I want to write a longer version of this in the future, but I'm going to take a while to write a comment to anchor it in my mind while it's fresh.

Many social decisions are about forming mutually advantageous teams. Bob and Charlie want to team up because they both predict that this will give them some selfish benefit. If this is a decision at all, it's because there's some cost that must be weighed against some benefit. For example, if Bob is running a small business, and considers hiring Charlie, there'll be various costs and risks for onboarding Charlie, or even for offering to interview him.

Part of evaluating a teammate is getting a sense of their effectiveness as social operators. Can they connect in conversation? Can they demonstrate workplace professionalism? Can they read people's character?

One aspect of effectiveness is the ability to apply pressure in order to get some result out of other people. If Charlie is being hired for a sales job, he needs to be able to apply some pressure to customers in order to make a sale.

One way that Bob can evaluate Charlie as an applicant is by seeing if Charlie can pressure Bob into hiring Charlie as a salesman. Bob wants to see if Charlie is capable of selling himself. He wants Charlie to pressure him, to remove (some of) the possibility of no. If Charlie can't do that, then Bob doesn't want him as a salesman.

It may be that this ability to apply social pressure is also relevant in other areas of life, such as mate selection, promoting scientific findings, or advancing beneficial policies and social norms. We choose partners or leaders based on their ability to pressure others, and us, into accepting their desires, because we are using this as a test of their effectiveness in dealing with the rest of the world. We predict that a partner or leader who can apply pressure on us will also be able to use that ability to advance our mutual agenda and bring rewards to us in the future.

In these situations, then, "yes" requires the impossibility of no.

Or at least the diminishment of that possibility below some threshold.

In the case of Bob and Charlie, this isn't entirely because Bob has been forced, despite his resistance, to acquiesce to hiring Charlie. It's also because Bob would have freely chosen not to hire Charlie if Charlie wasn't capable of overwhelming his autonomy. Bob might have even been able to sit back comfortably and tell you so in advance of his interview with Charlie.

There may be an interesting interaction when these pressure tactics are applied to advancing an agenda of greater freedom and less pressure. Perhaps we can use pressure to specifically punish pressure tactics, in order to safeguard a low-pressure space. This has parallels to the Leviathan concept, in which the government monopolizes the use of force in order to prevent its citizens from having to defend themselves. It uses high-violence tactics to achieve a low-violence environment. We also see it in some current attitudes about sexual consent.

That said, though, even in an enforced low-pressure environment, people will still face the challenge of getting the goods some other way, either for themselves or for their team. They may find alternative ways to exert social pressure. Or they may find some other means of leverage that was previously either second-rate or actually inaccessible due to the former high-pressure climate. In a noisy room, having the loudest voice might give you an edge as a conversationalist. If the room has been quieted, other attributes might make you more competitive.

Once we identify whatever new tactics give us a manipulative edge in the low-pressure environment, we may then start to require that candidates for collaboration or leadership demonstrate their ability to manipulate us with these tactics.

The key to balancing the need for consent and commitment seems to be creating defined spaces in which we alternate between these modes.

Consider the hiring situation again. In particular, imagine that Bob and Charlie have roughly equivalent value to offer to each other. Bob's offering Charlie a lucrative commission rate, but Charlie's able to generate a lot of profitable sales for Bob.

Bob and Charlie both want to have some confidence that they're not about to enter into a temporary, exploitative arrangement for the sake of convenience until some marginally better alternative is found. So they need a sense that each of them has the freedom to choose alternative options.

On the other hand, Bob wants Charlie to demonstrate that he's capable of using high-pressure sales tactics to convince Bob to hire him. So the "space for freedom" needs to be followed by a "space for commitment." At this point, Charlie should be convinced that he wants to work for Bob, and Bob's last remaining reservation about hiring Charlie should be his ability to pressure Bob into hiring him. If Charlie can do it, then the end result will be something that Bob wanted during the time when they were both still in the "space for freedom."

This requires some finesse. To execute this strategy successfully, they have to sequence their mutual evaluation in the proper order, and Bob has to be prepared to give up his freedom from Charlie's pressure tactics for a certain period of time.

In other scenarios, such as romance, it might be that the people involved are not capable of such careful coordination. Failure to properly sequence the "space for freedom" and the "space for commitment" might lead to problematic pressure applied when there were other reservations to sort through with a clear mind. Failure to apply pressure at the right time might result in a confusing or frustrating letdown.

What's more, the whole notion here is that the ability to apply pressure is a demonstration of one's capacity to operate effectively in the world, and that potential teammates evaluate this by seeing if their potential partner can do it to them. Other skills, like the ability to send and receive social signals, are also relevant here.

So we could see a situation where, optimally, potential partners are evaluating each others' ability to sequence and transition between a "space for freedom" and "space for commitment," but in which they are evaluating signaling skills. Bob may want to evaluate whether Charlie can implicitly detect when Bob is expecting him to begin applying pressure.

If there are serious outcomes at stake, then the combination of reliance on implicit signals and application of pressure could lead to wasted time, frustration, or harm. If both people are bad at figuring out that this is what's going on, then they might just experience themselves as imcompetent.

A natural-seeming correction to these failed negotiations is to make the implicit explicit and to remove the pressure. But this also removes precisely the qualities that the negotiation was meant to evaluate. Hence, I expect that such interventions either lead to the re-introduction of signaling and pressure by other means,  or to people ignoring or avoiding the intervention.

It might be more useful to educate people about what's actually going on during such negotiations, and help them gain skill in reading subtle signals and understanding the uses and misuses of pressure. That's tricky, since there's probably little explicit understanding of those considerations, and it'll pattern match with what's commonly considered to be bad behavior. This is all a wild theory off the top of my head, but I'm interested to think about it more.

(I moved the meta thread that used to be below this comment to its own post here)

is it? i find it very Christian way of thinking, and this though pattern seem obviously wrong to me. it's incorporated into the Western Culture, but i live in non-Christian place. you can believe in Heaven to all! some new-age people believe in that. you can believe in Heaven to all expect the especially blameworthy - this is how i understand Mormonism.

thanks for the insight! now i can recognize one pretty toxic thought-pattern as Christian influence, and understand it better! 

WRT #9, a Bayesian might want to believe X because they are in a weird decision theory problem where beliefs make things come true. This seems relatively common for humans unless they can hide their reactions well.

The issue of wanting X to happen does seem rather subtle, especially since there isn't a clean division between things you want to know about and things you might want to influence. The solution of this paradox in classical decision theory is that the agent should already know its own plans, so its beliefs already perfectly reflect any influence which it has on X. Of course, this comes from an assumption of logical omniscience. Bounded agents with logical uncertainty can't reason like that.

So like, sometimes when the answer seems vague it's because there are actually two questions? Like, "am I good at music" can be answered in relation to the entire world or to ones friend group, or specifically focusing on music theory versus performance versus composition versus taste, so there's no meaningful (one word) response; it's always possible to doubt reassurance because one can look at a slightly different question.

At least, that's what I think I get from your penultimate paragraph. I don't understand your first two paragraphs. I think your first paragraph is saying: the opinions of individuals doesn't definitively answer yes or no, because you need an authority. Second paragraph: We only experience bias with personal and not scientific/political questions because we are more emotionally involved with the formal, which also(?) lack an authority to give a definitive answer.

Is that accurate?

I usually interpret this as action. When one is doubting whether one is good enough to get into some school, it doesn't really matter to evaluate goodness because the correct action is still usually to apply/audition, viz. applying/auditioning dominates. And a negative result doesn't justify hating oneself because self-hatred is unproductive, viz. self-neutrality dominates.