I'm pasting below an excerpt in my community's manual that talks about the theory of social value. It uses some terms that are defined in earlier chapters and references people/examples from earlier in the book but I think its comprehensible in this form. It goes on to elucidate strategies that effectively maximize social value and if youre interested in reading it lemme know!.

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"Chapter 4 The wingman and a theory of social value

Social value is speculative like a stock.  No one knows objectively how much a stock is worth.  Its worth only as much as people are willing to pay for it.  The price they are willing to pay is based on the perceived worth of that company.  The same with people.  Our self investment definitely gives us value and while you can quantify your net worth or your max bench press or how many of the state capitals you know, when we are engaging socially, we are viewing an aggregate of that person and since that aggregate is so complex, comprised of quantitative and qualitative data, discrete and nondiscrete measurements, known and unknown variables, that we tend to think more subjectively.  And just like the value of a stock whose price is decided by the speculations of a group of people collectively known as a market, a person’s social value is also decided by the group of people he is around – not by some empirical standard.  Its really what people are willing to pay.  They want you to spend your social resources on them.  They perceive your access, your personality as superior.

Ever seen footage of Beatlemania? Hordes of women whipped into a frenzy, reaching and groping at those four lads from Liverpool. They are in a mania, almost out of control. But what is the cause of such hysteria? Well their music is amazing. There’s no question about that. And while I’ve experienced a complex and intense pallet of emotion while listening to them I've never started screaming and crying and set out on foot to chase the band. Are they that handsome? I mean Paul is cute but otherwise these guys aren’t models. Are they rich? Not yet. No what we are witnessing is a runaway social value positive feedback loop. Allow me to explain.

A theory of social value

Have you ever been in the room with someone like Louis? Perhaps out to dinner with a group of friends? What do you notice? If you are astute you’ll pick up on how hungry people are for Louis’s attention. “Louis, Louis,” they’ll yell across the table in an attempt to get his attention. They’ll tap his shoulder even though he is in the middle of a private aside with someone else. When Lou tells a joke people laugh their asses off. If someone else told the joke even in the same way they wouldn’t have gotten as warm a response. People ask Lou’s opinion on matters and offer to do him favors. At a party Louis has to politely decline offer after offer from people wanting to be his beer pong partner. Even if Lou isn’t the best player on the court he’s picked first for basketball.

One might say Louis is super popular. And that wouldn’t be incorrect. But more precisely we would say that Louis has a high social value. What’s the difference? That’s a difficult question to answer and the very nature that distinguishes social value is varied and based on imprecise speculation. That is to say that your social value exists in the mind of the person perceiving you. And because everyone’s criteria for judging another’s social value is unique (perhaps they are more impressed by saxophone skills than your business acumen) your social value is necessarily different from person to person. Already it becomes an impossibly challenging task to appeal to every person’s individual tastes not just because you don’t know them but because that person might not even know them! They might tell you that they are more impressed with someone who can speak 5 languages than someone who has gotten the Heisman trophy but how much more? Can you quantify it? And we also can’t guarantee that this person knows themselves well enough for that first hand information to be true. In this sense what type of self investment you choose to engage in is not as important as how vigorously you commit to it.

Trying to gather and use this information becomes a black hole that ultimately proves itself not as useful as we thought it might. It becomes too complex and the sources become so unreliable that it yields few benefits. This is why humans rely on (and many other animals) a different system for signaling and interpreting social value. Instead of rigorously researching each person and measuring how much people respect what a persons does or what respectable skills a person has we instead rely on other people to make those assessments for us. People are very good at picking up even the most subtle of social ques from others. We can identify body language, posture, facial expressions, tone of voice, and a myriad of other indicators of social value. Sometimes we pick up on these ques, make an assessment and aren’t even aware that we did anything at all. It can happen at the most subconscious level. Or it can be very conscious like when someone confesses that they love you.

When calculating a person’s social value we will often observe how other people treat this person. It is usually safe to assume that the group has more information on this person than we do individually and thus their treatment of that person is a good indicator as to his/her social value. After we have gotten a sense of how the group feels about the individual we use that to draw our own valuation. This method has a couple of distinct benefits. The first is that it addresses the information problem I outlined earlier. There’s no way of knowing everyone’s good and bad characteristics and even if you did how would you know how to rate them? Instead we just assume that each person knows a little bit and together the group has a good idea about the value of that particular individual. Instead of doing years and years of research we can make an assessment from just a short group interaction. The other benefit is that you can make that assessment in real time. People and relationships are dynamic. Everything is constantly in flux and today’s Dr. Jekyll could be tomorrow’s Mr. Hyde. You might only interact with someone on the weekends or only in the context of work whereas other's in the group may know that person outside of work and see them in the dreary, humdrum context of weekday mornings. Because the group consensus is more reliable and immediately demonstrable it allows us to make the proper social decisions instantly which is important in case we need to change our demeanor.

The problem with this approach is that it relies on indirect and assumed information. Its a heuristic.
Not only do we not know what other people know, but we don’t know if the things they think they know are even accurate. Nonetheless our fully rational brain was left out of this decision making process long ago. Which brings us back to the Beatles! Clearly the Beatlemaniacs’ reaction was somewhat irrational or at least excessive. But what was at work here? Well when one girl sees another girl crying and screaming for the Beatles this behavior, which would seem ludicrous in any other context all of a sudden becomes socially acceptable. One girl sees another girl signaling the Beatles value and then, in her mind where the Beatles are already pretty awesome, she begins to believe that the band’s social value is so high that it warrants that manic behavior. And then its on to the next girl who wants the Beatles’ attention so bad that she’ll make her behavior even more excessive and unrestrained. This continues on and on in a positive feedback loop that ends in awesome pop music and female urine. We can use this very phenomenon to not only signal our social value but to maximize it as well.

Signaling social value..."