This is great! Definitely useful to tease out more dimensions in the social game.
However, I worry that there’s something not-quite-orthogonal about the two axes you describe. A piece of this is … both noticing and moving in the social game are in themselves predictive of high status. That is to say, if you’re in a social situation where you understand what’s going on and have the mental slack to control your status moves, almost everything you do naturally will look like playing high, and it feels quite awkward to play low intentionally.
What this means in practice is that on the high status side it’s very easy to play both big and small as the situation demands, but the lower right corner (low-status playing big) is a dangerous place to be and is rarely occurring in nature. This is probably why it’s harder to come up with a low-big example than a high-small example. You’re repelled from low-big by either (a) being pushed back down to the low-small state you “deserve” by social pressure or (b) being pushed up to high-big by gaining courage and status from playing big.
I’m curious about your claim that low-status playing big is rarely occurring in nature, because it was far easier for me to think of low-big examples than high-small examples. What examples did you think of, if you care to share? Maybe we’re interpreting the thing slightly differently? And I definitely agree that low-big is a dangerous place to be, but it’s not obvious to me that either (a) or (b) will come into play in all or even a majority of cases.
I think a lot of low-big happens when people are relatively socially oblivious, and in those situations I think social pressure is often ineffective at pushing people back down to the low-small state. There is a common problem at rationality meetups (where people skew higher-than-average autistic) where someone takes up far more than their fair share of air in the room and doesn’t pick up on others’ signals of annoyance or discomfort.
Another situation that leads to a lot of low-big is when a person who’s used to being high status comes into a new context and erroneously expects their status to be conserved across domains. A probably-familiar example is a freshman at an elite university who was the smartest person in his hometown and therefore has been trained to think that everything he has to say is really important, who dominates class discussion despite having nothing interesting or insightful to say. In that case I guess I would naïvely expect (a) to push that person to be smaller eventually, but in practice that hasn’t been my experience.
Also, a lot of old people and tenured professors play big no matter what situation they’re in, and (a) is very unlikely to work on them, but (b) also might not work if they’re in a situation where they can’t gain status just by being big and blustery (e.g. the rationality community!).
Do you think there are other forces that act to repel people from low-big besides (a) and (b)? If not, are there other reasons why you think low-big is not a stable equilibrium? I ask because it definitely doesn’t look like a stable equilibrium, but I haven’t thought of things other than (a) or (b) that would make that the case.
I also agree that “both noticing and moving in the social game are in themselves predictive of high status,” but I don’t think it necessarily follows that “on the high status side it’s very easy to play both big and small as the situation demands.” I think there are plenty of people (probably particularly females, because of how we’re explicitly socialized to not take up space) who have definitely acquired status but play small far more often than is warranted. Imperfect examples that come to mind are Lauren Lee and Scott Alexander (and me, but you don’t know me) - although I’m concerned I might be equivocating here between ‘being small’ and ‘playing low status.’ I definitely always am both small and playing low status and trying to wrench myself out of that is painful and confusing, but I don’t know if the same is true of Lauren or Scott.
I think all I’m really saying here is that ‘being good at the social game’ implies ‘high status’, but ‘high status’ does not imply ‘being good at the social game’ - which maybe makes the axes more orthogonal than you think.
I think I tend to filter out relatively socially oblivious people from in-person interactions, so I’m probably seeing a wildly different sample from you and that accounts for the difference. I’ll make the weaker claim that low-big, unlike the three other locations on the map, is just not a good place to be in almost any situation.
I’m interpreting high-small to include many self-deprecating/minimizing behaviors made by high-status people (say good teachers and speakers) to seem more approachable/human and make everyone else more comfortable. “Holding space [for someone]” Qiaochu mentions in the other comment is an example of this. My experience is that most people “good at the status game” know how to play (exactly) high-big and high-small.
Indeed “high status” does not imply “good at the status game,” that’s a good point.
100% agree that status and size are intertwined. Depending on how strongly you mean it, I think I disagree with “both noticing and moving in the social game are in themselves predictive of high status”? I certainly disagree that relatively lower-status people shouldn’t try noticing or moving.
For example, I think one straightforward and beneficial application of detangling these concepts is for people (of whom, like mingyuan in their other reply to you, I’ve met plenty) who spend a lot of their social lives unintentionally make themselves bigger than appropriate for their status. The beneficial outcome here isn’t “they realize they should be smaller and make themselves so, good riddance”—it’s something more like “they realize they should be smaller for now and make themselves so” → “they start working on ways to be higher status while staying relatively small for the moment” → “they gradually become higher status and can decide how much of that space to fill in any given moment”.
I personally know a really good example of this happening (though they didn’t use my terms/concepts, so it’s not evidence those are useful). When I met this person a few years ago, they were really quite low status, and they made themselves really quite big, all the time. It was really annoying, and they knew it, and they were trying to figure out how to fix it. This person is now much higher status in their circles than they were back then, and also smaller most of the time, and I think learning to be smaller is an important part of the causal chain that ended up with them being higher status. (In my telling it also involved them learning and doing a bunch of things—I don’t want to imply it was pure social conniving—but I think the smallness was a prerequisite or at least a notable booster.)
Come to think of it, though for some reason I’ve never put it in these terms before, I think this is also a good frame for a big shift I made in how I interact socially, around ages 17-20. Maybe that’s why this concept seems so important to me. Huh.
This is great! Definitely useful to tease out more dimensions in the social game.
However, I worry that there’s something not-quite-orthogonal about the two axes you describe. A piece of this is … both noticing and moving in the social game are in themselves predictive of high status. That is to say, if you’re in a social situation where you understand what’s going on and have the mental slack to control your status moves, almost everything you do naturally will look like playing high, and it feels quite awkward to play low intentionally.
What this means in practice is that on the high status side it’s very easy to play both big and small as the situation demands, but the lower right corner (low-status playing big) is a dangerous place to be and is rarely occurring in nature. This is probably why it’s harder to come up with a low-big example than a high-small example. You’re repelled from low-big by either (a) being pushed back down to the low-small state you “deserve” by social pressure or (b) being pushed up to high-big by gaining courage and status from playing big.
I’m curious about your claim that low-status playing big is rarely occurring in nature, because it was far easier for me to think of low-big examples than high-small examples. What examples did you think of, if you care to share? Maybe we’re interpreting the thing slightly differently? And I definitely agree that low-big is a dangerous place to be, but it’s not obvious to me that either (a) or (b) will come into play in all or even a majority of cases.
I think a lot of low-big happens when people are relatively socially oblivious, and in those situations I think social pressure is often ineffective at pushing people back down to the low-small state. There is a common problem at rationality meetups (where people skew higher-than-average autistic) where someone takes up far more than their fair share of air in the room and doesn’t pick up on others’ signals of annoyance or discomfort.
Another situation that leads to a lot of low-big is when a person who’s used to being high status comes into a new context and erroneously expects their status to be conserved across domains. A probably-familiar example is a freshman at an elite university who was the smartest person in his hometown and therefore has been trained to think that everything he has to say is really important, who dominates class discussion despite having nothing interesting or insightful to say. In that case I guess I would naïvely expect (a) to push that person to be smaller eventually, but in practice that hasn’t been my experience.
Also, a lot of old people and tenured professors play big no matter what situation they’re in, and (a) is very unlikely to work on them, but (b) also might not work if they’re in a situation where they can’t gain status just by being big and blustery (e.g. the rationality community!).
Do you think there are other forces that act to repel people from low-big besides (a) and (b)? If not, are there other reasons why you think low-big is not a stable equilibrium? I ask because it definitely doesn’t look like a stable equilibrium, but I haven’t thought of things other than (a) or (b) that would make that the case.
I also agree that “both noticing and moving in the social game are in themselves predictive of high status,” but I don’t think it necessarily follows that “on the high status side it’s very easy to play both big and small as the situation demands.” I think there are plenty of people (probably particularly females, because of how we’re explicitly socialized to not take up space) who have definitely acquired status but play small far more often than is warranted. Imperfect examples that come to mind are Lauren Lee and Scott Alexander (and me, but you don’t know me) - although I’m concerned I might be equivocating here between ‘being small’ and ‘playing low status.’ I definitely always am both small and playing low status and trying to wrench myself out of that is painful and confusing, but I don’t know if the same is true of Lauren or Scott.
I think all I’m really saying here is that ‘being good at the social game’ implies ‘high status’, but ‘high status’ does not imply ‘being good at the social game’ - which maybe makes the axes more orthogonal than you think.
I think I tend to filter out relatively socially oblivious people from in-person interactions, so I’m probably seeing a wildly different sample from you and that accounts for the difference. I’ll make the weaker claim that low-big, unlike the three other locations on the map, is just not a good place to be in almost any situation.
I’m interpreting high-small to include many self-deprecating/minimizing behaviors made by high-status people (say good teachers and speakers) to seem more approachable/human and make everyone else more comfortable. “Holding space [for someone]” Qiaochu mentions in the other comment is an example of this. My experience is that most people “good at the status game” know how to play (exactly) high-big and high-small.
Indeed “high status” does not imply “good at the status game,” that’s a good point.
100% agree that status and size are intertwined. Depending on how strongly you mean it, I think I disagree with “both noticing and moving in the social game are in themselves predictive of high status”? I certainly disagree that relatively lower-status people shouldn’t try noticing or moving.
For example, I think one straightforward and beneficial application of detangling these concepts is for people (of whom, like mingyuan in their other reply to you, I’ve met plenty) who spend a lot of their social lives unintentionally make themselves bigger than appropriate for their status. The beneficial outcome here isn’t “they realize they should be smaller and make themselves so, good riddance”—it’s something more like “they realize they should be smaller for now and make themselves so” → “they start working on ways to be higher status while staying relatively small for the moment” → “they gradually become higher status and can decide how much of that space to fill in any given moment”.
I personally know a really good example of this happening (though they didn’t use my terms/concepts, so it’s not evidence those are useful). When I met this person a few years ago, they were really quite low status, and they made themselves really quite big, all the time. It was really annoying, and they knew it, and they were trying to figure out how to fix it. This person is now much higher status in their circles than they were back then, and also smaller most of the time, and I think learning to be smaller is an important part of the causal chain that ended up with them being higher status. (In my telling it also involved them learning and doing a bunch of things—I don’t want to imply it was pure social conniving—but I think the smallness was a prerequisite or at least a notable booster.)
Come to think of it, though for some reason I’ve never put it in these terms before, I think this is also a good frame for a big shift I made in how I interact socially, around ages 17-20. Maybe that’s why this concept seems so important to me. Huh.