Be Slightly Evil: A Playbook for Sociopaths (Ribbonfarm Roughs 1)

by Venkatesh Rao

  When this does not work, it is usually because the bull will displace the strong emotion towards you (“don’t f$@%$@ just repeat what I say, I am MAD” or “How can you just sit there?”), but by then, you’ve bought yourself a favorable reaction-start point even if the bull continues the charge.

  Case Studies

  The Game of Hallway Chicken

  You’ve probably played the game of Hallway Chicken. That uncomfortable little dance you do when you need to maneuver around somebody going the other way in a hallway or lobby. Unlike the game of chicken on roads or in conflict, where you win by not being the first to give way, in Hallway Chicken, you win by being the first to give way, but doing so in a status-enhancing way so you appear gracious. Be honest – such encounters aren’t just practical problems. You feel either a small social win or loss each time.

  The key to giving way graciously, as it happens, is to slow your movements down to below the walking tempo of the oncomer. This is a status win because slow movements are associated with higher status. Happily, it is also a good way to actually solve the collision-avoidance problem efficiently.

  It’s a mathematical thing, and it’s easiest to explain via an analogy to dropped phone calls in the days before call waiting. When a call is dropped, if both parties try to call back immediately, they’ll both get busy signals (the equivalent of moving in the same direction in Hallway Chicken). One known method for resolving such conflicts is to simply wait a random period before trying again. If you get a busy signal, you wait a longer random period. This protocol solves the problem quickly and efficiently (it may even be optimal in some sense, I forget my long-ago technical introduction to this problem). Electrical engineers actually design such slow-down protocols to re-establish dropped connections in communication networks.

  Explaining why this works takes some tedious probability theory, but the point is, slowing down leads to a resolution of the collision avoidance problem. If one party slows down while the other continues to dance side-to-side rapidly, the dancer will more likely be the one to get the right of way, generally the lower-status outcome.

  It takes some practice to adopt this behavior, because in a given physical environment, people generally go with the flow and walk at a given pace or faster. Not slower. So Hallway Chicken situations typically start with roughly matched tempos. Besides consciously training yourself to instantly slow down in hallway encounters, you can also just try walking with slower, longer strides.

  For homework, consider another everyday walking-around situation that can turn into a status thing: the problem of if, how, and how long to hold a door open when people are coming through behind you. We’ll see in the next chapter a discussion of some solutions to this problem.

  Door-Holding and Illegible Queues

  Let’s analyze the status dynamics of the game of Holding Doors Open. I challenged a few friends to come up with their own analyses. I am sharing four in edited form here, with the full names withheld (I don’t want to accidentally out someone as a practitioner of the Slightly Evil arts). You will find my own view (and I make no claims to my own solution being the best) at the end.

  The 3-Second Rule

  First up, EB has a very systematic answer that starts with his notion of a 3-second rule:

  I’ve always reduced the door-holding problem to the “3 second rule”. If the person behind you is more than 3 seconds away from the door, you dont have to hold it. Now I realize it’s more complicated than that. For example:

  You lose status if you fail to hold the door within the 3 seconds, or extend the hold too long

  When a person holds a door for you, you are expected to walk faster even if carrying a lot of stuff

  People who do not speed up for a held door lose status

  If you are male, and the person behind you is male, the 3 second rule becomes fairly rigid

  If you are male, and the person behind you is female, the 3 second rule becomes relaxed and extends to about 5 seconds

  Rules are greatly relaxed when the next person is carrying so many things that opening the door would be problematic.

  Heres an interesting one...given a stream of people, if you hold the door for one person, the next male behind you is obligated to take over the door holding until he is relieved by another male or the stream ends

  A male who fails in his obligation in rule 7 (streaming) loses status

  I don’t entirely agree with the conclusions (in cases 3 and 8, I am not sure the offender loses status for example), but nevertheless, it is a very interesting breakdown.

  Swing Direction, Air Locks and Other Subtleties

  BE’s answer is more of a narrative analysis that raises more questions than it answers, than a set of rules. Some of BE’s answers conflict with EB’s (how’s that for symmetry)?

  The Swing Direction Matters

  Gaining status in 1:1 situations sometimes depends on the direction the door opens and depending on relative status before the encounter, may require being the one to open or having the door opened for you. When the number of people and doors involved increases, everything changes. The trickiest situation is the air-lock vestibule, where you enter a building through a set of doors, take a few steps and then have to go through a second set of doors.

  What Women Don’t Know

  Custom in the US dictates that gallant gentlemen should open doors for ladies. Have you noticed how few women know that once they step into the vestibule they are supposed to take a step to the side in order for the guy to enter and open the next door? Time and again I watch these awkward moments at restaurants where one or the other doesn’t know how to solve for this situation. On a date, status can be lost by failing to perform this dance properly, but I’m not sure status can (or should) be gained or leveled. The same is not true in the business environment.

  Air-lock Slam Dunk

  I walk fast and tend to be the pace-setter when walking with co-workers. When walking with just one other person, as we near the type of [air lock] entrance I just described, I slow down enough to let the person pass me, and then I step aside so they can open the second door for me as well. A completely unambiguous status statement. When walking with a larger group, I slow down to the third position, so I can be the first one completely through without holding any doors for anyone.

  And if you find yourself in the situation that I described where the person is waiting for you to open the second set of doors for them, you can somewhat re-level status by going through the second door and continuing on without making any effort to actually hold it for the other person.

  Making the Favor Explicit

  G approaches the problem from the point of view of negative and positive payoff scenarios. I wont quote his full answer, but he makes one very interesting point about the value of making the favor explicit:

  Hold the door briefly, but transfer the effort to someone (preferably male) in the other party as they come through. Offer a genuine smile, say “Got it?” and, if time allows and the other group is appealing in some way, I engage the group after they enter behind me (+++ if this turns into a social win for my group and theirs). Why does this work?

  It makes the favor explicit; they can’t help but follow your direction and there is at least a small status loss any time a man does what a stranger tells him to.You get to the be one offering politeness, the first one to speak and have the option to reopen the interaction after you are all inside. This is the prerogative of someone with higher status.

  Culture Matters

  RB points out that the local culture is very important in determining the status dynamics.

  In regard to opening doors...I’m a southern boy. I was raised to always hold doors for anyone who comes along as Im going in a door. But I have to admit that I usually use an approximate of 20ish yards to determine if I should hold the door for people far behind me. Women present an interesting situation these days. On a few occasions I’ve been asked if I was holding the door for a woman just
because she is a woman. To that I respond, “No, Ma’am. I’m holding the door for you because I’m a gentleman.” A little snarky, I admit, but I think it’s rude, anyway, to question the motive for generosity with something as simple as opening a door.

  The Natural Time Constant Rule

  In contrast to EB’s 3-second rule, KB has a sort of natural time constant rule, which I think is more sophisticated.

  If the other person is going in the same direction as I am I will hold the door only if I believe they will get to the door before it would fall closed naturally. My feeling is that one gains status by taking a moment to be gracious. However, one could lose status by appearing too eager to appear gracious. On the flip side, not holding the door gives leaves a poor impression.

  The other, and I find more awkward, way one can have this situation come up is when the parties are travelling opposite directions (one entering, one exiting). In these cases I always defer to the other party. Both parties are present so one can always appear gracious by being willing to delay themselves momentarily. This situation can become awkward when both parties are trying the same strategy. I’m not sure what the right move is here, but what I personally opt to do is allow them to be gracious both to avoid an impasse and I do get a minor feeling of status gain because while I have offered to be gracious, I do actually have somewhere to be.

  My Solution

  My solution is driven more by sheer laziness than any desire to have fun with status games. I’d distill my unconscious policy down to five heuristics.

  If the door pulls open towards me and there are people coming the other way, I simply step aside and hold the door open.

  If the door pulls open on the other side and there are people coming the other way, I wait for them to pass through. If one of them holds the door open, I pass through, but this is sort of rare. People seem to manage one-way situations in batches.

  If there are people behind me (whichever way the door opens), I do the “relay handoff” if the person is right behind me (holding the door propped open while passing through, rather than from the side). If there are more than a few paces behind me, I just give the door an extra hard shove as I pass through, so that the swing-shut is delayed. The latter is a bit callous, since the follower has to hurry to catch the door before it swings shut, but I don’t have to wait for the person. I get points for trying, but don’t really have to slow down.

  If I am with a group I know, and am out in front, I just hold the door open for everybody. If somebody else is doing that, I pass through with a nod, but never offer to take over.

  If it is an old, physically disabled or over-burdened-with-stuff person, I hold the door open always. This one is really a practical reciprocity norm rather than a status ritual. Anyone who doesn’t do this comes off looking both socially inept and inconsiderate in a childish way.

  I hadn’t really thought about the two-door/vestibule situation. I think there’s no really elegant solution there. It is just a physically awkward situation.

  An Exercise for the Reader: Illegible Queues

  One morning, I was third in line for coffee at Starbucks. It was one of those lines where the person ahead of me was standing a little too far back, and as the third person, I had to set the line direction, but couldn’t do so with complete clarity.

  A somewhat self-important looking guy came up behind me, but stood in the middle of the “ambiguous zone” where, if the person at the register hasn't been paying attention, it will not be clear who is next.

  I’ve observed this move many times. It is something just short of cutting in line (which is very rare in America today at least). It is ambiguous challenge/attempt to fork the queue, but there is room for plausible deniability (“Oh, I didn’t realize you were in line”). The situation is exacerbated in cases where multiple lines converge into a single line at a service location, and creating and manipulating “queue illegibility” can get you a couple of jumps ahead.

  There is also a cultural angle in this case. Crowded countries tend to have very close-together queueing norms, and what might seem like cutting in line in a high-personal-space country can be a genuine misunderstanding in a low-personal-space country.

  Whats your take on the dynamics here? Whats the difference in risk/reward structure between this kind of move and outright cutting in line? What are the available defenses if you are faced with this situation?

  Napping in the Trenches

  I occasionally give advice to people, if their case seems compelling enough. Kai had one such case–a subtle existential question masquerading as a banal lifestyle design question:

  I’m 26 with a background in economics and marketing. Until recently, I was the director of marketing with a large construction company. I’m a recently self-employed guy. I have really reasonable expenses (between rent, small student loans, and a small car payment, I’m about $2,000/mo). Between consulting work (website development, marketing strategy, and business development) and a few side projects (iPhone recycling via eBay) my expenses are covered. But I keep freaking out that I’m not doing enough. I’m covering my bases with 15hrs/wk of work which is exactly what I’ve wanted for the last few year, butmy days are filled with a bit of dread that I should be working harder, doing more, and trying to earn at a higher level. ...I haven’t had to dip into my savings. I’m meeting my needs. I landed a nice consulting contract with a startup. Things are going really well, but...Part of my head keeps saying I should be freaked out.

  In Kai’s email, the bits in bold are what jumped out at me. That’s the heart of the matter. The rest is just situational detail.

  Let’s see if we can help Kai relax a bit.

  This dread is certainly something I’ve experienced (and continue to experience) personally, and heard other people describe. If you haven’t experienced it, you’re either lying or clueless.

  To set up a model for Kai’s problem, imagine a 2x2 with scripted and unscripted on the X-axis, and failure and success on the Y-axis. In the paycheck world, you have scripts for both success and failure that tell you how to behave and react. Success comes with specific rewards that you’ve already been conditioned to process, and there is a lot of social support to help you deal with it. You sort of know how to behave when you get married, get promoted to VP, have a first kid, or get a big bonus. It’s like going to one of those arcades where you earn tickets from games and can trade them at the counter for items from a fixed menu of prizes. Or playing a video game. Failure is similar. There are standardized consolation prizes, safety nets, coping scripts and strategies. In both cases, you can tell when you aren’t being given your due (unlucky), or when you are being over-rewarded (lucky). You have a narrative frame of reference to make sense of events in your life and calibrate your responses to them. Sure, each new event is new for you, but you can rely on the experiences of others who’ve been through the same thing.

  But in the unscripted part of the world of work that free agents inhabit, there are far fewer behaviors to imitate, no well-tested scripts, and few social cues helping you calibrate success/failure and suggesting appropriate behaviors. If you’re actually failing (failing to make rent for example), the problem is quite simple. At some point you’ll run out of money no matter how low your burn rate, and end up having to head back to the scripted world or spiral down into a homeless shelter.

  The problem is with success. You have enough to continue indefinitely, with a little discretionary surplus that allows you to think beyond the next rent check. And that’s where the trouble starts.

  You’re not quite sure how to calibrate your response to your evolving situation. You don’t know quite what to do with your surplus. You could try and imitate the scripts of the paycheck world, but you’ve probably already discredited them in your own mind (and may not qualify anyway: try getting a mortgage on a volatile equivalent of a steady paycheck that would easily get you a mortgage).

  To take a very simple example, when you are living off volatile cash f
lows and managing “personal” and “business” investments dynamically in a mixed way, all those retirement planning calculators are useless. You have to be constantly be deciding whether a cash surplus goes into your retirement account, or whether you’d be better off investing it in growing your business in some way. What’s a better bet? An insight you have about Netflix stock, or an idea for an app you can work on? In the paycheck world, you never have to choose between those sorts of options. They are generally sealed off from each other.

  This concern isn’t limited to bootstrapped lives that seem to eternally endure, a slim margin away from collapse. Even radical success doesn’t make this lack of narrative structure go away. When things are absolutely booming, you have to face the terror of the thought that it may be a transient success that could vanish as quickly as it appeared. The question then becomes, this is too good to last; am I making enough hay while the sun is shining? Or, where can I safely put this cash I am spinning right now?

  So what do you do? The key to the answer is one word: insurance. Insurance is the idea that drives script building and behaviors for those who lack a script to deal with the rewards of success.

  I encountered this idea recently, from a couple of different sources, that the law of diminishing marginal utility does not apply to money because there is a category of uses for money (buying insurance) that don’t diminish in value no matter how much you have. When you are poor, with no surplus, you get your free tetanus shot at the community clinic and try to avoid getting sick. Then you get health insurance. Then you get life insurance. Then you start college savings accounts for your kids. On the business front, you start new projects, you fret about existing projects hitting end-of-life, you wonder if you should diversify. All of it is insurance-thinking. You wonder if dollar devaluation will make your $5 million stash worthless in the next financial crisis. You fret about the most secure place to stash what you have.