Hmm, I said I had no plausible guess, and then my guess turned out to be correct. I should have expressed myself in a manner that doesn’t require bending the laws of reality to my will.
Affiliation is a catch-all for being loved, liked, accepted, supported, understood, empathized with, etc. Bonding.
I think I would have gotten the idea immediately if you had said “Friendship”, “Companionship”, or something similar. Likewise, Stimulation could be called “Excitement”. Does “Status, Excitement, Companionship, Safety” make a good acronym? :)
I think I would have gotten the idea immediately if you had said “Friendship”, “Companionship”, or something similar.
Do bear in mind that my goal in communication is not always for people to get things immediately, if, in the process, it causes them to also bring along a ton of baggage, poor analogies, misconceptions, etc. In this case, one function of using very technical terms for the acronym is to encourage you to create a new bucket in your head for sorting these, rather than using existing (but incorrect) buckets.
Not all stimulation is excitement, and not all affiliation is companionship. One kind of affiliation is the sense of belonging or being a part of something, for example.
(It would actually be nice to have a similarly precise-yet-vague way of saying “Safety”, since it’s really more like “maintaining control and/or predictability of the circumstances surrounding my health and physical safety”.)
(It would actually be nice to have a similarly precise-yet-vague way of saying “Safety”, since it’s really more like “maintaining control and/or predictability of the circumstances surrounding my health and physical safety”.)
Definitely, the ‘safety’ part was the one that didn’t quite seem to fit. It also seems to be much more about the ‘maintaining control and/or predictability of the circumstances’ part than it is about limiting to ‘surrounding my health and physical safety’.
Sure, it may not make the categories quite so neat to acknowledge it but the ‘safety’ feelings apply to more than the physical. We get those feelings in response to ‘status’ threats too. At least, I do and I do not believe I am unique. Fortunately your list was described as ‘rough’ so it seems about right.
Fortunately your list was described as ‘rough’ so it seems about right.
One reason for that is that, for the uses I have for that list, it doesn’t require you to be able to objectively categorize your response or concern. It’s more like how we teach people the basic color names, and then people can argue about whether a particular color is teal or aqua. ;-)
All the list does is provide a convenient, memorable framework for thinking and talking about the terminal values human brains use to organize learning and behavior… and a way of pointing people to the aspects of their own experience that will show them how they’re programmed and what they need to do to reprogram themselves.
So, I guess what I’m saying is, if somebody wants to add “magenta” or “puce” to the list of colors, it doesn’t harm the idea of a spectrum, just as different musical scales can cover the same range of frequencies. The advantage of SASS as a particular “scale” or “color scheme” is that it’s simple and memorable: it’s easier to answer “which of these four things do I feel I’m missing/needing in this situation” than “why am I doing this?”
(In particular, the second question calls for a far-brain answer, and a big part of the social far brain’s function is to obfuscate your SASS-seeking motives from other people, by making up socially-acceptable reasons why you do things.)
Nice. Keeps the acronym, and matches the scope a bit better. I wonder if people will interpret that as meaning their “insecurity” is related, though. (Insecurities are generally affiliation or status-related.) On the other hand, people can have misconceptions about all of them, so that’s not necessarily a problem.
Another possible “S” candidate would be Stability.
I think I would have gotten the idea immediately if you had said “Friendship”, “Companionship”, or something similar.
That would be misleading. For the purposes of this kind of investigation it seems more useful to carve reality at ‘affiliation’. The associted negative emotions just seem to be more directly associated with maintaining affiliation than companionship. This is one of those things where we may say that we want companionship but act like we want affiliation.
Hmm, I said I had no plausible guess, and then my guess turned out to be correct. I should have expressed myself in a manner that doesn’t require bending the laws of reality to my will.
I think I would have gotten the idea immediately if you had said “Friendship”, “Companionship”, or something similar. Likewise, Stimulation could be called “Excitement”. Does “Status, Excitement, Companionship, Safety” make a good acronym? :)
Do bear in mind that my goal in communication is not always for people to get things immediately, if, in the process, it causes them to also bring along a ton of baggage, poor analogies, misconceptions, etc. In this case, one function of using very technical terms for the acronym is to encourage you to create a new bucket in your head for sorting these, rather than using existing (but incorrect) buckets.
Not all stimulation is excitement, and not all affiliation is companionship. One kind of affiliation is the sense of belonging or being a part of something, for example.
(It would actually be nice to have a similarly precise-yet-vague way of saying “Safety”, since it’s really more like “maintaining control and/or predictability of the circumstances surrounding my health and physical safety”.)
Definitely, the ‘safety’ part was the one that didn’t quite seem to fit. It also seems to be much more about the ‘maintaining control and/or predictability of the circumstances’ part than it is about limiting to ‘surrounding my health and physical safety’.
Sure, it may not make the categories quite so neat to acknowledge it but the ‘safety’ feelings apply to more than the physical. We get those feelings in response to ‘status’ threats too. At least, I do and I do not believe I am unique. Fortunately your list was described as ‘rough’ so it seems about right.
One reason for that is that, for the uses I have for that list, it doesn’t require you to be able to objectively categorize your response or concern. It’s more like how we teach people the basic color names, and then people can argue about whether a particular color is teal or aqua. ;-)
All the list does is provide a convenient, memorable framework for thinking and talking about the terminal values human brains use to organize learning and behavior… and a way of pointing people to the aspects of their own experience that will show them how they’re programmed and what they need to do to reprogram themselves.
So, I guess what I’m saying is, if somebody wants to add “magenta” or “puce” to the list of colors, it doesn’t harm the idea of a spectrum, just as different musical scales can cover the same range of frequencies. The advantage of SASS as a particular “scale” or “color scheme” is that it’s simple and memorable: it’s easier to answer “which of these four things do I feel I’m missing/needing in this situation” than “why am I doing this?”
(In particular, the second question calls for a far-brain answer, and a big part of the social far brain’s function is to obfuscate your SASS-seeking motives from other people, by making up socially-acceptable reasons why you do things.)
“Security”?
Nice. Keeps the acronym, and matches the scope a bit better. I wonder if people will interpret that as meaning their “insecurity” is related, though. (Insecurities are generally affiliation or status-related.) On the other hand, people can have misconceptions about all of them, so that’s not necessarily a problem.
Another possible “S” candidate would be Stability.
That would be misleading. For the purposes of this kind of investigation it seems more useful to carve reality at ‘affiliation’. The associted negative emotions just seem to be more directly associated with maintaining affiliation than companionship. This is one of those things where we may say that we want companionship but act like we want affiliation.
I think it’s a bit distracting.