Pedigree’s New Power

Professor Toby Stuart’s new book, Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World (Simon & Schuster, 2025), 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, the Leo Helzel Distinguished Professor of Business Administration, puts it, “Status begets more status.” The upshot: Our society is less meritocratic than we would like to think. 

We spoke with Stuart, who’s spent more than three decades studying social networks, about why social status influences nearly every part of our lives—and how AI will make reliance on pedigree even more pronounced.

Where does social status come from?

There are three kinds of status. 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. Achieved status is recognition we earn by doing something that’s exceptional or good for the group. And conferred status is transferred and always shifting. When UC Berkeley admits a student, for example, the institution bestows its status on them. 

Why do we often assign value based on association rather than intrinsic qualities?

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. What you can figure out is where the university sits in the prestige hierarchy. The problem with this is that some ascribed identity characteristics are hierarchically ordered. So, we could incorrectly rely on sociodemographic characteristics (e.g. white male, celebrity’s child) to assess the quality of people’s contributions.

How will AI influence the status system?

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 most capable students. How do we determine who those are when we no longer have, say, the written word to help us sort people? 

How will this phenomenon play out?

In the short term, at least, expect a resurgence of reliance on status symbols: elite diplomas, warm intros, old-fashioned references, ZIP codes, race, gender, and maybe even family names. Whether we end up in a world of more distributed opportunity or more unexamined pedigree may depend on our appetite for doing the harder work of verification or on our willingness to treat outputs of artificial and human creators as the same. Until we acknowledge the latter, or we develop new methods to assess and authenticate human capability, the democratic potential of these technologies will be overshadowed by the hierarchies they otherwise might have helped to dissolve.