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Stefan_Schubert comments on Status - is it what we think it is? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Very nice and illuminating conceptual analysis. Thanks!
These people who don't like to be in charge, what are they like, according to you and/or Johnstone? Less confident or just less ambitious? More commonly women, perhaps? I don't have a very clear model of their psychology.
I would expect there to be several different types. Less confident or less ambitious would certainly be one, another type that comes to mind would be people who were ambitious but whose ambition wasn't furthered by being in control of the group. E.g. someone who wants to be the best in the world at X where X is any task you typically do as part of a larger team with the others doing other tasks and you just want somebody else to be in charge of coordinating the team while you can focus on X. Being a leader requires specialized skills and a lot of people might simply not have time or interest to develop those skills.
Thanks. Those are good points.
For me, the enjoyment of getting to do things my way and having other people look up to me is outweighed by the stress of being responsible for getting it right, for all but the very smallest groups
I don't like to be in charge. Some relevant times when I particularly didn't like it:
When I was president of my university airsoft society, one of my exec team wasn't doing his job. That sucked for everyone in the society, and it was stressful for me, and I had to tell him off and he apologized; I don't remember if he started doing his job after that.
When I organized the HPMOR wrap party, for at least a week beforehand I was under pretty much constant low-level stress. I felt like I wasn't doing enough, but I wasn't sure what else I could be doing, and/or anything I could think of felt really ugh-y. At the end, a group of us went for a meal, and someone else was pretty clearly in charge for that part, which was great.
There's probably more I could say about this. Feel free to ask questions.
edit - I should note that although I didn't enjoy being in charge of the wrap party before it happened, it was rewarding afterwards, when it had turned out to be a really good evening. I definitely got something out of being in charge in that case, that I wouldn't have got from just participating. So it's probably oversimplistic of me to say that I don't like being in charge, but there is much that I dislike about it.
Interesting. I'm starting to believe some people might think that they want to be in charge but actually really don't. They have, so to speak, internalized society's expectations that people should want to be in charge. Because it is true that being in charge has serious drawbacks.