What if status competitions are everywhere?
Society for example promotes rankings. Children are a ranked academically world wide. Beauty is ranked in pageants. Intelligence is ranked in IQ tests. Goodness and badness are ranked according to popular sentiment of the behavior of the individual being reviewed.
The concept of social desirability is the idea that most people want to be liked. People tend to want to be socially desirable.
People also tend to want to be physically beautiful for the same reason. To be physically beautiful makes a person socially desirable.
Behaviors adjust to make a person more socially desirable but these behaviors are the result of environmental stimulus.
These environmental stimulus seem to resemble markets. In other words rewards, punishments, signals, costs vs benefits.
In Moral Markets, the profit seeking motive is adapted to behavioral analysis. In other words if Alice seeks to get the maximum amount of social rewards then she will adapt her behaviors according to how much praise she's getting, what kind of social response she's receiving.
Good or Bad is simply the review of the audience. If the world is a stage and everyone is on it then the reviews whether it be by God, or by the state like with China, or by the markets like in the United States. At the end of the day, in a less private more transparent society, all behavior eventually shall be reviewed, and this will create in my prediction a status competition environment.
Social credit is what China has. In China this social credit is generated by the state to measure the goodness or badness of a citizen.
The United States does not have social credit in from the state but instead has social media. Social media and the market for likes. Likes are currency in the sense that it's used to reward desired behavior. Undesirable behaviors are punished also on social media and elsewhere. So the end result is while the United States does not make it explicit, there is still a system where individually privately or perhaps secretly judge and rank each other and then distribute social consequences to those they think deserve it.
Behavior in society is shaped by the reward or incentive structure. This is true in China, in the US, or anywhere. This is true in human or animal society.
Status competition to produce a status ranking could be simply the competition to see who can be the most physically beautiful in the the community, or the competition to see who can be the most good person in the community. Community standards like beauty standards are what form the basis for judging.
References
Winegard, B. M., Winegard, B. M., Geary, D. C., & Clark, C. J. (2018). The Status Competition Model of Cultural Production.