I agree with some commenters (e.g. Taran) that the one example I gave isn’t persuasive on its own, and that I can imagine different characters in Alec’s shoes who want and mean different things. But IMO there is a thing like this that totally happens pretty often in various contexts. I’m going to try to give more examples, and a description of why I think they are examples, to show why I think this.
Example: I think most startups have a “plan” for success, and a set of “beliefs” about how things are going to go, that the CEO “believes” basically for the sake of anchoring the group, and that the group members feel pressure to avow, or to go along with in their speech and sort-of in their actions, as a mechanism of group coordination and of group (morale? something like this). It’s not intended as a neutral prediction individuals would individually be glad to accept/reject bets based on. And the (admittedly weird and rationalist-y) CEOs I’ve talked to about this have often been like “yes, I felt pressure to have beliefs or to publicly state beliefs that would give the group a positive, predictable vision, and I found this quite internally difficult somehow.”
When spotting “narrative syncing” in the wild, IMO a key distinguisher of “narrative syncing” (vs sharing of information) is whether there is pressure not to differ from the sentences in question, and whether that pressure is (implicitly) backchained from “don’t spoil the game / don’t spoil our coordination / don’t mess up an apparent social consensus.” So, if a bunch of kids are playing “the sand is lava” and you say “wait, I’m not sure the sand is lava” or “it doesn’t look like lava to me,” you’re messing up the game. This is socially discouraged. Also, if a bunch of people are coordinating their work on a start-up and are claiming to one another that it’s gonna work out, and you are working there too and say you think it isn’t, this… risks messing up the group’s coordination, somehow, and is socially discouraged.
OTOH, if you say “I like pineapples on my pizza” or “I sometimes pick my nose and eat it” and a bunch of people are like “eww, gross”… this is social pressure, but the pressure mostly isn’t backchained from anything like “don’t spoil our game / don’t mess up our apparent social consensus”, and so it is probably not narrative syncing.
Or to take an intermediate/messy example: if you’re working at the same start-up as in our previous example, and you say “our company’s logo is ugly” to the others at that start-up, this… might be socially insulting, and might draw frowns or other bits of social pressure, but on my model the pressure will be weaker than the sort you’d get if you were trying to disagree with the core narrative the start-up is using to coordinate (“we will do A, then B, and thereby succeed as a company”), and what push-back you do get will have less of the “don’t spoil our game!” “what if we stop being able to coordinate together!” nature (though still some) and more other natures such as “don’t hurt the feelings of so-and-so who made the logo” or “I honestly disagree with you.” It’s… still somewhat narrative syncing-y to my mind, in that folks in the particular fictional start-up I’m imagining are e.g. socially synchronizing some around the narrative “everything at our company is awesome,” but … less.
It seems to me that when a person or set of people “take offense” at particular speech, this is usually (always?) an attempt to enforce narrative syncing.
Another example: sometimes a bunch of people are neck-deep in a discussion, and a new person wanders in and disagrees with part X of the assumed model, and people really don’t want to have to stop their detailed discussion to talk again about whether X is true. So sometimes, in such cases, people reply with social pressure to believe/say X — for example, a person will “explain” to the newcomer “why X is true” in a tone that invites capitulation rather than inquiry, and the newcomer will feel as though they are being a bit rude if they don’t buy the argument. I’d class this under “don’t mess up our game”-type social pressure, and under “narrative syncing disguised as information exchange.” IMO, a better thing to do in this situation is to make the bid to not mess up the game explicit, by e.g. saying “I hear you, it makes sense that you aren’t sure about X, but would you be up for assuming X for now for the sake of the argument, so we can continue the discussion-bit we’re in the middle of?”
If you are looking for more examples of narrative syncing:
“I have read, and accept, the terms and conditions [tick box]”. I have not read the terms and conditions. They know I haven’t. This is not an information exchange.
I was shopping with my Grandma once. I knew bananas were on the list and put them in the trolley. She asked “why didn’t you take these bananas” and indicated a different brand. I thought she was asking for information so provided it, saying “they are smaller, cost more, and are wrapped up in plastic.”. I got body language that indicated I had mis stepped. The next day my mum told me grandma was upset that I had “forced” her to buy bananas that were too big. (Her doctor had told her to eat a target number of pieces of fruit so she was buying the smallest fruit she could find.) She hadn’t really been asking why I had spurned the small ones, she was asking to swap, had I understood that I would have immediately complied.
It is often not considered “fair” for a referee of a scientific paper to challenge what I would call “field mythology”. At some point someone said in a paper conclusion “A is possibly, kind of useful for X”. Then someone else said “good for X” in an introduction, citing the first person. 10 years later it is a commonly stated myth that this specific science topic is “good for X”. People working on the topic don’t really know or care if it is useful for that, they are working on it because they think its good science (the usefulness of science A for problem X is not a load bearing part of the argument for why they, or anyone else, is studying A.) If a referee challenges such a claim in a paper they they may be factually correct, but they are failing to play by “the rules of the game”. Also, it is not really “fair” to berate the paper for parroting the myths of its genre, the referee should be attacking what the paper adds to human knowledge (its marginal).
I think there’s an alternative explanation for why social pressure may be used to make the dissenter capitulate. This is when an uninformed non-expert is dissenting from the informed judgments of an expert on their core subject.
This is done for a few reasons. One is to use mild humiliation to motivate the non-expert to get past their pretentions and ego, do their research, and become more useful. Another is when it would be a bad use of time and resources to educate the non-expert on the spot. A third is when the non-expert is pointing out a real but surmountable challenge to the strategy, which is best dealt with at a later time. And a fourth is when the root of the issue is a values mismatch that is being framed as a disagreement about facts.
This maybe is why I’m more inclined to view this as “leadership language” than as “narrative syncing.” Narrative syncing implies that such actions are undertaken mainly for empty propagandistic reasons, to keep the game going. I think that much of the time, the motivations of the people pressuring dissenters to capitulate are as I’m describing here. It’s just that sometimes, the leaders are wrong.
Group identity statements (pressure not to disagree)
A team believes themselves to be the best at what they do and that their training methods etc. are all the best/correct approach. If you suggest a new training method that seems to be yielding good results for other teams, they wouldn’t treat it seriously because it’s a threat to their identity. However, if the team also takes pride in their ability to continuously refine their training methods, they would be happy to discuss the new method.
If a group considers themselves to be “anti-pineapple” people, then saying “I like pineapples on my pizza” would signal that you’re not really part of the group. Or maybe they think X is harmful and everyone knows pineapples contain X, then proudly declaring “I like pineapples on pizza” would mark you as an outsider.
Self-fulfilling prophecies (coordination + presure not to disagree publicly)
It’s the first week of school and the different student clubs and societies have set up booths to invite students to join. The president of club X tells you that they are the second largest club in the school. This makes club X seem like an established group and is one of the reasons you register your interest and eventually decide to join the group. Later on, you find out that club X actually had very few members initially. The president was basing his claim on the number of people who had registered their interest, not the actual members. However, since he managed to project the image of club X as a large and established group, many people join and it indeed becomes one of the largest student groups.
A captain tells the team before a game that they are going to win. The team is motivated and gives their best, therefore winning the game. (Some people may know the statement is false, which they may reveal to others in private conversations. They won’t state it in public because they know that the statement is intended to coordinate the team (i.e. it’s not meant to be literally true) and that they are more likely to succeed if everyone believes it to be true. It is important only for those who think this is a factual statement and are likely to give up if it’s false to believe the statement is true. People who think this is just a pep talk would assume that the captain will say the same thing regardless of what’s true.)
The Designated Driver Campaign successfully introduced the practice of having a designated driver when out for drinks by portraying it as a norm in entertainment shows. I’m not sure what it was like, whether people adopted the idea because they thought it was a good one even when they knew it was artificial or because it seemed like everyone was doing it, but here we have a social norm that existed only on TV that became an actual social norm because enough people decided to go along with it.
Group norms (coordination + disagreement is rejected)
We use 2 whitespaces instead of 4 whitespaces for indentation as a convention.
We act as one team. If we have come to a decision as a team, everyone follows the decision whole-heartedly even if they disagree. If you don’t want to, please quit.
OTOH, if you say “I like pineapples on my pizza” or “I sometimes pick my nose and eat it” and a bunch of people are like “eww, gross”… this is social pressure, but the pressure mostly isn’t backchained from anything like “don’t spoil our game / don’t mess up our apparent social consensus”, and so it is probably not narrative syncing.
Huh, I would have thought that counted as narrative syncing as well?
Do you agree that the social pressure in the pineapple and nose-picking examples isn’t backchained from something like “don’t spoil our game, we need everyone in this space to think/speak a certain way about this or our game will break”?
I think it’s mostly from thinking about it in terms of means instead of ends. Like, my read of “narrative syncing” is that it is information transfer, but about ‘social reality’ instead of ‘physical reality’; it’s intersubjective instead of objective.
There’s also something going on here where I think most in-the-moment examples of this aren’t backchained, and are instead something like ‘people mimicking familiar patterns’? That can make it ambiguous whether or not a pattern is backchained, if it’s sometimes done for explicitly backchainy reasons and is sometimes others copying that behavior.
Do you agree that the social pressure in the pineapple and nose-picking examples isn’t backchained from something like “don’t spoil our game, we need everyone in this space to think/speak a certain way about this or our game will break”?
Suppose some people are allergic to peanuts, and so a space decides to not allow peanuts; I think the “[normatively]: peanuts aren’t allowed here” is an example of narrative syncing. Is this backchained from “allowing peanuts will spoil our game”? Ehhh… maybe? Maybe the anti-peanut faction ended up wanting the norm more than the pro-peanut faction, and so it’s backchained but not in the way you’re pointing at. Maybe being a space that was anti-peanut ended up advantaging this space over adjacent competitive spaces, such that it is connected with “or our game will break” but it’s indirect.
Also, I predict a lot of this is the result of ‘play’ or ‘cognitive immaturity’, or something? Like, there might be high-stakes issues that you need to enforce conformity on or the game breaks, and low-stakes issues that you don’t need to enforce conformity on, but which are useful for training how to do conformity-enforcement (and perhaps evade enemy conformity-enforcement). Or it may be that someone is not doing map-territory distinctions or subjective-objective distinctions when it comes to preferences; Alice saying “I like pineapple on pizza” is heard by Bob in a way that doesn’t cash it out to “Alice prefers pizza with pineapple” but instead something like “pineapple on pizza is good” or “Bob prefers pizza with pineapple”, both of which should be fought.
I agree with some commenters (e.g. Taran) that the one example I gave isn’t persuasive on its own, and that I can imagine different characters in Alec’s shoes who want and mean different things. But IMO there is a thing like this that totally happens pretty often in various contexts. I’m going to try to give more examples, and a description of why I think they are examples, to show why I think this.
Example: I think most startups have a “plan” for success, and a set of “beliefs” about how things are going to go, that the CEO “believes” basically for the sake of anchoring the group, and that the group members feel pressure to avow, or to go along with in their speech and sort-of in their actions, as a mechanism of group coordination and of group (morale? something like this). It’s not intended as a neutral prediction individuals would individually be glad to accept/reject bets based on. And the (admittedly weird and rationalist-y) CEOs I’ve talked to about this have often been like “yes, I felt pressure to have beliefs or to publicly state beliefs that would give the group a positive, predictable vision, and I found this quite internally difficult somehow.”
When spotting “narrative syncing” in the wild, IMO a key distinguisher of “narrative syncing” (vs sharing of information) is whether there is pressure not to differ from the sentences in question, and whether that pressure is (implicitly) backchained from “don’t spoil the game / don’t spoil our coordination / don’t mess up an apparent social consensus.” So, if a bunch of kids are playing “the sand is lava” and you say “wait, I’m not sure the sand is lava” or “it doesn’t look like lava to me,” you’re messing up the game. This is socially discouraged. Also, if a bunch of people are coordinating their work on a start-up and are claiming to one another that it’s gonna work out, and you are working there too and say you think it isn’t, this… risks messing up the group’s coordination, somehow, and is socially discouraged.
OTOH, if you say “I like pineapples on my pizza” or “I sometimes pick my nose and eat it” and a bunch of people are like “eww, gross”… this is social pressure, but the pressure mostly isn’t backchained from anything like “don’t spoil our game / don’t mess up our apparent social consensus”, and so it is probably not narrative syncing.
Or to take an intermediate/messy example: if you’re working at the same start-up as in our previous example, and you say “our company’s logo is ugly” to the others at that start-up, this… might be socially insulting, and might draw frowns or other bits of social pressure, but on my model the pressure will be weaker than the sort you’d get if you were trying to disagree with the core narrative the start-up is using to coordinate (“we will do A, then B, and thereby succeed as a company”), and what push-back you do get will have less of the “don’t spoil our game!” “what if we stop being able to coordinate together!” nature (though still some) and more other natures such as “don’t hurt the feelings of so-and-so who made the logo” or “I honestly disagree with you.” It’s… still somewhat narrative syncing-y to my mind, in that folks in the particular fictional start-up I’m imagining are e.g. socially synchronizing some around the narrative “everything at our company is awesome,” but … less.
It seems to me that when a person or set of people “take offense” at particular speech, this is usually (always?) an attempt to enforce narrative syncing.
Another example: sometimes a bunch of people are neck-deep in a discussion, and a new person wanders in and disagrees with part X of the assumed model, and people really don’t want to have to stop their detailed discussion to talk again about whether X is true. So sometimes, in such cases, people reply with social pressure to believe/say X — for example, a person will “explain” to the newcomer “why X is true” in a tone that invites capitulation rather than inquiry, and the newcomer will feel as though they are being a bit rude if they don’t buy the argument. I’d class this under “don’t mess up our game”-type social pressure, and under “narrative syncing disguised as information exchange.” IMO, a better thing to do in this situation is to make the bid to not mess up the game explicit, by e.g. saying “I hear you, it makes sense that you aren’t sure about X, but would you be up for assuming X for now for the sake of the argument, so we can continue the discussion-bit we’re in the middle of?”
If you are looking for more examples of narrative syncing:
“I have read, and accept, the terms and conditions [tick box]”. I have not read the terms and conditions. They know I haven’t. This is not an information exchange.
I was shopping with my Grandma once. I knew bananas were on the list and put them in the trolley. She asked “why didn’t you take these bananas” and indicated a different brand. I thought she was asking for information so provided it, saying “they are smaller, cost more, and are wrapped up in plastic.”. I got body language that indicated I had mis stepped. The next day my mum told me grandma was upset that I had “forced” her to buy bananas that were too big. (Her doctor had told her to eat a target number of pieces of fruit so she was buying the smallest fruit she could find.) She hadn’t really been asking why I had spurned the small ones, she was asking to swap, had I understood that I would have immediately complied.
It is often not considered “fair” for a referee of a scientific paper to challenge what I would call “field mythology”. At some point someone said in a paper conclusion “A is possibly, kind of useful for X”. Then someone else said “good for X” in an introduction, citing the first person. 10 years later it is a commonly stated myth that this specific science topic is “good for X”. People working on the topic don’t really know or care if it is useful for that, they are working on it because they think its good science (the usefulness of science A for problem X is not a load bearing part of the argument for why they, or anyone else, is studying A.) If a referee challenges such a claim in a paper they they may be factually correct, but they are failing to play by “the rules of the game”. Also, it is not really “fair” to berate the paper for parroting the myths of its genre, the referee should be attacking what the paper adds to human knowledge (its marginal).
I think there’s an alternative explanation for why social pressure may be used to make the dissenter capitulate. This is when an uninformed non-expert is dissenting from the informed judgments of an expert on their core subject.
This is done for a few reasons. One is to use mild humiliation to motivate the non-expert to get past their pretentions and ego, do their research, and become more useful. Another is when it would be a bad use of time and resources to educate the non-expert on the spot. A third is when the non-expert is pointing out a real but surmountable challenge to the strategy, which is best dealt with at a later time. And a fourth is when the root of the issue is a values mismatch that is being framed as a disagreement about facts.
This maybe is why I’m more inclined to view this as “leadership language” than as “narrative syncing.” Narrative syncing implies that such actions are undertaken mainly for empty propagandistic reasons, to keep the game going. I think that much of the time, the motivations of the people pressuring dissenters to capitulate are as I’m describing here. It’s just that sometimes, the leaders are wrong.
Potentially related examples:
Group identity statements (pressure not to disagree)
A team believes themselves to be the best at what they do and that their training methods etc. are all the best/correct approach. If you suggest a new training method that seems to be yielding good results for other teams, they wouldn’t treat it seriously because it’s a threat to their identity. However, if the team also takes pride in their ability to continuously refine their training methods, they would be happy to discuss the new method.
If a group considers themselves to be “anti-pineapple” people, then saying “I like pineapples on my pizza” would signal that you’re not really part of the group. Or maybe they think X is harmful and everyone knows pineapples contain X, then proudly declaring “I like pineapples on pizza” would mark you as an outsider.
Self-fulfilling prophecies (coordination + presure not to disagree publicly)
It’s the first week of school and the different student clubs and societies have set up booths to invite students to join. The president of club X tells you that they are the second largest club in the school. This makes club X seem like an established group and is one of the reasons you register your interest and eventually decide to join the group. Later on, you find out that club X actually had very few members initially. The president was basing his claim on the number of people who had registered their interest, not the actual members. However, since he managed to project the image of club X as a large and established group, many people join and it indeed becomes one of the largest student groups.
A captain tells the team before a game that they are going to win. The team is motivated and gives their best, therefore winning the game. (Some people may know the statement is false, which they may reveal to others in private conversations. They won’t state it in public because they know that the statement is intended to coordinate the team (i.e. it’s not meant to be literally true) and that they are more likely to succeed if everyone believes it to be true. It is important only for those who think this is a factual statement and are likely to give up if it’s false to believe the statement is true. People who think this is just a pep talk would assume that the captain will say the same thing regardless of what’s true.)
The Designated Driver Campaign successfully introduced the practice of having a designated driver when out for drinks by portraying it as a norm in entertainment shows. I’m not sure what it was like, whether people adopted the idea because they thought it was a good one even when they knew it was artificial or because it seemed like everyone was doing it, but here we have a social norm that existed only on TV that became an actual social norm because enough people decided to go along with it.
Group norms (coordination + disagreement is rejected)
We use 2 whitespaces instead of 4 whitespaces for indentation as a convention.
We act as one team. If we have come to a decision as a team, everyone follows the decision whole-heartedly even if they disagree. If you don’t want to, please quit.
Huh, I would have thought that counted as narrative syncing as well?
Can you say a bit more about why?
Do you agree that the social pressure in the pineapple and nose-picking examples isn’t backchained from something like “don’t spoil our game, we need everyone in this space to think/speak a certain way about this or our game will break”?
I think it’s mostly from thinking about it in terms of means instead of ends. Like, my read of “narrative syncing” is that it is information transfer, but about ‘social reality’ instead of ‘physical reality’; it’s intersubjective instead of objective.
There’s also something going on here where I think most in-the-moment examples of this aren’t backchained, and are instead something like ‘people mimicking familiar patterns’? That can make it ambiguous whether or not a pattern is backchained, if it’s sometimes done for explicitly backchainy reasons and is sometimes others copying that behavior.
Suppose some people are allergic to peanuts, and so a space decides to not allow peanuts; I think the “[normatively]: peanuts aren’t allowed here” is an example of narrative syncing. Is this backchained from “allowing peanuts will spoil our game”? Ehhh… maybe? Maybe the anti-peanut faction ended up wanting the norm more than the pro-peanut faction, and so it’s backchained but not in the way you’re pointing at. Maybe being a space that was anti-peanut ended up advantaging this space over adjacent competitive spaces, such that it is connected with “or our game will break” but it’s indirect.
Also, I predict a lot of this is the result of ‘play’ or ‘cognitive immaturity’, or something? Like, there might be high-stakes issues that you need to enforce conformity on or the game breaks, and low-stakes issues that you don’t need to enforce conformity on, but which are useful for training how to do conformity-enforcement (and perhaps evade enemy conformity-enforcement). Or it may be that someone is not doing map-territory distinctions or subjective-objective distinctions when it comes to preferences; Alice saying “I like pineapple on pizza” is heard by Bob in a way that doesn’t cash it out to “Alice prefers pizza with pineapple” but instead something like “pineapple on pizza is good” or “Bob prefers pizza with pineapple”, both of which should be fought.