Shame as a strategy

I recently enjoyed playing a game called Avalon. I won't go too deep into the rules, but it's a hidden RPG in the vein of Secret Hitler or Werewolf, where a team is "good", trying to find out who among them is "evil", before the bad team won't win.

One of the characters you can play is Merlin. Merlin knows who the evil players are, but cannot reveal what he knows, because the evil team can kill Merlin and win the game. So Merlin relies on another character, Percival, to be his decoy.

Percival's only power is that he knows who Merlin is. He therefore secretly monitors Merlin's actions throughout the game and amplifies these signals to the rest of the party. The typical strategy is for Percival to draw attention away from Merlin and towards himself.

But another riskier strategy is for Merlin to play as if he is Percival. In this case, Merlin flaunts what he knows so shamelessly that it confuses everyone. The evil team, believing that no Merlin would be dumb enough to show up like that, think he must be Percival and write him off.

The Merlin-as-Percival strategy is bold because it blatantly defies our expectations of how the game is won. To achieve this, Merlin must sow confusion around his actions. He needs other players to not know if he's incredibly stupid or incredibly smart.

More and more, I think the "shameless" approach is becoming a mainstream strategy today. It was first popularized in modern canon by Paris Hilton, who played the "dumb blonde heiress" stereotype so well that everyone assumed she really was as dumb as she looked. air.

Paris didn't play by the 'obvious' celebrity rules. She was widely ridiculed by the media and her peers as, at best, a train wreck and, at worst, a selfish amateur. And yet, people kept talking about her. A decade later, Paris is remembered as the mastermind behind the playbook that made the Kardashians, Jenners and other socialites so successful.

It's important to note that people despised Paris, because to validate his playbook would be to admit that they were playing an inferior game. Everyone else had invested years in optimizing the most readable version of the rules. They would look stupid if they admitted that she had found a better way of doing things.

Without getting into tedious politics, the "shameless" strategy also defined the 2016 US presidential elections. It was shouted down by people from both established political parties, because they used to respect "obvious" rules, but I suspect that in a decade we will look back on this election and realize that it marked the beginning of a whole new style of politics.

Ditto, perhaps, for the leadership styles of Mark Zuckerberg, who has been following the "obvious" playbook for years, versus Jack Dorsey, who employs tactics that seem so obviously stupid (tweeting about fasting and meditation!) that we are quick to write them off. And yet I guess Zuckerberg's strategy is making him increasingly unsympathetic and untrustworthy in the same way that any major politician who sticks to a pre-2016 playbook today is definitely not going to win .

The shameless strategy seems counter-intuitive, because our first instinct is to want to punish this kind of behavior. And historically, these sanctions have been effective. Punishing extravagant behavior is an important aspect of cooperative governance: it preserves social order by ensuring that we all play by the same rules.

Today, it seems that punishing shamelessness only increases the social rewards of the transgressor. What has changed?

One explanation could be that this is an expected effect of today's blurring of social boundaries. In the past, if your community was limited in size (like a village or an aristocratic social class), people wouldn't enter or leave those communities as frequently. Under these conditions, sanctions are probably still effective, as community members want to be liked and accepted.

But the boundaries of online communities are much more fluid, if not non-existent. With open borders, the sanctions will backfire, as they simply serve as a signal to the transgressor, attracting strangers who resonate with that person's message. What is meant to be punishment instead becomes a flare shot straight into the night sky.

The “establishment” mistakenly assumes that a shameless person wants the approval of their community, when it turns out that, like any cult or counterculture, that person’s goal was to attract a clientele, whatever its members. The disgust of his peers no longer matters, as this disgust forms the basis of a whole new community.

A common criticism...