Status hierarchies dampen conflict by limiting cross-group comparisons, yet cannot explain rapid social change.

Evidence

It could be argued that only conflicts of interest perceived as such create hostility. This requires that groups must compare their respective situations. And, according to some views, it is only relatively similar groups that engage in mutual comparisons; therefore, many forms of status differences will reduce perceived similarity (see Festinger, 1954; Kidder & Stewart, 1975). It follows that status systems may reduce social conflict by restricting the range of meaningful comparisons available to any given group. This hypothesis may be a useful tool to account for some of the determinants of social stability; but if it is taken to its logical conclusion, it can account for no more than that. It fails to account for social change (in the sense of changes in the mutual relations, behavior, and attitudes of large-scale human groups that have been distinctly different in status in the past), particularly when the processes of change become very rapid. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2695

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely dense, two-sided claim: status systems reduce conflict by constraining comparison, but this very mechanism is self-limiting and cannot account for change — a paradigm the reader could sit with.
• ADDENDUM: Relates to ‘On Sacrifice’: the stability of stratified societies purchased at the cost of subordinate self-esteem echoes how ritual sacrifice stabilized stratified social orders.
• XREF: connects to: Quiescent subordinate groups show less ethnocentrism until questioning their low-status identity reignites resource conflict. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 2698; Status now fragments into group-specific capitals even as consumption failure still marks inferiority — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 159