(Compare with Sarah Constantin’s claim that group-coordination activities like dancing serve as a way to identify and exclude people who are out of sync with the whole. This stands in some tension with her more recent claim that people should exaggerate differences in order to have some social standing within a group.)
Hmm. So I was about respond that this seemed relatively straightforward to resolve. Then I read Sarah’s twitter thread and it seems even more straightforward – AFAICT the two claims are literally the same claim. Group coordination activities are about seeing who is out of sync. Performative opinions are about seeing who is out of sync. You’re incentivized to exaggerate your opinions such that they are a costly signal of group affiliation with whichever group you’re trying to cohere with.
There’s a different thing I thought you meant initially, which is that you also are incentivized (in a more complex fashion) to have contrarian opinions within a group. But this is a more dangerous game – it’s the the game that distinguishes high and lower status people within the group.
Low-to-medium status people perform the standard default opinions. Weird opinions usually result in you losings status, but if you successfully gamble that people will end up liking your opinion, or fitting it into the overall paradigm of the group, distinguishing yourself allows you to become a schelling choice for gaining power as well as for getting scapegoated.
I think the emphasis on “distinctive” is important here. Trying to dance in sync means trying not to be distinctive. You only want to be clearly located within the social space insofar as there’s more than one political coalition, and even then you don’t really want to be locatable personally like a named cartoon character such as Waldo, you want to be clearly tagged as a member of a comparatively undifferentiated class. Unless you’re making a bid to be king or something.
I fear you’re assuming a consistency of expectations that leads toward a vastly oversimple model of incentives. Groups value some kinds of diversity, and some instances of deviant competence (unusual things that work out), while punishing some that on many dimensions seem very similar to the things they reward.
Details matter, and path-dependencies abound (where you can’t get from here to there without a viable intermediate which may not be optimal for anything).
I want to be uniquely desirable to my mate and to my employer, to avoid competing on a level field with others, and to avoid the admission that I’m just one of 7.5 billion living humans, and so can’t actually be all that special. I simultaneously want to signal that I’m predictably productive on standard dimensions, and a positive outlier on at least one. Counter-signaling is an important part of this. Showing that I deviate from norms on some (harmless) dimensions is an indicator that I’m competent enough in more important dimensions that I don’t have to care about conformity.
You have to dance in sync for some parts of some songs, and show your unique strengths (which includes showing weaknesses and neutral distinctions as part of counter-signaling) during other parts of the dance. even line dances and highly-prescriptive victorian dances have segments where some amount of freestyle performance is beneficial.
You only want to be clearly located within the social space insofar as there’s more than one political coalition
I think I’m disagreeing about how much information you need to convey to locate yourself in location space. You don’t want to stand out from the others in the dance. That doesn’t mean the dance itself isn’t extremely distinctive. There’s a huge difference between a rave, square dancing, line dancing, being a Las Vegas showgirl, being one of the ensemble cast in a Broadway show.
Your entire model here is about zero-sum games, and being able to survive coalition politics. Insofar as there isn’t more than one political coalition, the entire model seems less relevant. (But, there are almost always multiple coalitions so that doesn’t seem to be a problem)
Second, even if you’re just a small group in the wilderness and there are no other humans, if you want to preserve tight social bonds I suspect it’s still important to have a distinctive culture.
Insofar as there isn’t more than one political coalition, the entire model seems less relevant. (But, there are almost always multiple coalitions so that doesn’t seem to be a problem)
This varies a lot depending on structural factors. The survivor game can show up within a largely homogenous group, and within that group one doesn’t want to be distinctive.
In intergroup conflict, from one group’s perspective, you want outsiders to all seem distinctive, and that has to involve making yourselves distinguishable from them. But from the inside that feels like your group just looks kinda normal, and everyone else is “ethnic” or “exotic” or “has an accent” or “uses jargon” or “has weird rules” or some other stereotype.
I think you want the ingroup to seem “normal”, but I think there is selection pressure on groups for their “normal” seeming beliefs to require costly signals. (Or, in general, group cohesion is stronger when group membership requires costly signals. One such type of signal is What Group Members Believe. If your social games depend on that particular input, your beliefs are going to be weird enough to distinguish the ingroup from the outgroup)
Hmm. So I was about respond that this seemed relatively straightforward to resolve. Then I read Sarah’s twitter thread and it seems even more straightforward – AFAICT the two claims are literally the same claim. Group coordination activities are about seeing who is out of sync. Performative opinions are about seeing who is out of sync. You’re incentivized to exaggerate your opinions such that they are a costly signal of group affiliation with whichever group you’re trying to cohere with.
There’s a different thing I thought you meant initially, which is that you also are incentivized (in a more complex fashion) to have contrarian opinions within a group. But this is a more dangerous game – it’s the the game that distinguishes high and lower status people within the group.
Low-to-medium status people perform the standard default opinions. Weird opinions usually result in you losings status, but if you successfully gamble that people will end up liking your opinion, or fitting it into the overall paradigm of the group, distinguishing yourself allows you to become a schelling choice for gaining power as well as for getting scapegoated.
I think the emphasis on “distinctive” is important here. Trying to dance in sync means trying not to be distinctive. You only want to be clearly located within the social space insofar as there’s more than one political coalition, and even then you don’t really want to be locatable personally like a named cartoon character such as Waldo, you want to be clearly tagged as a member of a comparatively undifferentiated class. Unless you’re making a bid to be king or something.
I fear you’re assuming a consistency of expectations that leads toward a vastly oversimple model of incentives. Groups value some kinds of diversity, and some instances of deviant competence (unusual things that work out), while punishing some that on many dimensions seem very similar to the things they reward.
Details matter, and path-dependencies abound (where you can’t get from here to there without a viable intermediate which may not be optimal for anything).
I want to be uniquely desirable to my mate and to my employer, to avoid competing on a level field with others, and to avoid the admission that I’m just one of 7.5 billion living humans, and so can’t actually be all that special. I simultaneously want to signal that I’m predictably productive on standard dimensions, and a positive outlier on at least one. Counter-signaling is an important part of this. Showing that I deviate from norms on some (harmless) dimensions is an indicator that I’m competent enough in more important dimensions that I don’t have to care about conformity.
You have to dance in sync for some parts of some songs, and show your unique strengths (which includes showing weaknesses and neutral distinctions as part of counter-signaling) during other parts of the dance. even line dances and highly-prescriptive victorian dances have segments where some amount of freestyle performance is beneficial.
I agree that mating complicates this substantially.
I think I’m disagreeing about how much information you need to convey to locate yourself in location space. You don’t want to stand out from the others in the dance. That doesn’t mean the dance itself isn’t extremely distinctive. There’s a huge difference between a rave, square dancing, line dancing, being a Las Vegas showgirl, being one of the ensemble cast in a Broadway show.
Your entire model here is about zero-sum games, and being able to survive coalition politics. Insofar as there isn’t more than one political coalition, the entire model seems less relevant. (But, there are almost always multiple coalitions so that doesn’t seem to be a problem)
Second, even if you’re just a small group in the wilderness and there are no other humans, if you want to preserve tight social bonds I suspect it’s still important to have a distinctive culture.
This varies a lot depending on structural factors. The survivor game can show up within a largely homogenous group, and within that group one doesn’t want to be distinctive.
In intergroup conflict, from one group’s perspective, you want outsiders to all seem distinctive, and that has to involve making yourselves distinguishable from them. But from the inside that feels like your group just looks kinda normal, and everyone else is “ethnic” or “exotic” or “has an accent” or “uses jargon” or “has weird rules” or some other stereotype.
I think you want the ingroup to seem “normal”, but I think there is selection pressure on groups for their “normal” seeming beliefs to require costly signals. (Or, in general, group cohesion is stronger when group membership requires costly signals. One such type of signal is What Group Members Believe. If your social games depend on that particular input, your beliefs are going to be weird enough to distinguish the ingroup from the outgroup)
(A lot of my thinking is downstream of this post by Scott from awhile back)