社会地位。在兔子洞里

"After this," says Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix, "there is no turning back."

"在这之后，"《黑客帝国》中莫斐斯对尼奥说，"没有回头路可走。"

You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

你吃了蓝色药丸--故事结束，你在床上醒来，相信你想相信的一切。你吃了红色药丸--你留在仙境，我告诉你兔子洞有多深。

Today I'm offering a red pill (of sorts): an eye-opening account of social status. I won't say there's "no turning back" after reading this — but I've seen down the rabbit hole, and it's indeed as deep as advertised.

今天我提供一粒红色药丸（某种意义上的）：一个关于社会地位的令人大开眼界的叙述。我不会说读完这个就 "没有回头路了"--但我已经看到了兔子洞，它确实像广告中说的那样深。

If you decide to join me (warning: long), by the end of this essay you'll know most of the important things I know about social status. There are wider and more practical perspectives we could take, but today we're going straight down, i.e., into the theoretical and evolutionary roots of the thing.

如果你决定加入我（警告：很长），在这篇文章结束时，你会知道我所知道的关于社会地位的大部分重要事情。我们可以采取更广泛和更实际的视角，但今天我们要直接下去，即进入这个东西的理论和进化根源。

Allow me briefly to set the stage.

请允许我简要地介绍一下情况。

In seeking to understand particular forms of human behavior, especially social behavior, it often pays to look for analogues elsewhere in the animal kingdom. In a way, this makes perfect sense: humans are animals, after all, creatures sculpted by the same inexorable forces that have given rise to all other life forms. But we're also far and away the most intelligent species on the planet, which suggests that we're capable of many things no other animal can do. Why, then, is it so useful to study other species? Haven't we largely risen above our biology?

在寻求理解人类行为的特定形式，特别是社会行为时，往往需要在动物王国的其他地方寻找类似物。在某种程度上，这很有意义：人类毕竟是动物，是由产生所有其他生命形式的相同的不可抗拒的力量所雕琢的生物。但我们也是地球上最聪明的物种，这表明我们有能力做许多其他动物无法做到的事情。那么，为什么研究其他物种会如此有用？难道我们在很大程度上没有超越我们的生物学吗？

The problem is this: Even though we're capable of a seemingly-infinite variety of individual behaviors, our patterns of behavior are a lot more constrained — in particular, by the laws of economics an...