x

LESSWRONG

LW

Submission and dominance among friends — LessWrong

13

Submission and dominance among friends

28th Mar 2017

1 min read

13

This is a linkpost for http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/submission-and-dominance-among-friends

13

New Comment

Rendering 0/29 comments, sorted by

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 6:51 AM

More from jsalvatier

Curated and popular this week

29

Comment Permalink

There are probably at least three things going on here:

Re-affirmation of mutual trust through fake aggression. Camaraderie, basically.
Taking or declining responsibility. Sometimes you are just happy to let someone else take care of things.
And only finally, sub/dom power games.

I think 1 and 3 are closely related. 2 seems like a logically distinct thing that people associate with dominance, maybe because people who are cowed by authority behave submissively and also don't think they're allowed to take charge of anything.

4Dagon9y

I don't think those things are necessarily distinct. Many people do not compartmentalize the status-hierarchy-supporting behaviors from the trust-building and responsibility-dividing ones.