Thought experiment: I’m your boss, and you make me some coffee. We are working together on something in my office and another employee comes in to visit. “This is really good coffee”, I say to the employee who came in, but I make no mention of the fact that you made it.
Do you feel appreciated? I’m indicating pleasure for something you did, but I’m not assigning you any status for it.
That doesn’t correspond to what I am thinking. It would be more like me flashing a smile and saying thank you for you holding the door open while I am carrying a large package. I appreciate your effort, but no relative status message is given.
Or, if you absolutely must insist on making it about status, you can say that I’m sending the message we are equals, which might be either status-raising or status-lowering, depending on your perception of the situation. However, since the original context concerns peer feedback, the point is pretty irrelevant: we are talking about people who are at least in theory, already status equals. And I am making the point that, if you communicate status changes with your praise, then you have failed the point of the exercise of providing peer feedback.
In contrast, your straw man scenario contains a deliberate omission of relevant information, which is an explicit negative message, not merely the absence of an implicit positive. Again, you are confusing “there are status-neutral positive messages” with “it is possible to convey pleasure in ways that negate status”… a proposition which I never disputed.
I simply don’t think it’s pertinent to the question, and certainly doesn’t offer any more evidence for a “status is everything” hypothesis than it does for a “humans value lots of things” hypothesis.
That doesn’t correspond to what I am thinking. It would be more like me flashing a smile and saying thank you for you holding the door open while I am carrying a large package. I appreciate your effort, but no relative status message is given.
I wouldn’t describe that act as predominantly about status but even so a relative status message is given. Specifically it signals that the difference in status that you claim is below the threshold at which you would take their effort as your due and their obligation. That you smiled, rather than just saying thank you gives a further message—thanking without smiling would, all else being equal, give a message of somewhat greater relative status in your favor.
And I am making the point that, if you communicate status changes with your praise, then you have failed the point of the exercise of providing peer feedback.
That seems false. The communication of the status change is a largely unavoidable side effect of the providing of peer feedback. Distorting the peer feedback such that no net status change is implied by the feedback will potentially corrupt the feedback, not sanctify it.
As long as we’re arguing, I’d be curious to hear what you think of my article 6 Tips for Productive Arguments. (I’ve just reviewed my own recommendations...)
That doesn’t correspond to what I am thinking. It would be more like me flashing a smile and saying thank you for you holding the door open while I am carrying a large package. I appreciate your effort, but no relative status message is given.
I suspect saying thank you is a way of assigning higher status to someone. Sure, you don’t feel like you’re assigning substantially higher status to a friend by saying thank you, but what if your friend repeatedly bailed you out of sticky situations without you ever reciprocating, and with you saying thank you more and more profusely each time? Who would have more power in this friendship?
What if your friend bailed you out of sticky situations repeatedly, but your thanks did not get more profuse? That would be incongruous, I suspect, and your friend might begin to resent you.
This may be why people who don’t say thank you are considered “entitled”. They fail to assign others high status in certain situations where it’s generally considered appropriate to do so.
So far I assign high credence to the hypothesis that appreciation is about status, because every case of genuine appreciation I can think of involves assignment of higher status, and every case of less than genuine appreciation doesn’t involve it (basically, tone/body language/etc. is incongruous with the assignment of higher status implied by the appreciative remark).
You’re welcome to explore this hypothesis with me or come up with your own hypothesis.
your straw man scenario contains a deliberate omission of relevant information
I’d argue that the information of where the coffee came from is not inherently relevant. If I had gotten the coffee from Starbucks, it would not be especially odd for me to fail to mention this fact.
there are status-neutral positive messages
Let’s think in terms of reinforcers. Humans are reinforced by tasty food, sex, accumulation of material goods, flow, laughter, love/empathy, status bumps. What category of reinforcer does social approval constitute? I suspect in most cases it constitutes a status-type reinforcer, especially between people who only have weak ties.
If I explained to my grandparents what I actually used their Christmas gift for (as opposed to thanking them for it), this reinforcer is probably more along the lines of love/empathy than status. Depending on how we define “appreciation”, this would probably constitute appreciation. But it seems outside the sphere of concerns one worries about when one is worried about making one’s appreciation sufficiently “genuine”.
Humans are reinforced by tasty food, sex, accumulation of material goods, flow, laughter, love/empathy, status bumps
This is hardly an exhaustive list. We’re also reinforced, for example, by people we like being happy, especially in relation to us. This is the type of reinforcement I’m talking about.
When my wife smiles because of something I did for her, the warm feeling I get does not resemble the feeling of status elevation. This is even more relevant in the case of, say, a stranger thanking me for holding the door—I don’t know them and don’t really care what status they assign me.
Finally, I really don’t understand what you’re arguing for here. Specifically, I fail to see where you are offering any different actual advice for people to carry out, and we agree that insincere appreciation equals status-lowering.
We only appear to disagree on whether status-raising is a requirement for appreciation to be reinforcing… and there, you seem to have retreated to the position that any sort of positive appreciation affords a status grant, even if no increase in relative status results.
But it does not appear to me that your argument is other than definitional: that is, I do not understand why it’s important to you to assume that all actions either generate or consume status points, as opposed to say, viewing some actions as being status-neutral. Which way you look at it strikes me as being merely dependent on how you choose to frame the math, and that there is no strong reason to prefer one framing over the other.
Actually, if I were to follow what seems to be your model, where people need to be repeatedly filled with status-giving gestures in order to merely maintain their current status position, then I would either have to have a model for how status deflation occurs, or else assume that everybody’s status is always increasing in the absence of any actions taken to decrease status. This seems incoherent to me, especially since it would imply that older people would nearly always have higher status than younger people, a correlation which doesn’t hold much past adulthood.
At this point, unless you clarify your model of status and what it is exactly that you think we differ on, I don’t see much point in continuing this thread. (Honestly, I’m not sure why you started it in the first place.)
When my wife smiles because of something I did for her, the warm feeling I get does not resemble the feeling of status elevation.
The fact that she chose you as her partner, instead of other potential candidates, gives you some status (not relative to her, but relative to all other real or imaginary candidates). Could this play some role in your feelings from her smile?
This is even more relevant in the case of, say, a stranger thanking me for holding the door—I don’t know them and don’t really care what status they assign me.
A stranger thanking you for holding the door confirms that you belong to a set of polite people. Not everyone is in this set, and people in this set have higher status than people outside of the set.
You are right, a clear definition of status is necessary, otherwise pretty much anything can be “explained” by status. But I suspect that if a meaningful definition is made, it will allow transactions of type: person X is increasing status of person Y without decreasing their own status (by decreasing status of someone else, for example an unspecified absent person).
a stranger thanking me for holding the door—I don’t know them and don’t really care what status they assign me.
The “really” in that statement hides a lot of ambiguity. Here, the status assigned to you fails evolution’s consequentialist calculation, so one might say that evolution shouldn’t care what status strangers in a big city assign you. Your psychological adaptations might still care, in the sense that they get activated, not having recognized absence of evolution-relevant consequences.
On the other hand, the psychological drive may be seen as representing a terminal value, preference for accumulation of status for its own sake, irrespective of its effect on other people’s behavior or of the impact of their behavior on you. In that case, one may say that you should care. It would still be the case that you should care even if the relevant psychological adaptations don’t in fact activate, so that you happen to not care in the psychological sense.
The “really” in that statement hides a lot of ambiguity.
Not really. ;-)
It specifically meant, “I don’t care as long as they don’t assign me low status”, i.e., threaten my status with their response. That’s not a lot of ambiguity.
Thought experiment: I’m your boss, and you make me some coffee. We are working together on something in my office and another employee comes in to visit. “This is really good coffee”, I say to the employee who came in, but I make no mention of the fact that you made it.
Do you feel appreciated? I’m indicating pleasure for something you did, but I’m not assigning you any status for it.
That doesn’t correspond to what I am thinking. It would be more like me flashing a smile and saying thank you for you holding the door open while I am carrying a large package. I appreciate your effort, but no relative status message is given.
Or, if you absolutely must insist on making it about status, you can say that I’m sending the message we are equals, which might be either status-raising or status-lowering, depending on your perception of the situation. However, since the original context concerns peer feedback, the point is pretty irrelevant: we are talking about people who are at least in theory, already status equals. And I am making the point that, if you communicate status changes with your praise, then you have failed the point of the exercise of providing peer feedback.
In contrast, your straw man scenario contains a deliberate omission of relevant information, which is an explicit negative message, not merely the absence of an implicit positive. Again, you are confusing “there are status-neutral positive messages” with “it is possible to convey pleasure in ways that negate status”… a proposition which I never disputed.
I simply don’t think it’s pertinent to the question, and certainly doesn’t offer any more evidence for a “status is everything” hypothesis than it does for a “humans value lots of things” hypothesis.
I wouldn’t describe that act as predominantly about status but even so a relative status message is given. Specifically it signals that the difference in status that you claim is below the threshold at which you would take their effort as your due and their obligation. That you smiled, rather than just saying thank you gives a further message—thanking without smiling would, all else being equal, give a message of somewhat greater relative status in your favor.
That seems false. The communication of the status change is a largely unavoidable side effect of the providing of peer feedback. Distorting the peer feedback such that no net status change is implied by the feedback will potentially corrupt the feedback, not sanctify it.
As long as we’re arguing, I’d be curious to hear what you think of my article 6 Tips for Productive Arguments. (I’ve just reviewed my own recommendations...)
I suspect saying thank you is a way of assigning higher status to someone. Sure, you don’t feel like you’re assigning substantially higher status to a friend by saying thank you, but what if your friend repeatedly bailed you out of sticky situations without you ever reciprocating, and with you saying thank you more and more profusely each time? Who would have more power in this friendship?
What if your friend bailed you out of sticky situations repeatedly, but your thanks did not get more profuse? That would be incongruous, I suspect, and your friend might begin to resent you.
This may be why people who don’t say thank you are considered “entitled”. They fail to assign others high status in certain situations where it’s generally considered appropriate to do so.
So far I assign high credence to the hypothesis that appreciation is about status, because every case of genuine appreciation I can think of involves assignment of higher status, and every case of less than genuine appreciation doesn’t involve it (basically, tone/body language/etc. is incongruous with the assignment of higher status implied by the appreciative remark).
You’re welcome to explore this hypothesis with me or come up with your own hypothesis.
I’d argue that the information of where the coffee came from is not inherently relevant. If I had gotten the coffee from Starbucks, it would not be especially odd for me to fail to mention this fact.
Let’s think in terms of reinforcers. Humans are reinforced by tasty food, sex, accumulation of material goods, flow, laughter, love/empathy, status bumps. What category of reinforcer does social approval constitute? I suspect in most cases it constitutes a status-type reinforcer, especially between people who only have weak ties.
If I explained to my grandparents what I actually used their Christmas gift for (as opposed to thanking them for it), this reinforcer is probably more along the lines of love/empathy than status. Depending on how we define “appreciation”, this would probably constitute appreciation. But it seems outside the sphere of concerns one worries about when one is worried about making one’s appreciation sufficiently “genuine”.
This is hardly an exhaustive list. We’re also reinforced, for example, by people we like being happy, especially in relation to us. This is the type of reinforcement I’m talking about.
When my wife smiles because of something I did for her, the warm feeling I get does not resemble the feeling of status elevation. This is even more relevant in the case of, say, a stranger thanking me for holding the door—I don’t know them and don’t really care what status they assign me.
Finally, I really don’t understand what you’re arguing for here. Specifically, I fail to see where you are offering any different actual advice for people to carry out, and we agree that insincere appreciation equals status-lowering.
We only appear to disagree on whether status-raising is a requirement for appreciation to be reinforcing… and there, you seem to have retreated to the position that any sort of positive appreciation affords a status grant, even if no increase in relative status results.
But it does not appear to me that your argument is other than definitional: that is, I do not understand why it’s important to you to assume that all actions either generate or consume status points, as opposed to say, viewing some actions as being status-neutral. Which way you look at it strikes me as being merely dependent on how you choose to frame the math, and that there is no strong reason to prefer one framing over the other.
Actually, if I were to follow what seems to be your model, where people need to be repeatedly filled with status-giving gestures in order to merely maintain their current status position, then I would either have to have a model for how status deflation occurs, or else assume that everybody’s status is always increasing in the absence of any actions taken to decrease status. This seems incoherent to me, especially since it would imply that older people would nearly always have higher status than younger people, a correlation which doesn’t hold much past adulthood.
At this point, unless you clarify your model of status and what it is exactly that you think we differ on, I don’t see much point in continuing this thread. (Honestly, I’m not sure why you started it in the first place.)
The fact that she chose you as her partner, instead of other potential candidates, gives you some status (not relative to her, but relative to all other real or imaginary candidates). Could this play some role in your feelings from her smile?
A stranger thanking you for holding the door confirms that you belong to a set of polite people. Not everyone is in this set, and people in this set have higher status than people outside of the set.
You are right, a clear definition of status is necessary, otherwise pretty much anything can be “explained” by status. But I suspect that if a meaningful definition is made, it will allow transactions of type: person X is increasing status of person Y without decreasing their own status (by decreasing status of someone else, for example an unspecified absent person).
The “really” in that statement hides a lot of ambiguity. Here, the status assigned to you fails evolution’s consequentialist calculation, so one might say that evolution shouldn’t care what status strangers in a big city assign you. Your psychological adaptations might still care, in the sense that they get activated, not having recognized absence of evolution-relevant consequences.
On the other hand, the psychological drive may be seen as representing a terminal value, preference for accumulation of status for its own sake, irrespective of its effect on other people’s behavior or of the impact of their behavior on you. In that case, one may say that you should care. It would still be the case that you should care even if the relevant psychological adaptations don’t in fact activate, so that you happen to not care in the psychological sense.
Not really. ;-)
It specifically meant, “I don’t care as long as they don’t assign me low status”, i.e., threaten my status with their response. That’s not a lot of ambiguity.