Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it was always useless in the modern world -- as you say it's often effective. After all, we're still social primates operating in small groups! I think what I was trying to say was rather that to analyse this behaviour purely as "what is the rational reason for this action" gets you less far than looking at it as an emotionally-driven tendency that's driven by the part of our brain that is not the rational-conscious-thought part. Sometimes it's the rational thing to do, sometimes it's something we can construct a rationale for after the fact (our brains are very good at that), and sometimes it's genuinely a bad choice that a perfect rational robot would not make. But whichever of those any particular 'status-seeking' act falls into, I don't think many people are making the choice as a conscious purely reasoned cost-benefit tradeoff.