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.
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.