I was re-reading the chapter on status in Impro (excerpt), and I noticed that Johnstone seemed to be implying that different people are comfortable at different levels of status: some prefer being high status and others prefer being low status. I found this peculiar, because the prevailing notion in the rationalistsphere seems to be that everyone's constantly engaged in status games aiming to achieve higher status. I've even seen arguments to the effect that a true post-scarcity society is impossible, because status is zero-sum and there will always be people at the bottom of the status hierarchy.

But if some people preferred to have low status, this whole dilemma might be avoided, if a mix of statuses could be find that left everyone happy.

First question - is Johnstone's "status" talking about the same thing as our "status"? He famously claimed that "status is something you do, not something that you are", and that

I should really talk about dominance and submission, but I'd create a resistance. Students who will agree readily to raising or lowering their status may object if asked to 'dominate' or 'submit'.

Viewed via this lens, it makes sense that some people would prefer being in a low status role: if you try to take control of the group, you become subject to various status challenges, and may be held responsible for the decisions you make. It's often easier to remain low status and let others make the decisions.

But there's still something odd about saying that one would "prefer to be low status", at least in the sense in which we usually use the term. Intuitively, a person may be happy being low status in the sense of not being dominant, but most people are still likely to desire something that feels kind of like status in order to be happy. Something like respect, and the feeling that others like them. And a lot of the classical "status-seeking behaviors" seem to be about securing the respect of others. In that sense, there seems to be something intuitive true in the "everyone is engaged in status games and wants to be higher-status" claim.

So I think that there are two different things that we call "status" which are related, but worth distinguishing.

1) General respect and liking. This is "something you have", and is not inherently zero-sum. You can achieve it by doing things that are zero-sum, like being the best fan fiction writer in the country, but you can also do it by things like being considered generally friendly and pleasant to be around. One of the lessons that I picked up from The Charisma Myth was that you can be likable by just being interested in the other person and displaying body language that signals your interest in the other person.

Basically, this is "do other people get warm fuzzies from being around you / hearing about you / consuming your work", and is not zero-sum because e.g. two people who both have great social skills and show interest in you can both produce the same amount of warm fuzzies, independent of each other's existence.

But again, specific sources of this can be zero-sum: if you respect someone a lot for their art, but then run across into even better art and realize that the person you previously admired is pretty poor in comparison, that can reduce the respect you feel for them. It's just that there are also other sources of liking which aren't necessarily zero-sum.

2) Dominance and control of the group. It's inherently zero-sum because at most one person can have absolute say on the decisions of the group. This is "something you do": having the respect and liking of the people in the group (see above) makes it easier for you to assert dominance and makes the others more willing to let you do so, but you can also voluntarily abstain from using that power and leave the decisions to others. (Interestingly, in some cases this can even increase the extent to which you are liked, which translates to a further boost in the ability to control the group, if you so desired.)

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Morendil and I previously suggested a definition of status as "the general purpose ability to influence a group", but I think that definition was somewhat off in conflating the two senses above.

I've always had the vague feeling that the "everyone can't always be happy because status is zero-sum" claim felt off in some sense that I was unable to properly articulate, but this seems to resolve the issue. If this model were true, it would also make me happy, because it would imply that we can avoid zero-sum status fights while still making everybody content.

I am reading The other kind of status and it seems to me that status is seen as a single number, either objective, or in the eyes of other people in the group, or your own, either ordinal or cardinal, but at the end of the day you can say your status is 67 points or 12th in rank. And I think it is not actually the case! A few examples why it is more complicated:

Intimidation, power, authority

People behave in a respectful, deferential, submissive way to people they are afraid of, be that their personal scariness or power and authority. However this is not genuine respect. (Well, it is hard to say exactly - I would say for most of you it is not so, but OTOH there are people out there who like strength or authority so much that they truly respect those who can intimidate them, because they too would like to be intimidating people. Let's say it is not genuine respect in all cases.) If your neighbor is a cop and people behave with him extra tactfully because if he gets pissed off he may find an excuse for an arrest, is that status? Better example: crimelords, The Godfather (by "normal" people, not their fellow criminals).

The opposite: the purely moral status

People who are very, very good, and their goodness also means they are very meek, they are very much the kind of people who would not hurt anyone not even in self defense, and it is obviously showing - they get a strange kind of respect. Many people genuinely treat them with respect, but somehow it lacks certain aspects of the respect a high-ranking businessman gets, somehow it seems if people are so obviously harmless, the respect has less depth.

Most common status

I think most common cases of status have elements of both. To be high status you need to have power - not necessarily in the social-political sense, but in the sense of "the ability to affect things". For example, a good example is being very intelligent and learned. It is a kind of power. And you need to use that power in ways we generally morally approve of, for we don't really respect a criminal mastermind. But you also need to have a bit of an intimidation potential too, you should not look too harmless, of course you don't need to behave in intimidating ways, but still if people think "wow, I would not want such a smart person as my enemy, I could get a check-mate", that gives more depth to the respect. Perhaps it is better  - less disturbing - if you call it not intimidation potential, but _ally potential_: if someone else would want to hurt you, does this person have anything to assist you in the conflict? Anything could mean intelligence, knowledge, social influence, charisma, political position, physical strength...

I dislike made-up evo-psy as much as everybody else, but this sort of makes sense in an ancestral environment. We respect people who are useful allies, tribe members, who have power i.e. abilitites or resources usable in affecting the world, but what makes them useful allies also makes them dangerous as potential enemies so there is also a bit of an intimidation potential as well, and generally we want them to use these abilities or resources for the tribe, not against it, which is probably where morality comes from.

But that is only the beginning

In the example above, status is not one number but two: power status 43, morality status 51.  This alone demonstrates the problem with the single-number approach. However there can be so many numbers... I have seen very, very confusing and ambiguous status-setups in my life that probably came from many numbers.

- For example, some people assign high status to people who wear business suits and their female equivalents because it suggests a powerful social position, but also some people (young-ish) were more like "Ah, so you work. How boring. Worky worky working bee tehehee. Why aren't you a rich playboy or gangster who does not need to work?" So I saw a kind of a wants-to-work vs. must-work split here or I am not even sure exactly what.

- I saw people who were generally materialistic and yet valued wearing designer clothes more than driving an expensive car in China-Mart clothes, so apparently they assigned a number to style and a number to wealth and it interacted in non-obvious ways.

- Or simply at school - it was not-obvious, whether the students with good grades had higher status, or those who considered it a romantic rebellion against authority to not study and not write tests and not answer teacher questions. Many kids envied the courage of the second group but were still afraid of punishment and studied conscientously anyway and the funniest part was that in trying to satisfy both goals, they studied conscientously, got good grades, then lied about it and boasted they did not study at all and got that good grade purely on luck or smarts! Because studying was seen like being a teacher boot licker, almost as bad as a snitch... but of course getting and admittance letter into a university of law (= "Wow Rob is gonna be a rich lawyer!!") made him a hero so both studying and not-studying conferred status!

- Still school, easier example: in the breaks, being funny and entertaining was valued. In the phys ed class, skill, as we played a lot of ball sports (and it was not considered being a teacher's pet to be good at it), high skilled players were respected. The hierarchy visibly changed in the break before and after phys ed class. This is a fairly clear example of status consisting of multiple numbers, like Humor 43, Skill 71.

Of course one could say it is just different people valuing different things and that is that, but I think the multiple-number hypothesis is better: the same people valuing other people in different ways, as in the very first example (intimidated respect to the crime boss or policeman, respect but without depth to the moral saint), or valuing other people differently in different circumstances...

Do the following things in email tone lower status?:

• Exclamation marks
• Friendliness
• Saying 'please', or 'it'd be great if'
• Saying 'you don't have to do this, but...'
• Saying 'sorry' (e.g. 'sorry to bother you')
• Signing of with 'Thanks!'

Alain de Botton speaks about Status Anxiety

There is nowhere where I've witnessed (and felt) more status anxiety expressed and talked about than in Lesswrong. I tried to partly dispel the mith at least as it regards sexuality.

People talk about status in all its forms and shapes a lot here. Which made me wonder, what do you think of Alain de Botton's opinions on "status addiction" in western societies?

http://www.meltingasphalt.com/the-economics-of-social-status/

Discusses a number of aspects of social status, including the "social status as currency" concept that Morendil and I previously wrote about.

Now we get to the really interesting stuff: the economic properties of social status.

Let’s start with transactions, since they form the basis of an economy. Status is part of our system for competing over scarce resources, so it should be no surprise that it participates in so many of our daily transactions. Some examples:

• We trade status for favors (and vice versa). This is so common you might not even realize it, but even the simple act of saying “please” and “thank you” accords a nominal amount of status to the person doing the favor. The fact that status is at stake in these transactions becomes clear when the pleasantries are withheld, which we often interpret as an insult (i.e., a threat to our status).
• An apology is a ritual lowering of one’s status to compensate for a (real or perceived) affront. As with gratitude, withholding an apology is perceived as an insult.
• We trade status for information (and vice versa). This is one component of “powertalk,” as illustrated in the Gervais Principle series.
• We trade status for sex (and vice versa), which often goes by the name “seduction.” Sometimes even the institution of marriage functions as a sex-for-status transaction. Dowries illustrate this principle by working against it — they reinforce class/caste systems by making it harder for high-status men to marry low-status women.
• We reward employees in the form of institutionalized status (titles, promotions, parking spots), which trade off against salary as a form of compensation.
• We can turn money into status by means of conspicuous consumption, or status into money by means of endorsement (i.e., being paid to lend status to an endeavor).

But the part that I found the most interesting was the idea of defining communities via their status standards:

Previously we defined status with respect to a community, but we could also flip it around:

A community is a group of people who agree on how to measure status among their members.

In other words, it’s a group of people who share a common status currency. Silicon Valley, for example, is a community oriented around a particular way of measuring status — the ability to influence the growth of engineering companies. But Silicon-Valley status won’t buy you anything in Hollywood — unless you convert it to something that makes sense in the Hollywood economy. (Financial wealth usually does the trick).

This definition allows us not only to draw boundaries between communities (porous and fuzzy though they may be), but also allows us to discuss the strength of a community, i.e., the level of agreement about how to measure status. Google, for example, is a fairly strong community insofar as Googlers agree on how to measure status among themselves, but Google engineering might be an even stronger community.

Treating communities as “status-currency blocs” helps explain how there’s relatively free trade (at low transaction costs) within the community — and also how trade is distorted across community boundaries. The fluctuating ‘exchange rates’ and asymmetric information make cross-community interaction more difficult. When a Google VP walks into a meeting with some employees from Facebook, say, everyone will be unsure about their relative statuses, and the group will have to spend time and effort (and a lot of posturing) in order to figure it out.

The “currency bloc” metaphor also helps explain both the benefits and the costs of institutional re-orgs. Merging two organizations, for example, can increase economic efficiency (by standardizing on a single status currency and thereby facilitating more interaction/trade), but the integration will also require some ‘repricing’ — with resistance from everyone who loses out.

The article has a lot more.

I can't remember how I found this, just that I was amazed at how rational and near-mode it is on a topic where most of the information one usually encounters is hopelessly far.

LessWrong wiki link on the same topic: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Status

The Improv Wiki

Status

Status is pecking order. The person who is lower in status defers to the person who is higher in status.

Status is party established by social position--e.g. boss and employee--but mainly by the way you interact. If you interact in a way that says you are not to be trifled with, the other person must adjust to you, then you are establishing high status. If you interact in a way that says you are willing to go along, you don't want responsibility, that's low status. A boss can play low status or high status. An employee can play low status or high status.

Status is established in every line and gesture, and changes continuously. Status is something that one character plays to another at a particular moment. If you convey that the other person must not cross you on what you're saying now, then you are playing high status to that person in that line. Your very next line might come out low status, as you suggest willingness to defer about something else.

If you analyze your most successful scenes, it's likely they involved several status changes between the players. Therefore, one path to great scenes is to intentionally change status. You can raise or lower your own status, or the status of the other player. The more subtly you can do this, the better the scene.

High-status behaviors

When walking, assuming that other people will get out of your path.

Making eye contact while speaking.

Not checking the other person's eyes for a reaction to what you said.

Having no visible reaction to what the other person said. (Imagine saying something to a typical Clint Eastwood character. You say something expecting a reaction, and you get--nothing.)

Speaking in complete sentences.

Interrupting before you know what you are going to say.

Spreading out your body to full comfort. Taking up a lot of space with your body.

Looking at the other person with your eyes somewhat down (head tilted back a bit to make this work), creating the feeling that you are a parent talking to a child.

Talking matter-of-factly about things that the other person finds displeasing or offensive.

Letting your body be vulnerable, exposing your neck and torso to the other person.

Moving comfortably and gracefully.

Keeping your hands away from your face.

Speaking authoritatively, with certainty.

Making decisions for a group; taking responsibility.

Giving or withholding permission.

Evaluating other people's work.

Speaking cryptically, not adjusting your speech to be easily understood by the other person (except that mumbling does not count). E.g. saying, "Chomper not right" with no explanation of what you mean or what you want the other person to do.

Being surrounded by an entourage, especially of people who are physically smaller than you.

A "high-status specialist" conveys in every word and gesture, "Don't come near me, I bite."

Low-status behaviors

When walking, moving out of other people's path.

Looking away from the other person's eyes.

Briefly checking the other person's eyes to see if they reacted positively to what you said.

Speaking in halting, incomplete sentences. Trailing off, editing your sentences as you got.

Sitting or standing uncomfortably in order to adjust to the other person and give them space. Pulling inward to give the other person more room. If you're tall, you might need to scrunch down a bit to indicate that you're not going to use your height against the other person.

Looking up toward the other person (head tilted forward a bit to make this work), creating the feeling that you are a child talking to a parent.

Dancing around your words (beating around the bush) when talking about something that will displease the other person.

Shouting as an attempt to intimidate the other person. This is low status because it suggests that you expect resistance.

Crouching your body as if to ward off a blow; protecting your face, neck, and torso.

Moving awkwardly or jerkily, with unnecessary movements.

Touching your face or head.

Avoiding making decisions for the group; avoiding responsibility.

Needing permission before you can act.

Adjusting the way you say something to help the other person understand; meeting the other person on their (cognitive) ground; explaining yourself. E.g. "Could you please adjust the chomper? That's the gadget on the kitchen counter immediately to the left of the toaster. If you just give it a slight rap on the top, that should adjust it."

A "low-status specialist" conveys in every word and gesture, "Please don't bite me, I'm not worth the trouble."

Raising another person's status

To raise another person's status is to establish them as high in the pecking order in your group (possibly just the two of you).

•	Ask their permission to do something.

•	Ask their opinion about something.

•	Ask them for advice or help.

•	Express gratitude for something they did.

•	Apologize to them for something you did.

•	Agree that they are right and you were wrong.

•	Defer to their judgement without requiring proof.

•	Address them with a fancy title or honorific (even "Mr." or "Sir" works very well).

•	Downplay your own achievement or attribute in comparison to theirs. "Your wedding cake is so much whiter than mine."

•	Do something incompetent in front of them and then apologize for it or act sheepish about it.

•	Mention a failure or shortcoming of your own. "I was supposed to go to an audition today, but I was late. They said I was wrong for the part anyway."

•	Compliment them in a way that suggests appreciation, not judgement. "Wow, what a beautiful cat you have!"

•	Obey them unquestioningly.

•	Back down in a conflict.

•	Move out of their way, bow to them, lower yourself before them.

•	Tip your hat to them.

•	Lose to them at something competitive, like a game (or any comparison).

•	Wait for them.

•	Serve them; do manual labor for them.

Tip: Whenever you bring an audience member on stage, always raise their status, never lower it.

Lowering another person's status

To lower another person's status is to attack or discredit their right to be high in the pecking order. Another word for "lowering someone's status" is "humiliating them."

•	Criticize something they did.

•	Contradict them. Tell them they are wrong. Prove it with facts and logic.

•	Correct them.

•	Insult them.

•	Give them unsolicited advice.

•	Approve or disapprove of something they did or some attribute of theirs. "Your cat has both nose and ear points. That is acceptable." Anything that sets you up as the judge lowers their status, even "Nice work on the Milligan account, Joe."

•	Shout at them.

•	Tell them what to do.

•	Ignore what they said and talk about something else, especially when they've said something that requires an answer. E.g. "Have you seen my socks?" "The train leaves in five minutes."

•	One-up them. E.g. have a worse problem than the one they described, have a greater past achievement than theirs, have met a more famous celebrity, earn more money, do better than them at something they're good at, etc.

•	Win: beat them at something competitive, like a game (or any comparison).

•	Announce something good about yourself or something you did. "I went to an audition today, and I got the part!"

•	Disregard their opinion. E.g. "You'd better not smoke while pumping gas, it's a fire hazard." Flick, light, puff, puff, pump, pump.

•	Talk sarcastically to them.

•	Make them wait for you.

•	When they've fallen behind you, don't wait for them to catch up, just push on and get further out of sync.

•	Disobey them.

•	Violate their space.

•	Beat them up. Beating them up verbally, not physically as in martial arts or how you learned UFC fighting in an gym, in front of other people, especially their wife, girlfriend, and/or children, is particularly status-lowering.

•	In a conflict, make them back down.

•	Taunt them. Tease them.

The basic status-lowering act

Laugh at them. (Not with them.)

The basic status-raising act

Be laughed at by them.

Second to that is laughing with them at someone else.

(Notice that those are primarily what comedians do.)

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Note that behaviors that raise another person's status are not necessarily low-status behaviors, and behaviors that lower another person's status are not necessarily high-status behaviors. People at any status level raise and lower each other all the time. They can do so in ways that convey high or low status.

For example, shouting at someone lowers their status but is itself a low-status behavior.

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Objects and environments also have high or low status, although this is seldom explored. So explore it. Make something cheap and inconsequential high status. (This fingernail clipping came from Graceland!) Or bring down the status of a high status item. (Casually toss a 2 carat diamond ring on your jewelry pile.)

Source: http://greenlightwiki.com/improv/Status
Retrieved 20 March 2012

http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13492

To investigate the impact of social context on IQ, the researchers divided a pool of 70 subjects into groups of five and gave each individual a computer-based IQ test. After each question, an on-screen ranking showed the subjects how well they were performing relative to others in their group and how well one other person in the group was faring. All of the subjects had previously taken a paper-and-pencil IQ test, and were matched with the rest of the group so that they would each be expected to perform similarly on an IQ test.

At the outset, all of the subjects did worse than expected on this "ranked group IQ task." But some of the subjects, dubbed High Performers, were able to improve over the course of the test while others, called Low Performers, continued to perform below their expected level. By the end of the computer-based test, the scores of the Low Performers dropped an average of 17.4 points compared to their performance on the paper-and-pencil test.

"What we found was that sensitivity to the social feedback of the rankings profoundly altered some people's ability to express their cognitive capacity," Quartz says. "So we get this really quite dramatic downward spiraling of one group purely because of their sensitivity to this social feedback." Since so much of our learning—from the classroom to the work team—is socially situated, this study suggests that individual differences in social sensitivity may play an important role in shaping human intelligence over time.

From "Academics Doubt Impact of Osama bin Laden’s Death":

"...Fifty-three percent of the terrorist organizations that suffered such a violent leadership loss fell apart — which sounds impressive until you discover that 70 percent of groups who did not deal with an assassination no longer exist.

Further crunching of the numbers revealed that leadership decapitation becomes more counterproductive the older the group is. The difference in collapse rates (between groups that did and did not have a leader assassinated) is fairly small among organizations less than 20 years old but quite large for those more than 20 years in age, and even larger for those that have been around more than 30 years.

Assassination of a leader does seem to negatively impact smaller terrorist groups: The data shows organizations with fewer than 500 members are more likely to collapse if they suffer such a leadership loss. But organizations with more than 500 members are actually more likely to survive after an assassination, making this strategy “highly counterproductive for larger groups,” Jordan writes."

See also Lost Purposes, The Importance of Goodhart's Law, & Faster than Science.

Giving advice is one of those common human behaviors which doesn't get examined much, which means a little thought might improve understanding of what's going on.

The evidence-- that giving advice is much more common than asking for it or following it-- suggests that giving advice is more a status transaction than a practical effort to help, and I speak as a person who's pretty compulsive about giving advice.

So, here's some advice about advice, assuming that you don't want to just raise your status on unwilling subjects.

Do what you can to actually understand the situation, including the resources the recipient is willing to put into following advice.

The idea that men give unwelcome advice to women, when the women just want to vent but can solve their problems themselves, is an oversimplification. There are women who give advice (see above). There are men who are patient with venting. I think the vent vs. want advice distinction is valuable, but ask rather than assuming gender will give you the information you need.

I have a friend who I've thanked for giving me advice, and his reaction was "but you didn't follow it!". Sometimes it helps to give people ideas to bounce off of.

Pjeby (if I understand him correctly) has been very good about the way people can reinterpret advice in light of their mental habits-- for example, hearing "find goals that inspire you" as "beat yourself up for not having achieved more".

Eliezer on Other-Optimizing-- it's from the point of view of being given lots of advice (mostly inappropriate), rather from the point of view of giving advice.