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RichardKennaway comments on The Social Coprocessor Model - Less Wrong
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I have never encountered or heard of this behaviour. I would be rather startled if someone I had just met asked me to buy them a drink. I'd guess they were too poor to get their own (and with all respect to poor people, my interest in pursuing a relationship with them would substantially diminish).
I can understand your explanation, but I would find an opposite explanation just as plausible (they are trying to determine if the cost of a drink is a mere trifle to you, hence buying them one = good).
Is this a culturally specific thing? Where is this action, with this meaning, a standard pattern of behaviour?
Lily Allen has. The relevant section:
Cut to the pub on our last night out,
Man at the bar cos it was his shout,
Clocks this bird and she looks OK,
Caught him looking and she walks his way,
"Alright darling, you gonna buy us a drink then?"
"Err no, but I was thinking of buying one for your friend.
It seems very weird to me that this seems unfamiliar to you. It's a cliche in movies and the like.
It's a cliche in movies but it's actually rare in real life, in my experience, except as a joke.
I just realized that one person's joke is another person's status test, of course.
In bars and clubs in the UK, US and Canada at least.
Never. That could explain it. I don't watch romantic movies either, or any TV.
So, how does the script normally play out?
"No."?
"No, we don't know each other well enough yet?"
"snort Too poor to get your own, are you?"
Ignore or somehow deflect the request and talk about something else?
None of the above?
If I had to guess I'd go with the fourth, but I'm only guessing.
ETA: I don't mind getting the karma, but I'm curious about why I'm getting several upvotes within minutes of posting this.
Well hang on. It isn't that simple. The man buying the woman a drink is more or less the courtship norm. They haven't actually stepped that far out of line by asking for a drink so the way you respond has to be calibrated to their status. If their status isn't that high and it was something of a gutsy move to ask for one, there is nothing wrong with letting them down softly with a "Nope. It isn't anything personal, you seem cool. I just don't buy drinks for women I just met" and you can segue into a conversation about how silly the norm is if you like. If the person has really high status then something more along the lines of lightly mocking them for being a spoiled brat who won't buy their own drinks can go over fine.
Umm, only with someone with whom I was already acquainted and I think the way I phrased it sounds worse than I meant it to sound. Spoiled is a bit much, I meant it to describe the extreme end of the possible responses you were suggesting. My point was more (1) when someone asks you to buy them a drink while they are testing your status they're also putting themselves at risk for rejection. So if your status is fairly equal already, be nice about it. And (2) the greater the initial status differential between you and the other person, the more confident you need to be (which, as I understand it has been well tested, I can anecdotally testify to and which is consistent with dominance hierarchy theory.)
This was not a particularly constructive example to use in the original post, for several reasons.
There are basically two situations that lead to this: First, the other person is interested in you, but is somewhat awkward and uses this as a rather blunt test to measure your interest in them. Second, if person is not interested in you, but sees you as a means of getting a free drink.
As the latter tends to be more likely, and in the former, there are still ways you can show interest without buying them a drink, you should not buy them a drink. However, buying them a drink is not wrong insofar as no unpleasant social consequences result from it (as they might result from, for example, an unflattering comment about a person's weight or appearance). All that happens is you're out $3-10, depending on the bar.
It's also worth noting that with certain people and in certain circumstances, you may actually be seeking someone with the qualities indicated by this request. If I were a rich and not particularly attractive older man, and the subject were a much-younger and attractive woman, this comment may actually suggest we could establish a mutually beneficial relationship. Our response to the request is really a response to the person making the request, and your hypothetical assumes we should a negative response, which is generally but not invariably true. Your description of the
That doesn't cover Mallah's story. I think the free drinks explanation is largely a confabulation by girls who don't know why they do it.
It covers the story up to the point of her not taking the drink. Perhaps she just wanted to see if she could. I agree that getting him to buy the drink may be more significant than actually consuming it. Or it could simply be a way of chastising someone she didn't believe should be talking to her. Or, perhaps, she simply forgot.
For practical purposes, she's not different whether she takes the drink or not. It's still a waste of money. If she didn't forget, it's likely she simply got a kick out of ordering some guy around. Not a situation I anticipated, but certainly deserving the same response as the selfish drinker.
I believe that covers that story perfectly. he approached an attractive woman, who saw him as a sucker who'd buy her an expensive drink, which he did, whereupon she promptly ignored him. If that's not exactly what I said, I don't know what is.
This seems very odd to me. You seem to be suggesting that this is the typical way a socially successful NT responds to being asked for a drink, and that just seems truly, bizarrely wrong to me. Where did you learn this? Is it a PUA thing? I'm not necessarily saying it wouldn't work - it might, in the same way that weird PUA crap like "peacocking" might work, but it definitely isn't normal behavior, even for NTs
I'm confused why you think this is so bizarrely wrong. I mean, yes, some inexperienced guys are easily manipulated by attractive women, but I think that more successful and more experienced people would just make a joke of it, and not allow themselves to be manipulated easily.
And everyone "peacocks" every time they dress for an occasion or buy clothes because they like how they look. That's not weird or bizarre either.
Roko explicitly wrote about using a status-lowering level of teasing.
Part of the problem may be that a lot of play is inhibited attack, and it can be hard to judge just how much of a verbal attack is either intended or received.
I think that the emphasis on status here is misplaced. Here's an analogy:
Imagine that you, dear reader, are very smart, and when you get into conversations about intellectual topics, people almost always say "Wow, you're smart," based on superficial indicators, and seem impressed. Now imagine that you meet someone who reacts differently: they take it for granted that you're smart, and actually try to engage with you intellectually, rather than being awed and amazed by your intellect.
Can you see that your reaction might be very different? You might be more likely to like and be interested in talking to this person, intrigued that they weren't so easily won over, and possibly a little motivated to prove your intelligence to them.
That's what's going on in the example with attractive girls, except with looks and sexuality rather than intelligence. It's less of a "Oh wow you have high status" reaction on the girl's part, and more of "Hey, finally someone who isn't a pushover just cause I'm hot. He might actually be fun to talk to." This is communicated all the time with little things like body language, the way you turn to look at someone, the way you stand, and how you speak. It usually isn't as direct as "Will you buy me a drink?"
Yes, I like this analogy between intellectual interaction and social (status) interaction. Both types of interaction have "I'll push you until you stop me" behavior, that would be considered offensive or attacking if it was manifested in the other form of interaction.
A common mode of interaction for intellectuals is to argue for positions that you aren't sure of in order to figure out if they believe in, or even to argue for positions that they don't believe just to play devil's advocate. These debate styles push against people, expecting them to push back, analogous to the social styles of many neurotypical extraverts.
Just as introverts on the autistic spectrum hate it when neurotypical extraverts try to turn everything into a status game, neurotypical extraverts hate it when autistic spectrum introverts try to turn everything into a debate.
In a group of neurotypical extraverts, saying something like "you're such a dork" to someone else is not necessarily considered rude or an attack. They expect the other person to handle it and fire back. Likewise, in a group of autistic spectrum introverts, saying something like "you're wrong" is not necessarily considered rude or an attack. They expect the other person to be able to handle it, and either defend or concede their position.
Both groups have different norms for showing assertiveness, and an assertiveness display in one group could be considered an attack if it was performed in the other group.
Good point about "you're wrong," which has unnerved me a few times. Also, especially on this site: "you're unethical" or "that's unethical."
It just runs counter to my own experience and observation. Deflecting the request with a joke would be an effective way to avoid getting played for free drinks, if you think that's what's going on, or of politely declining if you're just not interested, but it doesn't seem like a generally effective, or commonly practiced, method of actually parlaying the interaction into a "score" - not unless you happen to be dealing with the kind of person who's attracted to assholes. My impression is that these kind of PUA style techniques are geared towards successfully picking up people with low self esteem. That may work, but I think it's a mistake to draw conclusions from that about "normal" social interaction.
I am very confused by this comment. Who are you talking about as the "asshole" in this scenario? I think you may be misunderstanding it. The idea is that two people are talking and flirting, and the girl asks the guy for something (like a drink, but it could be anything: taking a picture, helping her with something) at which point the guy teases her about it. I'm not seeing anything about low self esteem here.
The guy who says "no" when, in the middle of flirting, a girl asks for a drink. This just doesn't happen IRL unless the guy is intentionally trying to shut down the interaction.
Could you explain your basis for this claim a little more?
I guess the kind of person who is not attracted to assholes wouldn't ask a stranger for a drink in the first place, would they?
Decline, but the conversation would never have got that far anyway, and isn't going to get any further. I'm not very good at maintaining a conversation, but when I deliberately put out the "please shut up and go away" vibes it has no chance. :-)
I'm not sure what this has to do with the original scenario, where the two people are still trying to assess each other. Or what status has to do with those examples.
The way we respond to others has a lot more to it than that. If I'm approached by someone of the wrong sexual orientation for me, then my declining their advances has nothing to do with status. The same with 15-year-old girls (the only example in the original version of your comment). My response to these people will be whatever is necessary to get them to give up on the sexual advances. This does not strike me as a useful response to someone that I would like to get together with.
Perhaps the idea you are trying to get across is that you should begin by trying to put the other person off, but (if you still want to get together with them) take care not to do so too effectively? I am familiar with the custom of ritually refusing a gift before accepting it -- is this something similar?
Are you speaking from personal experience or is this something you have only worked out on paper?
On a very narrow and self-selecting sample, i.e. people who show up at bars and clubs with the express intention of getting "picked up"
I would call that simply value. If their status matters to me, it is part of their value to me; if it does not, it is irrelevant.
Tested by you? Ok, maybe that's too personal a question, but I'm aware in general terms of the PUA stuff, and I have only a limited interest in soup of the soup.
Sorry, what is "NT"? I read this blog often enough that I feel like I should know, but I don't.
"Neurotypical" - in context, not being significantly autistic.
Thank you.
I completely understand the general idea here, I just think the drink-buying thing is a bad example. In my experience, refusal to buy a drink for someone who's flirting with you doesn't send the signal "you're X statusvalue lower than me", it sends the signal "I'm not interested in playing this game at all"
I think you're misunderstanding the "refusal." It's not a "No, go away," it's more like "you buy me one first, I'm cuter" said playfully.
I've never understood why people think that's effective.
What good does it do to act like you're higher status if you're not? You can't change your face or your income by signaling. Is everybody really so gullible?
And also -- I've not spent a huge amount of time in bars, but I've never seen anyone ask a stranger for a drink.
Income and looks are only one component of status. Other components are determined by signaling and other forms of implicit communication in actual interactions. So, merely acting like you are high status will go a long way to convince people that you are, as long as you aren't giving off contradictory low status signals also.
One of the reason that people play status games (of which "buy me a drink" often is), is because there is a margin of error in status perception, and poking the other person with a status ploy is a way to confirm or disconfirm your initial impression of their status. If you believe that you are higher status that someone, and you attempt a successful status grab that they submit to, then it confirms that you are higher status.
As I've hypothesized, the way normal people tend to interact (or at least, a typical mode for certain types of extraverts to interact) is to constantly bump up against each other socially in mini-dominance battles and figure out the pecking order by seeing who can away with what against who.
This form of interaction used to be rather alien to me, and I would interpret it as an affront (which is how RichardKennaway seems to interpret it), but Ben Kovitz's weird psychology wiki gave me some ideas to help understand it.
From an article on negotiation:
From another negotation article:
Status is partly a process of empirical discovery. It is decided through negotiation. People with different phenotypes approach this negotiation in different ways. Some people negotiate by acting lower in status to everyone. Some people negotiate by acting equal in status to everyone. Some people (such as neurotypical extraverts) negotiate by acting higher in status to everyone. Non-neurotypicals are simply unaware of this negotiation.
To people like us, neurotypical socially-dominant extraverts will seem annoying with their constant status grabs. But they aren't necessarily trying to be jerks, they are just interacting the only way they know how. They are attempting to negotiate with you, they just begin the negotiation by driving a hard bargain. They may assume that you are like them, and expect you to stand up for yourself and give them a counter-offer back of a different status relationship, where instead of them being on top, you two are equals, or you are on top. They may even want you prove that you are higher status, and their test is an opportunity for you to do so. They will expect you to negotiate yourself, by either submitting, or attempting to fight back; what they won't be able to understand is someone who doesn't even participate in this sort of negotiation in the first place.
I've heard this before, but framed as 'Ask Culture meets Guess Culture'.
Even guess cultures have that distinction; look up the etymology of otaku sometime.
Yep. And depending on the way you opt out of the negotiation, you may be perceived as either very low self-esteem, or as an arrogant bastard.
The latter category (which I personally have been categorized as a lot) tends to happen when you assume that all people are supposed to be equal, dammit, and refuse to give ground to anything that isn't Right with a capital R. This results in the problem of causing others to have to lose face when you win... and people don't like it.
(Later in life, I've realized that it generally works better to arrange things so that other people can receive status strokes by siding with you, and they then tend to return the strokes.)
Status isn't something you have, it's something you do.
As long as we're piling on anecdotes, I've asked folks for drinks on numerous occasions. And the bartender at a club I frequented back in the day used to give me my drinks for free.
I voted you up because I wanted to attract attention to your comment, because I also wanted the questions contained within answered as well.
I can confirm that this does happen at least sometimes (USA). I was at a bar, and I approached a woman who is probably considered attractive by many (skinny, bottle blonde) and started talking to her. She soon asked me to buy her a drink. Being not well versed in such matters, I agreed, and asked her what she wanted. She named an expensive wine, which I agreed to get her a glass of. She largely ignored me thereafter, and didn't even bother taking the drink!
(I did obtain some measure of revenge later that night by spanking her rear end hard, though I do not advise doing such things. She was not amused and her brother threatened me, though as I had apologized, that was the end of it. She did tell some other lies so I don't know if she is neurotypical; my impression was that she was well below average in morality, being a spoiled brat.)
In European bars or nightclubs, if (relatively) attractive girls ask strangers for drinks or dishes, then it typically means they are doing it professionally.
There is even a special phrase "consume girl" meaning that the girl's job is to lure clueless customers into buying expensive drinks for them for a cut of the profit. The surest sign of being a "consume girl" is that they typically don't consume what they ask for.
It's all about money, and has nothing to do with social games, whatsoever. They are not spoiled brats, but trained for this job.
I am not sure how common is this "profession" in the US, but in Europe it's relatively common.
Sounds like Cabaret Hostesses in Japan. They have male counterparts, too, but the female variety is a lot more common.
It's common in Korea--they call them "juicy girls" (from the korean word for "please," roughly "juseo"). I've never seen it here in the US. I don't know why it doesn't exist in the US, the only other slightly relevant and consistent difference I can think of is the cultural attitudes toward tipping.
Well, there is this...
In the US the equivalent job is selling people VIP tables for bottle service.
I've heard of such in the US, too, but only in decades-old fiction. I don't know whether it's current practice.
I don’t like to go meta, but this comment and its upvotes (4 at the time I write) are among the more disturbing thing I’ve seen on this site. I have to assume that they reflect voters’ appreciation for a real-life story of a woman asking a man to buy a drink, rather than approval of the use of violence to express displeasure over someone else’s behavior and perceived morality in a social situation.
I’m also surprised that you’re telling this story without expressing any apparent remorse about your behavior, but I guess the upvotes show that you read the LW crowd better than I do.
Correct in my case.
I'm wondering if it's a true story. The part about the drink is conceivable. I'd be surprised if the woman's behavior is at all common,. though.
The violence..... where is there enough privacy at a bar to spank someone?
I didn't get the impression that the spanking was done in privacy.
You think he lied about the story?
If it wasn't done in privacy, then I understand my culture less than I thought.
Would people just let a man grabbing a woman and spanking her happen? No one calls the police? There's no bouncer?
If the glass of wine was expensive, this isn't an extremely sleazy bar, if that matters.
The story is so far off from my priors of how people behave that I think the possibility that it isn't true should be considered.
Probably.
Bouncers are a way to get around the bystander effect.
Hey, I never thought of that— having a designated person to come over and break up a fight is probably more valuable than a naive analysis would reckon, not even counting the other security benefits.
He didn't say "grabbing", and in context, I'd guess that by "spanking" he meant a single swat to the buttocks.
It says more that you don't get out much, or aren't very observant when you do. I don't get out much, and never got out much, even during the brief few years when I was both single and of age, and such a story as this one is so utterly mundane and commonplace in its elements as to seem scarcely worthy of comment in the first place.
Most guys that protest such behavior from women make some other form of scene than swatting, of course, and most simply whine to their buddies or suffer in silence rather than make a scene at all. But apart from that, it's an utterly ordinary story, and observable many, many times a night in any "meet market" where the women go to dance and drink, funded by deluded potential suitors.
I agree that "spanking" is ambiguous, and a single hit would be plausible.
It's true that I don't get out much in that sense-- I don't like loud noise (as in really hate it) or drunk people.
huh?
(emphasis added)
Read in the context of the entire thread, I take this as a non-apology apology, not an expression of remorse or contrition. In the thread, Mallah continued to take the position that the woman “deserved” the spanking, and it appears to me that the apology was made in order to avoid future confrontation/trouble, not remorse. Moreover, Mallah also commented:
Remorse involves some genuine feeling of regret that one's actions had been wrong in some ethical or moral sense, not merely reconsideration because they had been ill-advised in a a practical sense.
You assaulted her because she asked for an expensive drink, you gave her the drink, and then she ignored you?
You say you don't recommend what you did, but I'm curious about why, considering that you seem to think she deserved it.
It was a single swat to the buttocks, done in full sight of everyone. There was other ass-spanking going on, between people who knew each other - done as a joke - so in context it was not so unusual. I would not have done it outside of that context, nor would I have done it if my inhibitions had not been lowered by alcohol; nor would I do it again even if they are.
Yes, she deserved it!
It was a mistake. Why? It exposed me to more risk than was worthwhile, and while I might have hoped that (aside from simple punishment) it would teach her the lesson that she ought to follow the Golden Rule, or at least should not pull the same tricks on guys, in retrospect it was unlikely to do so.
Other people (that I have talked to) seem to be divided on whether it was a good thing to do or not.
[Note: this is going to sound at first like PUA advice, but is actually about general differences between the socially-typical and atypical in the sending and receiving of "status play" signals, using the current situation as an example.]
I don't know about "good", but for it to be "useful" you would've needed to do it first. (E.g. Her: "Buy me a drink" You: "Sure, now bend over." Her: "What?" "I said bend over, I'm going to spank your spoiled [add playful invective to taste].")
Of course, that won't work if you are actually offended. You have to be genuinely amused, and clearly speaking so as to amuse yourself, rather than being argumentative, judgmental, condescending, critical, or any other such thing.
This is a common failure mode for those of us with low-powered or faulty social coprocessors -- we take offense to things that more-normal individuals interpret as playful status competition, and resist taking similar actions because we interpret them as things that we would only do if we were angry.
In a way, it's like cats and dogs -- the dog wags its tail to signal "I'm not really attacking you, I'm just playing", while the cat waves its tail to mean, "you are about to die if you come any closer". Normal people are dogs, geeks are cats, and if you want to play with the dogs, you have to learn to bark, wag, and play-bite. Otherwise, they think you're a touchy psycho who needs to loosen up and not take everything so seriously. (Not unlike the way dogs may end up learning to avoid the cats in a shared household, if they interpret the cats as weirdly anti-social pack members.)
Genuine creeps and assholes are a third breed altogether: they're the ones who verbally say they're just playing, while in fact they are not playing or joking at all, and are often downright scary.
And their existence kept me from understanding how things worked more quickly, because normal people learn not to play-bite you if you bare your claws or hide under the couch in response ! So, it didn't occur to me that all the normal people had just learned to leave me out of their status play, like a bunch of dogs learning to steer clear of the psycho family cat.
The jerks, on the other hand, like to bait cats, because we're easy to provoke a reaction from. (Most of the "dogs" just frown at the asshole and get on with their day, so the jerk doesn't get any fun.)
So now, if you're a "cat", you learn that only jerks do these things.
And of course, you're utterly and completely wrong, but have little opportunity to discover and correct the problem on your own. And even if you learn how to fake polite socialization, you won't be entirely comfortable running with the dogs, nor they you, since the moment they actually try to "play" with you, you act all weird (for a dog, anyway).
That's why, IMO, some PUA convversation is actually a good thing on LW; it's a nice example of a shared bias to get over. The LWers who insist that people aren't really like that, only low [self-esteem, intelligence] girls fall for that stuff, that even if it does work it's "wrong", etc., are in need of some more understanding of how their fellow humans [of either gender] actually operate. Even if their objective isn't to attract dating partners, there are a lot of things in this world that are much harder to get if you can't speak "dog".
tl;dr: Normal people engage in playful dog-like status games with their actual friends and think you're weird when you respond like a cat, figuratively hissing and spitting, or running away to hide under the bed. Yes, even your cool NT friends who tolerate your idiosyncracies -- you're not actually as close to them as you think, because they're always more careful around you than they are around other NTs.
pjeby:
Your cat/dog analogy is very good, but this requires some extra elaboration.
As you say, in regular socializing, this "cat-baiting" behavior is characteristic of jerks and bullies; regular people will typically leave "cats" alone rather than provoke them. However, in male-female interactions in which the woman deems (consciously or not) that the man might have some potential mating value but requires additional assessment, or if she perceives that the man is actively trying to win her favors, she'll typically engage in some "cat-baiting" to test him for undesirable "catlike" traits.
There's nothing surprising there once you really understand what's going on; it's simply a regular way of assessing a potential partner's fitness. Sometimes this "cat-baiting" will be subtle and entirely unremarkable to the man, but sometimes it has the form of harsh and unpleasant shit-tests which can leave him angry and hurt, and which go far into the jerk territory by the standards of regular socializing. The latter will happen especially if the woman generally imposes high standards, or if the man looks like a poor prospect who could redeem himself only with some amazing bullet-dodging. (Hence guys who give off a "catlike" vibe often get the worst of it.)
For many guys, understanding this would, at the very least, save them a lot of pointless anger in situations like the one described above by Mallah.
Thank you, that was a very helpful explanation for me. It's posts like these that make me thankful you contribute here, even as we've had our differences in the past.
Reading it, I thnk I can interpret a past experience in a new light, in which I was, long ago, asked to leave a large NT-dominated club, for (what seemed like) kafkaesque reasons which were criticisms of my behavior they couldn't rationally justify. In particular, how I was told that far more people had a negative reaction to me than I had ever interacted with. I had heard third-hand (though from a trusted source) that it was because someone passed around a false, serious accusation that they never told me about.
But looking back, the explanation that there was a dog/cat expectation barrier makes a lot of sense of the way they treated me, which was not just vicious, but bizarre. (I think that NTs would agree that some my treatment was wrong, even from an NT perspective, but believe that the my reaction to it escalated the conflict, drawing out my different behavior.)
PS: Whoever voted the parent down, I request an explanation.
Am I correct in thinking that sensitivity to a downvote like this is "cat" like?
No. As I keep pointing out, there is a group of posters on LW strongly opposed to this frank discussion of the real governing factors behind sociality, such as those discovered by the PUA community. We need to have a similarly open discussion of what drives people who want to keep such helpful comments as pjeby's above from being made.
Since I'm not out to punish the comment, or feel threatened by it, but just want to understand the various positions regarding this issue, it is not "cat like".
It may be a moot point though, as I may have been mistaken in thinking that anyone downvoted pjeby's comment; I had voted it up, then shortly after saw it at zero. I inferred that someone must have downvoted and canceled my vote, but given the quirks we've seen with the codebase, there's a good chance it may have just been a case of the site briefly not reflecting my vote, meaning it's still possible no one voted it down.
Really great post. I can definitely see some "cat" like tendencies in myself that I'd like to know how to change more, like getting irritated at things I see as rude. Any specific ideas on how to change that, or recognize when I'm overreacting, and when I need to speak up so as not to let people get away with treating me badly?
I would like to see more discussion of this on LW, as it applies across the board to all kinds of interactions, and I think it'd be very useful.
Interesting theory-- as a catlike person, I'm passing it around to see if it makes sense to a range of people.
I suspect that a lot of social difficulty is caused by dog types who don't know how to dial it down with cats, or are so in love with their usual behavior that they feel they shouldn't have to. They aren't jerks (those who enjoy tormenting cats), but they can look rather similar.
Interestingly, this metaphor ties in perfectly with another dog/cat metaphor that has geeks as the cats:
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/08/06/on-seeing-like-a-cat/
I think this situation falls pretty squarely into "two wrongs don't make a right" territory. The moral intuition is that a minor social infraction doesn't justify a violent response, even extremely minor violence. Even though you don't say so, perhaps that was a tacit reason for you to acknowledge it as a mistake.
I do sympathize with your frustration at encountering such naked privilege and entitlement on her part, and that you would want some sort of recourse. It's possible that such brattiness would cause her trouble in her future relationships with men, but that isn't even necessarily true. You can't really get recourse for behavior like this; you just have to shut it down when it appears. I think you've learned that lesson.
It sure was one hell of a low status signal. The worst possible way you can fail a shit test is to get visibly hurt and angry.
As for whether she deserved it, well, if you want to work in the kitchen, better be prepared to stand the heat. Expecting women you hit on to follow the same norms of behavior as your regular buddies and colleagues, and then getting angry when they don't, is like getting into a boxing match and then complaining you've been assaulted.
I don't think I got visibly hurt or angry. In fact, when I did it, I was feeling more tempted than angry. I was in the middle of a conversation with another guy, and her rear appeared nearby, and I couldn't resist.
It made me seem like a jerk, which is bad, but not necessarily low status. Acting without apparent fear of the consequences, even stupidly, is often respected as long as you get away with it.
Another factor is that this was a 'high status' woman. I'm not sure but she might be related to a celebrity. (I didn't know that at the time.) Hence, any story linking me and her may be 'bad publicity' for me but there is the old saying 'there's no such thing as bad publicity'.
But you didn't get away with it.
Also, technically, you acted like a creep, not a jerk. (A jerk acts boldly, a creep is sneaky and opportunistic.)
I wasn't sneaky about it.
That's true only if you manage to maintain the absolute no-apologies attitude. If you had to apologize about it, it's automatically a major fail. (Not trying to put you down, just giving you a realistic perspective.)
I still don’t understand how she “deserved” to have you escalate the encounter with a “hard” physical spanking; nor do I understand how, if you spanked her in a joking context, you would consider it punishment or “some measure of revenge.” From what you’ve said, it doesn’t seem like you were on sufficiently friendly terms with her that the spanking was in fact treated as teasing/joking action; you previously stated that she was not amused by the spanking, her brother threatened you, and you apologized.
I’m certainly not trying to say that her behavior wasn’t worthy of serious disapproval and verbal disparagement. But responding to her poor behavior with physical actions rather than words seems at least equally inappropriate.
Thanks for the explanation.
Indeed, this pattern seems totally strange to me. While on the dating scene, if a woman brazenly asked a man to get her a drink, I would consider it a test to see if he can handle assertiveness. That is, if he is fun and easy-going. If he said no, I would think she could consider him either not interested in her enough to part with a few dollars AND too cheap to satisfy a small request, or insecure about his status in the company of a woman. Hopefully, he would say yes, and they could enjoy a drink together.
Do men really say, 'no, I won't' and find success with that??
[Apologies for the editing and then un-editing; I commented naively and then realized I'm kind of over my head here with the inferential distance; culture and values-wise. I think things have changed since I was dating, or I noticed different things.]
The above is correct but this part would depend a lot on how the "no" is delivered:
The real status test is about whether he considers his company to be as valuable as hers. If he complies with the request (without any quid pro quo), then he's ceded her the higher social status -- which was what the question was testing (either intentionally or unintentionally), in the common case.
Declining the request, reversing it (you buy me one), or insisting on a quid pro quo, are the only ways to maintain equivalent or higher status in the interaction (absent an ongoing equal relationship wherein the quid pro quo is assumptive). Also, skillfully handling any of these options raises the observer's estimate of your social coprocessor's power rating as well. ;-)
There are a wide variety of context-sensitive ways to decline or redirect such a request, depending on the situation and level of rapport of the conversation... from the polite to the downright rude, all of which can be functional if delivered with confidence. But certainly, "fun and easygoing" no's are possible.
(For example: pretending to misinterpret the request as an offer, eg. "Oh, yes please. That's very kind of you. I'll have a..", a playful, "Oh? And what are you going to do for me?", or even a humorous, mock-offended and effeminately-voiced, "Hmph! What kind of boy do you think I am? Are you trying to get me drunk and take advantage of me?")
As thomblake points out, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman"contains his story of finding out this counterintuitive fact - although the specific story involves calling a woman "worse than a whore" for getting him to buy $1.10 worth of sandwiches. She then proceeded to pay him back the $1.10... and then came over later to have sex with him.
In Feynman's second story, he asks “Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?” -- and gets a "yes".
Amusingly, the "Player Guide" (an open-source guide for beginning PUAs) isn't quite so bold - it only recommends asking for a french kiss as the quid pro quo. ;-)
Of course, all of these anecdotes and advice are subject to selection bias - i.e., to the mostly-NT women who show up at bars and ask men to buy them drinks. My guess is that most non-NT women don't ask guys to buy them drinks unless there's either an ongoing quid pro quo (i.e., "I'll buy the next round"), or they've consciously chosen to exploit the social dynamic for financial/alcoholic gain.
tl;dr: a man is generally best-off treating a request for a drink as a test to determine whether he has low enough self-esteem to believe he needs to pay for female company, and an opportunity to display an unruffled and socially-skillful response.
Hang on half a second here. No more than 1% of Americans are autistic. (CDC estimates 1 in 110.) Autism is four times as common among males as females. This whole "NT" vs "non-NT" thing you're talking about is distinguishing 99.75% of women from 0.25%. I think this may be misguided. There are way more women who don't ask to be bought drinks than that.
I didn't say that (most NT women) (ask men for drinks), I said (most women who ask men for drinks) are NT.
Given your statistics, this would be expected even if half of all women asked men for drinks, because then you'd have half of 99.75% of women being NT+drink.asking and half of .25% being non-NT+drink.asking.
That being said, I do not assume that non-NT-ness requires actual autism or even diagnosable Asperger's. High intelligence alone (IMO) qualifies one for being neurally "atypical" in my book.
Ah, I misunderstood (I've only ever heard "NT" to refer to "not autistic.")
You're quite right, technically; I perceived an implication the other way as well but you may not have meant that.
Personality is a factor, not just attractiveness. Women who are some combination of the following don't engage in testing like this, or are less likely to do so:
Sweet, sensitive, nerdy quiet types of both genders just don't like status games very much, and they tend to be bad at them.
The standard PUA model focuses a lot on women who do engage in testing and status games, because they tend to disproportionately encounter women who play them. This is understandable, but flawed.
I expect that women who match one or more of your bullet points are less likely to be the most eye-catching.
I suppose that's true.
My confusion with this whole business is quantitative. The assumption in Roko's drink-buying model is that this is the right way to interact to attract the kind of women his audience would be interested in. That's a statement of probability. It's likely that you'll be going to bars to meet women, it's likely that any women you're interested in engage in shit-testing, it's likely that any women you're interested in respond the way the girls in the Feynman story do. I'm really not sure about that.
There are, as I mentioned, very, very few autistic women. So Roko and Nancy lump in the less attractive women. Fine, in principle. I'm still not convinced that a typical straight male LW reader won't find, in his dating pool, quite a few women who don't behave like the prototypical chick in a PUA parable. I only have anecdotes, of course, but I and most of my female friends and family members don't behave like that. We hit a lot of HughRistic's bullet points. And we've stumbled into our fair share of good relationships.
In other words: I think nerdy women are pretty numerous, far too numerous to be diagnosable autistics, and do just fine on the dating market. And I suspect the typical straight male LW reader wouldn't mind dating one.
Actually, it's a statement of conditional probability, conditioned on a woman asking a man for a drink in such a setting, often as a prelude to having any conversation at all.
(It's not, however, a great example of a cacheable response. Really, the whole point of it as a status/social skill test is that it is hard to fake!)
Anyway, here's the reasoning: if a man is asked for a drink, it may or may not be a test, conscious or unconscious. However, in all possible cases, the man is highly likely to improve the situation by skillfully declining or negotiating a quid pro quo, because the situation is still a signaling opportunity, even if the woman's attraction wouldn't have decreased upon acquiescence. (In other words, you either win, or don't lose - a positive expected outcome over multiple trials.)
For example, let's say it's one of those "nerdy women" -- she is not fishing for a drink, not consciously testing, and (probably) not unconsciously testing, but maybe has been taught that this is how you signal openness to being courted, or just doesn't think about it at all.
Well, in that particular case, it's an opportunity for a signal like, "Not a feminist, huh?" -- probably leading to a thought-provoking conversation about feminism, chivalry, and the impact of social trends on dating behaviors...
A conversation that wouldn't have happened if the response was a bland, "okay". If he'd simply agreed without further comment, maybe he wouldn't have lost any points, but he certainly wouldn't have gained any either -- he has simply failed to distinguish himself from any other man who lacks the social skill to finesse the situation. He is out a drink, and gets nothing except (maybe) the continuation of the conversation... assuming that her attraction doesn't mysteriously evaporate shortly thereafter, due to her unconscious lowering of his status.
But the (extreme) case of a nerdy woman who's both sincerely asking for a drink and won't subconsciously decrease attraction upon compliance, is actually the worst case scenario for measuring the advantage of the "never buy a drink without quid pro quo" heuristic... and yet it still comes out well ahead of compliance in the best case, and only slightly better in worst-case!
And in all other scenarios, such as a woman using this to get rid of the guy or to get drinks, using it as a filter for non-interesting guys, or even a woman who thinks it's normal but unconsciously feels less attracted to men who comply... the heuristic produces much better results on average than buying the drink does. (Assuming, again, the guy has developed the social skills to pull it off.)
Among other things, it's also a counter-filter, since the woman who truly has no interest in the guy outside his ability to procure alcohol will immediately depart in search of another sucker, no matter how skillfully it's done. For the rest, you still either win, or else you don't lose.
Of course, this is all conditional on the man's skill in making use of all the available information in the situation... for one thing, he's got to be socially calibrated enough to be able to tell the difference between the woman who'll respond to "Sure, bend over, you spoiled brat" vs. the one who'll respond to "Not a feminist, eh?"... and preferably be able to tell that before even starting the conversation. (Oh, and let's not forget that those two can be the same woman, in different moods!)
But that's the "software" way of doing it... the "coprocessor" way is that the guy ideally just believes that it'd be silly to buy a woman a drink without a quid pro quo (like Feynman's advisor) and lets their social hardware handle the details of responding.
Attempting to cache a specific behavioral response in "software" isn't going to cut it, though; the PUA methods that revolve around "canned" material are necessarily probabilistic and essentially manipulative. So, if there's a flaw in Roko's example, that would be it: caching a specific response pretty much guarantees it's not going to be done with a truly beneficial level of skill.
And yet, even in that case, it's still probably positive-sum advice, as long as the man continues learning and improving over the long haul.
Well, if "behave like that" is asking guys for drinks, then there's no conflict with what Roko said, since the situation will never come up.
However, if "behave like that" is responding with increased attraction to a display of confidence, tact, humor, and/or other social skills, I'd be surprised. (It's just that what you would personally consider to be such a display is going to depend on a lot of situational factors that a single canned response can't possibly take into account.)
I think this needs to be emphasised a lot. Also the differences between types of women. While a nerdy girl may not ask for a drink, they may ask for help with a heavy box. Now from the canned advice given this can be seen as a shit test, will the guy demean himself by lugging a heavy box to try and get with someone of my level. If so they don't want to be with a loser who lifts his own boxes. So a response like "Do I look like a shelf stacker?" said in a suitably amused tone, would be appropriate.
However the nerdy girl might just want the box moved and be interested in people who can just get stuff done with a minimal amount of prodding. The appropriate response in this case is to help. Grumbling (with a grin) while doing so, or making a light comment about being owed one might show you aren't a complete push over and won't put up with too much of that sort of thing without something in return, would be appropriate I think.
I'd have a lot less problem if advice were couched in term of normal human interaction rather than just trying to get into an extrovert girls pants.
Aaaaaaaugh.
As someone who is fairly good at predicting my own behavior in various counterfactual situations, I'd like to hereby offer to tell people how I'd react to lines about which they are curious. I don't know to what extent I'm in the reference class anyone's aiming for, but if the information would be useful, there it is.
Well, the "buying a drink" story is an extreme example that's been canonized to make a point. But I'm convinced that in general, human beings are always unconsciously "testing" each other, and that this applies to everyone, male or female, autistic or NT. It's just part of how humans talk and joke around and communicate. For instance, saying hi to someone and smiling is "testing": you're seeing what kind of mood someone is in. Making a joke, or laughing at a joke, is "testing": you're seeing how other people react.
I don't see the "PUA" stuff as about sex or dating or men and women. It's about human social interaction in general.
I suggest there's a difference between "testing" and "checking". In a test, you're trying to find out whether the other person will fail or (in the case of bullies) hoping they will, while in a check, you'll hoping they'll succeed. I gather there are some people who are pretty evenly balanced on the chack/test scale-- if the other person passes, fine, it's a potential friendship, and if the other person fails, the harassment commences.
I think that a lot of small talk is what I call "pinging"-- "Hello, I'm here and friendly".
Yes, status-testing is a general component of typical human interaction. I think this is the point that Roko was trying to make, even though his particular example was rather gendered. If you want to see status testing in a non-male-female context, watch the behavior of frat boys, for example.
The point is that for those unfamiliar with this behavior, they need to be able to identify it when it happens, to not take it personally or as a sign of hostility, and know how to respond. Roko's advocation of "caching responses" is very helpful, until one gets a gut feeling and can be guided towards a satisfactory response merely by emotions.
I don't see any necessary contradiction between Roko and SarahC's perspectives in determining an optimal dating strategy for men with LW-reader phenotypes that doesn't rely on luck.
Are there nontrivial subsets of women who would make good matches for male LW-readers, with psychology not correctly described by the standard PUA model? Yes. Should these guys go outside that model to understand these women? Yes.
Are there nontrivial subsets of women who would make good matches for male LW-readers, with psychology that is correctly described by the standard PUA model, in part or in whole? Yes. Would these guys benefit from attaining knowledge of neurotypical social behaviors (from PUAs or elsewhere) to be able to date these women, instead of arbitrarily cutting them out of their dating pool? Yes.
I take an empirical approach to romantic success. Being able to date many kinds of people gives you a lot of options. Sometimes, you can't know whether you would be compatible with a certain type of person until you try dating someone like that. Saying "but I don't want anyone like that anyway" about people out of one's reach because of a lack of common social skills is a failure mode. Yet if you attain the skills to date someone like that, and you find it doesn't work, then you know that you are not merely the fox calling the grapes sour in Aesop's fable.
I think a lot of what I'm disagreeing with you and blueberry about is this assumption that meat-market type bars and clubs, and the PUA style tactics that may work well in those environments, are a representative sample of "typical social behavior"
Umm. The purpose of dating is to find someone you're compatible with. "Expanding your dating pool" to include personality types you don't like defeats the whole point.
With introversion, agreeableness, and sensitivity, I wouldn't suspect any negative correlation with conventional attractiveness (agreeableness could even have a weak positive correlation). Nerdiness and lack of socialization may be related, and even if there is a negative correlation between them and attractiveness for whatever reason, that correlation may not be particularly strong.
I would hypothesize that personality traits are at least as big a factor as looks in explaining variance in female status testing behavior. As a result, I agree with SarahC's view that neurotypical vs. non-neurotypical status does not adequately demarcate women who ask men to buy them drinks from women who don't. And I also disagree with Roko's suggestion that women who don't engage in this behavior predominantly lie in the left tail of the attractiveness distribution for age.
If pjeby's original intent, however, was to present NT women as those most likely to engage in this behavior, and non-NT women as least likely, then I would agree with him that such a correlation is plausible. If Roko wanted to hypothesize a weak-to-moderate correlation of attractiveness and status-testing behavior, than I would agree. I just consider certain personality traits that are probably uncorrelated with beauty as having a large effect on engaging in this kind of behavior.
I actually didn't state either of the things that people are attributing to me. I simply referred to "the mostly-NT women who show up at bars and ask men to buy them drinks".
The mostly-NT is hyphenated because it is an attribute of "women who show up at bars and ask men to buy them drinks" -- and this attribution does not require any correlation. The simple fact that non-NT women are a minority, period, ensures that most of the women who do this showing up at bars and asking of drinks will be neurotypicals.
I was making a point about the selection bias effect of this on PUA models, not attempting to draw any conclusions about the likelihood of drink-asking behavior given neurotypicality. (I did suggest a negative correlation between neuro-atypicality and drink-asking behavior, however.)
FTFY
[citation needed]
I'm curious what you mean by this. Do you mean you think they will have put less effort into clothing, hair, makeup, etc. (perhaps true, but perhaps less relevant to male attraction than you think) or do you mean that you expect some inverse correlation between physical attractiveness and the personality traits described?
Partly that they put less effort into their appearance (which, for many, also includes a non-trivial effort to be thin), but also that a desire to be noticed is more related to extroversion and dominance than their opposites, and skill at being noticed favorably is related to neurotypicallity.
I think you're letting an instrumental approach to psychology affect your epistemic rationality.
Ah, then we have a miscommunication. I think it could have been worded better in order to avoid an unsavory misinterpretation.
A woman asks a man for a drink at a bar.
The PUA theory explains this in terms of a status interaction. The woman is testing, 'is this man so low status he feels compelled or obligated to buy me a drink?'
I am wary of explanations based on status interactions. It is the kind of explanation that can explain anything and therefore nothing. Also, I am skeptical based on my sense of the woman's subsequent disappointment and embarrassment if the man says no directly -- this is not a test where the level 1 correct answer is 'no'.
Alternatively, there's the simplistic evolutionary explanation, that I present here as what I would use to explain the phenomenon to a true human-outsider. Asking a man for a drink at a bar covertly or overtly, and in general men buying drinks for women, is the first step in a courtship ritual in which the man is to display that he is a provider. Raising children is a big investment and a family will be successful if the man and the woman together provide for the family. The woman's investment is largely guaranteed by other mechanisms, so it is the male's investment that must be tested and assured.
When a woman asks a man for a drink, this is the modern equivalent of asking him to bring her an animal skin. Something of token value that is of some benefit to her. What happens next is variable and perhaps does depend upon status. The woman can signal that she is not a single-animal-skin female, perhaps because providing for a child is much bigger than a single-animal-skin investment. Alternatively, the female can signal loyalty (her test in the courtship game) and signal that in return for the drink, the man has secured her undivided attention (politely, for at least the length of time it takes her to consume the drink).
This is all level-1 interaction. Human beings are intelligent, and the interaction can go meta to level 2 or 3 or higher. A woman should have concerns about a man that will buy any woman a drink that asks him. If he is too nice (signals too generally that he is a provider) then you can predict he will be fixing Aunt Rosa's faucet when he ought to be changing diapers. Also, he might not be very smart, or too low status in the tribe to provide much for the family. Thus a man that can deflect the request in a humorous/intelligent way will be very attractive -- especially if it is early in the courtship (he will not provide indiscriminately to every female that asks!) and especially if he manipulates the situation to advance the courtship (he is intelligent and capable and interested!).
Level 3 or higher would be the man going meta about the courtship ritual itself. (Not feminist? Or commenting on how silly the norm is.) This can be very attractive because the man is signaling intelligence and a larger meaning-of-life potential value. This is someone you can talk to about whether you should have kids or not.
I would guess that if you are naturally successful with people of the opposite sex, you slide easily and naturally among these levels. PUA seems to recommend making it level 2 or higher. My preference in courtship would be level 1 and level 3 together: the drink and signaling at the meta level about intelligence and gender roles. Because real life is changing diapers, but it's valuable to have a mutual awareness that life is -- to some extent -- a set of choices.
My hunch is that Feynman had success with his rogue tactics because he was meta, and this is what the intelligent women attracted to his intelligence were looking for. His behavior, if given at level 1 or level 2, would flop disastrously.
This is true -- but only because just answering "no" is a DLV - demonstration of lower value. It says that you're not paying attention, or that you're either stingy or you lack resources. (Also, the PUA model is basically if that the woman ends up feeling bad, you're doing it wrong. Feynman's "worse than a whore" story should not be considered a canonical example here.)
The big problem, though, with these hypothetical discussions is that they're abstract, and what is actually a DHV or DLV is going to depend hugely on body language, voice tone, and numerous other elements of context that are impractical to talk about in text like this.
Likewise, on the flip side:
The exact same words can still be a DLV, if they're uttered without social calibration. A guy who says these things while being in his head and not actually connecting with the woman in front of him, may well be seen as a self-centered jackass or a pompous twit.
It's not just what you say or how you say it, but the degree to which both show that you are tuned in and present to what is going on around you... especially what's going on with the person in front of you. Otherwise, it's still not expensive enough of a signal! (Secondarily, the inherent riskiness of the act implies your authenticity and courage -- more expensive, hard-to-fake signaling.)
Interestingly, I've seen that there is at least one PUA school ("Authentic Man Program") that has focused their training efforts on precisely these hard-to-fake aspects of signaling, to the virtual exclusion of everything else.
That is, they appear to focus on training men to be present and responsive to what is going on, while maintaining the integrity of their own mission or principles. And they claim that it is these qualities of presence, awareness, and authenticity that female status/value testing is really trying to measure.
(Side note of possible interest: they may also be the only PUA school that employs more female teachers than male ones - some of their workshop samples show panels of three or four women working with two male teachers, or pairs of women giving students feedback on their presence qualities, while the male coaches then just tell the guy what to do (mentally and physically) with the feedback that's been given. IOW, it seems like the women are used as experts on the female experience of the men, while the men focus on how those things are generated or experienced inside men.)
Anyway, their goal seems to be to train men to actually have these attractive qualities (and get rid of the beliefs and behaviors that interfere with them), rather than teaching all the ways the qualities can be signaled or faked, as other PUA schools do.
This is what I mean by status theories can explain anything: if buying the drink for the girl on average results in a good outcome, you could say that buying a drink on average raises your status in her point of view. If not buying the drink for the girl on average results in a good outcome, you could say that not buying a drink on average raises your status in her point of view. In either case, you assume rather than establish that higher status corresponds to the more successful outcome.
How do you know if "status" is a real thing if you can't measure it directly but only infer it from successful outcomes? The problem is that maybe higher status is redefined in each case as getting the good outcome, in which case "status" is just the property-of-resulting-in-successful-outcomes. Even if status is some external objective thing, if we don't know how to objectively measure whether it has increased or not, this is missing in theories based on predicting what happens if it's increased or not.
Later edit: I thought about it a little longer and my true argument isn't that good outcomes aren't correlated with higher status, I suspect they are. It's that the theory is missing where you predict which things will raise status and which will lower status. If not buying the drink helps, you deduce that this raised your status. But why should it have been raised? This last part is just filling in the blanks.
Some PUA theories use "value" and "compliance" as their currency rather than status. i.e., giving compliance implies the other person has value to you. This is at least marginally better, although as your previous comment points out, there are various levels and dimensions on which "value" can be measured.
There are PUA terms for value demonstration - "DHV" for demonstration of higher value, and "DLV" for demonstration of lower value. Self-deprecating behavior, deference, and compliance are DLVs, while confidence, humor, leadership, social proof (e.g. having friends or followers) are all DHV's. PUA's also attempt to tell stories that contain oblique references to things that imply value, by showing how you treat your friends and allies, protect your mates, and that you have other positive qualities such as openness to new experiences (implied bravery and resource/fitness surplus), etc.
Of course, at level 1 this is just boasting that you work out and have a fast car; so PUA's select stories that show these qualities implicitly, rather than directly boasting about them, so that the inferences are drawn subconsciously, instead of being presented on the surface for conscious dismissal.
(Btw, as with so many things in PUA, these concepts apply to other social interactions as well. A marketing message (or really, any story) is more effective when it "shows" instead of "tells" the things it wants you to conclude.)
Related Less Wrong post.
Another proxy for measuring status is how attractive you are to attractive women - given that the fundamental attractor is reliable status signals.
The explanation is fitted to the observations of the custom. It is therefore not supported by the observations. Had the observations been different, the explanation would never have been invented.
Later that night...
"So... you wanna come in for a cup of tea?"
"Ummm... okay, but just a cup of tea then."
"[mock relief] Phew, and here I was afraid you were trying to get into my pants!"
Feynman would end up with the woman buying him a drink.
Yes. Especially if success is partly defined by "not wasting money on other people". But even if it isn't. You have to be humorous about it but, yeah, the only time I would ever buy a woman I just met a drink is if it is her birthday. I'll also buy second rounds if the girl buys the first.
On the other hand this tradition makes going out to bars with my girlfriend a lot cheaper since she can just walk away for a minute and someone will come up to her and buy her a drink. After which she comes back to me, drink in hand. (ETA: Though, I don't think she's ever asked for a drink. She's much too nice for that. People just come up and offer.)
As a non-drinker, I often passed proffered drinks onto my friends, who could make use of them. Obviously I would never ask for a drink, except maybe a glass of water.
I'll buy you an orange juice if you want. ;)
The point was partially made by the fact that water is free, at least everywhere I've lived. Thanks, though.