'The latest research on the effects of environment and genetics on personality...'

'Matt Thomson, Klout’s VP of platform, says that a number of major companies—airlines, big-box retailers, hospitality brands—are discussing how best to use Klout scores. Soon, he predicts, people with formidable Klout will board planes earlier, get free access to VIP airport lounges, stay in better hotel rooms, and receive deep discounts from retail stores and flash-sale outlets. “We say to brands that these are the people they should pay attention to most,” Thomson says. “How they want to do it is up to them.” -- When we see ourselves ranked, “we’re trained to want to grow that score.”' -- Have you any wool?

'"It seems that people have a tendency to stomp down on those they have defeated, to really rub it in," said Brad Bushman, co-author of the study and professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University. "People were more aggressive when they were better off than when they were worse off than others," Bushman said.' -- Now with something to lose.

'Meaningful actions exist because we find or impose patterns on the specific behaviours we observe or otherwise learn about. The patterns are constructions, but once generated, they are maintained because they disambiguate reality and thereby provide coherent understanding and a stable platform for subsequent thought and behaviour. Because they are constructions, however, they can admit to tremendous variability across people and contexts. Hence, the certainty of action that exists for each individual embedded in a particular context coexists with the uncertainty of action across individuals and contexts. That said, there is one metric for disambiguating action that seems solid and reflects a shared reality. The multiple act identities for an action tend to be organized in a hierarchical manner. A simple criterion is useful for sorting an action's multiple identities into a hierarchy: One act identity is higher-level than another identity if it makes sense to say that one does the former by doing the latter. -- ...when two or more plausible identities are available, people are inclined to choose the identity that provides the most comprehensive understanding of what they are doing, plan to do, or have done. -- #Social Influence: The influence agent first induces the target to consider the relevant action in concrete, low-level terms. Simply describing the action in terms of its details can induce low-level identification, as can presenting the target with a surplus of concrete information regarding the action. From this low-level state, the target experiences a heightened press for coherence. On his or her own, the target might emerge with a higher-level identity that reflects past perspectives or perhaps one that reflects a new integration. But if the influence agent offers a message that provides the missing integration before the target has demonstrated emergence on his or her own, the target may embrace this message as an avenue of emergent understanding, even if it conflicts with his or her prior conception.'

'Compared with low-level agents, high-level agents express a more internal locus of control, report more stability and consistency in their actions across contexts, and have clearer and more stable self-concepts. By contrast, low-level agents report acting more impulsively and describe their actions with less reference to mental states. The tendency to identify one’s actions at higher levels then may be indicative of an awareness of one’s own mind as a cause of behavior. -- Mentalizing incorporates subprocesses whereby the perceiver infers the existence of mental states, internal events, and other features of agents from external cues or from a personal simulation of the other’s experience... The tendency to mentalize in adults has been examined in studies of empathy, perspective-taking, emotion recognition and attribution, and knowledge estimation....mentalization is a continuum. At the lowest end of the continuum is the failure to attribute mental states to an agent, which might be called dementalizing. Thought, emotion, and intention are not inferred or are ignored. A perceiver can dementalize a person by explaining the person’s actions in terms of physical events, preexisting dispositions, or causal chains that do not require a mind.'

'Mentalization is the process by which an observer views a target as possessing higher cognitive faculties such as goals, intentions and desires. Mentalization can be assessed using action identification paradigms, in which observers choose mentalistic (goals-focused) or mechanistic (action-focused) descriptions of targets’ actions. Typically, healthy adults mentalize liked others more than disliked others... This discrepancy is reflected in discrepancies in action identification across targets. Liked
targets’ actions are consistently identified at higher levels than disliked targets’... This suggests that mentalization as assessed by action identification tasks varies as a function of the observer’s impression of the actor. Activation in several regions increased when participants considered the actions of disliked targets. These regions included the bilateral dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral anterior insula and right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. These are regions consistently associated with negative emotions such as disgust, anger and pain...'

'If successfully enacted, an action tends to be identified at a relatively high level; if unsuccessfully enacted, it tends to be identified in lower-level terms. ...in the face of failure, the actor is likely to think about the action in more mechanistic terms. -- ...the extension of action identification principles to the communication of action allows for a certain "coyness" in self-presentation. Rather than boasting of one's personal competence, a person might nonetheless communicate this image of himself or herself through high-level identities. And rather than admitting failure or explaining it away, one can simply (and honestly) describe what one has done in mechanistic terms, thereby circumventing the presentation of oneself as incompetent. Finally, one can cultivate an image of modesty in the eyes of others by describing action-even successful action-in relatively low-level terms.'

'...people identify the actions they perform at the highest level they can.' -- Links to PDF papers

Action Identification: High/Why vs Low/How: "We have meaning and significance at the high levels of identification... When you focus at low levels there's less self-relevance to what you're doing." -- Being vs Doing

'The pre-Interent double-take zone was fairly stable. Double-take events were truly serendipitous and generally didn’t go anywhere. Most relationship options expired due to low social and geographic mobility. A random encounter was just a random encounter. Since double-take encounters temporarily dislocate people from the default context through which you know them, and make them temporarily more alive after, you could say the double-take zone is coming alive with nascent relationships: relationships that have been dislodged from a fixed physical or digital context, but haven’t yet been socially situated. There is an additional necessary condition for more to happen: the double-take moment must also destabilize default assumptions about relative status. ...one of the effects of the breakdown of the middle class and trading-up is that status relationships become context-dependent. There is no default context. You never know when you might turn a barista into a new friend after a double-take encounter, or renew a relationship with an old one via a Facebook Like. The sane default attitude today is the world is small and life is long. Reinventing yourself is becoming prohibitively expensive.'

'Losers are far too smart to fall for Hanlon Dodge maneuvers as individuals. You need to work them in groups to get them behaving in sufficiently stupid ways. When you work gemeinschaft — the matrix of personal connections and trust relationships that binds Loser groups together — there is really only one basic tactic: divide-and-conquer. The key to successful divide-and-conquer moves lies in recognizing and exploiting two features of Loser groups. Within the group ... skirmishes work to keep the group at the edge of stability. The fault lines remain in a fluid state, widening and narrowing as the group saga evolves. Attractive and repulsive forces balance to keep the group at a marginally stable level of intimacy. Until Sociopaths step in to exploit the precarious equilibrium. Loser group dynamics offer a natural exploit: almost anyone can be made to ally with, or turn against, anybody else, with no need to manufacture reasons. Almost any sub-group can be played off against any other sub-group, since there are no absolute loyalties. The presence of myriad fault-lines within a Loser group presents a canvas for divide-and-conquer artistry.'

'...guanxi describes a personal connection between two people in which one is able to prevail upon another to perform a favor or service, or be prevailed upon. The two people need not be of equal social status. Someone is described as having good guanxi if their particular network of influence could assist in the resolution of the problem currently being spoken about. ...guanxi can describe a state of general understanding between two people: "he/she is aware of my wants/needs and will take them into account when deciding her/his course of future actions which concern or could concern me without any specific discussion or request". It is custom for Chinese people to cultivate an intricate web of guanxi relationships, which may expand in a huge number of directions, and includes lifelong relationships. Reciprocal favors are the key factor to maintaining one’s guanxi web, failure to reciprocate is considered an unforgivable offense. The more you ask of someone the more you owe them.'

'Guanxi operates as essentially a private favor exchange. If I can organize a chain of value exchange among my web threads that results in getting something that I want, then I can execute a Guanxi transaction (or chain transaction). The system is lubricated by the concept of a Guanxi Debt. I can utilize the system for short-term needs certainly, and that is a very common aspect of the system. But I can also incur or accrue Guanxi that (if managed wisely) can be utilized for larger purposes at a later time. Naturally, such favors often have financial components. Even the outright sale of Guanxi is common. ...Guanxi is like your brain, or your muscles. It must be used in order to grow strong or stay sharp. Since everybody is operating within the same system, if I develop some particularly important Guanxi thread, but then don’t use it, I will lose it. This is because the Guanxi thread is established by mutual agreement. The opposite party has also made his or her calculations...'

'...status shifts generally occur in response to truly new information being injected, and Q&A models are optimized to draw new information in. By contrast, neither Facebook or Twitter is designed for that. Your status on those services is dominated by the accumulated, average status of your recent past, and no one action can move that much. It takes a tweet or wall post of extreme stupidity to damage your credibility on Twitter or Facebook. And you cannot build Q&A effectively into either because the accumulated status would be eroded by the acid effects of unbridled Q&A, unless moderated deliberately. New information can and does enter these systems, but it is strongly filtered by a confirmation bias, either by individuals or groups. Q&A is a fundamental interaction, marked by high, but localized status volatility, and the dominance of current, situational status over aggregate, accumulated status. -- ...questions need to be owned by the community, but answers by the individual.'

'What was equally fascinating was when I decided to go against my guess, and acted as higher status than the other person no matter what their status was. A person who was confident he was an king and went around stage acting like one, started yielding when I consistently used a high posture and tone of voice during the conversation. Another who was a 5 suddenly started taking advantage of the situation when I lowered my voice and avoided eye contact. 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. Posture, eye contact, and tone of voice were my weapons. But since then, I’ve come to realize that I was having the best social interactions with people of equal status. If that’s not the case, I’d use the status game weapons to "level up" the conversation.'

'There are four status patterns: feeling low, playing low (LL) [Victims], feeling low, playing high (LH) [Abusers], feeling high, playing low (HL) [Friend-seekers], feeling high, playing high (HH) [Power-seekers]. Status is a variable whose importance is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you gravitate to preferred locked-status patterns, then you will expend energy preserving those patterns. You can be manipulated. Status matters if it matters. Conversely, if status doesn't matter to you, it becomes available to you as a situational control variable when dealing with those to whom status does matter. We all start out in a locked-status mode, but if you start breaking locked felt-played patterns then a curious thing happens: felt status of any sort weakens. Turns out felt status needs the nourishment of being hooked to a projected (and perceived-as-hoped and validated) status in order to survive. If felt status starts to vanish altogether, leaving a sort of "status vacuum" inside you.'

'What you need is a reaction that gives you reboot control, but doesn't leave you responsible for maintaining overall calm. Just your own calm. You leave the bull responsible for his/her own emotions... The basic trick is simple: you repeat all or part of their opening line, but with zero emotional content. #Bull: Whha wwhat am I going to do now? I am screwed. #You: You're screwed? When faced with an emotionally charged stimulus, your own emotional reaction will race ahead and censor the options generated by your cognitive reaction. What happens next? Usually, the bull will see your response as a request for elaboration. Elaboration takes coherent thinking, so he/she will be forced to slow down before saying anything more. At the same time, you've substituted your emotionally neutral repetition for the charged opening, as the stimulus to respond to. Most importantly, you don't end up with responsibility for the developing situation before you decide if you want it.'

'Speedtest.net, which had 165 million unique users in 2010, is now offering a way for users to sign up, save their results, share them with friends, create shared tests, and even win badges. “People like to show off,” Suttles said, pointing to a recently popular Reddit thread where a visitor to a Korea showed off a wickedly fast connection.'

'Here's the effective method: you need to interrupt as soon as you've roughly understood that there is an objectionable point being made (which can be before the speaker has finished making it), and before you've decided what to say. You do so by thinking out aloud, going "Aaaaaahhhhhhhhh!" or "Ehhhhummmmmm!" clearly, and stretching out your interrupt phrase over several seconds, until the interruptee shuts up and looks towards you. And most importantly, it should be patently clear that you haven't yet decided what to say, and are thinking about it. This means looking up, down, or away in the distance as you normally would when you are absorbed in thought, not directly at the interruptee. Don't try to stage this. An artificial use of this tactic will be transparent to smart people. The quality of your timing will tell the other smart people in the room whether you know what you are doing, or faking it.'

'...social functionality operate within a space defined by the following three dimensions. #Knowledge: We use this stuff to learn. Specifically, we use it to learn from each other. For example, user reviews or Wikipedia. #Connection: We use this stuff to communicate, bond, meet, define affiliations and dislikes or just hang out where the people are. For example, friending... #Display: We use this stuff to communicate and manage presentations of ourselves, truthfully or not, to others. For example, user profiles or Flickr. No piece of social functionality is all one and none of the others, but they tend to be weighted differently in each case. Display often motivates contributions (and impacts the type of contributions) made via Knowledge and Connection functionality. ...it's crucially important for motivating contribution and can actually stabilize and help self-regulate systems of social functionality. ...the three Display dimensions: Status, Reputation and Esteem – form a continuum.'

'Zynga's made a $400 million profit on $850 million revenues in 2010, reports the WSJ. If that's true, that's an astounding 47% profit margin. 47%! And this after Zynga pays Facebook taxes in the form of advertising to acquire users and 30% of virtual goods sales. So the real question is: How does Zynga's virtual goods business work? The easiest way to understand it is to remember the the videogame arcades of the 1980s. Back then, arcade games made money by addicting people to simple games (like Pacman), introducing "friction" into these games (by making them harder after each level), and then charging small amounts of money to ease that friction (by allowing gamers to buy "lives.") That's what Zynga's social games do – charge people small amounts of money to reduce friction in games they are addicted to.'

'Give something to your audience – even warm tingles, and they’re one step closer to being happy customers. Give them something and let them beat the bad guy, and they’re yours for life. Everyone wants to have stories to tell. If they’re in the stories, they tell them better. And more often. This storytelling/folklore is the best part of the whole equation, because your audience loves you for making them part of the story, and they help you get the word out at the same time. If beating the bad guys and taking their stuff is the incentive that gets people involved with you, then telling stories is how you can get existing customers to indoctrinate new people into the club and keep them there. How many people here run businesses that live and die on referrals? What’s a referral? Uh-huh. It’s someone telling others how smart they were to choose you. They’re telling the tale of how they conquered the Great Black Beast of Q1 Sales Goals. #Slay monsters #Take their treasure #Tell the tale'

"The cycle of life is that children are inconvenient when they're very young, and parents are inconvenient when they're very old."

'Perhaps the most controversial modification is that self-actualization no longer appears on the pyramid at all. At the top of the new pyramid are three evolutionarily critical motives that Maslow overlooked: mate acquisition, mate retention and parenting. The researchers state that while self-actualization is interesting and important, it isn't an evolutionarily fundamental need. Instead, many of the activities that Maslow labeled as self-actualizing reflect more biologically basic drives to gain status, which in turn serves the goal of attracting mates. "Among human aspirations that are most biologically fundamental are those that ultimately facilitate reproduction of our genes in our children's children. For that reason, parenting is paramount." Kenrick adds, for humans reproduction is not just about sex and producing children. It's also about raising those children to the age at which they can reproduce as well. Consequently, parenting sits atop the revamped pyramid.'

'When I look at how teens hurt each other, I can’t help but also see how they’re developing training wheels for future relationships and reflecting normative behaviors that they see around them. I hear teens’ dramas reflected in their stories about how their parents fight – with each other, with their friends and family and colleagues, and with them. What teens are doing is more coarse, more direct, and more explicit. But they’re witnessing adult dramas all around them and what they tend to see isn’t pretty. Parents talking smack about work colleagues or bosses. Parents fighting with each other or ostracizing their family members over disagreements. And it’s not just parents... Celebrity fights and dramas aren’t just in their face; they’re glorified! Teens are seeing drama everywhere – they’re seeing it as a legitimate part of adult society that can often lead to notoriety. And here’s where we run into another major component of bullying… attention.'

'Then he was all like "Dont know who the eff u r. I wanted to buy a Hummer but ended up in this lil piece of shit car. Know the gas is cheap but still feel like a pussie when I drive it around." Then I was like "I live on an ice cap thanx for not melting it." Then he said "Global Warming is Bull shit. Go back 2 ur g-d hippie college and leave me alone with ur liberal propaganda [via the Daily Colbert Show]." Humans are kinda lame. Not sure if they 'get' the environment or if they really care abt animals like me/relevant ecosystems. Seems like they only care abt hybrid cars for the sake of 'status'. Just kinda sux that everything is abt branding + consumerism instead of 'doing it 4 the right reasons' 2 save the polar bears. I'm still alone. No1 understands me. I'm completely fucked.'

'As much of an online paradise as Twitter is, it's not *completely* free of the kinds of annoying behavior we see in the real world. High on the list are the sorts of adolescent posturing that social media in general make so easy--preening, name-dropping, ass-kissing, pandering, cliquishness, slavish trend-following. Yes, a tweet is usually just a tweet, but sometimes it's as conspicuously coded as the brand of jeans a high-school girl wears.'

"Think of it as non-fiction gaming." -- "If you don't have a good status system to offer to your users in exchange for their behaviour, you need to give them cash." -- "Games are the only force in the known universe that can get people to take actions which are against their self interest, in a predictable way, without the use of force." -- "No matter what game you're playing, the house always wins. There is no way to beat the house long-term. So you have the choice in a more gamified world, of either being the house, or being played."

'For high-empathy people, all this is natural. By participating in collective feeling in groups of any size, and reacting to basic attraction/aversion drives, you can actually safely navigate all the complexity by instinct. Not only can you do this, you will actually feel good doing this. This feeling is called happiness. ...happiness is entirely a social phenomenon... Non-social feelings that seem like happiness turn out, upon further examination, to be distinct emotions like contentment, equanimity or hedonistic pleasure. Why do we use the word “cringe” to describe the peculiar brand of humor in The Office? Psychologically, you cringe when you realize you are committing a social faux pas and can expect a negative social-proof judgment. ...this cringing helps you interrupt the offending behavior and try to recover. Empathic social cringing is even more effective among losers, since you can watch my developing “embarrassed for you” reaction to moderate your own behavior in time.'

'Among the clueless, status stays static. Among the sociopaths, status is irrelevant. But among losers, status is real, and it matters. Humor causes status shifts among jokester, victim and audience. Net inflow of social capital occurs when the victim is out-group. Redistribution and appreciation/depreciation happen when the victim is in-group. Net outflows happen when an entire group is made victim by another individual or group. Among losers, in specific situations, status may go up or down, but overall, it just goes round and round. But the social capital DOES appreciate and depreciate through the churning economy of jokes, sympathy, moaning, commiseration, solidarity, anger/derision directed against out-groupers, etc. That whole chaotic chemistry that we dignify with the word “culture"... Who owns the social capital? That’s the beauty of the thing. Due to status illegibility, there can be no “fair and equitable” distribution. So the group can only deploy the capital collectively.'

'Groucho Marx: “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.” #Marx’s First Law of Status Illegibility: the illegibility of the status of any member of a group is proportional to his/her distance from the edges of the group. #Marx’s Second Law of Status Illegibility: the stability of the group membership of any member is proportional to the illegibility of his/her status. Obfuscated status signalling is the foundation of every aspect of loser group dynamics (which is also all group dynamics, since forming groups is a loser activity). If your status is clear, and the status of the club is clear (by definition, the average status of all its current members) then either your status is higher, in which case the club will want you, but you won’t want to join, or your status is lower, in which case the opposite is true. How new members segue into existing group games is what determines their future. Social skills > Social truth hypotheses > Social proof > Social capital'

'Not all hipsters arrive in the big cities flush with cash, but they almost always possess some cultural capital, usually a university degree and refined upbringing. They can use this to prevent themselves from ending up on the bottom of the pile, even if their only means of upward mobility are snarky putdowns and a working knowledge of the Smiths. "It becomes a defence mechanism, if you're 'declassed' in a city, to stop yourself from winding up at the bottom," Greif argues. "It's about social positioning, how to mark yourself out as different or exclusive in a democratic society, where it's quite easy to buy the consumer trappings of success."'

On self-esteem and social levelling: "One of the problems with self-esteem is mistaking the accidental for the personally virtuous. You don't want to place your self-esteem on the accidental characteristics that you may have."

'Nobody likes hipsters, not even hipsters. ...any people who legitimately enjoy all the trappings on hipsterhood must psychologically distance themselves from the demographic group of which they are so clearly a part. And so their subconscious brains have to work double time so that they can convince themselves that the things they buy do not reflect on their true character. The deeper irony is that those who try to assert their independence from the commodification of identity wind up tapping into another marketplace myth, what the authors call "the myth of consumer sovereignty." This is the idea that by assiduously selecting from all the identity markers available for purchase, a person can assemble one that authentically reflects their true self independent of the marketplace.'

'The Bully Dialogue – where they spend ten minutes chatting nicely even though both of you know you're eventually going to get stuffed in a locker – is another Cognitive Kill Switch, which is about reversing power and dominance. The aggressive "Hi, what's your name, that's a nice shirt you got there" works because you're not willing – you feel you're not allowed – to respond to the situation for what it is: a bully trying to dominate the conversation. You feel obligated to reply to their words, and not the meaning. -- Back to Louie. When that kid appeared at his table, everyone knew why he was there. So this is how the scene should have gone...: "Hi, my name's Sean, what's your name?" "Get your punk-ass away from me, I don't want to know you." Now the kid's either going to fight you, or back down – which is the same thing that was going to happen anyway, but at least you stood up for yourself.'

'...nerds want to show off their non-social skills, and so require social games so that there are others who can observe their impressive performance. But nerds seem to prefer more social interaction in their games than having a mere audience requires. Another explanation is that while nerds like to socialize, they are terrified of making social mistakes. This explains why they tend to avoid eye-contact – it is too easy to make the wrong eye contacts. Games let nerds interact socially, yet avoid mistakes via well-defined rules, and a social norm that all legal moves are “fair game.” Role-playing has less well-defined rules, but the norm there is that social mistakes are to be blamed on characters, not players. An third explanation is hinted at by the fact that we use the word “game” to refer both to “fun/frivolous” and to “seriously selfishly strategic.” While social norms usually forbid overt strategic selfishness in social behavior, such strategic selfishness is allowed in games.'

'#Moving With: Strategies in which psychologically healthy people develop relationships: communication, agreement, disagreement, compromise, and decisions. #Moving Toward: The individual moves towards those perceived as a threat to avoid retribution and getting hurt. The argument is, “If I give in, I won’t get hurt.” This means that: if I give everyone I see as a potential threat whatever they want, I won’t be injured (physically or emotionally). #Moving Against: The individual threatens those perceived as a threat to avoid getting hurt. #Moving Away: The individual distances themselves from anyone perceived as a threat to avoid getting hurt. The argument is, “If I do not let anyone close to me, I won’t get hurt.” A neurotic desires to be distant because of being abused. If they can be the extreme introvert, no one will ever develop a relationship with them. If there is no one around, nobody can hurt them. They emotionally remove themselves from society.'

'Taking walks is the entry drug into the quiet, solitary heaven of idleness. For modern Americans, idleness is a shameful, private indulgence. If they attempt it in public, they are stricken by social anxiety. They seem to fear that the slow, solitary, and obviously purposeless amble that marks “taking a walk” signals social incompetence or a life unacceptably adrift. If a shopping bag, gym bag, friend or dog cannot be manufactured, nominal non-idleness must be signaled through an ostentatious “I have friends” phone call, or email-checking. If all else fails, hands must be placed defiantly in pockets, to signal a brazen challenge to anyone who dares look askance at you, “Yeah, I’m takin’ a walk! You got a problem with that?” In America, visible idleness is a luxury for the homeless, the delinquent and immigrants. The defiantly tautological protest, “I have a life,” is quintessentially American. The American life does not exist until it is filled up.'

'...the machinery of credit was used politically to try and manage and retain control the structure of power in the world. It was not a conspiracy, it was simply those in power taking the line of least resistance. -- I thought I would put up some of the films from the BBC archive from the time when there was moral disapproval by those in power of the "lower orders" wanting to "live beyond their means". The programmes are quite extraordinary and riveting in their tone of patrician sniffiness about people borrowing on the "Never Never" and Hire Purchase. And not just from the bankers who are interviewed - it is also in the commentary. But if you peer through that, you can see something else emerging in the ordinary people interviewed. It is a powerful desire to borrow money - so they can have what those above them in society have. The good life. And beyond that there is a growing envy and resentment.'

'The next time you feel angry at a friend who has let you down, or grateful toward one whose generosity has surprised you, consider this: you may really be bargaining for better treatment from that person in the future. According to a controversial new theory, our emotions have evolved as tools to manipulate others into cooperating with us. -- You get angry not when someone hurts you, but when their actions betray a setting of their cooperation dial that is lower than you expect, and your anger is both a threat to turn down your own dial and an inducement to them to turn theirs up. You show gratitude not when someone benefits you, but when their dial is set higher than you expect, and this signals that you plan to turn yours up in response.'

'“The selfish gain on the altruistic, but once in a while, the groups composed of selfish guys get clobbered in competition with groups that have altruistic individuals.” Asked whether the willingness to participate in battle might be taken for fear of within-group punishment, Bowles said that merely “displaced the question.” “I might hope that someone would punish you, but why should I do it? You might hit back. The idea that I can exert order on you presupposes the idea that someone is altruistic.”' -- Survival of the witness. (My public selflessness is self-interested since it enhances my social status; my private selflessness is self-interested since it enhances my self-esteem.)

'The self-aggrandizement that offended the group is standard fare in my Twitter feed — my own posts too often included. (BTW, I’ll be appearing on TV this week.) But far from clearing out the virtual bar, expressions of vanity online are usually rewarded with a cascade of back-patting: a virtual thumbs-up, a hearty “congrats!,” a “proud-to-know-you” retweet. Social networking sites have inverted the rules of privacy and etiquette, and no cultural norm is tossed aside more often on the Web than plain old modesty. This raises an existential question: When you celebrate yourself online, are you a willing participant in a brave new social future, or are you just being an ass?'

'#Time Sensitive: Now Or Never Urgency: Limited time offers, special editions, and location specific actions are designed behaviors that remind users to take action in certain settings or time frames. This sense of urgency provides users with anchor points of engagement. It’s counter intuitive to restrict the actions of your users, but if your users abide by your rules, then it means they’re engaging with you. #Tracking Progression: Look At How Far You’ve Come: Record a users’s history to show progress and provide feedback. These achievements can be digital markers or physical rewards that are manifestations of satisfaction that can be combined with social aspects to increase ambition and competition. #Offer Exclusivity: Only The Few Deserve It: Lofty goals keep heavy-users interested. The criteria for earning these rewards thrive in a meritocracy, where the most active users should be the ones with the most desirable rewards.'

'George Orwell said sport was war minus the shooting. Sport is certainly inclined to infantilise us. For the duration of the match or tournament, fans care more about the result than almost anything. It hurls us into the moment and reduces us to despair or euphoria... As life becomes more atomised, people yearn to be part of a crowd. Sport has infected other fields with its values. Everything from hairdressing to accountancy now has its own awards ceremony, making mere workers into winners and losers. The recent British election was dominated by televised debates between the main party leaders, which turned a four-week campaign into a three-set match. Heavily previewed and then exhaustively dissected, the debates were sport without the drama... A winner-takes-all culture, which would have been abhorrent a generation ago, has spread outwards from banking, with its eight-figure bonuses. It is harder to protest against that when we swallow the extreme economics of sport.'

'Dismissing his students' fears, Dr. Milgram set out to try it himself. But when he approached his first seated passenger, he found himself frozen. "The words seemed lodged in my trachea and would simply not emerge." Retreating, he berated himself: 'What kind of craven coward are you?" A few unsuccessful tries later, he managed to choke out a request. "Taking the man's seat, I was overwhelmed by the need to behave in a way that would justify my request. My head sank between my knees, and I could feel my face blanching. I was not role-playing. I actually felt as if I were going to perish." Those tension-filled subway rides in the spring of 1972 are still easily recalled by many of Dr. Milgram's former students scattered across the country. "I really did feel sick to my stomach," said Dr. Krogh, remembering her first attempt. "Afterwards, I thought, 'I wonder if that wasn't helpful because the person must have thought: "This person looks sick. She needs the seat."'"

'Newspapers thrived, in part, because reading just one edition provided only a few cents' worth of social currency. Compounding your earnings requires that you read the damn thing nearly every day. Ignore a couple of issues, and you get left behind. Newspapers are designed to be read and argued over. You've got to spend social currency to make social currency. Other institutions do far better jobs at issuing social currency these days. What is Facebook but the Federal Reserve Bank of social currency? And it's all social currency you can use! Like cocktail chatter, a Facebook posting—be it a link, a list, a photo, or travel plans—conveys the message, I am here. Listen to me. If skillfully wielded, a Facebook page can increase a person's status by attracting "cooler" or more influential friends. These days, you can't raise your status more than a bump by carrying the Wall Street Journal under your arm.'

'In the course of life it is important to avoid letting people get levers on you. The cons learn their victim’s likes and dislikes and personal history, so that they will be able to forge a more “authentic” bond with the victim. Inmates often work in large cabals, colluding in their informational exchange. One other tactic they use is to compliment the guard. Compliments are actually a devastating manipulative tool, because they enhance the ego of the complimented. Because the ego is false, and impermanent, the complimented becomes less grounded in reality... By asking the guard for help, they improve the bond (after all, to help someone is to be of higher status than them – and this nurtures the illusion of the guard that *they* are the ones in charge...) In prison as in real life, if someone doesn’t actively speak up and say something, silence is taken as assent. When human beings touch each other, if the touch is not aggressive, oxytocin is often released, causing a bond to form.'

'...when it comes to experiences, status can only be derived from being seen by others—while experiencing the experience, which may be a relatively brief moment—or by telling others about the experiences afterwards (which can go on for years ;-). Hence STATUS STORIES becoming more attractive and prevalent: as more brands (have to) go niche and therefore tell stories that aren't common knowledge for the masses. So as experiences and non-consumption-related expenditures take over from physical (and more visible) status symbols, consumers will increasingly have to tell each other stories to achieve a status dividend from their purchases. Expect a shift from brands telling a story, to brands helping consumers tell their own status-yielding stories to other consumers.' -- What's my motivation?

'In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it's OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture. In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. If you're a Guess Culture person then unwelcome requests from Ask Culture people seem presumptuous and out of line, and you're likely to feel angry, uncomfortable, and manipulated. If you're an Ask Culture person, Guess Culture behavior can seem incomprehensible, inconsistent, and rife with passive aggression. Guess behaviors only work among a subset of other Guess people -- ones who share a fairly specific set of expectations and signalling techniques. The farther you get from your own family and friends and subculture, the more you'll have to embrace Ask behavior.'

'Reality-Distortion by the Clueless: #I am OK if Mommy applauds my performance (early childhood, Michael) #I am OK if I earn badges from teachers (pre-adolescence, Dwight) #I am OK if I can sit with the cool kids (adolescence, Andy) -- It is no accident that the clueless totem pole is stacked in what seems like the wrong order: Michael is the boss, Dwight is Number 2 and Andy is Number 3. The sublevels of clueless development are typically insufficiently separated to allow the more developed clueless to dominate, so the Curse of Development kicks in. Keep in mind that that the rough equation of individuals to “levels” merely represents the center of gravity of their most deeply-entrenched strength-addiction behaviors, to which they regress most easily when threatened.'

'The Three Laws of Arrested Development: #1. Your development is arrested by your strengths, not your weaknesses. #2. Arrested-development behavior is caused by a strength-based addiction #3. The mediocre develop faster than either the talented or the untalented [because mediocrity is your best defense against strength addiction, and a guarantor of further open-ended psychological development.] -- An alternative way of looking at these three laws is to note that defense mechanisms emerge to sustain addictions even when the developmental environment that originally nourished it, vanishes. In our model, the three development stages – clueless, losers and sociopaths – correspond to different patterns of arrested development and different strength-addictions. Each pattern is based on a preferred, dominant variety of delusion: #1. The clueless distort reality #2. The losers distort rewards and penalties #3. The sociopaths distort the metaphysics of human life'

'The Curse of Development: The depth of any transaction is limited by the depth of the shallower party. If the situational developmental gap between two people is sufficiently small, the more evolved person will systematically lose more often than he/she wins. -- #1. The less-developed person does not know what he/she does not know, and is typically attempting to operate from their regressed comfort zone of strength, which to you represents a zone of unrewarding mediocrity that you are attempting to leave/have left behind. This lends your opponent confidence. #2. Your own knowledge is fresh, unstable and not yet ingrained as second nature. You are acutely aware of, and anxious about, your beginner status in your new level. This makes you lack confidence. #3. To win through persuasion, you must teach (a superior-inferior transaction) without first reversing the default unfavorable status relationship (you, not confident, low-status, he/she confident, high-status)'

'"Behavior placement" is designed to sway viewers to adopt actions they see modeled in their favorite shows. And it helps sell ads to marketers who want to associate their brands with a feel-good, socially aware show. Unlike with product placement, which can seem jarring to savvy viewers, the goal is that viewers won't really notice that Tina Fey is tossing a plastic bottle into the recycle bin...' -- Because this is drama, all that viewers are going to judge is the successful/artful enaction of the action itself, not the symbolic meaning of the action ie., How well did the bottle land in the bin? Was it the first attempt? Was anyone else present? Were they attempting the same action? What do successful or failed actions say about the characters' relative status? -- The other examples are just product/object/environment placement aka fashion and more likely to work in adu-edu-docu-lifestyle-training productions.

'The most successful F2P games (monetization-wise) in China all give their paying customers HUGE advantages. Rich people lead poor people to fight with other rich people via clans. It is much better than rich people killing poor people all the time. Creates a highly dynamic social system with better balancing. Maybe this is popular in China. Apparently people there will pay money for it. Perhaps when they want to escape from their day-to-day lives in an oppressive centralized regime, that's what they fantasize about: being peasants forced to fight for a brutal overlord, in an oppressive decentralized regime. As if all this weren't depressing enough, Mr. Ye explains how game designers can make money out of hate and humiliation in social environments: Conflicts are good. Conflicts make the game world more energetic and live. More importantly, conflicts trigger emotions. When people are emotionally unstable, they are more likely to make purchases. Is this what game design has come to?'

'Chatroulette can well imitate an act of meeting strangers on the street. You can choose between two acts: you can play active or passive. They are both highly addictive. You can actively approach, and they might not get interested in you. You keep on trying. At the same time, you can choose to be the one who turns down interactions. That can be satisfying don't you think? The no commitment part is achieved by users' anonymity. Chatroulette doesn't require any identification or user subscription. You don't have to work hard and fake your identity. Finally, there is something new in these sets of random acquaintances that leaves you unprepared. This surprise element can never be achieved offline. ...you get a chance to play with an imaginary sense of control. While in real life you hardly talk to strangers, here you get it as a social norm.'

'Asked about ways the $14 trillion might be better spent, Professor Ian Thorson, a sociologist at Georgetown University, suggested the funds be used to combat poverty, but acknowledged that donating to charities was not always effective, as even those Americans in need often spend much of the assistance they receive on trying to look cool. "The whole thing ends up being a vicious cycle," Thorson said. "The only way this situation will ever be remedied is if people just relax and try to be themselves, you know? I mean, that's cool, man." Added Thorson, "Right?" Thorson said his current research indicates that true coolness may in fact come from not caring what other people think—a finding he hopes to submit to his peers for review before publishing it in a journal admired by students and colleagues alike.'

'Taking Iraq and President Bush as starting points, and examining the defense mechanisms we use to cope with both, yields the unsurprising conclusion that we are a society of narcissists. While this discovery is familiar to readers of my blog, what might be a surprise is what this heralds for our society politically and economically. It isn't socialism, or even communism, as I had feared. It's feudalism. Let's begin.' -- Defence mechanisms: 'Splitting/Dissociation: reducing the other person to a binary abstraction of all good or all bad, is a primitive, or regressive, defense mechanism used when the emotional level and complexity is greater than a person's capacity to interpret it. Inherent in the act of splitting is apathy. You don't try to find a solution to the problem person, the split is the solution. It allows you not to have to deal with the other, because you've decided that the other is irredeemable. #Projection/Scapegoating #Denial #Reaction Formation/"Going overboard."'

'Looking happy isn't hip. When did you last see a catwalk model ­grinning? This is probably down to signalling, noted ­researcher ­Timothy Ketelaar: smiling indicates eagerness to please, ­suggesting low status. If a Prada model isn't smiling, she clearly doesn't need to, implying high status. Brands that target less wealthy ­customers use smiling ­models, suggesting lower status, and thus affordability. -- The image of the brooding artist is compelling; cheeriness ­betokens a failure to comprehend the horrors of existence.'

'"Guess it's time for Cooter and Horlene to stock up on turlit paper and Cheez Doodles," Klein scoffed on his way to purchase affordable, designer-inspired bathroom supplies and a family-size bag of pita chips.'

Lanier: "Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting. Initially people aren't sure what the pack is. Somebody tries to ridicule something else, and other people who want to play it safe join in so that they're not the target. Gradually, the pack forms. You can tell it's formed by two things: an internal enemy and an external enemy. The internal enemy is the low person on the totem pole who gets ridiculed. And then there's the external enemy, the "other"." -- Krotoski: "We see this in playgrounds, we see this pack mentality in other, non-web environments. -- Lanier: "That's because it comes from the people, not from the machine."

#Prestige-status #Domination-status -- Comment: tom: "Only when we have no ‘near’ relationship to a person can there really be ['far'] prestige pride separate from ['near'] domination pride. Fear applies near only, but envy applies near and far." -- Comment: mjgeddes: "I claim there are actually 3 thought modes (very near, near, far), 3 types of reasoning, (deductive logic, bayesian induction, categorization), 3 types of intelligence (domain specific, rational, emotional), 3 types of causality (structure, action-potential, signal), 3 types of politics (conservatism, libertarianism, socialism) and so forth. I think there are 3 types of status, (1) Domination-status, (2) Prestige-status and (3) Charm-Status. Charm-Status: social skills, life of the party, good entertainer, sort of thing. 3-fold classification of personality types: Warriors (Domination status). Tycoons (Prestige Status) and Artists (Charm Status). I actually put Domination status as ‘very near’..." -- *nodding*

'...the premise [is] that Americans are genetically/culturally more prone to risk taking, impulsivity, novelty-seeking, and therefore addiction... -- The brain has been fooled into ‘thinking’ that achieving [any] high is equivalent to survival... -- If the rush is tied to something that society rewards we call it ambition, if it's attached to something a little scary, then we label the individual a ‘risktaker’ and if its tied to something illegal – then they are an ‘addict’ or substance abuser. So it seems culture has voted on which drugs are 'good' to pursue. -- In order to overcome addictions, it is usually not enough to argue about which year the drug supply is going to begin its decline. It's a better path to understand the addiction, admit it before one hits rock bottom, and either begin the cold turkey process or become addicted to something else. -- ...when an addict (broadly defined) is exposed to higher prices, conventional economic theory will not hold.'

'As our group membership forms our identity, it is only natural for us to want to be part of groups that are both high status and have a positive image. Crucially though, high status groups only have that high status when compared to other groups. In other words: knowing your group is superior requires having a worse group to look down upon. Seen in the light of social identity theory, then, the boys in the experiment do have a reason to be selfish about the allocation of the virtual cash. It is all about boosting their own identities through making their own group look better.'

'We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.' -- George Orwell

'Our generation, more than any in the past, has elevated the moralistic (voicing the right opinions) over the moral (doing the right thing). -- The trouble with the Michael Moore view of the world is that it elevates motive over outcome. Never mind if the consequence of what you’re proposing is to make people poorer. The main thing is that to flaunt your niceness by hating the right people. The funny thing is that the ones who hate the hardest tend to be the ones who aspire to the highest of the moral high ground.'

Gisted: "People keep attacking us for wanting to know the truth, or for being curious about the truth, or for not being certain. To not be certain is an anathema to weak egos; they can't take it. It's certainly an anathema to the false self, because it's designed to mask doubt. Whenever you bring up the truth around just about anyone, you're attacking their false self: you're directly threatening what they perceive as the entire basis of their personality, you're threatening virtue, you're threatening confidence, you're threatening self-esteem, you're threatening everything. Most people don't have any clue that a particular idea is threatening all their values, they just feel angry. That is the reaction of the false self. The false self manifests when you've come to genuinely love those who continually abuse you—and don't realise that's a problem. -- Like Winston's love for Big Brother at the end of 1984, the horror of the false self is when you no longer realise that you're lying."

'The Careless Losers – the carefree, perhaps – have something else going on in their lives and see work for what it is: a distraction from what counts. In this sense, the Losers, as the biggest group that constitutes most of us, are composed of that “silent majority” that upholds a good deal of old fashioned anarchist sensibility: act as if the State/Corp doesn’t exist. In the indication of a blindspot within an organisation’s powergame environment, Venkat’s analysis suggests that other systems of power might lie elsewhere. This elsewhere keeps those with an ear to the outside constantly seeking an alternative means to living without working, and as Virno suggests, means that exodus (or the politics of disappearance) constitutes the general strategy of the (Loser) workforce.'

'...when given the choice, try and move up the hierarchy of value. If given the opportunity to work with two customer segments, one of which sees your product as a basic utility and another of which sees it as a lifestyle statement, choose the latter. IMVU made that choice early on, when we abandoned some profitable customers who wanted to use our product as a regular-IM substitute. There was no way to service them while still engaging with the goths, emos and anime fans who were rapidly becoming IMVU's top evangelists. We doubled-down on identity value, and it worked out well.'

'Thanks to a cooperation with Citi and other third-party data suppliers, Bundle is able to compile detailed statistics about how Americans are spending their money. To get started, you just enter your location, age, income and whether you are married, single or have kids. Bundle will then create an infographic that represents the spending habits of similar households in your neighborhood. From there, you can drill down deeper into the statistics. At its most granular level, Bundle displays where people are spending their money. My neighbors, for example, buy their electronics at Best Buy, Apple and Fry's.' -- Lambs to the slaughter.

'One of the most important films ever made.' -- The ways to the One are as many as the lives of men.

'How'd I get here? Well, it's quite a story. Probably not as interesting or inspiring a story as that of the two men ahead of me, but quite a story nonetheless. You see, as a boy, I was teased mercilessly by the other kids at school. But then one night as I lay in bed crying, I realized that I had a choice: I could either live my life as a doormat for the entire world or as a doormat for a select few, wiping my boots on the majority of people remaining below me. "Someday I'll show most of them," I told myself that night. "Someday I'll show practically all of them!"'

'It is my strong belief, based on considerable experience with children, that we are born strong, secure, confident and empathetic. It takes a fierce effort to destroy the natural strength of children. [P]arents teach their children [...] nonsense. -- The moment you lie to someone, you become both their slave and their master. You are their slave, because you are terrified of being discovered—and you are their master, because you must control their perceptions. You must destroy their curiosity. You must respond to any approach to your falsehoods with irritation, condemnation and withdrawal. The energizing question ‘why’ becomes your implacable enemy. You must undermine their capacity to reason, to think for themselves. You must overcomplicate the world. And most of all—most of all—you must become the sworn enemy of all principles, even the most innocuous. The only ‘rules’ you can allow are base commandments, such as ‘respect your elders’, ‘love your country’ and so on.'

'Baudrillard: “Just as exchange value is not a substantial aspect of the product, but a form that expresses a social relation, so use value can no longer be viewed as an innate function of the object but as a social determination.” One can’t pursue authenticity through that route—by using only generic objects that we “need”—anymore than one can by acquiring authentic luxury items. What is “real” about a given object’s provenance is open to constant reevaluation; the emphasis can be shifted to suit the needs of those questioning reality at various junctures. -- But why not use fake luxury goods for other reasons? They function as a kind of social sabotage, a direct attack on distinction that forces those invested in positional goods to become uncomfortable and shift their ground.'

'Life under conditions of global capital has shown us that there’s no way to consume our way out of the traps of consumerist conformity, no matter how alternative or distinctive our consumption practices are. We simply can’t stop ourselves from producing the terms of our own exploitation. -- ...the various sensual satisfactions that goods might supply have all been supplanted by the overarching satisfaction of having our identity, as expressed through a particular consumption act, recognized and validated. Then we know it mattered, that it meant something. -- Our desire, though it makes our own identity, is someone else’s capital. Though it registers to ourselves as integrity and psychological complexity, it is at the same time an impersonal measure of our productive capacity as immaterial laborers. We can’t prevent our consumption from serving as immaterial labor, and anything else we do is easily translated into a sign, into consumption.'

'...the "release" of informational goods produced and distributed in social networks is not free; there is a cost to the user in stress, in insecurity, in the fear of exclusion, of not knowing, not keeping up, being hopelessly out of style, being obscure. The self -- the individual subject -- within systems of social production is fundamentally insecure and unstable, and is compelled to continue to produce information by consuming other information and goods in a social forum under conditions the require the consumption to be competitive, signifying. -- The value of social production is that can exploit that source of emotional motivation without having to provide any wage compensation.'

'...she said he was "being inappropriate." -- Cognitive kill switches change the focus from content to identity. -- If you accept that the kill switch changes the focus from content to character, then what she's doing isn't judging the words, she's judging you. You don't really get that she has this ability—any abilities; you assume she knows nothing about you other than what you tell her, you assume she is less intuitive than you, whether it be because you are older or perhaps "smarter." The exact opposite is true. Because you don't appreciate this, you think you are fooling her by masking your real interets with neutral phrasing. -- The sum total problem you are having is this: you don't see her as a person, you see her as... You think you are seeing her as a single, complete individual, but you are mistaking your undivided attention to her as [her] perception of her.'

'...the administrator of the website was hired by Fox news to read “tweets” during their made for internet program “Judge Talk for Freedom”. This was a very cheap and effective way of silencing whatever intelligent opposition remained at the site. By promoting the visible leader of the site to a position within the corrupt news organization the news organization achieved a quick and easy coup de etat. Perhaps the website was already finished, but the notion that free speech was a likelihood after that move is a silly notion. The reason isn’t because Fox had sudden jurisdiction over the site. The reason is because half of the contributors succumbed to the cheap bait that they might too develop a career as government TV commentators if they played their cards right. Even if there was only an outside chance of landing a gig as a libertarian, media-savvy commentator on Rupert’s stage why ruin it by biting the hand that might potentially feed you?'

'The US military is extremely top heavy. Why? It's staffed for great power war. This means that it has the middle management and 'leadership' to absorb millions of conscripts. As a result, internal competition for 'inclusion' in combat ops is fierce (for promotion and 'validation of value' purposes). This also leads to extreme specialization of bureaucratic function -- lots of different types of oversight.' -- '#Pinpoint specific decision making processes for disruption.'

'Helping children develop social skills is viewed as a reasonable educational endeavor in elementary school, but by high school, educators switch to more "serious" subjects. Yet, youth aren't done learning about the social world. Conversely, they are more driven to understand people and sociality during their tween and teen years than as small children. -- The practice of hanging out is consistently demonized by educationally-minded folks as a waste of time. Yet, it is in that space where youth learn to navigate social situations, make sense of impression management, and develop the social skills necessary to be productive adults. -- Youth turn to [social media] to reclaim unstructured social encounters, to create a public space that allows them to simply hang out with their friends, peers, and cohort. The flirting, gossiping, and joking around that takes place is not proof that social media is useless, but proof that it's extremely valuable.'

'#1. Unoccupied play: the child is relatively stationary and appears to be performing random movements with no apparent purpose. A relatively infrequent style of play. #2. Solitary play: the child is are completely engrossed in playing and does not seem to notice other children. Most often seen in children between 2 and 3 years-old. #3. Onlooker play: child takes an interest in other children's play but does not join in. May ask questions or just talk to other children, but the main activity is simply to watch. #4. Parallel play: the child mimics other children's play but doesn't actively engage with them. For example they may use the same toy. #5. Associative play: now more interested in each other than the toys they are using. This is the first category that involves strong social interaction between the children while they play. #6. Cooperative play: some organisation enters children's play, for example the playing has some goal and children often adopt roles and act as a group.'