Social Status is an abstraction to model how people relate to each other, how social hierarchies are formed, and how people facilitate trade in the absence of financial accounting (as well as a variety of other stuff). I mean, everyone knows what status is, but here is where we break that down into its components and really try to understand what's happening on a mechanistic level.

See Also

Signaling

Notable Posts

The Nature of Offense by Wei Dai - People are offended by grabs for status.
Why Real Men Wear Pink by Yvain
Actors See Status by Robin Hanson, quoting Keith Johnstone
That Other Kind of Status by Yvain

External

Melting Asphault (by Kevin Simler) has many great posts on status
Elephant in the Brain by Simler and Hanson
Impro (book on improv covering status relations)
Writings by Venkatesh Rao such as Gervais Principle and something, something Psychopath