When you see and interact with a high-status person, you want their attention very badly. That feeling is both excitatory and inhibitory. What I mean is that at the same time that you feel you want their attention and their praise, you also will feel like you need to strongly regulate your own behavior. You can see this if you’ve ever observed an audience quiet down when the speaker enters: each person’s brain is sending them a signal that they should pay attention and stop moving. That’s what’s making you feel paralyzed. You feel paralyzed because your brain is actually paralyzing you, and that’s totally normal.
Something that I’ve always believed very strongly is that you teach people how to treat you. The moment anyone senses weakness, they will walk all over you.
‘Cause you know, you can’t just, like, be a wimp and then a year and a half or two years later decide to not be a wimp anymore. Because people will always treat you like a wimp once they have decided that’s what you are. So you can never, ever be that. You have to be strong and tough and intelligent and smart and kind of plan out what you’re going to say and know who you are. So that people will get that right away. Because then they’re always going to be great to you. And they’re always going to treat you with respect. And that’s what you want, because then they listen to you. And then they listen to your songs. And then they give you a chance. Otherwise, you get nowhere. Hold your head high and don’t let anyone walk over you. People won’t respect you if you don’t have a strong backbone
The “be yourself” platitude is suicidal. You can’t talk to your boss and your best friend the same way. You always have to wear a different mask when talking to different people. Your body languages changes, the pitch of your voice also changes.
To be liked, one should always bring oneself a bit closer to the average status of the social circle one’s in. If you’re the highest-status member, play low-status. If you’re lowest-status member, play high-status.
People have a preferred status; that they like to be low, or high, and that they try to manoeuvre themselves into the preferred positions. A person who plays high status is saying “Don’t come near me, I bite.” Someone who plays low status is saying “Don’t bite me, I’m not worth the trouble.” In either case the status is a defence, and it’ll usually work. It’s very likely that you will increasingly be conditioned into playing the status that you’ve found an effective defence. You become a status specialist, very good at playing one status, but not very happy or competent at playing the other. Asked to play the “wrong” status, you’ll feel “undefended”.
Examples:
To investigate:
Playing High Status
Never shout. If you don’t want to talk about something, let people know it firmly.
Speak with a still head. Elocute.
Don’t let your your body be vulnerable, exposing your neck and torso to the other person. When walking, don’t move out of other people’s path.
Being surrounded by an entourage, especially of people who are physically smaller than you.
Never boast - just let your importance be quietly obvious. Don’t praise yourself, unless you are obviously joking. Let the other party praise you. If the other party is consistently praising you, reciprocate, but try to divert the attention to other things that might be more interesting. It’s possible that the other party is praising you because they feel a lack of power. You should lower your status in this case. Don’t humble brag, ever.
Use Conversation Fillers (Yah, Right)
Win. Avoid situation where you’ll lose.
Make decisions for a group; take responsibility. Come up with hypothesis.
evaluate other people’s work.
“Chomper not right”
No explanation of what you mean or what you want the other person to do. Don’t adjust the way you say something to help the other person understand; meeting the other person on their (cognitive) ground; explaining yourself.
“Could you please adjust the chomper? That’s the gadget on the kitchen counter immediately to the left of the toaster. If you just give it a slight rap on the top, that should adjust it.”
Case Study: Nice Guys
Most nice guys’ “niceness” is not niceness at all. Instead, it’s mostly submissive, approval-seeking, low-status behavior. That kind of behavior elicits instinctive disgust from women. The fact that women hate feeling disgust towards nice guys who did nothing wrong — and whose only sin is being clueless and socially inept — only makes it worse. As if eliciting disgust weren’t bad enough, eliciting guilt and anger really makes the experience potentially very unpleasant for women.
Niceness is only valuable when it comes from a position of strength and high-status. The problem is that most nice guys have no idea whatsoever how to project high status. Nice guys read the words “high status” and think it has something to do with expensive cars and high-paying jobs. Human instincts evolved over tens of thousands of years, mostly in primitive hunter-gatherer societies that lacked status toys.
So, what is status? How can one project high status? Quoting British playwright Keith Johnstone, the pioneer of improvisational theater:
Suddenly we understood that every inflection and movement implies a status, and that no action is due to chance, or really “motiveless”. It was hysterically funny, but at the same time very alarming. All our secret manoeuvrings were exposed. If someone asked a question we didn’t bother to answer it, we concentrated on why it had been asked. No one could make an “innocuous” remark without everyone instantly grasping what lay behind it. Normally we are “forbidden” to see status transactions except when there’s a conflict. In reality status transactions continue all the time. In the park we’ll notice the ducks squabbling, but not how carefully they keep their distances when they are not.
[…]
A comedian is someone who is paid to lower his own or other people’s status.
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We want people to be very low-status, but we don’t want to feel sympathy for them—slaves are always supposed to sing at their work.
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When a very high-status person is wiped out, everyone feels pleasure as they experience the feeling of moving up a step. This is why tragedy has always been concerned with kings and princes, and why we have a special high-status style for playing tragedy. […] Tragedy is obviously related to sacrifice. Two things strike me about reports of sacrifices: one is that the crowd get more and more tense, and then are relaxed and happy at the moment of death; the other is that the victim is raised in status before being sacrificed. The best goat is chosen, and it’s groomed, and magnificently decorated. A human sacrifice might be pampered for months, and then dressed in fine clothes, and rehearsed in his role at the centre of the great ceremony. Elements of this can be seen in the Christ story (the robe, the crown of thorns, and even the eating of the “body”). A sacrifice has to be endowed with high status or the magic doesn’t work.
Social animals have inbuilt rules which prevent them killing each other for food, mates, and so on. Such animals confront each other, and sometimes fight, until a hierarchy is established, after which there is no fighting unless an attempt is being made to change the “pecking order”.
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In animals the pattern of eye contacts often establishes dominance. A stare is often interpreted as an aggressive act—hence the dangers of looking at gorillas through binoculars. Visitors to zoos feel dominant when they can outstare the animals. I suggest you try the opposite with zoo animals: break eye contact and then glance back for a moment. Polar bears may suddenly see you as “food”. Owls cheer up perceptibly.
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It’s only to be expected that status is established not by staring, but by the reaction to staring. Thus dark glasses raise status because we can’t see the submission of the eyes.
[…]
Source: Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre.
One should be polite and courteous to all. One creates the perception of high status by establishing boundaries and policing them. Body language and stare create 90+% of the perception. “a genuine ‘high-status’ guy being nice/kind/gentle” Status is environment-dependent. A high-status man in one social circle can be a low-status man in another. A beautiful 16-year-old girl will be high-status in her high school, but average-to-low status in a modeling competition. “women are attracted to guys who are being fakely authoritative/dominant over others, the relationship arising out of this attraction isn’t going to be harmonious in the long run” You assume that the man will use the same tricks as the relationship evolves, which isn’t true. Assertiveness creates interest in women and establishes high-status. The man becomes visible. Then the man must be shrewd and allow the woman to “hunt” him. He must engineer the perception that she is conquering him step by step, which enormously pleases the woman. If he surrenders too early, tells her he loves her, and submits, she loses interest because he lowered his status too much. The hunt was too easy. The way it works is that women instinctively test a man to see how mentally strong and socially savvy he is. If he fails the test, that is, if he’s nice instead of firm, she will lose a bit of respect for him. At some point, after many failed tests, she will have no respect left for him.
Women certainly want niceness, reliability and loyalty from the men they marry. But to get to the point where they are ready to marry a man, he must prove his value to her first, and to do that he must be firm instead of nice when she tests him. The problem with nice guys is that they’re nice when they shouldn’t. Niceness should always be conditional. If she’s behaving in a way that you disapprove of, you must assertively tell her to behave, like a father would to his child. If you don’t, if you tolerate her bad behavior, you will not get to a point where she’s ready to commit to you. Interpret a woman’s test as a request “teach me to respect you, please”. Don’t take it personally. If she’s testing you, she has at least some interest in you.
Women usually divorce their husbands when they can no longer respect them and tolerate their submissive behavior. He fails all her tests. He is too easy to control and manipulate. He offers no resistance to her mental games. He’s boring!! Worst of all, he doesn’t even realize that there are games being played.
Women are hunters, too. But women hunt in the psychological and emotional worlds, rather than in the physical world. Generally speaking, a woman wants the hunt to be fun, which means that the prey should not make it too easy for her. The problem is that most men don’t know how to make it not-easy for a woman, thus ruining her hunt.
For a woman, the greatest pleasure is to find a good-looking, intelligent man with a good career and seduce him. But she does not want to seduce him only with her looks, because she knows her looks will fade. She wants to capture the man with her charm, which she considers unique (all women think they’re unique). Why? Because if she captures him with her charm, then once she loses her beauty, her man will still be interested in her. It’s a much more stable situation, as much more energy is required to break the bond.
Hence, men should be very careful when praising a beautiful woman’s beauty. She already knows she’s beautiful. It’s wiser to praise her intelligence (assuming she has some).
A man who praises a beautiful woman’s beauty too soon is announcing to her that he’s easy prey and that it would be boring for her to “hunt” him. She loses interest in him.
A man who shows some contempt towards a woman’s beauty is telling her that he’s not easy prey and that she must offer more than only looks to capture him. He projects high status, as a man who treats beautiful women with contempt must have lots of experience with them, and must thus be “special”. She must earn his affection with actual work and charm, not merely with her looks.
Most of this female behavior is instinctive. There is no point in complaining about it, because Mother Nature made women that way.
One should be polite and courteous to all. But one should also establish boundaries and police them aggressively. Nice guys allow women to cross boundaries all the time. Moreover, trying to please a woman you barely know, trying to make her like you, is low-status behavior. One can be polite without playing low-status. Think of chivalry. Chivalry was invented when knights had enormous power over peasants. Chivalry is essentially the set of actions that allow a knight to lower his status to raise the status of the peasants.
Chivalry is dead because most men are low-status in women’s eyes. Lowering one’s status puts one in an even worse position.
23 February 2019