In new book, Professor Toby Stuart lifts the curtain on how social status shapes our lives

In 2008, Toby Stuart got a call from a senior partner at a blue-chip law firm working for Microsoft. The company had been rebuffed in its bid to acquire Yahoo, and the lawyer had an unexpected offer: Did Stuart want to join a proposed slate of directors that Microsoft would nominate to replace Yahoo’s current board of directors?

Stuart was flattered but confused. He was a business professor who’d taught at three elite schools and had extensive consulting experience, but at the time he’d never served on a corporate board or run a company, let alone one going through a historic takeover attempt. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s hard-ball plan was to nominate 10 replacements for Yahoo’s board who—if shareholders approved them—might be more amenable to the acquisition.

“This offer wasn’t about my skills and experience,” Stuart said. “It was about the titles and institutions on my resume.” In the end, Microsoft gave up on its takeover attempt. But for Stuart, the experience was a glaring example of the role social status plays in who gets ahead.

Stuart’s new book, “Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner Take Most World,” lifts the curtain on how often we judge quality by association rather than intrinsic attributes. As a result, people who go to an elite university or win a prestigious prize are much more likely to continue racking up accomplishments, even if others are equally qualified.

As Stuart puts it, “status begets more status.” The upshot: Our society is less meritocratic than we would like to think. And, he believes, it will become even less so as artificial intelligence advances.

Stuart, the Leo Helzel Distinguished Professor of Business Administration, has spent more than three decades studying social networks. He is the faculty director of the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program and the Institute for Business Innovation, and a Distinguished Teaching Fellow.

We spoke with him about why, in a world of daunting complexity and endless choices, social status influences nearly every part of our lives.

(This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)

Berkeley Haas: Where does social status come from?

Toby Stuart: There are three kinds of status: Achieved status is recognition we earn by doing something that’s exceptional or good for the group. Ascribed status, which is assigned at birth, is the unearned status we get (or lack) from factors we inherit, such as family background, gender, and physical characteristics. And conferred status is transferred and always shifting. When Berkeley admits a student, the institution bestows its status on them. That’s true of prizes, awards, and positive reviews from critics, but it’s also true in social groups. If the cool kid hangs out with you in middle school or a well-regarded colleague pays you a compliment in front of others, status is transferred on a small scale. It happens all the time to all of us, and we confer status upon others, too.

BH: You point out that we often assign value to things based on who or what they’re associated with rather than intrinsic qualities. Why do we do this?

Because we need to—we’re either incapable of evaluating the product, or it’s too much work. It’s way easier to size up the associated person or organization than the thing itself. For example, you can’t really determine how good a Berkeley degree is in advance based on what you’ll learn or whether the faculty will be amazing teachers. What you can figure out is where the university sits in the prestige hierarchy.

That base condition of uncertainty exists everywhere. You don’t know whether a bottle of wine is amazing until you try (and most of us also have no idea after we’ve partaken), but maybe you know that it’s from a prominent winery. You might know whether a piece of art appeals to you, but you don’t know if it has value in the eyes of the market. So instead of evaluating the object, you evaluate the artist or gallery. The same thing happens in the workplace: It’s hard to evaluate ideas, but easier to evaluate the social standing of the person who espouses them.

BH: What are some risks of using this mental shortcut?

TS: The problem is that some status-based identity characteristics, like race and gender, are hierarchically ordered. In all societies at all times, some ascribed identity characteristics (e.g. white male; celebrity’s child) are granted higher status than others. So we could incorrectly rely on sociodemographic characteristics to assess the quality of people’s contributions.

We also risk creating a reinforcing cycle that gives some people an unfair cumulative advantage. A new scientific article is considered good because the author is famous, the prestigious publication makes them more famous, and you end up with highly skewed outcomes. Opportunities are finite: If I give one to someone, it’s to the exclusion of someone else, even if they are more deserving.

BH: You refer to this process as the “Matthew effect.” Can you explain what that is and where you’ve seen it at play?

TS: The “Matthew effect” was coined by sociologist Robert Merton and refers to a sentence in the Gospel according to Matthew: “For unto every one that hath shall be given and he shall have abundance: but for him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” We see this cumulative advantage with social status: If you have more status, you get more credit, which gains you more status and more resources to support your endeavors, and so on.

I decided to become an academic partly because I thought it was a meritocracy—the profession is about having the best ideas and doing the most careful research. Later, I realized that everything about academia is a status system. In my own life, I recognized that I had chosen a relatively narrow academic field to focus on, which helped me get accepted to an elite doctoral program. I had prominent dissertation advisors who supported me in landing an assistant professor position at the University of Chicago. That affiliation meant my papers were seriously considered by journals, and I got invited to meetings and conferences with the top minds in my field. This doesn’t mean that I wasn’t qualified, but there were likely many others with similar skills and talents who didn’t benefit from an early advantage.

BH: Does this mean that people’s achievements are never fully earned?

TS: People often have a status that’s decoupled from their level of achievement—they’re not perfectly correlated. Particularly at the top of the status distribution, there are a handful of people with super high notoriety that doesn’t correspond to their superiority. You have fifty people who wrote astonishingly good fiction, and you have one Nobel Prize to give. Whoever gets the prize is going to have a big boost, and advantages accumulate on top of that. But if you replaced the selection committee with an equally qualified one, in the majority of cases they’d pick a different winner.

In the grand scheme of things, 2025 America is more fair than feudal Europe or apartheid-era South Africa. But the standard definition of a meritocracy is an equal distribution of opportunity, and I want people to be attuned to the fact that the cumulative advantage aspect of the status system creates a highly unequal distribution of opportunity.

BH: Are there any downsides to being “anointed”?

TS: One is the hamster wheel: When you rise to the top, you have to work pretty hard to stay. There are high expectations for productivity and quality. Meanwhile, your time gets fractured, because you have prominence and people want you to do lots of things. There’s also imposter syndrome. Many actors, for example, seem to be aware that they caught a break and remember when they were struggling. They realize they were not much better than the person sitting next to them, but now they’re celebrities. Still, these downsides pale in comparison to those experienced by people on the other end of the status hierarchy.

BH: How will AI influence the status system?

TS: It will have an enormous effect. It will be increasingly difficult to make distinctions among people on the basis of their work output. But companies still want to hire the best talent; universities still want to admit the smartest, most capable students. How is it that we determine who those are when we no longer have, say the written word, to help us sort people? Unfortunately, we rely on pedigree, such as diplomas from prestigious schools, personal referrals, family of origin, and even race and gender. In the short term, at least, we will end up relying more heavily on status.

Read the book:

“Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner Take Most World“

By Toby Stuart

Simon & Schuster, September 2025