Why You Think You'll Never Stack Up

The pursuit of prestige has an upside. The quest for cash and cachet—and envy of others' good fortune—are not simply base instincts to be overcome. A bit of status anxiety is a good thing, so long as you understand what you really covet and why.

By Carlin Flora, published on September 01, 2005 - last reviewed on January 19, 2009

There are few non-legally binding documents as closely read but as coolly received as class notes from one's alma mater. "On the same day I was accepted to a trauma surgery/critical care fellowship, I asked my beautiful girlfriend, an internal medicine resident, to be my wife," reads one Ivy League entry. Another alum informs that while his wife "has continued her participation with the U.S. national women's lacrosse team and hopes to win her third World Cup, I've had much more modest success on the sailplane racing circuit." The alumni journal is a gratingly personal catalogue of a universal predicament: status anxiety. Like all universals, this anxiety has its own deep logic. Learning that our best friend from college is happily married and wildly successful brings sincere joy and admiration but also waves of envy, which serve a primal purpose. Envy nudges us to earn an impressive job title, snag material comforts and catch and keep a fetching spouse, all of which, as nature would have it, boil down to life's reproductive necessities. We may never be able to overcome our concern with status, and we may not want to: In moderation it is good for us. Understanding our need for status can help us to channel our energies most productively and make use of our talents.

We are all at least a touch malcontent with our lot. The frustrations that accumulate as we fall behind in our career goals or mortgage payments are tiring and vulgar; the hair loss serums and the struggle to fit into our favorite pair of jeans are not battles we're proud of. But to our credit, we don't simply want more, more, more.

Sure, images of Donald Trump's gilded Boeing jet or of Kimora Lee Simmons's 30-carat diamond ring and 42-inch legs feed into our status anxiety on some level, but at the end of the day, we're concerned with our immediate reference group—one made up of about 150 people. "When you see Bill Gates' mansion, you don't actually aspire to have one like it. It's who is local, who is near you physically and who is most like you—your family members, coworkers and old high school classmates—with whom you compare yourself," says economist Robert H. Frank, of Cornell University. The homogeneity in most communities sensitizes us to tiny upgrades in our midst. "If someone in your reference group has more," he says, "you get a little anxious."

In the 1980s, Frank dismantled a premise central to economic theory: People will always choose the greatest absolute amount of wealth. Landmark research shows that our preferences are actually quite relative. We'd rather make $50,000 while living in a neighborhood where everyone else makes $40,000 than earn $100,000 among those who are raking in $150,000.

Peers in our little pond, such as the old college crew, are the most accurate yardsticks of our own performance. They probably started out in life with the same advantages as we did and are the same age. They are our rivals, fair and square. "The more similar people are to us, the more we can really gauge their success in a particular area," says Richard Smith, associate professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky. He recalls drawing a stick figure on his two-year-old daughter's easel just before the mother of one of her preschool classmates walked in. "Did your daughter do that?" the girl's mother exclaimed in a panicky voice, while her own daughter continued to scribble wildly. The two little girls happened to share the same birthday, which made the mother even more acutely afraid that her daughter's fine motor skills were dramatically outclassed.

"People are rarely satisfied with simply knowing their own performance, as anyone who has taught students knows," says Smith. "They want to know how they stack up against others." Our natural tendency is to establish a pecking order: When placed in an unfamiliar group, subjects are quick to accurately judge where they and other group members rank on various characteristics, even before they speak to one another. Supposed respites from ranking are not immune either: The heavier children at fat camp are ostracized; communes—even prisons—are heavily stratified.

We are primed for pettiness, programmed to notice seemingly inconsequential gradations, but for good reason: Being chronically dissatisfied is an effective stimulus to best your more complacent peers.

David Buss, of the University of Texas at Austin, and his graduate student Sarah Hill see our persistent status anxiety as a survival mechanism developed hundreds of thousands of years ago when our psychological apparatuses took form. In those times, we traveled in small herds and jockeyed for food and love in very direct ways that lent urgency to cutthroat ranking (as well as to cooperative living). The civilized modern stage upon which status dramas are enacted is not so stripped down—we don't literally miss out on meals if our neighbors overstuff their pantry—but the mechanism remains intact and attuned to the same ultimate goals.

Because it is in our nature to home in on the goals of survival and reproduction, men and women conserve mental energy for comparisons in realms that relate directly to these two pursuits. Think of how women are easily irritated by a gorgeous secretary, while (straight) men barely cast a glance at the dashing young male paralegals in the office. Women are more envious of other women's good looks, say evolutionary psychologists, because appearance is an important marker of youth and fertility. In a beauty-contest version of the economist Frank's salary preferences breakdown, women in Buss and Hill's survey reported they would rather be a "5" among "4s" than an "8" among "10s." Their male counterparts would rather be the best looking in absolute terms.