Types of Social Talent Privilege
So at the Winter Party there was a very satisfying amount of discussion about this whole “Social Privilege” thing, whereby certain types of social talents are responsible for a lot of success that people achieve, but are generally unacknowledged. We had a lively debate over this early this summer here http://sandmantv.livejournal.com/83681.html
I was glad to see people interested in this subject in a group setting, and I had a lot of fun discussing it, and seeing other people discuss these dynamics at length. However, it’s clear that this issue is really about multiple different ways people have Social Privilege, and I wouldn’t want them to get conflated. Extroversion and Charisma both give people advantages, but that doesn’t mean I’m foolish enough to think all Extroverts are Charismatic. So instead of discussing the general issues of this topic at length (please do so elsewhere), I just wanted to quickly list what I think are the different axes of social talent we are talking about.
I should also make clear, that while these properties are not all the same, I do believe they are correlated among people. And the most successful people in the world have all 5, while the least successful people often have none.
• Extroversion: The generic introverted vs extroverted axis you can find on any Myers Briggs test, about whether you like interacting with other people or not, especially in groups. Someone who enjoys or is tolerable at that, is going to be able to display their traits and make their preferences known more often, in ways that will cause people to respect them or their needs more. Sometimes people react to Social Privilege by saying these are beneficial skills that should be encouraged, and I think that’s generally wrong. The biggest way in which it’s wrong I think is with Extroversion, we shouldn’t encourage people (especially our loved ones) to make this dramatic change in their personality. We should make society require extroversion less.
• Charisma: Some people are just downright fun and charming and we all just love listening to them. Which is great, they bring much happiness to others. However the fact that this determines so much professional success is problematic. Two people with the same work ethic and same intelligence, but one of whom is much funnier, should not earn dramatically different amounts of money in life. But they do. I liken this on some level to physical attractiveness. Pretty people sure are fun to look at, but we as a society have agreed that your prettiness shouldn’t give you a large amount of material and political reward. But with charisma, it does.
• Aggression: This one is the closest to actually downright harmful (on net). The willingness to assert your attention and self over others. A lot of groups and meetings are like “attention tragedy of the commons” where whoever demands the most attention “wins”, but if everyone becomes aggressive, we lose as a group over all. I certainly admit that I can be aggressive in pushing my interests and attitudes, and of all my traits, it’s the one I would like to reduce the most. I think this is often what people are talking about when they say “alpha and beta” personalities, but I feel that binary is flawed. It’s more of a spectrum, where >N beats N. I analogize this often to violence. In the past being violent was very helpful, but that doesn’t mean the solution was to make everyone better at violence. The solution is to reduce this as an acceptable advantage in interaction.
• Confidence: This is the belief in yourself, which is somewhat more removed from social skills than the other 4 traits. Accurate confidence in your abilities is obviously a good thing, but I think our society penalizes low confidence in your abilities and rewards high confidence in your abilities too much. And especially on the national leadership level, I think we’ve all seen the result of business and political leaders who have far too much confidence. We should set up mechanisms that select for over-confidence less.
• Social Intuition: Contra aggression, a solid understanding of what’s going on in social situations is a good thing to have and I’d love to encourage more people to develop that. I think I am separating “learned knowledge” and “intuition” here (like, will this joke be funny), but perhaps some of you object to that stark separation. There’s nothing wrong with having this talent, I just think it’s important to remember how much advantage those of us who _do_ have it get, in ways that are separate from more obvious traits. Disdaining someone for telling an unfunny joke, that would have been acceptable if it was funny, often seems cruel to me.
Anyone have more to add? Categories they think should be deleted?
Now please take a moment to internally reflect on which of these 5 traits you think you have, and how you think that has helped you in life over someone who lacks that trait. Thank you kindly.