It is often said that you can always tell a millionaire by her shoes. She may dress like a slob in every other respect, but someone from the upper class is bound to have expensive, custom-made footwear. Whether this is true or not, it helps demonstrate the way we Group of answer choices
A) try to "better ourselves" by increasing the amount of cultural capital we possess.
B) allow relative levels of prestige to determine our class status.
C) make split-second judgments about who people are and what social statuses they occupy based on their appearances.
D) surrender to the impersonal forces of the market.

Social status refers to the relative social position that is given to a person by other people in society. This status can be given because of real or imagined differences. Often times, when it's hard to determine what social status a person holds, we resort to social cues that we generally understand can give us that information. In our example, our social cue is that an upper class person will always wear expensive footwear, no matter what else that person might wear, but we don't know for certain if this true or not. This is a clear example of how we often make judgments about other people about their social status, even if we lack accurate information.