2.1 Post summary / Table of contents

This is the second of two blog posts where I try to make sense of the whole universe of social-status-related behaviors and phenomena. The previous one was: “Social status part 1/2: negotiations over object-level preferences”.

In that previous post, I was focusing on the simplified special case of two people interacting, where they have different “object-level preferences”, but where we ignore their higher-level preferences regarding the interaction itself (e.g. the desire not to be rude). In that post, I offered a series of vignettes and toy models, covering the ideas of “mostly leading” versus “mostly following”, “ask versus guess culture”, “pushiness”, and some other topics.

Now that we have that foundation, we’re ready to talk about the universe of social behaviors built on top of that basic dynamic, including dominance-versus-prestige, getting offended, passive-aggressiveness, status, self-deprecation, and more.

This post is organized as follows:

Section 2.2 surveys the wide variety of reasons why people might want to “mostly lead” or “mostly follow” in an interaction. I offer six categories. First, leading is nice for the obvious reason that you get to fulfill your object-level desires (see previous post). Second, it’s possible that there is an “innate drive” to lead. Third, you may want to “lead” or “follow” if you think your object-level desires are better- or worse-informed than the other person’s, respectively. Fourth, you may want to “follow” due to general admiration of the other person, or “lead” due to general scorn of the other person. Fifth, you may want to “follow” to avoid blame, or “lead” to get credit. Sixth, you may want to accommodate (or undermine) the other person’s preference to lead or follow.
Section 2.3 introduces “dominance versus prestige” of Dual Strategies Theory, and how they relate to the idea of “mostly leading” versus “mostly following” from the previous post. Specifically, “Alice is being dominant” means: Alice is “mostly leading”, and Beth wishes that Alice wouldn’t lead so much, but Beth doesn’t do anything about it because she’s afraid of offending Alice. By contrast “Alice has prestige” means: Beth directly wants to “follow”, and wants Alice to lead, because Beth likes and admires Alice.
Section 2.4, following this 2018 blog post, defines “status” as a tacit shared understa

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