More like the latter. I think that the primary or most common purpose of social influence/manipulation is not to hurt anyone, but simply to get what one wants. It‘s like a knife: sure, it can be a weapon, but the vast majority of knife-uses are just using the knife as a tool.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what sort of things you classify as “social influence/manipulation”, but to me manipulating other people “simply to get what one wants” is pretty much a paradigmatic example of something bad.
As far as I understand “Telling a good joke with the intent that people will think I’m funny and thus high status” would be social influence/manipulation in the sense Sarah uses the words.
You likely need to be in the company of people with a lot of self awareness and control over their social actions for people not to engage in behavior like that constantly.
If so, then it seems there’s been some topic drift, because the context from a few comments upthread is this remark of Sarah’s: “I’ve had a hard time with people using emotional/social rapport-building tools in communication, because it feels like it’s exploiting hacks in my psychology to make me comply.” I don’t think Sarah would regard telling jokes with the goal of being seen as funny-hence-high-status as “exploiting hacks in my psychology to make me comply”.
Maybe the average person who tells a joke wouldn’t count but a good comedian who’s actually skilled at it would count as someone who can do social magic. They get undo influence that isn’t do to anything besides their ability to do social magic.
A good comedian is hypnotic in the sense that Sarah uses the term.
More like the latter. I think that the primary or most common purpose of social influence/manipulation is not to hurt anyone, but simply to get what one wants. It‘s like a knife: sure, it can be a weapon, but the vast majority of knife-uses are just using the knife as a tool.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what sort of things you classify as “social influence/manipulation”, but to me manipulating other people “simply to get what one wants” is pretty much a paradigmatic example of something bad.
As far as I understand “Telling a good joke with the intent that people will think I’m funny and thus high status” would be social influence/manipulation in the sense Sarah uses the words.
You likely need to be in the company of people with a lot of self awareness and control over their social actions for people not to engage in behavior like that constantly.
If so, then it seems there’s been some topic drift, because the context from a few comments upthread is this remark of Sarah’s: “I’ve had a hard time with people using emotional/social rapport-building tools in communication, because it feels like it’s exploiting hacks in my psychology to make me comply.” I don’t think Sarah would regard telling jokes with the goal of being seen as funny-hence-high-status as “exploiting hacks in my psychology to make me comply”.
Maybe the average person who tells a joke wouldn’t count but a good comedian who’s actually skilled at it would count as someone who can do social magic. They get undo influence that isn’t do to anything besides their ability to do social magic.
A good comedian is hypnotic in the sense that Sarah uses the term.