rationally deciding what suits you best. Rather, anointment did most of the legwork for you.

Think of it like this: two things must happen before you make any consumption choice. First, you must become aware of the option. These days, advertising, word of mouth, and social media all influence what products, services, and experiences you learn about, but so do an industry’s movers and shakers. Designers, marquee brands, magazine editors, celebrities, and influencers all sift through many options for you, dramatically winnowing your consideration set.

Second, you must perceive the option as relevant to your needs, preferences, or goals. Here, familiarity helps. People feel drawn to an option if they have experienced it in the past, recognize a brand, or have some general knowledge about the option. The ever-present, flowing force of social influence also comes into play. We’re massively influenced by our friends, family, coworkers, and people we admire or think are wise or cool, as well as broader societal and class-based preferences.18 If someone we know or admire endorses an option, that means a great deal to us.

Anointment often is the operative force underlying both our awareness of options and our interest in pursuing them. In the case of the LBD, Chanel’s vaunted status as a creative force in the industry endowed her with the influence to popularize a bold design choice. And because many eyes were on Chanel in 1926, the LBD drew immediate attention from the industry’s eminent players, distinguishing it from countless other stylistic options. Vogue’s endorsement added heft to the LBD, as have the generations of celebrity endorsers continuing to the present day. This is hardly an isolated occurrence. When high-status creatives establish new trends that take off, the process produces a limiting force—a stylistic gravitational pull, if you will—that constrains the options that the majority of us consider.

In this way, the anointment dynamic works a lot like having your own personal stylist, albeit one that doesn’t charge by the hour. Members of the elite exert influence to preselect which fashions we learn about in the first place. Then, because many of us take our cues from the Audrey Hepburns of the world when making choices, the number of relevant options in our consideration set shrinks even further. Thank goodness for this two-part process. In fashion and many other areas of our lives as consumers, we need a way around the maddening diversity of options. The anointed shrink our decision horizons—in a good way.

The Power of Deference


Anointment also lends a hand in dealing with uncertainty about how to behave in social or work settings. Much like it does with consumer decisions, anointment helps us in social interactions by restricting the range of behavioral choices at our disposal. We don’t simply behave minute to minute in ways that are unfettered or random. Rather, as I suggested in the introduction, we tend to shape our behavior to acknowledge other people’s social rank or to reinforce our own position. In other words, we behave in ways that show deference to others or that lead us to expect it from them.

In Catholic tradition, the faithful might pay homage to the pope by bowing down to kiss his ring. In everyday situations, acts of deference are subtler but far more profuse. We see deference in nods of affirmation and minor praises sprinkled through our interactions as well as the order in which members of a group speak, who approaches whom, who interrupts whom, who apologizes to whom, and so on.19 Each of these little acts is inherently asymmetric: inequality is baked into them. On many occasions we’re aware of deferring to another person, deciding consciously to acknowledge that someone is higher than we are in the pecking order. But in most instances small acts of deference—facial expressions, glances, slight shifts in posture—are habitual or involuntary responses of which we’re only dimly aware, if at all. As a result, we scarcely notice the status dynamics that animate them.

We don’t always think about it, but our use of language also is rife with deference. We recognize status differences in the pitch and intonation we use, in our choice of words, and even in the confidence with which we express ourselves. A doctor might address patients by their first names, whereas patients will often show respect for the doctor’s position by calling them by their title. In a courtroom, attorneys don’t call the judge “Janice” or “Waleed.” They call them “Your Honor.”

As these last examples suggest, we often affirm status distinctions by the actions we don’t take. We might show respect for a celebrity’s social stature by not approaching them in a restaurant and asking for their autograph. In high schools, unpopular kids often steer clear of the popular ones. Likewise, we might refrain from using vulgar words out of respect for someone in a position of authority, just as we might refrain from casually slapping them on the back.

We’re constantly evaluating others’ qualities and actions, and they ours. We scour our social environments, seeking out verbal, tonal, visual, facial, and body language cues that help us grasp the group’s social map.20 We’re sensitive to whether we and others are behaving in ways that conform to or depart from the norms that apply in specific situations and to specific positions in the hierarchy. Are we dressed properly? Are we showing enough confidence, humility, aptitude, kindness, sincerity, modesty, or patience given the social context and the person with whom we’re interacting? Are we demonstrating too much of these traits? In any given moment, the outcome of all of these snap judgments is our recognition or denial of someone else’s status.

At the same time, these status-driven determinants of our behavior do something very important for us on a cognitive level: they convert choice into habit. Conforming to the rules of the status system gives us a respite from uncertainty. We need not ponder the myriad ways we might behave in every minor social encounter. We’ve been conditioned to know the established rules of deference, and we repeatedly revert to them automatically, without having to think about it.

Consider a meeting at your workplace. If there is a chair at the head of the conference table, does the same person generally sit there? Do others predictably choose surrounding seats? As the conversation gets underway, who occupies more airtime and who feels compelled to pay the most attention? Who speaks more confidently and who less? Who glances at their phone surreptitiously and who feels free to do so without attempting to conceal it?

As you ponder these questions, you’ll begin to see that your organization’s meetings all have a subtext to them, a theatrical performance of status dynamics that runs parallel to and intersects with the discussion’s overt agenda. This subtext might lack the amusement value of The Office, but it does significantly simplify the range of behavioral choices we make. As attendees, we comply with the tacit code of conduct dictated by the pecking order, including who says and does what. If the status hierarchy and its unspoken rules didn’t exist, we’d all possess a vastly wider range of options for how to behave, and the group would spend a great deal more time negotiating among competing priorities. The mental burden of always having to decide how to act in the here and now would be exhausting, even paralyzing.

The Peacemaker


What about the third source of uncertainty: questions about how to allocate resources? Here we find that hierarchies can serve a peacemaking function in the most profound sense of the term, helping us to resolve disputes before they even surface.

In a pride of lions, the dominant male—often the eldest or the strongest—eats first. The same was true of the head of the household—often the oldest male—in many traditional societies. In corporate hierarchies, top executives receive the bulk of the perks, like the largest offices with the best views and the nicest furniture. And let us not forget that business-class travelers are entitled to board the plane first. Whether we’re considering military organizations, ant colonies, a pack of wolves, a tribal society, or a workplace, the status hierarchy in each unburdens the group from uncertainty about how to divvy up the pie. It predetermines who gets what, thus creating a level of coordination that makes it easier and less costly for groups to acquire and allocate what they need.

A closely related pathway through which social hierarchies promote tranquility and efficiency is that they make it more apparent who does what. Some jobs are preferable to others, and with a hierarchy in place we have greater clarity about our roles. In a hospital setting, an established hierarchy exists among medical professionals. Surgeons, attending physicians, residents, medical students, nurses, and physician assistants all have defined roles. This clarity of responsibilities avoids confusion about who makes what decisions and who performs which tasks.

Of course, many of us resent where we sit in the food chain. Feelings of shame, envy, and inferiority are part and parcel of life in social hierarchies—something you know if you were ever teased or excluded by the popular kids in grade school. That said, most of us prefer short jolts of negative emotions to living with extreme uncertainty, routine disorder, and a constant, lurking risk of conflict. Interactions become more predictable when one party agrees to behave in a subordinate manner and the other in a superior one.

This holds true in relationships of all kinds. Life without social hierarchies and their attendant norms often creates situations where mutual distrust prevents beneficial cooperation. In economic exchanges, each party might worry about being cheated by the other. This uncertainty can lead to a classic game theory scenario: even though both parties would benefit from cooperation, the fear of being exploited leads each to act defensively or opportunistically. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy where the expectation of untrustworthy behavior creates exactly that outcome. Like players in the prisoner’s dilemma, each person’s rational response to anticipated betrayal produces an outcome that leaves everyone worse off than if they had found a way to cooperate.

Social status helps us resolve this dilemma by creating incentives for good behavior, which fosters trust.21 With status hierarchies in place, cheating comes at a cost—a loss of respect and a hit to one’s reputation—that’s best to avoid. The longer-term goal of maintaining our position in the status hierarchy clashes with whatever short-term benefits we derive from screwing a counterparty in a deal. (Of course, this presumes that we actually have something to lose: the cost of deception tends to be higher as we ascend the hierarchy because those without status have less valuable reputations to protect.)22 The presence of status hierarchies often contributes to circumstances in which we’ll feel more confident that people will do what they say when dealing with us. In this way, hierarchy facilitates the trust we require to enter some of the relationships that enhance our lives.

Plenty of research suggests that a built-in hierarchy discourages conflict and results in higher group productivity. Imagine two teams, one of which consists entirely of high performers (like the members of an All-Star team in Major League Baseball) and the other of members who fit into a clearly established hierarchy. Which team will likely see more conflict and less cooperation? Which team will move more quickly toward decisions, and which will be more effective at divvying up tasks and allocating people’s efforts across them? Common sense suggests—and research has confirmed—that the team of high-status players will likely experience more conflict.23 Meanwhile, teams with clear hierarchies, established patterns of deference, and a division of labor based on status distinctions experience less conflict and ultimately see better group productivity. This is true even for chickens! One study showed that egg production among chickens is highest with stable group structures, and would decline if all the high producers were assembled in a coop.24

Many in our society cherish the idea of equality. We raise our glasses to the egalitarian idea that each voice holds weight, that every opinion should add its hue to a group’s discourse. In this regard, the functioning of status hierarchies confronts us with an inconvenient truth: a system of inequality grounded in anointment is in fact also a magnetic force that binds the group together, serving as an antidote to entropy in the social world. We might prefer not to acknowledge how indispensable an organized system of inequality is in keeping our worst instincts at bay, but that is the inescapable reality. Social hierarchies imply inequality because the greatest quantity of resources almost always flows to individuals in the highest ranks. It might not be fair, but these hierarchies offer a clear benefit by precluding endless conflicts over who is entitled to what.

The Imperfect Shortcut


Anointment exerts a potent grip on our lives because it makes the social world clearer, simpler, more predictable, and less chaotic than it otherwise would be. Humanity may be able to stick the landing of a spacecraft on Mars, but seemingly simple questions about what we consume, how we behave in any given social context, and how we allocate resources within groups are still endlessly confounding. We might know that we prefer a double espresso in the morning and mindlessly order it. But in countless other situations, decision-making becomes arduous because bounds on our rationality can’t keep up with the sheer number of available choices, our difficulty in predicting the future, the subjective nature of many judgments, and so on.

In ways we rarely contemplate, the anointed preselect which fashions, products, films, books, ideas, wines, and so forth come to our attention. Then, within a curated set of options, we consciously or unconsciously assess the value of each product, service, or idea based on its association with high-status individuals, further guiding us toward specific choices. In the panoply of social contexts we encounter, we are preprogrammed and acculturated to play our part in status rituals: our behavioral choices morph into habitually enacted actions. Meanwhile, amid the theoretical potential for ever-escalating spats about how to allocate resources in groups, the status ordering clarifies entitlements. Across these three realms—reducing options and facilitating evaluation, prescribing behavioral responses in social settings, and reducing conflict over resource allocation—anointment serves as a powerful shortcut. Its presence expedites our path to action and alleviates the mental strain that would otherwise mire us all in indecision.

Status is kind of magical in this regard. But it’s also deeply flawed. If it makes social life possible and our individual journeys on planet Earth less troublesome, it also creates profound problems, most notably by entrenching inequality and causing us to allocate our efforts and resources poorly. Because we rarely consider the full range of options, we routinely commit to decisions and courses of actions that underserve us and are unfair to others. If we are to have any chance of solving or at least mitigating these problems, we must examine more closely how anointment functions and whether we might somehow design a better operating system for society.