I agree, and that would imply that today's environment favors acting high status. And in fact I have a pet theory that the increase in urbanization and mobility in, say, the 1900s have led to a shift to more socially aggressive short-term status posturing behaviors (vs. carefully cultivating a reputation long-term.) This accounts, among other things, for the rise of the "self-esteem" movement as well as the recent rise of pickup artistry, which in its initial forms was nothing more than a way to rachet up your apparent status, unsustainably, for the short term, and was therefore dependent on urban anonymity. Susan Cain agrees with the timeline: http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/9439
So this explains why people are playing high status these days. It doesn't explain why other people often don't react badly to status plays.
How exactly do you imagine "reacting badly" to someone?
There are two basic ways to put down a person: a personal attack, or a coordinated group attack.
A personal attack is reasonable only if you think you win, and even then your personal benefits should outweigh the possible costs (which are always non-zero). In an ancient environment, the alpha male would beat the pretender badly, and any accidental damage to the alpha male would be just a necessary cost for maintaining his position.
In today's environment, we have laws. But we also have people w...
The other day, someone did something I didn't expect. It was something many people have done before; something that I thought of as very normal, but that I in no way understood and had not predicted.
As I said, this had happened many time before, so I wrote it off as "me not understanding people" or "people are weird" for a second, like I usually do, before realizing that "bad at" really means "lacking basic knowledge", which I had never realized before.
And then I thought "I should ask someone who is different from me why people do that, and eventually someone will have an answer."
But many people will have many more questions like this. So, what have you observed people doing time and time again, but never understood? Or something that you only understood after a long time or asking someone about it?
And can Less Wrong tell us, not necessarily why (I for one can make up evolutionary psychology fairy tales all day if I want) but what conscious thought process occurs behind these events?