One thing that Johnstone emphasizes, and which I was a bit surprised you didn’t explicitly mention, is that status isn’t something you have, it’s something you do. For instance, the “status expert” teacher would alternatively raise and lower his own status in relation to that of the students, thereby maintaining an atmosphere that was maximally conductive to learning. The low and high status teachers tried to stuck into just one mode of status, regardless of what was most appropriate to the situation.
I thought about these teachers a lot, but I couldn’t understand the forces operating on us. I would now say that the incompetent teacher was a low-status player: he twitched, he made many unnecessary movements, he went red at the slightest annoyance, and he always seemed like an intruder in the classroom. The one who filled us with terror was a compulsive high-status player. The third was a status expert, raising and lowering his status with great skill. The pleasure attached to misbehaving comes partly from the status changes you make in your teacher. All those jokes on teacher are to make him drop in status. The third teacher could cope easily with any situation by changing his status first.
Status is a confusing term unless it’s understood as something one does. You may be low in social status, but play high, and vice versa.
I don’t think this really contradicts the idea of status as a zero-sum game. Also, to support the “status is something you do” case, the book was also full of various improvisation exercises designed to make explicit the different ways of trying to claim status.
External circumstances—like having climbed an especially high mountain—can make it psychologically easier to claim status, but you could still simply not claim it and treat everyone your equal. I suppose part of the confusion that makes people think status is something you have is that it is socially expected that you allow people in certain roles (like kings) to claim status automatically, and people might get uncomfortable if those people refuse to claim it. (You can probably imagine some superior whose refusal to claim higher status and an insistence to act friendly would feel uncomfortable to you.)
I was reading a social psych book on group dynamics a while back, and it defined status as the ability to control the group. A person with a great degree of status is able to choose the topics of conversation, the tone in which different topics are being discussed, as well as how much attention the individual other members get. That’s probably still missing some important things, but I think it’s the best definition so far. It also explains some things like Yvain’s question of why having an interesting medical problem might raise your status—the woman bringing up her medical problem was trying to make the conversation center around herself, i.e. trying to claim status.
Good point. I felt some regret as I posted that I hadn’t mentioned this, but it seemed to me that the notion of “self-esteem transactions” I introduced did direct attention to status as something people do.
You can find the relevant quotes about the three teachers in the excerpt I linked to.
status as the ability to control the group
This can be in part a matter of positional power. In my secret identity I am sometimes called on to work with a group as a facilitator: pretty much by definition, my job description is then to control the group (or more precisely the group’s process).
Granted, It’s not all about the position. I know how to build trust and rapport, and I can even articulate some of how I do that. I suspect that if I was clueless about these things I’d have a hard time facilitating group meetings.
Since I haven’t seen anyone say it explicitly, this type of status is not zero sum. Members of a cooperative group have more ability to influence it then members of an uncooperative group or members of a group lacking confidence to propose actions.
One thing that Johnstone emphasizes, and which I was a bit surprised you didn’t explicitly mention, is that status isn’t something you have, it’s something you do. For instance, the “status expert” teacher would alternatively raise and lower his own status in relation to that of the students, thereby maintaining an atmosphere that was maximally conductive to learning. The low and high status teachers tried to stuck into just one mode of status, regardless of what was most appropriate to the situation.
I don’t think this really contradicts the idea of status as a zero-sum game. Also, to support the “status is something you do” case, the book was also full of various improvisation exercises designed to make explicit the different ways of trying to claim status.
External circumstances—like having climbed an especially high mountain—can make it psychologically easier to claim status, but you could still simply not claim it and treat everyone your equal. I suppose part of the confusion that makes people think status is something you have is that it is socially expected that you allow people in certain roles (like kings) to claim status automatically, and people might get uncomfortable if those people refuse to claim it. (You can probably imagine some superior whose refusal to claim higher status and an insistence to act friendly would feel uncomfortable to you.)
I was reading a social psych book on group dynamics a while back, and it defined status as the ability to control the group. A person with a great degree of status is able to choose the topics of conversation, the tone in which different topics are being discussed, as well as how much attention the individual other members get. That’s probably still missing some important things, but I think it’s the best definition so far. It also explains some things like Yvain’s question of why having an interesting medical problem might raise your status—the woman bringing up her medical problem was trying to make the conversation center around herself, i.e. trying to claim status.
Good point. I felt some regret as I posted that I hadn’t mentioned this, but it seemed to me that the notion of “self-esteem transactions” I introduced did direct attention to status as something people do.
You can find the relevant quotes about the three teachers in the excerpt I linked to.
This can be in part a matter of positional power. In my secret identity I am sometimes called on to work with a group as a facilitator: pretty much by definition, my job description is then to control the group (or more precisely the group’s process).
Granted, It’s not all about the position. I know how to build trust and rapport, and I can even articulate some of how I do that. I suspect that if I was clueless about these things I’d have a hard time facilitating group meetings.
“status as the ability to control the group”
Since I haven’t seen anyone say it explicitly, this type of status is not zero sum. Members of a cooperative group have more ability to influence it then members of an uncooperative group or members of a group lacking confidence to propose actions.