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How Prestige Bias Shapes Our Online Behavior
TikTok dancers, groypers, anti-zionists, and more.
Caleb Wait
August 20, 2024
Psychodogma is a review of the stories we tell about the things we believe and the groups we belong to.
I have been actively online since I was 13. I was 17 when Instagram was released, and since I was already a devoted user of Facebook and MySpace before that, and fan forums before that, I didn't think twice about downloading another app. And I didn't think twice about how it might be changing my behavior.
Just as “being online” and the smartphone have drastically changed sexual habits and practices, we might expect it to impact any number of things.
One of the more embarrassing things I did shortly after getting an Instagram account was spend $25 to buy 250 fake followers. At the time, someone I was upset with was accruing more followers than me, which I couldn’t stand. Buying fake followers to outpace someone else’s follower count is cringeworthy—yes—even shameful. But what mattered more to me was my ability to have a kind of metric, even a fake one, that helped ensure I wasn't falling in esteem among my peers. Insecure kids doing pitiable things for appearance's sake is a tale as old as time, but if your status and popularity in a friend group or network has a definitive metric, it seems perfectly reasonable to your average teen to put time and attention into boosting that metric.
The gamification of status is one of the many (not so) unintended consequences of social media.
Online Prestige Bias
In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt helpfully draws out the effects of what anthropologists refer to as “prestige bias.”
"... there's an important learning strategy that goes beyond copying the majority: Detect prestige and then copy the prestigious. The major work on prestige bias was done by the evolutionary anthropologist Joe Henrich who was a student of Rob Boyd's. Henrich noted that the social hierarchies of nonhuman primates are based on dominance—the ability, ultimately, to inflict violence on others. But humans have an alternative ranking system based on prestige, which is willingly conferred by people to those they see as having achieved excellence in a valued domain of activity, such as hunting or storytelling back in ancient times" (p. 60).
It’s not hard to see where Haidt and other social scientists take prestige bias from here.
"... Platform designers in Silicon Valley directly targeted this psychological system when they quantified and displayed the success of every post (likes, shares, retweets, comments) and every user, whose followers are literally called followers. Sean Parker, one of the early leaders of Facebook, admitted in a 2017 interview that the goal of Facebook's and Instagram's founders was to create 'a social-validation feedback loop ... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology'" (p. 60).
My wife recently showed me a meme that clearly illustrates Haidt's point. Maybe you've seen it. "Teenagers today compared to my sister and I on a Friday night in our computer room in 2007."
The video depicts a perfectly choreographed TikTok dance between two teen girls in 2023 before cutting to a video of two, much more awkward teens, in 2007, clumsily singing and dancing to a pop song together. The juxtaposition is hilarious. But teenagers do not simply wake up one day and decide to shed their endearing traits for magnetism and charisma. As all humans do, they mimic what their community deems prestigious. As Haidt points out, this kind of mimicry is incredibly valuable in more embedded communities and institutions, especially if mentors and coaches are available to guide apprentices. Whether you're on a sports team, a freshman on campus, or someone new on the job, you will be rewarded for emulating the person tasked to train you or the person the community regards with prestige.
In old media, such as film, radio, and television, a large gap existed between the prestigious celebrity and the average fan. Even though teens in the early 2000s knew every word and dance move to NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, and Britney Spears, when they filmed their versions of music videos at home, the gap between awkward teen and celebrity made the mimicry endearing.
But social media has seemingly closed the gap between the highly prestigious and the viewer. Prestige is no longer modeled by the uber-famous and it certainly isn't modeled by relationships within real-life communities. Prestige is most prominently modeled through whoever garners the most views, likes, and comments on their posts.
"In a real-life social setting, it takes a while—often weeks—to get a good sense for what the most common behaviors are, because you need to observe groups in multiple settings. But on a social media platform, a child can scroll through a thousand data points in one hour (at three seconds per post), each one accompanied by numerical evidence (likes) and comments that show whether the post was a success or a failure. Social media platforms are therefore the most efficient conformity engines ever invented. They can shape an adolescent’s mental models of acceptable behavior in a matter of hours, whereas parents can struggle unsuccessfully for years to get their children to sit up straight or stop whining" (p. 59).
Why are Gen Z and Gen Alpha's TikTok dances less endearing and cringy than our homemade music videos? Because they mimic whatever is viral, successful, and "prestigious" on social media. Teens are no longer limited to comparing their wardrobe and body image to movie stars and the popular kids at school, they can compare themselves to hundreds of micro-celebrity influencers whose content they consume all day. So when they begin expressing themselves, their expression is informed by thousands of data points they see online rather than the few data points in their local environment.
The same can be said of many young men on the Right who are increasingly attracted to "based" views that are borderline authoritarian or fascist. No one wakes up and decides they want to become an online edgelord. Rather, their data points are made up of seeing anon accounts reap thousands of likes, upvotes, and re-posts in their online communities that they then mimic accordingly. Likewise, if you're on the Left you might have already been pro-Palestine, but after seeing Ivy League professors post things online such as, "Israelis are pigs. Savages…. Irredeemable excrement…. May they all rot in hell” as well as online swarms celebrate October 7th, you might find yourself mimicking this behavior and chanting along.
Online prestige bias is highly formative for the young and impressionable, but it can also impact the disillusioned and disaffected in peculiar ways.
How Online Prestige Bias Erodes Your Local Community
If you feel alienated from your current affiliations and community and are wondering if the grass is greener elsewhere, online prestige bias can exacerbate and distort this experience.
It is one thing to compare our workplaces, religious communities, and even our families to idealistic examples we see online. It is another thing to see someone outside your group and place—in opposition to it—seemingly "have it all figured out." If someone outside your camp has garnered online prestige, they can stand as a kind of indictment on your community or station. They can make you imagine, "What if my life was like theirs?"
In her provocative, and perhaps self-indulgent essay, How I Demolished My Life, Honor Jones tells the story of her divorce.
"I didn’t have a secret life. But I had a secret dream life—which might have been worse. I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t. But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself. Everything I experienced—relationships, reality, my understanding of my own identity and desires—were filtered through him before I could access them. The worst part was that it wasn’t remotely his fault; this is probably exactly what I asked him to do when we were 21 and first in love, even if I never said it out loud. To shelter me from the elements; to be caring and broad-shouldered. But now it was like I was always on my tiptoes, trying to see around him. I couldn’t see, but I could imagine. I started imagining other lives. Other homes."
In her story, Jones' husband had done nothing wrong. He simply constrained her life from uncharted potential.
"I wanted to be thinking about art and sex and politics and the patriarchy. How much of my life—I mean the architecture of my life, but also its essence, my soul, my mind—had I built around my husband? Who could I be if I wasn’t his wife? Maybe I would microdose. Maybe I would have sex with women. Maybe I would write a book."
Jones is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where she published her story. If social media helped her imagine her "secret dream life," she doesn't say. But social media no doubt plays a role in thousands of others imagining their dream lives.
If you live in a city and feel weary of its pace and quirks, content that makes small-town, rural life seem romantic is not just wholesome and whimsical; it functions as a critique of your life. If you're sick of your office job, you might find yourself nodding along to that viral LinkedIn post giving you 10 reasons why remote work should be a non-negotiable. If you're a Christian working through doubts about faith, seeing someone get praise and acclamation online for sharing their story of spiritual deconstruction might feel more persuasive than any moral or philosophical rationale for believing in God.
In each of these cases, if you want to mimic the prestige you see online, you can’t simply put on a trendy outfit and nail a TikTok dance, you have to leave the place you're in. You have to move. You have to quit. You have to convert or deconvert. You must leave and divorce whatever attachments you currently have.
If social media platforms are "the most efficient conformity engines ever invented," as Haidt says, they might also be the most efficient engines at making us feel dissatisfied.
Mimic the Prestigious Storytellers
If we go through with leaving our attachments for greener pastures, our stories are not over. Situated in new contexts, we find ourselves as novices, initiates, and new converts. And there's nothing quite like the embittered and sensational conversion story.
Here is one example of a liberal to MAGA-Trumper conversion story—just after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump:
A lot can be said about this but I will make three simple observations:
When we convert, our stories often lack a sense of humility and sobriety. There is only a polarized, black-and-white narrative. In this case, the "fancy-feminism-white-men-bad infected brain" vs. patriotism. These polarized narratives prevent us from seeing the mundane, tragic, and comedic elements of life that make up reality.
Prestige bias online reinforces polarized storytelling because sensational narratives are highly rewarded, as the post above was (57M views, 220K likes, 31K retweets, etc.). The sensational conversion story always condemns one group and worldview and reinforces another. The new convert is rewarded with all of the praise and acclamation of the new group.
Notice that this conversion story ends with a freed version of the self. "Saying it out loud feels so freeing." If there is a throughline in all of our modern conversion stories, from conservative to liberal or liberal to conservative and everything in between, it is this: authenticity. Freeing oneself from repressive strictures is the pinnacle of prestigious self-actualization. This borderline religious experience is one of the most valorized experiences the modern individual can have.
Prestige bias helps explain the little ticks and habits that shape our online behavior, but the most prestigious stories in modernity are stories of authenticity, a point that Charles Taylor has been making for decades.
Again, from Honor Jones' story of divorce:
"There were days when the magnitude of what I’d done bore down on me. I kept wondering if I’d feel regret, or remorse. It is hard to admit this—it makes me cold, as cold a woman as my ex-husband sometimes suspects I am—but I didn’t. I felt raw, and I liked it. There was nothing between me and the world. It was as if I’d been wearing sunglasses and then taken them off, and suddenly everything looked different. Not better or worse, just clearer, harsher. Cold wind on my face.
I had caused so much upheaval, so much suffering, and for what? He asked me that, at first, again and again: For what? So I could put my face in the wind. So I could see the sun’s glare. I didn’t say that out loud."
In Jones' case, the reader is told that all of the familial upheaval that comes with divorce is secondary compared to putting one's face in the wind and looking at the sun's glare. If authenticity is the highest good, then chasing after it completely justifies reducing our friends, family, and colleagues, to props in our dramas.
I have no idea if Jones' decision three years later feels just as romantic as it did in 2021, but it should be noted that such stories only empower senior editors at elite publications. When lower-class families break apart, poverty and childhood instability are much more likely to result.
Which should cause us to question the dissatisfaction that can fester due to prestige bias.
Are we sure that in our fragmented and isolated lives, we are acting in ways we won't regret, or are we being formed and influenced in the same cringe-worthy ways we were as teenagers?
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I am also working on setting up interviews for the newsletter. If you have any recommendations of writers or scholars who you would like to read on themes of alienation, disillusionment, and modern identity and conversion stories, please do let me know: [email protected].