What you describe would be a status-lowering act for a CEO if she was doing it with her employees (i.e. such a CEO might be praised for her egalitarian leadership style), but it’s only a little status-lowering if you do it with friends you are on equal terms with. The more advice/help you ask for, the more you lower your status ceiling. Thought experiment: imagine a CEO who asked her employees for input on almost every decision she made.
This is unfortunate (seems possible that it’s an efficient use of resources to get input from friends on all of your major life decisions and problems; I know I think better about other people’s problems than my own). It’s not obviously unsolvable though.
It probably matters a lot the sort of person you are talking to. I suspect I have a strong tendency towards assigning status based on intelligence only, so hearing about someone’s problems doesn’t cause me to assign them lower status. (I’ve also taken a number of acting classes, which partially left me with the alief that status is a big game that doesn’t really matter.) I assumed this stuff was true for other people as well, tried to get them to debug/improve me, and found out the hard way that they would permanently lower my status for this.
One thing that occurred to me reading this was that a somewhat effective (not 100% effective) way of “guarding” one’s status would be to solicit for help / advice in private rather than in pubic. Obviously you can’t guarantee that people will not disclose things, but if you are in a position like the CEO in your example, you could take measures to encourage your employees not to share the contents of confidential discussions and so forth.
Of course, this has costs and benefits as well: it is much easier to make one post on a public blog than it is to private message everyone on your Facebook. If you’re concerned about maintaining your status, it might be worth considering. For example, for someone with high status and a relatively “forgivable” question (difficult, not obvious) just posting it in public is probably better than going through the hassle to make the inquiry private; for someone with low status asking a less “forgivable” question (“He really should know better, did this guy not listen to what the prof said in lecture?”), the extra effort might well be worth it.
I would be careful extrapolating results from one study, which only has one trial scenario. See these comments of mine:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/bs0/knowledge_value_knowledge_quality_domain/6d88
http://lesswrong.com/lw/bs0/knowledge_value_knowledge_quality_domain/6d94
What you describe would be a status-lowering act for a CEO if she was doing it with her employees (i.e. such a CEO might be praised for her egalitarian leadership style), but it’s only a little status-lowering if you do it with friends you are on equal terms with. The more advice/help you ask for, the more you lower your status ceiling. Thought experiment: imagine a CEO who asked her employees for input on almost every decision she made.
This is unfortunate (seems possible that it’s an efficient use of resources to get input from friends on all of your major life decisions and problems; I know I think better about other people’s problems than my own). It’s not obviously unsolvable though.
It probably matters a lot the sort of person you are talking to. I suspect I have a strong tendency towards assigning status based on intelligence only, so hearing about someone’s problems doesn’t cause me to assign them lower status. (I’ve also taken a number of acting classes, which partially left me with the alief that status is a big game that doesn’t really matter.) I assumed this stuff was true for other people as well, tried to get them to debug/improve me, and found out the hard way that they would permanently lower my status for this.
One thing that occurred to me reading this was that a somewhat effective (not 100% effective) way of “guarding” one’s status would be to solicit for help / advice in private rather than in pubic. Obviously you can’t guarantee that people will not disclose things, but if you are in a position like the CEO in your example, you could take measures to encourage your employees not to share the contents of confidential discussions and so forth.
Of course, this has costs and benefits as well: it is much easier to make one post on a public blog than it is to private message everyone on your Facebook. If you’re concerned about maintaining your status, it might be worth considering. For example, for someone with high status and a relatively “forgivable” question (difficult, not obvious) just posting it in public is probably better than going through the hassle to make the inquiry private; for someone with low status asking a less “forgivable” question (“He really should know better, did this guy not listen to what the prof said in lecture?”), the extra effort might well be worth it.