The illusion of ‘prestige’
We often have a tendency to mistake the appearance of things for their reality. ‘Prestige’ is meant to be an indicator of quality, and we gravitate to associate ourselves with it — people, items, institutions or jobs with superior social status. This tendency has given rise to the whole area of ‘branding’ within marketing, in which strategies are designed to lend the allure or prestige to things without attending to their quality. ‘Brand managers’ design the look and feel of people, products and institutions to give then an aura and emotional cum spiritual appeal. The appearance of things becomes more relevant than their qualities.
The Overcoming Bias blog has an interesting series of postings on the deceptive power of ‘prestige’. People often choose to associate themselves with prestige, even when it is not in their best interests to do so. I found the most interesting example to be the influence of macro-economists with prestigious positions on public policy:
It turns out that many macro economists frequently forecast future macro events. Furthermore, many places keep standardized track records of such forecasts, records that can be compared for accuracy; we can compare the accuracy of such folks! Isn’t that an ideal basis on which to decide who to believe?
Alas, it turns out that there is almost no overlap between the macro-economists who are considered the most prestigious and those who even publish forecasts. Politicians and reporters show little interest in the policy advice of those with the most accurate published forecasts; interest is overwhelmingly in those with prestigious positions.
Very true. While i was choosing my university, i was shocked between to see big differences between the University Rankings according to prestige, and those according to quality.
University rankings *are* the prestige. But rankings are often made on the basis of research production, which doesn’t correlate with the quality of undergraduate teaching. Many students choose to attend universities for their undergraduate degrees based on university ‘ranking’ when this may not be an appropriate proxy value for quality.