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Morendil comments on The many faces of status - Less Wrong
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I think my qualification about agreements on status in a given situation is important and somewhat independent of class, power and prestige. Wealth, class, power and prestige are all factors in status but within a given social situation where these are fairly evenly matched they are not the deciding factors in who comes out on top in any status games. In social situations where there is incomplete information about the relative levels of these things status moves are a complex game which are partly attempts to signal these qualities and figure out relative rankings.
I would expect that if you took a group of strangers and placed them in a social situation together you could find agreement within the group and from observers over what relative status was achieved that could not be fully explained by wealth, class, power or prestige.
It is interesting to observe people in situations where they do not have the pre-qualification of status normally granted by wealth, power, class or prestige. There's a fairly run of the mill reality show on TV at the moment called Undercover Boss, the premise of which is that a CEO goes undercover at his own company and works entry-level jobs. I've caught a few episodes and found it quite interesting to observe how some of the participants seem to maintain status even without anyone knowing who they are while others cannot without the benefit of the external factors that usually grant them status.
Just going undercover might not correct for all hints about class, to single out but one of the components - think Pygmalion and things like language, accent, body posture.
On the other hand, I suspect you're partly right, to the extent that you could put people in an IRC chatroom, really stripping everyone of nearly all observable properties, and some of them would still come out as being "on top". But that's also grist for my mill: I'd expect those to be the more skilled at manipulating perceptions of self-esteem through subtle use of language.
I'm still struggling with exactly what you mean when you talk about 'self-esteem'. You seem to be saying something like this:
There is a somewhat objective property called 'status' that we can observe people having more or less of in a given situation. Many social interactions serve to raise or lower relative status positions. There is a hidden variable called 'self-esteem' which is the thing that is actually being manipulated in social interactions and it is more fundamental than status.
Is that roughly what you are saying or am I misunderstanding?
That feels close, yes. I might quibble over the "somewhat objective".
By somewhat objective I pretty much just mean what I suggested earlier: you could ask a group of observers or participants in a social situation to rank people by status and there would be broad agreement. You indicated you might agree with that. I think this property would correlate with things like wealth, class, physical attractiveness, power and achievements but I don't think they are sufficient on their own to explain it - there are other factors. I also think the issue is complicated by the fact that some of these 'other factors' are things that assist people in acquiring money, power and recognition for their achievements.
It seems like you might be using 'self-esteem' as a catch all term for the factors that explain status that are not covered by wealth, class, power and achievement. I don't find that a useful application of the term. If you mean something narrower than that then I think you're missing out on other important explanatory factors.
Not a catch-all, but a specific disposition, which would show up in, say, psychometric tests asking people questions such as the ones I mentioned above.
Again, I don't really care whether we name a particular variable "status" or "self-esteem" - just so long as we're not mistaking it for another variable (e.g. class, power, prestige), and "status" does have the unfortunate ambiguity with these others.
But my inquiry is more into how many variables are in play, what the causal relationships between them might be, and so on.
Well 'status' seems to me to be somewhat like 'intelligence' - most people have an intuitive conception of what it means and could rank order others in a way that would tend to match the rank ordering of other observers. It also correlates to some extent with a number of other traits such as wealth, power and prestige. It is not clear however to what extent a unitary g exists for intelligence and similarly it is not clear whether a unitary 's' might exist for status.
My understanding of 'self-esteem' is a factor that probably correlates with status but it is not clear which direction causation works. In other words reducing discussion of status to discussion of self-esteem is a bit like reducing discussion of intelligence to discussion of logic puzzles. Focusing too narrowly on this one factor ignores many other important factors that contribute to the broader idea of status.