This question has been central to me for a long time. Reading Impro by Johnstone and Inner Ring by C.S. Lewis yourself is central to understanding this topic.

This question has been central to me for a long time. Reading Impro by Johnstone and Inner Ring by C.S. Lewis yourself is central to understanding this topic. First thing to understand is that status follows power law dynamic, instead of being normally distributed. Thus, in social status games, there is typically winner-take-all mentality. The bigger the game, the more the distribution is skewed. You can easily understand why, if you think about blogs. The first blogs have a huge advantage. Everybody wants to link from the popular ones, so they befriend the people maintaining those blogs. So if you are already popular, people will want to connect to you, so you will get even more popular, as more people join the community. It is easier to talk about this in the context of social dancing, because the feedback on your status is more immediate and visible. If you have high social status, you are sought after as dance partner by the opposite sex. If you have less than high social status you are either not sought after, or even avoided as dance partner. Interesting thing is that your social status is dynamic, it depends on status of others. For example, in some dance parties I may be one of the high status males. In other dance parties I can be some of the medium status males. Sometimes I may even be a low status male. If I don't know anybody in a place, then women might be less than willing to take a risk and dance with me. If I cannot easily find a partner, and I am left without a partner, women start thinking there is something wrong with me, and start actively avoiding me. So there is negative status spiral as well. The thing to understand here is that nothing in my skill has changed. Only the environment has changed. People are highly influenced by the environment. People use the interest of others (i.e. status) as a heuristic to gauge whther they should be interested in somebody (i.e. grant them status). However, the inner truth here is that ultimately none of this really matters. I am not kinesthetically gifted, my dancing is not visually very attractive, so I cannot get high status by showing off. My strength is that I appear to be a little bit more emotionally open so that something I call "emotional connection" in the dance happens more often and is deeper. The dancers who are emotionally more open in this sense is actually the circle of "sound craftsmen" which C.S. Lewis talks about. And they recognize each other, regardless of social status. And "emotional connection" is something that really brings happiness in the dance.