There is an interesting party game played with cards that for some reason I only remembered just now. Here is how I recall it.
You take a group of people and assign each of them a card from the deck, Ace high, deuces low. You give everyone a headband so that they can carry the card around on their foreheads, where others can see it but they can’t. You have the group mill around talking to each other, instructing them to take into account the rank of the person they’re talking to. After some time you ask people to pocket their cards, mill around some more, then line up in what they think is the order corresponding to their rank.
To the extent that this order reflects the card ranks, we can conclude that social interactions act as a carrier for information that allows people to sense a linear hierarchy. (I can’t remember, when I played it, how close the match was.)
There is an interesting party game played with cards that for some reason I only remembered just now. Here is how I recall it.
You take a group of people and assign each of them a card from the deck, Ace high, deuces low. You give everyone a headband so that they can carry the card around on their foreheads, where others can see it but they can’t. You have the group mill around talking to each other, instructing them to take into account the rank of the person they’re talking to. After some time you ask people to pocket their cards, mill around some more, then line up in what they think is the order corresponding to their rank.
To the extent that this order reflects the card ranks, we can conclude that social interactions act as a carrier for information that allows people to sense a linear hierarchy. (I can’t remember, when I played it, how close the match was.)
What you’re describing is a canonical warm up game in improv acting.
Ooooh, thanks. I’m not surprised to find out about the status-improv link, with Johnstone as the point of departure in my investigation.
But follow the hyperlinked term “Status” in the page you linked to, and what do I read?
I always felt that LW/OB in general were/are using “status” in different ways than I understood it from studying improv acting.
pjeby’s highly voted comment best sums how I always thought about “status”.
On the dominance hierarchy theory: We should taboo “dominance”, and “submission” for that matter. What do we mean then?