Self-Esteem and Human Hierarchies (Book Notes: The Cheating Culture)

How much do you care about what you have and what you are paid? How much do you care about how your material well-being compares to others? Studies show that people care far, far more about the latter than the former - so much more, in fact, that they would prefer to have less on an absolute scale if it means having more relative to those around them.

In The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, David Callahan writes:

[M]ost human beings think about their well-being in terms relative to those who share their immediate community, as Thorstein Veblen pointed out a century ago in The Theory of the Leisure Class and as Robert Frank has discussed in some detail in his book Luxury Fever. Absolute well-being doesn’t matter as much as it should.

Most of us would rather earn $100,000 a year in an organization where nobody makes more than $90,000 than make $110,000 at a job where all our colleagues are paid $200,000. We’d feel better about ourselves if we owned a ‘97 Toyota Camry in a neighborhood where everyone else drives ‘88 Honda Civics and ‘90 Mazda Proteges, than if we owned a brand-new Camry in a neighborhood filled with Jaguars and Mercedes.

At first, this sounds ridiculous — a rational person would rather make more money rather than less, regardless of what others are making, right? In fact, this isn’t as silly as it seems initially. If you make far less than all your colleagues, doesn’t this suggest that you and your work aren’t valued as much as your colleagues? Doesn’t it suggest that you simply aren’t as good as others and, if push came to shove, you’d be among the first to be fired?

Job security is important. Being valued by friends, family, and co-workers is important. If we don’t feel valued and secure, we experience far more stress and ultimately far less happiness:

The notion that people worry more about their place in the economic pecking order rather than the size of their paycheck has found support in research exploring the interplay of money, hierarchy, and happiness. Studies by biologists and health researchers also suggest that being in a subordinate position can do a hatchet job on your self-esteem, leave you chronically stressed out, and undermine your physical health. A famous long-term study of thousands of British civil servants found that lower-ranked employees died earlier — even when researchers controlled for diet and personal habits like smoking. Stress and “low job control” appeared to explain the difference in mortality rates.

Concerns about relative position are not simply the product of envy and other shallow emotions. We compare ourselves to others for very good reasons. If you’re wearing a $500 suit and another job applicant sports a $1,000 suit, both of you are wearing nice suits. But the other guy may have an advantage, all other things being equal. ... Frank and others argue that, ultimately, anxieties about relative position reflect evolutionary imperatives shaped by a long human history in which small advantages over others translated into a better chance to survive and reproduce. “There is compelling evidence that concern about relative position is a deep-rooted and ineradicable element of human nature,”Frank writes.

Humans are social animals and, as such, care very much about their place in the social order — it’s not just about being valued by those around use, but about succeeding in life. Those who do well socially will, from an evolutionary standpoint, do better when it comes to reproducing and raising successful children. This matters a lot, so naturally we will experience anxiety over not doing as well as those around us.

This matters to employers, too. If they want their workers to be happy and productive, they will want to reduce social and work-related stress as much as possible. This means, for example, making workers feel valued and important. Employers can take this too far by giving out ridiculous awards that don’t mean anything — people recognize when this happens and it will make them feel worse. Genuine gestures of appreciation, however, may accomplish a lot.

 

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