Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Social status part 1/2: negotiations over object-level preferences, published by Steven Byrnes on March 7, 2024 on LessWrong.

1.1 Summary & contents

This is the first of two blog posts where I try to make sense of the whole universe of social-status-related behaviors and phenomena:

This post is focused on a special case of two people interacting, where they have different object-level preferences - maybe one wants to order pizza for dinner while the other wants sushi. This gets us into various topics like "leading and following", averaging different people's utility functions, being more or less "pushy", "ask culture versus guess culture", plausible deniability, politeness arms-races, and more.

Then the next post, "Social status part 2/2: everything else", will layer on another heap of complexity on top of all that, related to the fact that people also have preferences related to the interaction itself, like "a preference not to be rude". That gets us into topics like dominance, prestige, getting offended, passive-aggressiveness, status, self-deprecation, and more.

Some context for how I came to write this: While I often write about neuroscience and brain algorithms, these two posts have essentially none of that. They're just about systematizing everyday behavior and folk psychology, and I hope they will be generally useful as such. As it happens, my own larger project is to understand the neuroscience underlying social status behaviors (as part of

this even larger project related to AI alignment). But I have no hope of figuring out the neuroscience underlying social status behaviors, if I don't understand social status behaviors in the first place. Hence these posts.

I previously attempted to talk about social status a couple months ago

here. I still think I was pointing towards something important and true in that old post, but it was just one little piece of the puzzle, and I described it very poorly because I was confused about the bigger picture. Anyway, I neither expect nor recommend that you read that; these two posts will hopefully be self-contained.

This post is organized as follows:

Section 1.2 describes the setting and some basic terminology. In particular, I use the word "negotiation" very broadly to include most everyday interactions, including making plans and decisions as a group, requesting favors, divvying up responsibilities, and even things like taking turns speaking and changing conversation topics.

Section 1.3 defines two key terms for this post: "leading" and "following". If two people, Alice & Beth, are interacting, and Alice is "mostly leading" while Beth is "mostly following", that means that, when Alice & Beth have conflicting object-level preferences, the group will make decisions that follow Alice's preferences more than Beth's. I then argue that the idea of "leading" and "following" are equally applicable to both "dominance" and "prestige" interactions (in the terminology of

dual strategies theory).

Section 1.4 offers a toy model for the dynamic above, where Alice & Beth each has a utility function for their object-level preferences, and the group decisions are based on a weighted average of Alice's and Beth's utilities, and more "leading" simply means that your preferences get more weight in the weighted average. Thus, "leading-ness" always sums to 100%: if Alice is "70% leading" within the interaction, then Beth must be "30% leading", and so on.

I discuss some insights that we get from this toy model, and also clarify a technical issue related to the incommensurability of different people's desires.

Section 1.5 offers another related toy model, where there's an objective scale of "pushiness" - ranging from making strong explicit demands, to subtly hinting at one's own preferences - and where "leading" and "following" correspond respecti...