Status Affiliation Puzzles
Recently I posted on otherwise puzzling behavior that can be easily explained via seeking status via affiliations.
Students prefer distracted profs who grade and recommend corruptibly.
Macro and foreign advisors have fancy affiliations, not forecast track records.
Patients prefer docs with prestigious affiliations over health success rates.
I see more examples:
Voters far prefer representatives over direct democracy or random selection.
Donors prefer to picking grantees, over giving prizes to whoever succeeds.
Homeowners don't give good money incentives to real estate brokers.
Investors prefer actively managed funds that lose on average.
Decision markets lose overwhelmingly to heroic "decider" managers.
In all these cases standard economic accounts seem to seriously miss the mark by ignoring strong human desires to gain status via affiliation. As most of my institution design efforts suffer this problem, understanding this better is, to me, of the highest priority.
Added 3Mar: It is usually possible to make up many explanations for any puzzling behavior, and some of these may fit well with our own conscious explanations for our behavior. But the details in most of these cases seems hard to fit with most of the other proposed explanations, and we know that status is very important to people yet they do not like to admit they do things for status.
The key to taking this idea further is to better understand just what sort of relations most confer status via affiliation. It seems to me that arms-length formal relations where you each minimize your risk from the other's bad behavior do not show a mutually trusting relation, which as a closer connection confers more status via the relation. So people are eager to trust high status affiliates, without evidence and even against the evidence.
No, I'd prefer not to give up on Social Science.That said, it seems that you are over-generalizing. Status seeking may be a significant element of some of these activities, while still being a minor factor in others. Likewise there are no doubt individuals engaged in each activity who are significantly influenced by status affiliation, but how explanatory is the idea over the broad mass of people?
Given the temptation to buy into a bold, simple theory of wide applicability I think we need a higher ratio of evidence to anecdote.
I don't dispute that people do get some status from these affiliations; I just don't expect it to be much or to have wide-ranging influence. i.e., people who already know the individual in question may be slightly impressed but it won't broadly impact that person's wider social standing.
To clarify, these kinds of affiliation are typically unidirectional and observers will likely note this and discount the affiliation effect strongly, while the person seeking status affiliation will, from their own perspective, only see that they've gotten closer to a person of high status. To use a more direct example, the fact that you (the blog owner) replied directly to me (an obscure commenter) is more likely to push my subconcious status affiliation reward buttons than it is to actually change my perceived status among other commenters on the blog. For this reason, people will seek status affiliation out of proportion to the actual status benefit they gain from it.
I'm not sure that arguing what people should grant status for would be fruitful. I expect that the affiliation effect in particular is a biologically-driven bias, not a cultural one; though I could certainly be wrong.