Your brain is wired in some non-standard manner, so that it doesn't deal with status signaling and social conformity in the usual way. This clearly sends off bad signals, since it increases the probability that you might be weird, dysfunctional, or even dangerous in all sorts of ways.

Your brain is wired in a way that makes it hard to acquire those beliefs that happen to be respectable here and now. (But you would conform easily, perhaps exceptionally so, in a different society with different respectable beliefs.)

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I'm not sure about that. It seems to me that these might be completely independent mechanisms. The first, unlike the second, would stem from a failure of the general mechanisms for handling status and social norms, indicating a more generally dysfunctional personality, while the second one would result in a perfectly functional individual except for this particular quirk consisting of some odd and perhaps disreputable beliefs.

Yes, but some societal beliefs are about status distribution. Or to go for a more general argument societies have differing status distributions and emphasise different ways to distribute status. Its perfectly possible that not "dealing with status signalling" in a usual way might actually be an advantage in some societies or would have a workable niche or societal role that isn't available in some other society. Thus basically the system wouldn't really be a failure in such situations, the individual would be by definition functional.

Historically (and even today) mental illness seems to me to be an example a category where the status hit seems more or less proportional to societal dysfunction or rather how the person fails to live up to ideals, rather than making any clear distinction between the two.

Why would we have differing mechanisms for this? Isn't it easier for the brain to cover both under a simple "avoid socially dysfunctional people" directive?