
Hacking The Status Game - amirkhella
http://blog.amirkhella.com/2011/04/18/the-status-game/
======
mindcrime
There is much wisdom in improv. I would encourage anyone and everyone to take
at least a "Intro to Improv" or "Improv 101" course. It can definitely change
your outlook.

And as far as "hacking the status game" goes, this is part of what the Pickup
Artists have been teaching for a while... how a given woman reacts to you is
largely about how _you_ present _yourself_. Act like she's the superior in the
relationship, "the prize" as it were, and she'll lower her view of you. Treat
her as a peer, or someone of lower status, and you actually become more
attractive. Well, that's the theory anyway, and it definitely seems to be
borne out at times.

Of course this concept is more general than just interacting with the opposite
sex. But you have to be careful... too much of this with your boss, and you
may get written up for insubordination or something. :-)

~~~
RockyMcNuts
Or you could be seen as just a straight shooter with upper management written
all over him ...

[http://www.hulu.com/watch/12638/office-space-peters-
intervie...](http://www.hulu.com/watch/12638/office-space-peters-interview)

~~~
Murkin
I hope for a day, when posting links to geographically-limited sites like hulu
on international forms, will be considered similar to posting links behind a
pay-wall. - Bad form.

~~~
RockyMcNuts
sorry, couldn't find any other watchable links, looked like Fox had DMCAed the
others .

Hulu used to be cool, but the networks crippled it.

------
jseliger
If you're interested, try reading Keith Johnstone's Impro: Improvisation and
the Theatre, which has gems like this in it:

"Once you understand that every sound and posture implies a status, then you
perceive the world quite differently, and the change is probably permanent. In
my view, really accomplished actors, directors, and playwrights are people
with an intuitive understanding of the status transactions that govern human
relationships. This ability to perceive the underlying motives of casual
behaviour can also be taught" (72).

Or this: "A further early discovery [in theatre status games] was that there
was no way to be neutral [...] The messages are modified by the receivers"
(37).

Consequently, we all have to play status "games" (an imperfect term that
nonetheless gets used frequently) whether we wish to or not. Attempting not to
play such games might confer the highest status of all, implying that one
doesn't need to rely on status modifications to achieve social standing: one
is beyond the petty concerns and judgments of others. Chances are that almost
one actually is beyond such judgment, but we would like to pretend that we
are.

~~~
sherif
i'd like to second this reading recommendation and add that in the first few
paragraphs of this book i found one of the more inspired and simple brain
hacks i've ever tried (paraphrasing here ... the book's on a 6-degrees loan
somewhere):

"to free your mind of its cluttered and stunted awareness, walk around the
room calling out at the objects you see, but use different names for
everything. look at the chair and say 'banana', then the door and say, out
loud, 'desk', and so on. go on walking and calling things by their wrong name
out loud. it takes a few minutes, maybe 10, but soon you might notice
something happening. maybe a kind of brightness falls over the objects in the
room around you. suddenly things appear more vivid, fresh and new, for no
particular reason. it's like an adrenaline shot for your creative mind.
getting into this state takes deliberate effort at first, but gets easier with
practice."

if you're familiar with it, there's a scene from the remake of 'the manchurian
candidate' that uses a similar lighting effect to signal an altered state of
mind for key characters. but it's nothing like that. those are the movies. --
just to set the right expectation.

------
limist
Fascinating. And furthermore, smart people may be at a major disadvantage with
this game; as Bertrand Russell said, "The trouble with this world is that the
stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." Put another way,
overconfidence and bravado come readily to those with the least real skill and
insight; people who know enough to realize they don't know may often stay
quiet and deferential.

But at the other extreme, people who have reached mastery in something often
exhibit a subtle authority which shows up in body language alone.

~~~
fleitz
No, smart people are at a major advantage, the cocksure can easily get
themselves into difficult situations with this, if you're smart and cocksure
then you can lull the idiots into poor positions, and you can defend your own
poor positions with some clever use of rhetoric.

I was once in a meeting where the CEO was deciding that we should standardize
the developer's OS. This was because I had installed Windows on a Java
developer's workstation and the CEO was kind of pissed at me about it and
thought the developer should have Linux on his system. (The dev was porting C#
to Java)

So I suggested at one point, by asking the sys admin what would make his life
easiest, whether the best way to standardize was to run whatever we ran in
production so that it would minimize bugs due to OS differences. The CEO and
sys admin who was his trusted lieutenant immediately seized upon this and were
barking out orders that we should run whatever was in production. I happend to
know that we ran Solaris in prod for these products, now all the Linux
developers were pissed they'd have to run Solaris, immediately revolted in the
meeting and the result was no developer OS standardization.

The key with cocksure idiots is to tell them something that sounds good that
they will seize upon which will be laughed at by everyone who is in the know.
Then they go away and stop fucking with you. Most people are just looking for
someone to tell them what to do, be that person and you can run the show.

~~~
hugh3
Cool story, bro. Are you playing the role of the smart person or the cocksure
idiot in this particular situation?

~~~
fleitz
I think I'm playing the smart person :) Who really knows, smart and idiotic
are all perceptions in the minds of others.

Semmelweis who was influential in the idea that germs spread disease was
jailed for insanity because of it. Was he smart or an idiot?

I went into the meeting wanting to kill OS standardization and it worked. I
got my way but whether standardization is better / worse, who knows?

------
shalmanese
One thing that's always important to emphasize to people who first discover
status games is that it's not always about high status. High status is high
reward but also high risk. Properly playing the status game means being able
to move fluidly from high to low status as the situation and context demands.

~~~
hugh3
Indeed. Acting higher-status when you're really not is a sure way to make
people take a _very_ strong dislike to you.

A student comes into a professor's office to ask for help. What's going to
happen to the student if he starts acting like he's got higher status than the
professor? Nothing good.

Likewise, if I start lording myself over my friends (who are supposed to be my
equals) then they're gonna stop being my friends pretty soon.

The number of social situations in which artificially attempting to raise your
status is a _good_ idea is pretty limited. The only really useful part of all
this is in making sure you don't give off an artificially low status.

~~~
keeptrying
Useful social situations for artificially raising yous status:

1\. Attracting a good looking girl.

2\. Communicating to your boss that you will not be pushed around without
resorting to words. I used this a lot (maybe a bit too much). But I never had
to do shit work that I didnt want to do.

3\. Communicating to others who are not in your reporting hierarchy, but still
senior to you, that you "get it". IF this is coupled with actual execution
capability then you'll gain a lot of credibility pretty fast.

And yes I do agree that if you want to learn something from someone then you
do have to assume a slightly lower status.

But the most interesting insight is that status is something that you give to
someone else and not something a person can create on their own. Ie, someone
elses status requires your active participation.

~~~
keeptrying
Just wanted to add that if you pull this on a manager who has a slight
inferiority complex then he will think your brilliant, regardless of the
quality of the work that you produce. This is in turn is something you have to
stop from affecting your psyche.

Very strange. :)

------
sp332
_Almost every person correctly guessed the number on his or her forehead, or
was off only by 1! Could this mean that it wasn’t a game we were playing for
the first time? Could it be that we’re playing that game over and over every
day?_

Really? Maybe it's just that, once everyone knows the rules of the game, they
are reasonably successful in communicating a tiny piece of information (a
single number) to each other.

 _This demonstrated that by simply deciding to change my own status and acting
accordingly, the other person almost immediately granted me that status and at
times, changed their own._

That's because he thought he was _supposed_ to, not because it was necessarily
something he would normally have done.

~~~
Natsu
> That's because he thought he was supposed to, not because it was necessarily
> something he would normally have done.

He mentions successfully testing it outside of the game halfway through the
article:

"For the following weeks, I started experimenting with this game in real life:
I’d go into conversations picking a random number for myself and others,
assume my posture and tone to match, and enjoy seeing strangers changing their
behavior quite randomly. Sometimes I’d make it more fun by swapping statuses
with the other person halfway through the conversation and enjoy seeing many
people transform in front of my own eyes."

~~~
arvinjoar
Still, his conclusion is presented as a result of the improvisation game, not
after he tried to verify it.

------
fxm4139
The timing of this post is a coincidence because I just did the "status game"
this past weekend at my improv class. It's a fun insightful game and Amir is
spot on about the fact that we are always playing this game. In fact, we were
in a class with 12 people, and after walking and interacting around the room
(while only knowing the numbers of everyone but yourself on the forehead), the
instructor asked us to arrange ourselves in ascending order in a line. It was
amazing how almost everyone knew where exactly they were with respect to
everyone else (especially when a #5 and a #6 interact, its hard to figure out
if you are the superior or not, but the subtleties do tell quite a bit). Both
times we did the exercise, only one person was out of place, and that too,
they were right next to each other.

Like mindcrime says, there is quite a bit of wisdom in improv. I enrolled in
classes because I wanted something very different to break up my usual routine
that mostly involves writing code. What was really enlightening to me was that
most of improv was not about being funny, but really about the fundamentals of
how to communiciate and convey something to a fellow improviser as well as the
audience, in the least amount of time (short scenes).

~~~
zby
How could exactly one person be out of order? If one person is out of order he
occupies other persons place - so that other person has to be out of order as
well. Am I missing something?

~~~
RickHull
1, 2, 3, 5, 4

Arguably only the 5 (or the 4) is out of order. Simply remove it and order is
maintained.

------
munificent
The scene in _Office Space_ where Peter is talking to the two Bobs, while
presented as comedy, is a perfect example of how this actually works. As soon
as he acts like he isn't subordinate to them, they begin to feel that he's
"management material".

~~~
vishaldpatel
In that scene, he isn't acting. He has simply lost fear and is therefore
presenting his case openly.

------
kongqiu
This is such a key insight. Coming from a lower-middle class background and
working my way up in large corporations, the power of "status" slowly dawned
on me. Some kid from a well-off background comes in and acts like he owns the
place, and it works with 7 out of 10 people! Meanwhile a guy from a lower
socioeconomic class comes in, works his arse off and hesitates asking for a
raise because he's afraid of overstepping -- this guy gets looked down on or
taken advantage of by 7 out of 10 people.

Would be nice to have learned about this earlier.

~~~
michaelochurch
Indeed. You want to find the "middle path", however. If you overplay your
attempts at high status, you have the opposite effect: people see you as
having "a problem with authority" or a proletarian "chip" on your shoulder.

[http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/yes-rich-
kids...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/yes-rich-kids-already-
won-the-career-game-heres-why/)

Using the cards metaphor, you never want to be one point away from the other
person. Step 1: figure out where the other person sees himself. Step 2: figure
out what he wants-- a protege (1-2 points lower), a friend and equal (same
status), or a mentor (1-2 points higher). Almost no one wants a supplicant (3+
lower) or arrogant boss (3+ higher). And more importantly, almost no one wants
to be a supplicant or an arrogant boss.

~~~
kongqiu
Wise words. Good essay, too.

------
iterationx
If you get really good at this sort of thing you can take people's wallets
just by asking <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR4y5iX4uRY>

~~~
frankdenbow
I've watched tons fo Derrin Brown videos. His experiments are pretty
interesting. Subliminal advertising and the chess grandmaster ones were the
most interesting.

See what happens when you leave a wallet on the ground:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxYCh_p2Mjs>

~~~
barrkel
Just don't forget that he's a showman, and explication is part of his act.

------
asymptotic
Was it just me or did anyone else think of "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell? The
author of this article implicitly assumes that all the participants of the
game come from similar cultural backgrounds.

Read: [http://bokardo.com/archives/what-malcolm-gladwells-book-
outl...](http://bokardo.com/archives/what-malcolm-gladwells-book-outliers-can-
teach-us-about-interface-design/)

Some cultures, e.g. Colombian or South Korean, are more geared towards
respecting authority than other cultures, e.g. New Yorkers. A collision of two
such disparate cultures can result in disasters such as Flight 052:

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Avianca_Fligh...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Avianca_Flight_52)

More details about the Power Distance Index (PDI):
[http://www.maximizingutility.com/2009/06/culture-clash-
power...](http://www.maximizingutility.com/2009/06/culture-clash-power-
distance-index.html)

------
jdp23
Well said. Skills and attitudes from improv are incredibly useful in all kinds
of situations ...

A variant I'd suggest when playing the game in real life: as well as imagining
an ace on your own forehead, imagine that the other person also has an ace.

~~~
ddlatham
_Next time you’re in a conversation with a friend or stranger, try imagining
that you’re carrying the ace card, act with a matching confidence, imagine
everyone else holding the same card, and treat them with the respect that
other aces deserve._

That seems to be the same thing he's suggesting.

~~~
jdp23
right you are. how embarrassing. can i downvote my own post?

~~~
olalonde
A case of cryptomnesia perhaps? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia>

------
karolisd
Once you get an eye for it, it's very easy to see other people playing this
game.

~~~
JakeSc
Specifically, what types of things do you look out for?

~~~
BasDirks
If interaction were a function, feed it subtle edge cases ;)

------
6ren
Strikingly similar to "karma". People don't care about some number, but their
status.

When pg experimented with visually distinguishing people with high avg karma
(an orange dot IIRC), many people noticed the changing status dynamics (a
lower "cringed" before a higher), and it discouraged discussion between
equals.

------
Tycho
I wonder if this guy is hacking the status game with this 'my latest project
Keynotopia was built in 3 hours with a budget of $47' claim.

It's like he's saying, 'yeah, that's right, I'm a fucking rock star
programmer. The type that makes things happen. The type that's 100x more
productive than the average coder. The type you need to hire.'

Cause otherwise, why would he bother saying that, as customers usually want to
believe a lot of work has gone into something before they buy it.

------
frankdenbow
A few summers ago when I was in Sunnyvale I took a course at the SF Comedy
College (<http://www.sfcomedycollege.com/>). The course opened my mind up to
being completely in the moment and creative without overthinking things
(applicable to almost everything you do in life). They go through common
improv exercises like Yes-ands and scenario role plays. Highly recommend
improv classes.

------
iuguy
I've always liked the phrase, "99% of success is just showing up", although to
be honest 0% of success happens when you don't. Self-confidence is a hard
thing to gain but really worthwhile trying all you can.

~~~
samatman
The original is 80% and is attributed to Woody Allen.

The other 20%, of course, is schmoozing when you get there.

------
alokt_
Isn't this analogous to a "guess a number" game? You have a stack of cards
that range from 2 to Ace. If I were to play this game I would not start
talking to a guy who has a King on his forehead. I would go to a 5-7 and then
determine where I ranked, if I felt I were below 5-7, then I know I am in 2-4
or if I were above them, 8-K. It would seem it would only take only a few more
iterations to figure out which status I have.

~~~
michaelochurch
Remember that the 5-7 don't know that they're 5-7 when the game starts. They
have no idea. It takes a while before they figure out where they stand. When
the game starts, people are all over the map in how they represent themselves.

The 2-4 and the Q-A figure it out quickly. Then the Q-A start talking down to
the 9-J but no one else does, so they figure out where they stand. Because of
miscommunication and confusion, it takes a few minutes (maybe 10) of
interaction before people figure it out.

Just to fuck around and have fun, I'd talk down to the Q-A and suck up to the
2-4. It'd be interesting to see how this game changes when there's an
intentional "spoiler" in the mix.

------
d_r
There is an excellent discussion of status games in the book "Impro." Highly
recommend it if you're interested in hacking the non-tech side of things.

[http://www.amazon.com/Impro-Improvisation-Theatre-Keith-
John...](http://www.amazon.com/Impro-Improvisation-Theatre-Keith-
Johnstone/dp/0878301178)

------
DavidMcLaughlin
I guess this could be good advice for manipulating status for short time
periods (dating, job interviews, business meetings, etc.), but fortunately
once it goes beyond that (relationships, careers, business deals, etc.) the
status of everyone involved will settle down to the natural order of things.

~~~
michaelochurch
What is social status based on? To a large extent, nothing. A lot of people
are "famous for being famous", and every high school or college has that
notorious "creepy guy" who did nothing wrong other than piss someone off his
freshman year and get "a reputation". Status is self-perpetuating and often
derived from _itself_ rather than any "underlying" trait. If you're a 2, you
probably have to practice being a 5 before you can be a King, but you can
"fake it till you make it".

The trick is to: (a) accurately assess the other person's "card", in terms of
self-image, and (b) figure out what the person wants and expects from you. If
he or she wants a mentor (+1) be that. If he or she wants an equal and friend
(same) be that. If he or she wants a protege (-1) be that. Three points (using
the 2-A card metaphor) in either direction will ruin the relationship. One
exception: never go lower than a 6 or so. Also, in a group, err on the high
side. If the group expects you to be the "alpha", be 1 point higher than the
next highest person. If it expects and wants, someone else to be an "alpha",
be 1 point lower than that person.

The "one-point" rule is important because people generally think in relative
terms. If someone is extremely powerful and arrogant and acts the part (King)
and you become an Ace you are "crossing" him (literally, in the number-line
status metaphor). That's usually bad. On the other hand, there's no harm in
being a Queen rather than an 8 or a 2. You get more respect that way.
Likewise, if someone is (in terms of self-image) a 7 and you come in as a
King, you're just going to be overbearing.

------
bzupnick
if you go into a conversation mentally giving people status', and then swap in
the middle unbeknownst to the other people in the conversation, wouldnt that
just really confuse them and make them think, "wait, am I the alpha male or is
he.....i coulda sworn he was but then, it just kinda changed..."

~~~
hugh3
It'd probably make people think "This guy is acting really strange, though I
can't put my finger on what he's doing. I don't like this guy. I'm going to
get out of this awkward social situation now."

------
afterburner
Also, think like a winner.

(Yay, games with life.)

Be careful with this when there are _actual_ status labels in play. Like rank
or position. Act like you're an Ace around a boss or slight superior who's not
an idiot and you may find yourself wearing that person's patience down _very_
fast.

------
chernevik
Interesting. I imagine that observers notice "tells" of some kind when a
person is acting above their own internal status estimate, and downgrade their
own status estimate of that person accordingly.

------
nhangen
Great post until the end, when it was mentioned that everyone should be
treated as an ace. I don't agree, because quite simply, not everyone is an
ace.

------
jcfrei
dont play this with your friends.

~~~
lazerwalker
You already play this with your friends on a daily basis. Haven't you ever
teased a friend, or pretended something they did was silly? You're lowering
their status and raising yours, if only temporarily and in the spirit of fun.

Keith Johnstone even argues that this sort of status game is the sign of a
close friendship, implying that the two of you are comfortable enough with the
status dynamics of your relationship to play around with them.

~~~
afterburner
Doesn't a real friendship imply equal status? That equal status is always
there, the teasing is thanks to it being equal, not fluctuating. At most you
could say you are pretending to be lower or higher than each other, but
acknowledging that is in fact pretending.

~~~
gaius
If you are male then yes. Pretty much all male bonding is about temporarily
raising or lowering yours or your friends status, then laughing at the
absurdity at what you've just done. Male groups typically have a leader (or
"alpha") and the rest are equals.

If you are female then there is a harder edge to this game. It's played far
more subtly, but the changes in status are real and permanent and no-one's
laughing afterwards. Female groups have very strict pecking orders.

~~~
Naomi
I am a female and I am only friends with equals, both men and women.

