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pjeby comments on Open Thread: May 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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I just want to throw in a note that I don't think human motivation is adequately explained by status alone -- I would expand the list to SASS: Status, Affiliation, Safety, and Stimulation. (Where, as some folks here have pointed out, "Safety" might be more accurately described as stability, certainty, or control, rather than being purely about physical safety.)
Book-reading, in particular, is more likely to meet Safety/Stimulation needs than Status or Affiliation ones.... though you could maybe get those latter two from a book club or an academic setting.
pjeby:
I agree, but most complex and multi-faceted human behaviors are likely to be compelled by a mixture of these motives. My impression is that status features more often and more prominently that most people imagine, and its often masqueraded and rationalized by pretenses of other motivations.
My hypothesis is that super-stimulation of the same urges that cause people to enjoy gossip is responsible for a significant part (though by no means all) of human enjoyment of books and other ways of presenting stories. This would be a good example of super-stimulating an urge whose original evolution was to a large degree driven by status games, in a way that however has no direct relation to the present-day status games.
People just as routinely masquerade and rationalize the other three, actually.
However, that's because their operation is fairly opaque to consciousness. We have built-in machinery for processing social signals relating to Status and Affiliation, and during our "impressionable" years, we learn to value the things that are associated with them, and come to treat them as terminal values in themselves.
IOW, SASS is how we learn to have non-SASS terminal values. So, when a person claims to be acting out of a non-SASS value, they're not really lying. It's just that they're not usually aware of (i.e. have forgotten about) the triggers that shaped the acquisition of that value in the first place.
Plenty of other animals manage to be curious, needing actual stories. Also, some of us like to read things that aren't gossip or stories.
Presumably one could test your hypothesis by finding out whether individuals lose interest in reading when they gain status; my personal experience suggests this is not the case, and that instead books compete with other forms of stimulation.
So, ISTM that even if curiosity (and certain templates for what to be curious about) were shaped by status competition, this doesn't mean there is an operational connection between books and one's self-perception of status.
To a certain extent, we could say that everything is about status, in the same way that every organ is a reproductive organ. But saying that everything is X, is the same as saying as nothing is X - it reduces your predictive power, rather than increasing it.
In retrospect, I probably should have put more care into the wording of my comments in this thread (which I wrote more quickly and with less proofreading than usual). Several people have understood my positions as more extreme than I honestly meant them to be, and I evidently failed in conveying some of the more subtle points I had in mind.
While I agree with most of your above comment, there seems to be a major misunderstanding here (probably due to my lack of clarity):
Well, insofar as reading is a directly status-related activity, nothing I hypothesized predicts that, nor is it the case in reality. In fact, if you enjoy high status as an intellectual, you are required to read a lot constantly to maintain that status; having nothing much to say when you're asked what you've read lately would be a major embarrassment. Of course, this is rarely by itself a very prominent motivation -- people who achieve high intellectual status usually have more than enough interest in reading out of curiosity and professional needs -- but I wouldn't say it's entirely negligible either, especially when it comes to trendy highbrow literature.
However, that's not at all what I had in mind with my reading-as-gossip-super-stimulus hypothesis. What I had in mind there is that the appeal of certain genres of literature and other storytelling media might be in part due to the fact that they stimulate the same urges that make people enjoy gossip. Thanks to these media, besides the thin diet of mundane real-world gossip, you get to enjoy huge amounts of artificial gossip skillfully crafted to be super-interesting, albeit about people who are fictional (or at least remote and personally irrelevant).
This mechanism has nothing at all to do with one's actual status and behaviors that influence it. The status connection here lies the fact that the gossip-enjoying urges had previously evolved under the influence of status dynamics, in which gossip is one of the key practical instruments. Their present stimulation with concentrated artificial gossip delivered via literature and other media no longer serves this function; it is merely stimulating an urge that evolved as an adaptation to a different environment.
So that list doesn't include curiosity. Are you denying that curiosity is a significant drive? Or (say) competence?
Curiosity falls under the "stimulation" heading, as does skill acquisition for its own sake (e.g. video games).
To be fair, the SASS list is more a convenient set of categories, than it is an attempt to be a comprehensive and rigorously-proven classification system. However, it's definitely "less wrong" than assuming everything is about status... yet not so unwieldy as the systems that claim 16 or more basic human drives.
That I can live with. :)
The evolution of a desire for competence is an excellent question. Impulses such as curiosity and systemizing could be related to developing competence.
Systemizing could indeed be useful for your survival, and the survival of those around you, via tool-making, weapon-making, hunting/cooking techniques, etc... So systemizing could be a status-related adaptation.
Yet if your systemizing skills create a breakthrough (e.g. you design a useful tool), then your tribe may well accord you status, enhancing your survival and reproduction.
A desire for competence could also be useful for mating, because competence displays "good genes." This is true of skills that don't provide such obvious survival benefits, such as singing and dancing.
A desire for competence, and adaptations that facilitate its development (curiosity, systemizing), could well be useful for any combination of survival, reproduction, and status.