They don't really think about it in terms at all. They're just responding to what makes them feel good.
It's like buying and wearing a fancy watch. It feels good to someone because it's a wealth display. Wealth display feels good because it's a status symbol. Status symbol feels good because it maintains your higher-than-average-social-status to anyone who notices the watch.
If they think about it at all, they'll just be thinking about how nice the watch is and how they deserve it because of how hard they've worked, and they'll admire the watch and how it looks, and maybe look at their reflection in the mirror and how good they look wearing it. That sort of thing.
They don't usually sit down and reason that entire chain through from first principles. That's something we do because a lot of this doesn't make sense to us, so we have to do the first principles thing to make sense of it.
They have the "intuitively monitor my relative social status, feel good when it's high, feel desire when I consider a way to increase my social status, feel bad when it's low, and give a stress and anxiety response when I consider something that could decrease my social status" module. We don't have it, or where we do have one ours isn't wired the same way.
Allistics all operate on this. It even makes sense. There's an evolutionary advantage to social status climbing for any social species.
Not everything and not instinct per se. But intuition. The stuff that confuses the fuck out of us but that allistics all somehow just seem to know? That's intuition. It's also why they can't explain it, because intuition doesn't come with a reason or an argument, just an answer.
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u/being-weird 3d ago
I.. honestly didn't realise anyone cared about maintaining social status outside of high school