I don't really believe that superhuman standards have anything to do with a faulty upbringing. Let's get back to the social status thing... there are people in this world who are perceived by many (if not most) as humans who do not worry or tend to their own status at all, which is but one component that makes up their irresistibly charismatic pull.
Think Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, even Einstein- these people are generally not perceived as being concerned about lowly things like social status, but as hardliners for their high causes. Or just look at some gurus who are still alive and revered. Even self-help guys like Tony Robbins are widely perceived that way. For anyone with a streak of perfectionism or simply high standards it would only be natural to try to emulate the "best". But of course such people do not actually exist and evolutionary psychology tells you exactly why they can't. (Sure you don't need Ev.Psy. to tell you that, but it's one way of becoming aware of the kinds of tricks your mind and perception can play on you.)
There are still a lot of people out there who hold onto the ludicrous "blank slate" model of malleable personality, because they simply can't bear the thought that life is severely impacted by our genetic make-up. They are stuck in what is called the "fair world fallacy" - the delusion that somehow we all have equal chances from birth and that life is somehow a fair race, and that you can become anything. It's basically a complimentary model of psychology that plays into the fantasy of "The American Dream". Some people invent karma or the afterlife to satisfy their deep need for a sense of fairness, and others simply deny that there is a problem to begin with and start believing in a highly delusional version of the American Dream. They think they can shape themselves into whatever person they desire.
In retrospect, my example was poorly chosen, because you are perfectly right when you say that being aware of our neediness for social status doesn't require an understanding of EvPsy at all. A perhaps better example where an understanding of EvPsy is much more useful to make sense of our own thoughts may be the problem of rationality and being aware of our numerous psychological biases.
When I found Less Wrong and started reading, when I made my first post, when I went to my first meetup….
It was a little like coming home.
And mostly it wasn’t. Mostly I felt a lot more out of place than I have in, say, church youth groups. It was hard to pinpoint the difference, but as far as I can tell, it comes down to this: a significant proportion of the LW posters are contrarians in some sense. And I’m a conformist, even if I would prefer not to be, even if that’s a part of my personality that I’m working hard to change. I’m much more comfortable as a follower than as a leader. I like pre-existing tradition, the reassuring structure of it. I like situations that allow me to be helpful and generous and hardworking, so that I can feel like a good person. Emotionally, I don’t like disagreeing with others, and the last thing I have to work hard to do is tolerate others' tolerance.
And, as evidenced by the fact that I attend church youth groups, I don’t have the strong allergy that many of the community seem to have against religion. This is possibly because I have easily triggered mystical experiences when, for example, I sing in a group, especially when we are singing traditional ‘sacred’ music. In a previous century, I would probably have been an extremely happy nun.
Someone once expressed surprise that I was able to become a rationalist in spite of this neurological quirk. I’ve asked myself this a few times. My answer is that I don’t think I deserve the credit. If anything, I ended up on the circuitous path towards reading LessWrong because I love science, and I love science because, as a child, reading about something as beautiful as general relativity gave me the same kind of euphoric experience as singing about Jesus does now. My inability to actual believe in any religion comes from a time before I was making my own decisions about that kind of thing.
I was raised by atheist parents, not anti-theist so much as indifferent. We attended a Unitarian Universalist church for a while, which meant I was learning about Jesus and Buddha and Native American spirituality all mixed together, all the memes watered down to the point that they lost their power. I was fourteen when I really encountered Christianity, still in the mild form of the Anglican Church of Canada. I was eighteen when I first encountered the ‘Jesus myth’ in its full, meme-honed-to-maximum-virulence form, and the story arc captivated me for a full six months. I still cry during every Good Friday service. But I must have missed some critical threshold, because I can’t actually believe in that story. I’m not even sure what it would mean to believe in a story. What does that feel like?
I was raised by scientists. My father did his PhD in physical chemistry, my mother in plant biology. I grew up reading SF and pop science, and occasionally my mother or my father’s old textbooks. I remember my mother’s awe at the beautiful electron-microscope images in my high school textbooks, and how she sat patiently while I fumblingly talked about quantum mechanics, having read the entire tiny physics section of our high school library. My parents responded to my interest in science with pride and enthusiasm, and to my interest in religion with indulgent condescension. That was my structure, my tradition. And yes, that has everything to do with why I call myself an atheist. I wouldn’t have had the willpower to disagree with my parents in the long run.
Ultimately, I have an awfully long way to go if I want to be rational, as opposed to being someone who’s just interested in reading about math and science. Way too much of my motivation for ‘having true beliefs’ breaks down to ‘maybe then they’ll like me.’ This is one of the annoying things about my personality, just as annoying as my sensitivity to religious memes and my inability to say no to anyone. Luckily, my personality also comes with the ability to get along with just about anyone, and in a forum of mature adults, no one is going to make fun of me because I’m wearing tie-dye overalls. No one here has yet made fun of me for my interest in religion, even though I expect most people disagree with it.
And there’s one last conclusion I can draw, albeit from a sample size of one. Not everyone can be a contrarian rationalist. Not everyone can rebel against their parents’ religion. Not everyone can disagree with their friends and family and not feel guilty. But everyone can be rational if they are raised that way.