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Steve_Rayhawk comments on That other kind of status - Less Wrong
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Here's a piece that I think you're missing: identity and status are related, but not equivalent.
Identity is about living up to a social standard or ideal for a role that defines your place in the tribe. Living up to "your" ideals (i.e., the tribe's standard for the role) produces good feelings.
Let's say that a tribe has hunters, gatherers, warriors, shamans, and healers. Each subgroup (subculture?) has a set of practices, sayings, beliefs, values, etc. that are unique to that subgroup role. In order for an individual to occupy a productive specialization, they have to learn (and be motivated to embody) these standards and practices.
Also notice that what's high-status behavior for each subgroup is different; behavior that's honored when done by a shaman would be laughed at (or worse) in a hunter.
Thus, we get the all-too-human phenomena of conforming non-conformists, status-seeking behavior by people who claim that all status is beneath them, etc.
So, I think you're on the right general track, but missing a more specific mechanism that more closely explains why this type of behavior is rewarded. It's not status-seeking per se, it's "living up to ideals". Conspiracy theorists are emulating the ideal of a revolutionary truthseeker... and so, perhaps are most of us here. ;-)
Thing is, it's not the specific behaviors or results that are rewarded by this mechanism; it's attitudes, emotions, and other fuzzy stuff like that. So, you can be a really fuzzy thinker and still pride yourself on being a brilliant seeker of truth... in attitude. (Presumably, in the ancestral environment, your actual skill calibration would occur via real-world feedback and the not-so-gentle correction of your peers or mentors; but the motivation to persist in the learning would come via the pride-of-identity mechanism.)
Priming research, btw, shows that when we're reminded of the subgroups we belong to, our behaviors tend to conform to ideals or stereotypes of those subgroups -- IOW, identity, not status, is the key to stereotypical behavior. (And incidentally, it's a mild refutation of the idea that status needs drive everything. Human beings do have other motivators.)
One way to think about these ideas about identity and roles is in the context of a more general theory I want to suggest: that there is a recurring set of conditions under which of games of costly signaling of the ability to resemble prototypes of a category tend to evolve convergently.
Such a theory might be consistent with the results from experiments on attractiveness of facial symmetry and facial averageness.
It might also be consistent with some observations I make by introspecting on intuitions which predict social penalties for unusual but morally harmless behavior. (E.g. the penalties one would receive if one were to wear, without explanation, a formal business suit with details somehow precisely matching the accidents of fashion of a randomly and fairly drawn alternate history from 200 years ago, instead of a formal business suit with details precisely matching the accidents of fashion of our own local history.)
Such a theory would predict that there would be literature on a cognitive bias to prefer prototypical and central members of a category to non-prototypical and peripheral members of the category. But as far as I know, there is not very much specific literature on this question. The only specific literature I know of is work by Jamin Halberstadt of the University of Otago (NZ) and co-authors about visual attractiveness. A summary from 2006 is "The generality and ultimate origins of the attractiveness of prototypes". "Prototypes are attractive because they are easy on the mind" is an ungated paper from 2006 that reports an experiment controlling for the effect of preference for fluently processed stimuli, because prototypical stimuli are processed more fluently. (One possible interpretation of the result is that there may be a reason to prefer stimuli which aren't confusing, because confusing stimuli may hide defects better.) "The face of fluency: Semantic coherence automatically elicits a specific pattern of facial muscle reactions" generalizes part of this effect to non-visual stimuli, and "Uniting the tribes of fluency to form a metacognitive nation" argues that fluency experiences affect many dimensions of social judgement.