This post is part of a sequence on the gears of social reality. Roughly speaking, I want to explain the core mechanics of social reality in way that's fully grounded in physical stuff and patterns in the physical world.
A core claim of this sequence's model is that the main "objects" of social reality are free-floating concepts and associations. For example: the association between red roses and romantic dates. These associations are real patterns: the same associations appear in many human minds. But they're patterns which live primarily in humans' heads, and aren't fully determined by humans' goals. Erase the association between red roses and romantic dates, and it won't spontaneously grow back; something else will fill the niche of roses. Consequently, free-floating associations are easier to change in some sense than most other large-scale patterns in our world. If I want to change the association between red roses and romantic dates, a marketing campaign or even the right meme might do the trick.
Because free-floating concepts and associations are relatively easy to change, there's a whole layer of social interactions aimed at manipulating them. That, I claim, is the central game of "social reality". But in order to talk about that game and its rules, we first need a clear grounded explanation of what free-floating social concepts and associations even are. That's the purpose of this post: to explain what free-floating social patterns are.
Social constructs are real patterns out in the world, which exist because humans make the pattern exist - for instance, minivans and pickup trucks are vehicle-clusters with real predictive power because of which vehicles humans choose to make.
We can change the social construct by going out and changing things in the real world. Many humans, or a few well-resourced humans, could change which vehicle-clusters exist by changing what vehicles are produced.
Changing a social construct is not just about deciding that I personally am going to categorize things differently. If I draw different vehicle-clusters, I will probably just be wrong, in the sense that I make worse predictions about e.g. vehicles with sliding side doors also having three rows of seats.
In most cases, practical considerations nail down many pieces of the social construct. Even if all the pickup trucks disappeared tomorrow and everyone forgot about them, we’d probably soon develop a similar type of vehicle to fill the niche which pickup trucks once filled; that niche would still exist.
But some social constructs are especially underdetermined, especially patterns involving social associations. “Free-floating”, so to speak. For instance:
Roses are a distinct cluster of physical things, but they also have social associations, like romance.
Toyota priuses are a distinct cluster of physical things, but they also have social associations, like caring about the environment or living in urban places or being in the Blue Tribe.
Computers are a distinct cluster of physical things, but they also have social associations, like being a nerd.
Running is a distinct cluster of physical behaviors, but it also has social associations, like being young or physically attractive.
In most of these cases, there's a non-free-floating pattern in the world (roses, priuses, computers, running), but the social associations with that pattern are much less nailed-down.
(Note that most day-to-day words and concepts do not have significant social associations. Looking around my apartment, I see blankets and pillows, mirrors, an air conditioner, chairs, windows and doors, a fridge and sink and kitchen counter, etc; all of these are approximately socially neutral. Humans tend to find the socially-loaded things more salient than the socially-neutral things, so it’s easy to get the impression that everything is socially loaded, but that impression is basically false.)
And then there are words and concepts for which the social associations are basically the entire content. For instance:
Gourmet
Romantic
Cringeworthy
Victorian
What does “gourmet” even mean, besides its social associations? The associations are basically the whole meaning; the concept itself just refers to one bucket of social associations. That's a free-floating concept.
Of course free-floating concepts are social constructs, but they’re more fluid than most social constructs; thus “free-floating”. If we want to change socially-constructed vehicle categories like minivan or truck, we need to go make a bunch of new vehicles; we need to change physical stuff out in the world. But changing a free-floating concept like “romantic” only requires changing the associations in peoples’ heads. Run an ad campaign in which your brand of forks appears next to people on dates staring into each others’ eyes over wine and flowers, and next thing you know the social construct of “romantic” has expanded to include your fork brand.
How Do Humans Learn Free-Floating Concepts?
In general, it’s useful to ask how humans learn a word or concept. The classic wrong answer is “by hearing other people use it many times”. We know that answer is wrong because toddlers can typically learn new words basically-correctly with just a handful of examples, and often just one example. And adult humans sometimes see a new kind of object they haven’t encountered before (like e.g. a dragonfruit), point to it, say “what’s that?”, and then that one example is enough to identify that type of object again in the future. As these everyday examples illustrate, people do not typically learn new words or concepts by hearing other people use the word/concept many times. Instead, people typically learn a word or concept by first noticing some pattern in the world (like e.g. physical instances of apple), and then attaching a word to the pattern via hearing the word used one or two times by other people.
… but free-floating concepts are different.
Free floating concepts are defined mainly by the associations in peoples’ heads. So, much more so than most words/concepts, people really do learn free-floating concepts mainly by hearing other people use them many times, or noticing what associations other people draw between things. We really do learn what’s fashionable or romantic or cringe by hearing the people (and media) around us talk about fashion or romantic dinners or cringe things people did, and inferring what associations those other people draw.
Equilibration, Culture and Microculture
What happens when a group of humans are all learning associations by watching each other, talking to each other, and copying whatever associations other humans seem to draw?
Well, eventually the group will equilibrate to have roughly the same associations.
When a bunch of associations are approximately shared across a whole group of people, that’s what we usually call “culture” - or, if the group is relatively small, a “microculture”.
For instance, suppose a couple are chatting. One of them says “oh my friend Brian likes to make little tchotchkes for his girlfriend, it’s so romantic”. The other updates: tchotchkes have romantic associations. Now, within their little two-person microculture, the romantic associations of tchotchkes have become a microcultural standard; that association has equilibrated across the two of them.
At the larger scale, Western culture includes associations like:
Chocolate and flowers are romantic
Suits are high status
Broccoli and kale are healthy
Hummers and guns are red-tribe-coded
Priuses and liberal arts degrees are blue-tribe-coded
Common Types of Free-Floating Concepts
Positive/Negative Affect
Factual claims, in general, are subject to feedback from the world; they make predictions which turn out correct or incorrect. But value judgements - i.e. positive or negative affect - have much weaker feedback. Sure, they do occasionally give strong feedback; if you have positive-affect associations with drinking drain cleaner, you’re probably gonna get real strong feedback real fast.
But we don’t usually get clear direct feedback on the effects of day-to-day affect associations like:
“Broccoli and kale are healthy”
“Giving 10% of your income to mosquito net charities is good”
… so instead, humans mostly absorb these sorts of positive/negative affect associations socially.
These are not all fully free-floating concepts! For instance, there is some real fact of the matter about how broccoli or kale influence health; they could be unhealthy even if everyone believes they’re healthy.
… but in an awful lot of cases, the positive or negative affect itself comes mainly from expecting other people to have positive or negative affect. For instance, insofar as bowties are “cool” (dubious), bowties have positive affect association mainly because one expects others to have positive affect association with bowties - i.e. I think bowties are cool insofar as I expect others to think that bowties are cool. In that case, the positive/negative affect association is a free-floating concept.
And man, there are a lot of free-floating affect associations. At the level of society, there’s basically everything about fashion and style. At the level of groups, there are usually free-floating affect associations with the group’s symbols and identifiers, for instance:
Americans having positive affect toward their flag and negative affect toward Russia
Blue tribers having positive affect toward academia and negative affect toward oil wells
Rationalists having positive affect toward prediction markets and negative affect toward mainstream religions
My family having positive affect toward the Rolling Stones and negative affect toward lawyers
In fact, let’s talk about group membership signals more generally.
Group Membership Signals
Why does the American flag have lots of stars and stripes, while the French flag just has three stripes? Of course there’s a historical story and some bullshit about the symbolism, but realistically, if all the French and Americans woke up one day wanting to swap their flags, they’d come up with some new symbolism. The association between America and the pattern on the American flag, and the association between France and the pattern on the French flag, is a pure free-floating concept.
More generally, group identifiers tend to be free-floating concepts.
Now, free-floating-ness is not always black and white; there are degrees here. For instance: using a Linux operating system is a group membership signal for programmers (as well as a status signal within programmer social circles), but it’s not entirely free floating. Programmers disproportionately use Linux OSes because Linux is more convenient for programming (and less convenient for other things), compared to other major OSes. If everybody woke up tomorrow thinking that Windows was the OS for programmers and Linux the OS for stuffy business people, probably a lot of the programmers would soon switch back to Linux and the business people would switch back to Windows, because those two operating systems really are specialized for those two different types of users.
… on the other hand, if everybody woke up tomorrow thinking that Windows was the OS for programmers and Linux the OS for stuffy business people, a lot of them would not switch back. And insofar as people wouldn’t switch back, the OS choice is a free-floating group symbol.
(In particular, if everyone woke up tomorrow thinking that Mac OS was uncool, I expect very few people would switch back to it for practical reasons. That product does seem to ride mostly on free-floating cultural associations.)
“Status” typically connotes a mental model in which we could assign everyone a number/rank, and then some kind of behavior involving any two creatures is supposed to be well predicted by whose number/rank is greater. In particular, for dominance-status (beyond just humans), the number/rank is supposed to predict which of a pair tends to aggress and which tends to back down, between the two of them. That’s a substantive model which makes empirically testable predictions: there are possible patterns of dominance/submission which cannot be well predicted by assigning each creature a number/rank and then comparing numbers, no matter what ranking we use.
Suppose, for instance, that we have three chickens: Audrey Henburn, Beakoncé, and Chickira[1]. We put two of them at a time in a cage with only one feed bowl. We find that Audrey chases Beakoncé away from the bowl, Beakoncé chases away Chickira, and Chickira chases away Audrey. We can represent this graphically, with an arrow B -> A indicating that A “wins against” B:
Notice that the graph contains a cycle! That means these dominance relationships cannot be represented by a ranking. Why? Well, the ranking would need to satisfy:
rank(Audrey) > rank(Beakoncé)
rank(Beakoncé) > rank(Chickira)
rank(Chickira) > rank(Audrey)
… but put those all together and we get rank(Audrey) > rank(Audrey), which is not how numbers work. (And if we instead replace “>” with “≥”, we find that all three must have the same rank, which would make the model useless.)
On the other hand, if the graph looks like this:
… then we can represent the relationships with a ranking: rank(Audrey) > rank(Beakoncé) > rank(Chickira). All of the arrows in the graph go from the lower-ranking hen to the higher-ranking hen.
More generally: we can represent dominance relationships with a ranking exactly when the graph is acyclic.[2] Of course in practice we expect the occasional violation of the dominance ranking, but that’s fine, approximation is a thing we can account for. So: we can empirically test whether the concept of a “status ranking” makes sense at all, as an ontological choice, by checking whether the dominance interaction graph contains statistically very few cycles.
… and it turns out the behavior researchers have done exactly that kind of test; they call it testing for “linearity”. Indeed, they’ve done it many many times over, with several different operationalizations of the statistics, in a whole slew of species. The paper I was reading which prompted this post - “Dynamics of Hierarchy Formation: The Sequential Development of Dominance Relationships” - looked at hens, basically as described above. They only used ten groups of chickens, but all groups developed a linear hierarchy after a day or two of interaction. The paper also cites a long list of similar work in other species:
wasps and bumble bees (WILSON, 1971), chaffinches (MARLER, 1955), red cross bills (TORDOFF, 1954), coyotes (BEKOFF, 1976), cows (SCHEIN & FOHRMAN, 1955), ponies (TYLER, 1972), pigs (RASMUSSEN et al, 1962), rhesus monkeys (SALE, 1967), baboons (HAUSFATER, 1975), vervets (STRUHSAKER, 1967) and human children and adolescents (MISSAKIAN, 1976; SAVIN-WILLIAMS, 1977, 1979, 1980).
Note that last one: humans too.
To What Extent Is Status Free-Floating?
Status/dominance hierarchies don’t usually form via animals (or humans) actually fighting; fighting is expensive and dangerous. Empirically, one of the main ways status hierarchies form is via the order in which individuals join the group: new members typically enter at the bottom of the hierarchy. For instance, here’s how an experiment with Rhesus monkeys went:
… they formed two groups of male rhesus monkeys, let each group establish a dominance hierarchy, and then serially added the members of group 1 to group 2 at weekly intervals in reverse order of dominance in their home group (group 1). [...] First, there was no correlation (Spearman coefficient = -.05) between the original hierarchical ranks of group 1 males and their relative ranks within the merged hierarchy (BERNSTEIN & GORDON, 1980: 1036). Second, all the members of group 1 ranked below five out of six of the group 2 members, and only two out of 11 members of group 1 ranked above the previously lowest ranked member of group 2. (source)
For our purposes, the most important part of the paragraph is: “there was no correlation (Spearman coefficient = -.05) between the original hierarchical ranks of group 1 males and their relative ranks within the merged hierarchy”. In other words: the status hierarchy, at least in that experiment, turned out to be completely free-floating! If the monkeys all woke up remembering a different status hierarchy, they would not tend to slide back into the old dominance hierarchy at all.
Now, I’m not going to claim that a single experiment on 12 rhesus monkeys is the final word on human social principles. Human status is not completely free floating, or we would not see e.g. CEOs of major companies being statistically unusually tall (but not if they’re founders). But I do claim that human status hierarchies are mostly free-floating most of the time, and that mostly free-floating status hierarchies are the norm throughout most of the animal kingdom. For the most part, the status hierarchy ranking is whatever the group consensus thinks it is; change the consensus and you change the ranking.
Role & Narrative Associations
What are Roles and Narrative?
The physical stuff in our world has a lot of real patterns or clusters, statistically-recognizable variations on a template; e.g. dogs are one such pattern, Honda accords are another, puddles are a third.
Likewise, at a higher level of abstraction, there are real patterns or clusters in social interactions. Some examples:
Trading
Formal competition, like e.g. sports
Employment
Romantic date
Conversation in which one person shares how they feel and the other empathizes
“Professional” interactions, i.e. being impersonal and focused on the domain of one’s work
Giving/listening to a talk
House party
Rally or protest
English doesn’t provide great terminology here, but I think “narrative” roughly gestures at social patterns like these.
Within each of these patterns, people have roles. For instance, at a talk, there’s usually one speaker whose role is to deliver the talk, a bunch of audience members whose role is mostly to listen, and maybe an MC or a technician or other support staff. The predictive power of concepts like “a talk” comes largely from people in these different roles acting in similar ways across different talks, just like the predictive power of physical concepts like “dog” comes from different dogs having similar parts which act in similar ways across different dogs.
Narrative and role patterns are mostly not free floating, I claim. Even if everyone forgot the concept of employment tomorrow, it would soon reappear, because it’s a convergently-useful way for humans to interact. Even if everyone forgot the concept of formal competitions or romantic dates tomorrow, they would soon reappear, because they’re very natural fits to certain human instincts and emotions. Even if everyone forgot the concept of a talk or a house party tomorrow, they’d reappear, because they’re such natural ways to organize a get-together.
That said, many of the details of these narratives and roles are free-floating to some extent, and in particular most narratives have free-floating social associations.
Things Associated With Roles & Narrative
A central example here is the association between red roses and a romantic narrative. That association is completely free-floating; if everyone forgot tomorrow that roses are associated with romantic dates, then something else besides roses would fill the niche.
Professional uniforms are another good example, like e.g. a doctor’s lab coat or politician’s suit. The uniform is associated with a role (e.g. “doctor” or “politician”), and that role exists only within a social narrative (e.g. the social patterns of medical care or election campaigning). If everyone forgot that doctors wear lab coats, doctors would not spontaneously start wearing them again, though they might converge on some other professional attire.
taking blankets and pillows for example, i may read them as cozy, romantic, childish, old-fashioned, etc. not to mention their role in distinguishing class, gender, or fashion. similarly with the other items here.
(this comment is intended to inquire / clarify -- i suspect i'm confused about what counts as a social association, vs just an association.)
Roadmap
This post is part of a sequence on the gears of social reality. Roughly speaking, I want to explain the core mechanics of social reality in way that's fully grounded in physical stuff and patterns in the physical world.
A core claim of this sequence's model is that the main "objects" of social reality are free-floating concepts and associations. For example: the association between red roses and romantic dates. These associations are real patterns: the same associations appear in many human minds. But they're patterns which live primarily in humans' heads, and aren't fully determined by humans' goals. Erase the association between red roses and romantic dates, and it won't spontaneously grow back; something else will fill the niche of roses. Consequently, free-floating associations are easier to change in some sense than most other large-scale patterns in our world. If I want to change the association between red roses and romantic dates, a marketing campaign or even the right meme might do the trick.
Because free-floating concepts and associations are relatively easy to change, there's a whole layer of social interactions aimed at manipulating them. That, I claim, is the central game of "social reality". But in order to talk about that game and its rules, we first need a clear grounded explanation of what free-floating social concepts and associations even are. That's the purpose of this post: to explain what free-floating social patterns are.
"Free-Floating"
Recap from the previous post:
In most cases, practical considerations nail down many pieces of the social construct. Even if all the pickup trucks disappeared tomorrow and everyone forgot about them, we’d probably soon develop a similar type of vehicle to fill the niche which pickup trucks once filled; that niche would still exist.
But some social constructs are especially underdetermined, especially patterns involving social associations. “Free-floating”, so to speak. For instance:
In most of these cases, there's a non-free-floating pattern in the world (roses, priuses, computers, running), but the social associations with that pattern are much less nailed-down.
(Note that most day-to-day words and concepts do not have significant social associations. Looking around my apartment, I see blankets and pillows, mirrors, an air conditioner, chairs, windows and doors, a fridge and sink and kitchen counter, etc; all of these are approximately socially neutral. Humans tend to find the socially-loaded things more salient than the socially-neutral things, so it’s easy to get the impression that everything is socially loaded, but that impression is basically false.)
And then there are words and concepts for which the social associations are basically the entire content. For instance:
What does “gourmet” even mean, besides its social associations? The associations are basically the whole meaning; the concept itself just refers to one bucket of social associations. That's a free-floating concept.
Of course free-floating concepts are social constructs, but they’re more fluid than most social constructs; thus “free-floating”. If we want to change socially-constructed vehicle categories like minivan or truck, we need to go make a bunch of new vehicles; we need to change physical stuff out in the world. But changing a free-floating concept like “romantic” only requires changing the associations in peoples’ heads. Run an ad campaign in which your brand of forks appears next to people on dates staring into each others’ eyes over wine and flowers, and next thing you know the social construct of “romantic” has expanded to include your fork brand.
How Do Humans Learn Free-Floating Concepts?
In general, it’s useful to ask how humans learn a word or concept. The classic wrong answer is “by hearing other people use it many times”. We know that answer is wrong because toddlers can typically learn new words basically-correctly with just a handful of examples, and often just one example. And adult humans sometimes see a new kind of object they haven’t encountered before (like e.g. a dragonfruit), point to it, say “what’s that?”, and then that one example is enough to identify that type of object again in the future. As these everyday examples illustrate, people do not typically learn new words or concepts by hearing other people use the word/concept many times. Instead, people typically learn a word or concept by first noticing some pattern in the world (like e.g. physical instances of apple), and then attaching a word to the pattern via hearing the word used one or two times by other people.
… but free-floating concepts are different.
Free floating concepts are defined mainly by the associations in peoples’ heads. So, much more so than most words/concepts, people really do learn free-floating concepts mainly by hearing other people use them many times, or noticing what associations other people draw between things. We really do learn what’s fashionable or romantic or cringe by hearing the people (and media) around us talk about fashion or romantic dinners or cringe things people did, and inferring what associations those other people draw.
Equilibration, Culture and Microculture
What happens when a group of humans are all learning associations by watching each other, talking to each other, and copying whatever associations other humans seem to draw?
Well, eventually the group will equilibrate to have roughly the same associations.
When a bunch of associations are approximately shared across a whole group of people, that’s what we usually call “culture” - or, if the group is relatively small, a “microculture”.
For instance, suppose a couple are chatting. One of them says “oh my friend Brian likes to make little tchotchkes for his girlfriend, it’s so romantic”. The other updates: tchotchkes have romantic associations. Now, within their little two-person microculture, the romantic associations of tchotchkes have become a microcultural standard; that association has equilibrated across the two of them.
At the larger scale, Western culture includes associations like:
Common Types of Free-Floating Concepts
Positive/Negative Affect
Factual claims, in general, are subject to feedback from the world; they make predictions which turn out correct or incorrect. But value judgements - i.e. positive or negative affect - have much weaker feedback. Sure, they do occasionally give strong feedback; if you have positive-affect associations with drinking drain cleaner, you’re probably gonna get real strong feedback real fast.
But we don’t usually get clear direct feedback on the effects of day-to-day affect associations like:
… so instead, humans mostly absorb these sorts of positive/negative affect associations socially.
These are not all fully free-floating concepts! For instance, there is some real fact of the matter about how broccoli or kale influence health; they could be unhealthy even if everyone believes they’re healthy.
… but in an awful lot of cases, the positive or negative affect itself comes mainly from expecting other people to have positive or negative affect. For instance, insofar as bowties are “cool” (dubious), bowties have positive affect association mainly because one expects others to have positive affect association with bowties - i.e. I think bowties are cool insofar as I expect others to think that bowties are cool. In that case, the positive/negative affect association is a free-floating concept.
And man, there are a lot of free-floating affect associations. At the level of society, there’s basically everything about fashion and style. At the level of groups, there are usually free-floating affect associations with the group’s symbols and identifiers, for instance:
In fact, let’s talk about group membership signals more generally.
Group Membership Signals
Why does the American flag have lots of stars and stripes, while the French flag just has three stripes? Of course there’s a historical story and some bullshit about the symbolism, but realistically, if all the French and Americans woke up one day wanting to swap their flags, they’d come up with some new symbolism. The association between America and the pattern on the American flag, and the association between France and the pattern on the French flag, is a pure free-floating concept.
More generally, group identifiers tend to be free-floating concepts.
Now, free-floating-ness is not always black and white; there are degrees here. For instance: using a Linux operating system is a group membership signal for programmers (as well as a status signal within programmer social circles), but it’s not entirely free floating. Programmers disproportionately use Linux OSes because Linux is more convenient for programming (and less convenient for other things), compared to other major OSes. If everybody woke up tomorrow thinking that Windows was the OS for programmers and Linux the OS for
stuffybusiness people, probably a lot of the programmers would soon switch back to Linux and the business people would switch back to Windows, because those two operating systems really are specialized for those two different types of users.… on the other hand, if everybody woke up tomorrow thinking that Windows was the OS for programmers and Linux the OS for
stuffybusiness people, a lot of them would not switch back. And insofar as people wouldn’t switch back, the OS choice is a free-floating group symbol.(In particular, if everyone woke up tomorrow thinking that Mac OS was uncool, I expect very few people would switch back to it for practical reasons. That product does seem to ride mostly on free-floating cultural associations.)
Status Within A Group
Background: What is Status?
This section is mostly adapted from another post.
“Status” typically connotes a mental model in which we could assign everyone a number/rank, and then some kind of behavior involving any two creatures is supposed to be well predicted by whose number/rank is greater. In particular, for dominance-status (beyond just humans), the number/rank is supposed to predict which of a pair tends to aggress and which tends to back down, between the two of them. That’s a substantive model which makes empirically testable predictions: there are possible patterns of dominance/submission which cannot be well predicted by assigning each creature a number/rank and then comparing numbers, no matter what ranking we use.
Suppose, for instance, that we have three chickens: Audrey Henburn, Beakoncé, and Chickira[1]. We put two of them at a time in a cage with only one feed bowl. We find that Audrey chases Beakoncé away from the bowl, Beakoncé chases away Chickira, and Chickira chases away Audrey. We can represent this graphically, with an arrow B -> A indicating that A “wins against” B:
Notice that the graph contains a cycle! That means these dominance relationships cannot be represented by a ranking. Why? Well, the ranking would need to satisfy:
… but put those all together and we get rank(Audrey) > rank(Audrey), which is not how numbers work. (And if we instead replace “>” with “≥”, we find that all three must have the same rank, which would make the model useless.)
On the other hand, if the graph looks like this:
… then we can represent the relationships with a ranking: rank(Audrey) > rank(Beakoncé) > rank(Chickira). All of the arrows in the graph go from the lower-ranking hen to the higher-ranking hen.
More generally: we can represent dominance relationships with a ranking exactly when the graph is acyclic.[2] Of course in practice we expect the occasional violation of the dominance ranking, but that’s fine, approximation is a thing we can account for. So: we can empirically test whether the concept of a “status ranking” makes sense at all, as an ontological choice, by checking whether the dominance interaction graph contains statistically very few cycles.
… and it turns out the behavior researchers have done exactly that kind of test; they call it testing for “linearity”. Indeed, they’ve done it many many times over, with several different operationalizations of the statistics, in a whole slew of species. The paper I was reading which prompted this post - “Dynamics of Hierarchy Formation: The Sequential Development of Dominance Relationships” - looked at hens, basically as described above. They only used ten groups of chickens, but all groups developed a linear hierarchy after a day or two of interaction. The paper also cites a long list of similar work in other species:
Note that last one: humans too.
To What Extent Is Status Free-Floating?
Status/dominance hierarchies don’t usually form via animals (or humans) actually fighting; fighting is expensive and dangerous. Empirically, one of the main ways status hierarchies form is via the order in which individuals join the group: new members typically enter at the bottom of the hierarchy. For instance, here’s how an experiment with Rhesus monkeys went:
For our purposes, the most important part of the paragraph is: “there was no correlation (Spearman coefficient = -.05) between the original hierarchical ranks of group 1 males and their relative ranks within the merged hierarchy”. In other words: the status hierarchy, at least in that experiment, turned out to be completely free-floating! If the monkeys all woke up remembering a different status hierarchy, they would not tend to slide back into the old dominance hierarchy at all.
Now, I’m not going to claim that a single experiment on 12 rhesus monkeys is the final word on human social principles. Human status is not completely free floating, or we would not see e.g. CEOs of major companies being statistically unusually tall (but not if they’re founders). But I do claim that human status hierarchies are mostly free-floating most of the time, and that mostly free-floating status hierarchies are the norm throughout most of the animal kingdom. For the most part, the status hierarchy ranking is whatever the group consensus thinks it is; change the consensus and you change the ranking.
Role & Narrative Associations
What are Roles and Narrative?
The physical stuff in our world has a lot of real patterns or clusters, statistically-recognizable variations on a template; e.g. dogs are one such pattern, Honda accords are another, puddles are a third.
Likewise, at a higher level of abstraction, there are real patterns or clusters in social interactions. Some examples:
English doesn’t provide great terminology here, but I think “narrative” roughly gestures at social patterns like these.
Within each of these patterns, people have roles. For instance, at a talk, there’s usually one speaker whose role is to deliver the talk, a bunch of audience members whose role is mostly to listen, and maybe an MC or a technician or other support staff. The predictive power of concepts like “a talk” comes largely from people in these different roles acting in similar ways across different talks, just like the predictive power of physical concepts like “dog” comes from different dogs having similar parts which act in similar ways across different dogs.
Narrative and role patterns are mostly not free floating, I claim. Even if everyone forgot the concept of employment tomorrow, it would soon reappear, because it’s a convergently-useful way for humans to interact. Even if everyone forgot the concept of formal competitions or romantic dates tomorrow, they would soon reappear, because they’re very natural fits to certain human instincts and emotions. Even if everyone forgot the concept of a talk or a house party tomorrow, they’d reappear, because they’re such natural ways to organize a get-together.
That said, many of the details of these narratives and roles are free-floating to some extent, and in particular most narratives have free-floating social associations.
Things Associated With Roles & Narrative
A central example here is the association between red roses and a romantic narrative. That association is completely free-floating; if everyone forgot tomorrow that roses are associated with romantic dates, then something else besides roses would fill the niche.
Professional uniforms are another good example, like e.g. a doctor’s lab coat or politician’s suit. The uniform is associated with a role (e.g. “doctor” or “politician”), and that role exists only within a social narrative (e.g. the social patterns of medical care or election campaigning). If everyone forgot that doctors wear lab coats, doctors would not spontaneously start wearing them again, though they might converge on some other professional attire.