CHAPTER 11: THE POWER OF POPULARITY AND PRESTIGE
(SOCIAL PROOF)
When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.
—Japanese proverb
In your mating life, it’s easy to get caught in the trap of focusing only on what a specific woman thinks of you and ignoring everybody else. After all, you can’t put your penis inside your social network. You can do that only with individual women.
But that approach is totally wrong. Most of the time, individual women judge your fuckability by your social network. So you had better have proof—social proof—that it exists.
Humans are a highly social species. We have flourished for hundreds of thousands of years because we operate so effectively in groups and as groups. We are referred to by primatologists as “the social ape” for a reason.
As a result, we have evolved fast, accurate abilities to evaluate each other’s social standing within our groups. Over time, as we started living in larger, more diverse communities like towns, cities, and nations, we had even stronger incentives to show off our social influence—projecting strength to get resources, projecting wisdom to get followers, projecting sexual popularity to get mates.
That’s why ancient chiefs erected totem poles, high priests built monumental temples, and warlords took many wives. It’s also why young people today obsess over their friend counts on social media. One can tell, at a glance, who is King Deuce of Turd Island or Lord Awesome of Awesomeland.
Yes, a woman can take one look at you and get a good sense of your physical health and willpower. She can listen to you talk or check out your Facebook profile and judge how intelligent you are. But she will get a more complete sense of what kind of man you are, as a potential lover, partner, or father, by looking at all kinds of social proofs:
• Can she see that many people know and like you? That’s popularity.
• Can she see people paying attention to what you do and say? That’s status.
• Can she see people changing their minds to fit your worldview? That’s influence.
• Can she see people respecting your skills and expertise? That’s prestige.
• Can she see you being outgoing and socially confident? That’s extroversion.
• Has she heard of you through media before meeting you? That’s fame.
It is usually at this point that guys who have been chronically unsuccessful with women start hurling insults. They think that women caring about social proof just proves that women are superficial “fame whores,” “jersey chasers,” “gold diggers,” and “groupies.”
Do not become one of those bitter, misguided men. Social proof is not superficial. For hypersocial animals like us, it’s about as deep a signal of personal value as anything gets.
Remember, you are a male stranger. You represent a danger to her, and the collective opinion of your social network gives a woman a huge amount of information about your traits, strengths, virtues, and social skills that she would otherwise find out only by taking the risks of getting to know you—a male stranger.
Most young guys have some toxic misconceptions that social proof really boils down to just a few simplistic cues popularized in rap videos, action movies, and PUA ebooks: fame, money, and alpha-male dominance.
Sure, fame is a compelling form of social proof. Women throw themselves at famous men. The problem is that you’re as unlikely to become famous as you are to win the lottery, so any mating strategy of “first, just become a mega-famous rock star/actor like Jared Leto” is stupid for most men. Some 99.999 percent of you are never going to be famous even if you deserve to be. That’s not a judgment on your merits; that’s just the reality of the global news/entertainment/media industry. Achieving fame also takes a long time—usually at least a decade of 100 percent dedication to building skills, performing them in public, and marketing your personal brand. You need attainable, immediate forms of social proof, not fame fantasies.
One step below fame on the “c’mon now, be serious” pyramid of social proof are money and class. We evolved in small tribal groups, where our survival and reproductive success depended crucially on other people; social reputation, goodwill, gratitude, and prestige were the main forms of wealth for our ancestors. Prehistoric men acquired and stored their wealth mostly in the form of “social capital” (real-life relationships, a form of social proof), not in the form of “monetary capital” (printed currencies, a form of material proof). Women evolved not to be “gold diggers” but “status diggers”—to favor socially skilled, popular, respected, high-status guys. Although a man’s status as a potential mate is correlated with his wealth, political power, and socioeconomic class, these are all distinct concepts, and they weren’t as closely related in prehistory.
As we’ll see in the next chapter, material proofs of wealth and resources are important to your attractiveness, but don’t confuse them with social proofs. The guys who conflate the two are the guys who name-drop; buy expensive, exclusive things to express their “friendship”; and spend New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day with hookers in Vegas. They’re douchebags, not cool, fun guys who add value to their social world, and they don’t tend to do well with women.
The most toxic misunderstanding of social proof comes from the claim that you have to be a dominant “alpha male” to be attractive to women. This bullshit idea has been propagated through male culture because the pickup-artist community and the manosphere wildly misunderstood how human evolution worked.
It’s true that when gorillas mate, there’s a dominant alpha male who really does monopolize a local territory and the females who forage there. It’s true that dominant baboons act like selfish sexual despots.
But humans are different. We evolved in much larger, multimale, multifemale groups where there is not just one dominant alpha male. Instead, human males differed in all kinds of ways—formidability, dominance, respect, status, prestige, fame, trustworthiness, and influence—in different domains of life, at different points in their life spans.
Almost all hunter-gatherer societies are pretty egalitarian, with consensus-based decision making, and any pretentious dude who tries to become a bossy alpha male quickly gets mocked and ostracized. This leads to shame, guilt, and depression. And no women.
Dominance means you use aggressiveness to take advantage of others, whereas prestige means people respect you for being useful and knowledgeable. It’s prestigious men, not dominant men, who achieve higher reproductive success in tribal societies. Thus, modern social proof is more about having popularity, status, and prestige than trying to act like an alpha male.
So ignore all the bullshit advice that you have to “become an alpha” to get women, that if you just get fierce, domineering, and exploitative, everyone will love you and the world will be yours. That advice is totally ineffective and wrong.
Being known in your group (popular), attracting attention by delivering value (high-status), and provoking respect (prestigious) within your social group are the core of social proofs in our species, so that’s what you should focus on.
Dominance is a highly concentrated, sexually edgy spice that you can sprinkle onto your social proof; it should never be the main ingredient. Offering a woman nothing more than dominance is like challenging her to eat a spoonful of pure cinnamon—she might give it a shot, but she’ll gag and cry in the end.
WHY WOMEN CARE ABOUT SOCIAL PROOF
Social proof is at the heart of the difference between high-status and low-status males. It lets a woman see other people associating with you, being friends with you, reacting to you, and vouching for you. It’s a way for you to prove your effectiveness not at one particular trait or skill but in the entire rich tapestry of human relationships writ large.
In fact, your social proof is really just the answer to one key question: does this guy add value to people’s lives? If she can see that other people like you and appreciate the value you add to their lives, it makes it easier for her to like you too and to expect you’ll add value to hers, especially at the genetic, partnership, and fatherhood levels.
In prehistory, a man’s ability to get along with other men was crucial to his success in cooperative hunting of big game. Social outcasts just couldn’t bring home the bacon. The same holds true today: it’s very hard to make a good living as an introverted hermit, since economic success still depends heavily on social networks and getting along well with coworkers, bosses, mentors, investors, customers, clients, and fans. A guy with good social skills is much more likely to deliver useful resources to a woman and to their relationship.
In this way, social proof is a reflection of your mental health—more friends = less crazy—and there is strong heritability for mental disorders that interfere with these social relationships. There’s moderate heritability for most social traits that have been studied, including trust, cooperation, social network structure, loneliness, quality of friendships, extroversion, entrepreneurship, and status. Choosing a guy with good popularity and prestige offers a woman some reassurance that he’s not a flaming psychopath or a suicidal depressive and therefore probably won’t be passing on these kinds of mental disorders to her kids.
A man’s friendships also testify to his ability to protect himself and his mate from aggressive threats. Male primates form friendships based on who would make a good long-term ally in the event of in-group aggression. Similarly, male humans automatically associate mating effort with violent interindividual competition and possible intergroup warfare, so they intuitively rank their friends’ importance largely on the basis of how useful they’d be as allies in a potential fight.
Not surprisingly, women instinctively prefer guys who are part of an effective protection force, like cops or soldiers. And when competing against other groups for territory, food, and other resources, any male who increases group efficiency and strength would be valuable to everyone in the group, including women. So, women naturally prefer guys who make groups work better—as manifested in good leadership, teamwork, conflict resolution, or even as a great host for a party.
If you have a broad, deep, long-standing social network, you must be fairly kind and caring, because only caring people (as opposed to narcissists and psychopaths) have the patience and empathy to build deep, close, long-lasting friendships. Women seeking boyfriends want many of the same traits that your oldest friends value: generosity, loyalty, and reliability. And since long-term sexual relationships require the same mutual responsiveness and suppression of both selfishness and wary self-protectiveness that successful friendships demand, your good friendships predict good mateships and good parental relationships.
If you have even two or three truly close friends, you’re well ahead of the game compared to most guys, and women will respond. Having a solid reputation with a few great longtime friends can serve as significantly reassuring social proof to a woman about your qualities because it means you’ve consistently invested in other people’s well-being, and you’re also likely to do that for your partner and your children.
Thus, if a guy merits widespread respect (e.g., positive gossip, a reputation for altruism, or a reputation for punishing cheats), a woman can be pretty confident that he scores well on most of the traits that matter for her and your future children. Conversely, guys with poor physical health, poor mental health, low intelligence, poor willpower, low empathy, or low formidability tend to have bad reputations because they impose lots of costs and don’t offer many benefits in a group.
IMPROVE YOUR SOCIAL PROOF
The importance of social proof to your mating life speaks to the importance of improving it. Popularity and prestige are not chia pets, however. They don’t come in a box, and they don’t grow overnight if you smear a bunch of shit on them. Instead, you have to develop them over time. There are things you can do in the next few weeks and next few months to spur them along.
In the Next Few Weeks
In the short run, improving your social proof boils down to organizing, facilitating, and improving your social interactions with people. You can do all of these things right now, starting today.
Focus on Your Interactions: When you’re around people, put more effort into eye contact, warmth, active listening, conversation, and other basic social skills. Don’t just do this with women; do it with everyone. Make it a habit. The same social skills work with your male friends and colleagues, and they’ll respond by showing you more respect and warmth.
Project Confidence: As we saw in the confidence chapter, your sexual confidence reflects your recent mating success. Well, your social confidence reflects your recent social success. This means that social confidence is an important form of social proof. Projecting confidence—without being arrogant or overbearing—will help you seem far more socially attractive to both men and women.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to put yourself in situations where your particular strengths, virtues, skills, and expertise are highly valued by others. If you’re good at distance running, join a running club, and you’ll build both social proof and confidence. If you love food and know a lot about it, take a cooking class. Your passion and competence in those areas make it easier to project confidence around the other people in the club or class. And guess who likes running and cooking classes: pretty women.
Have Meals with People: Speaking of food, this is very simple, but it works very well. Sharing food helps strengthen social relationships in all primates. Having meals with people is a more instinctively compelling and relaxing way to bond with them than just meeting for drinks or activities, so whenever possible, involve food in your social gatherings. In the human mind, food sharing with a bunch of people automatically codes as “We are now in the same tribe; we are safe, familiar, and trusted.”
Happy hours are awesome, but sharing a sit-down meal at a restaurant with your running club forces you to sit near people that share your interests. It helps you practice eye contact, active listening, and conversation. All these things build extroversion and display social proof.
In the Next Few Months
In the long run, improving your social proof boils down to one thing: making good friends. Remember though, developing a great social circle isn’t just about getting women to like you; it’s about improving all aspects of your life.
Join Groups and Classes That Help You Learn Social Skills: If your social skills are lacking, or even if they are just OK, you should invest in improving them. You’ll benefit from the friends you make, the women you meet, and the social skills you learn in improv comedy classes, acting classes, public-speaking classes, and any other activities that teach you how to talk, listen, and command attention.
Take Social Jobs: Especially when you are young, you should pick jobs that force you to learn better social skills. Anything in sales, service, retail, tourism, or teaching can build your social intelligence and expand your social network. Almost any job in a mall builds social skills. Teaching English as a second language does too. Bartending especially does.
All of these jobs require interacting with lots of different people, over and over again, all day long. These jobs might not pay well, but look at it this way: they pay you to learn valuable social skills rather than you having to pay them for remedial social training. Also, you can meet lots of cool people and lots of single women in these sorts of jobs.
Volunteer: Volunteering is a fantastic way to boost social skills. Doing work in hospitals, mentoring (e.g., Big Brother), or working at an animal shelter allows for hundreds of interactions with people, and you get tons of practice in building all forms of social proof. Furthermore, you can meet lots of single women with hearts of gold at volunteering events.
Use Your Friends to Meet Friends: Your social network can grow quickly if you nurture it and make an effort to get to know friends of friends. This is the whole idea behind LinkedIn, the social media platform for professionals: you can make more work connections if others can see your existing connections and the people who vouch for your capabilities.
You can leverage the same network-growth effect informally. The more friends you have, the more new people you can meet. Your social network of friends, allies, mentors, and supporters grows through a combination of your existing popularity (your current social proof) and your similarity to new potential friends. Some of them might even be women who find you attractive.
Pick Your Roommates Carefully: Choose good housemates, roommates, and neighbors. If you can’t afford your own place and live in a shared apartment or house, make sure you get housemates who add rather than subtract from your social proof. Having roommates that you get along with adds greatly to your life.
This isn’t just a social proof issue either; from a practical perspective the last thing you want to do after a long day at school or work is come home to a house that feels like the Korean demilitarized zone. What ends up happening is you stay in your room, they stay in theirs, no one sees anybody, and you start isolating yourself.
Limit Activities That Isolate You: In modern life, a lot of young guys end up isolating themselves because they get too focused on educational credentialism (studying all the time), migratory careerism (moving all the time for work), individualistic consumerism (shopping all the time), and passive entertainment media (watching TV all the time). This turns them into lonely islands who don’t know their neighbors and don’t engage with local communities. Every hour you spend alone is an hour that you’re failing to build your social skills, your social network, and your social proof.
If you spend all your spare time in World of Warcraft slaying monsters and messaging with your raid team, you’ll feed your brain plenty of cues that you’re dominant and popular, but you won’t build any social skills that you can show to women—much less that they care about. Of course, gaming is fun. It’s specifically designed to provide as much addictive fun as you can possibly have through a computer! But if you also care about getting laid, limit gaming to a few hours a week.
Use Social Media Intelligently: Having a lot of Facebook friends or Twitter followers gives social proof that you’re interesting and popular, and a moderate amount of social media use can make you happier. College students attribute the highest social attractiveness and physical attractiveness to people who have about three hundred friends and attribute the highest extroversion if you have about five hundred; but above that, you look desperate, and your social status drops.
So it’s worth building a Facebook profile that showcases your life story, interests, background, and enthusiasms. But once you connect with your real friends and family, don’t become addicted to FB. It’s a tool to facilitate your life, not what your life is about.
DISPLAY YOUR SOCIAL PROOF
OK, OK, you get it already. Status, popularity, and prestige are important. The question now is, How do you reliably display those things?
The answer is, you already do. You display your social proof with everything you do in public, in any social setting.
Eating lunch at a table full of people in the school cafeteria? Going out to the bar for happy hour with coworkers? Hanging out after class? Those are all opportunities to display your positive social traits. Where you sit, whether you’re alone, who you sit with, how much you talk with them—everything testifies to your social proof, for better or worse, to every woman who’s watching and to every woman they gossip with.
We won’t flood you with an exhaustive list of every possible social-proof scenario; we’ll focus on the most basic, reliable, effective ways to display social proof in ordinary life, in ways that boost your attractiveness to most women.
Be Outgoing
Women are attracted to extroversion because it predicts all sorts of positive traits—being friendly, talkative, assertive, funny, cooperative, and professionally successful. Extroversion is also one of the easiest traits for women to judge accurately: from face-to-face interaction, short emails, text samples from blogs, and even photos (after just .05 seconds of exposure).
But being outgoing doesn’t mean you have to be the life of the party, swinging from chandeliers, dive-bombing keg stands, and floating from group to group like a social butterfly. Any one of those things can be a struggle for the introverts among you; and that’s perfectly fine, because more often than not all they show is that you’re a hyperactive maniac who can’t hold a conversation.
At the other extreme, the loner in the corner, making love to his drink while staring furtively at women over the rim of the Solo cup, has “Stranger Danger” written all over him. Best to find a middle ground.
The good news is that even if you’re not particularly extroverted, you can fake it. All that being outgoing really requires from a mating perspective is some basic human engagement: a warm smile, inviting eye contact, strong open posture, acknowledging her with words like “hello” and “how are you?” instead of the guy head nod or short bus wave. A woman wants to know that you are safe, accepted, and effective in your social environment.
Have Friends
You don’t need a lot of them; in fact three great longtime friends are better than three hundred casual acquaintances. But you need to have them, and you need to spend time with them out in the world where women can see you (and you can meet the women), because having friends is worthless as social proof unless you’re with them and you talk about them.
Being friends on 4chan and Xbox is great for entertainment value and even for your own version of male bonding, but it is completely ineffective in the mating game. If you want to display social fitness, prove that you’re social by spending time in public with people who like you, and do cool things with them that are worth talking about later on dates: going on trips, playing sports, fixing and building things, blowing shit up (OK, maybe not that); you get the idea.
Hang Out with Women
Novelist Milan Kundera wrote, “One of life’s great secrets: women don’t look for handsome men, they look for men with beautiful women.” This kind of “mate choice copying” is a big part of social proof in the mating game. It is also a good reason why you shouldn’t fear being “friend-zoned” by women. Hanging out in public with an interesting female friend automatically makes you more attractive to every other woman. The easiest way to get more comfortable talking with women you want to sleep with is to spend a lot of time talking with female friends you don’t want to sleep with.
Make Your Friends Part of Your Dating Life
Too many guys build a stupid firewall between their dating lives and their social lives. They worry that a woman might not like their friends and their friends might not like the woman they’re seeing, so they keep them separate way too long.
That’s a mistake, because to a woman, life is more social than physical. Your life isn’t just your apartment; it’s your social circle and your family. If you invite a woman into your bed but exclude her from your social network—your real, actual life that she knows matters to you—then she will assume you are not serious about her (i.e., you’re trying to seduce and abandon her) or that you’re ashamed of her (i.e., you’re trying to seduce and abandon her without anyone knowing).
If you have quality friends who actually like you, they can carry a huge amount of the courtship burden on your behalf; you just have to put them in the same room as your date. She will ask them about you, and they will answer, probably in more positive terms than you realize. Although good male friends constantly bust each other’s balls as a way to create camaraderie and protect against alpha-male arrogance within the group, they don’t do it when you’re not there (that’s called shit-talking), and they definitely don’t do it with women you like (that’s called cock-blocking). They will paint a glowing picture of you and praise you in ways that you couldn’t praise yourself without sounding like an egomaniac. And the positive traits that a woman perceives in your friends will rub off on you through a social halo effect.
We’ve emphasized that you tend to become the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Women intuitively understand this. So, if your five friends are smart, you’ll seem smarter. If they’re funny, you’ll seem funnier. The sooner you introduce her to some of your friends, and the cooler your friends seem, the more she will see your virtues through their eyes.
Host Parties and Organize Events
Big social proof comes from arranging and hosting social events—parties, conferences, band practice, anything where groups of people come to your home territory and you show your generosity and leadership. These don’t have to be big to-dos; even small gatherings that you organize are strong signals because they imply that you have enough popularity and prestige to incentivize a group to accept your invitation over all the other things they could do instead—like sleep, or masturbate, or masturbate and then go to sleep.
Guys with no friends don’t host parties. Guys whom nobody respects don’t organize events that are well attended. Pulling together a study group that is regularly attended, hosting an annual Halloween party, or acting as captain of your intramural team all display a degree of status and effectiveness that is attractive to women.
Go on Group Dates
The traditional American date—taking a woman out, one-on-one—is a great way for two people to get to know each other. You have a large, dedicated chunk of time to display your courtship ability, allowing direct verbal and nonverbal signaling and assessment. It’s like a pair of chimps going off into the forest by themselves for private canoodling. And it’s much easier for introverts, guys without a lot of friends, and guys who are really strong on verbal courtship.
But in the last several years, group dates (today’s version of prehistoric young folks socializing around the campfire) have gotten much more popular, and rightfully so, because they are more natural and productive in many ways. They allow a woman to see how you thrive in a mixed-sex clannish group—how much your male friends respect you, how good you are at coordinating and communicating with them, and whether other females are interested in you.
Group dates with your friends get you the mating benefits of being a popular, prestigious part of a successful social group; the opportunity to split off like a couple of safari-loving chimps will arise at some point, and hopefully your “forest” isn’t a bar bathroom.
Play Team Sports and Join Clubs
Team sports are just a more organized version of group dates where the game happens to be something other than mating—at least explicitly. If you’re on any kind of team or in any kind of sports clubs (skiing, hiking, etc.), your participation in those groups provides women with powerful social proof of your extroversion, popularity, prestige, and leadership.
It doesn’t matter if they’re in the stands watching or on the field playing with you. High school women fall for the varsity quarterback because he gives the most conspicuous social proof of his leadership ability, under brutally competitive conditions, in a highly valued activity.
Adopt a Pet
The more sociable pets, such as dogs, can give unconditional love, attention, and respect to their masters. So, you can get some free social proof just by having a dog that loves you.
DO NOT get a dog just as a social proof accessory; dogs are intelligent, sensitive creatures that require care and attention. But if you’re on the fence about whether to get a dog, it’s worth knowing that the time and attention that you invest in caring for a dog are exactly what make a dog’s love a strong form of social proof in a woman’s eyes. A socially careless and unreliable man can’t earn a dog’s love and respect, so an adoring Border Collie says to any woman in the dog park, “This guy’s a keeper.”
Takeaways
• Social proof is not superficial. Women can get valuable intelligence about what kind of guy you are by seeing how other people interact with you. If you add value to their lives, you’ll have probably accumulated some fame, popularity, dominance, status, influence, and/or prestige. Each is a reliable signal that you could probably add value to a woman’s life too. Social proof also reflects many important heritable traits, good partner traits, and good dad traits.
• Don’t worry about the unattainable, irrelevant, or repulsive forms of social proof like fame, wealth, or class. They are not the most efficient ways to attract women. Don’t assume that only dominant alpha males are attractive to women—dominance is a sexual spice for private play, not the main ingredient in your public social proof.
• You might think you have the best individual traits in the world, but if you’ve never leveraged them into a good set of friends and a good social reputation, a woman can’t trust that they’re actually effective in real life, which means real social life.
• To display social proof more effectively, practice being warm and outgoing, cultivate friendships with both sexes, host social events, integrate friends into your dating life, join sports teams and clubs, and take care of a pet.
• To improve your social proofs over the next few weeks and months, put more effort into your social interactions, project confidence, share meals, join groups and classes that teach social skills, take social jobs, do volunteer work, use your friends to meet new friends, find better housemates, reduce socially isolating activities, and use social media intelligently.