Status roles are something buried deep in our culture and social interactions. It is so ingrained into us, that we are engaging in status role behaviour without ever knowing it.
Marketers use them all of the time because we respond to them. In marketing it’s used to help us “keep up with the Jones’s”, but I was really interested how they show up, so I went digging.
It’s not an easy subject to research. Seth Godin suggests a book by Keith Johnstone called Impro which talks about status roles in theatre. Apparently if the actors don’t understand how status roles are played and aren’t using them, the audience doesn’t connect with the scene.
Every sentence that comes out of our mouths is either high status or low status depending on the relationship of the person you’re with.
Peers will jokingly play high and low status back and forth in conversation. Someone that you get along with quite well is someone who plays the same kind of status game with you.
Awareness of your actual status in a situation helps. We are usually intuitively figuring it out, but if you speak in a way that doesn’t match, you might be seen as arrogant or passive, or socially inept by others who are in tune.
Our culture is really fascinating when you start uncovering social norms that you didn’t even know existed.