Zachary Burt's Blog

Keith Johnstone’s Impro, subtitled Improvisation and the Theatre, comprises four essential sections: Status, Narratives, Spontaneity, and Masks, but I saw one theme emerge: the malleability of human nature. In my most recent post, I mentioned the Fundamental Attribution Error, a social psychology term. The Error, also known as correspondence bias, reflects the tendency of observers to over-value innate personality traits when explaining behavior, and fail to take into account situational circumstance. It seems that Johnstone has an intuitive understanding of this phenomenon, and I feel that Impro is actually a psychology book masquerading as an improvisational theatre textbook.

In the introduction, Johnstone began by reflecting on his school days, recalling how teachers shaped behavior according to cultural expectations, and violently reacted against students who failed to live up to their perceived norms. I recall one study in which students who tested as “dumb” were placed into gifted classrooms, and students who tested as “smart” were placed into remedial classes; the teachers were none the wiser and had no reason to assume that something was afoot. After a year of teaching, “dumb” students tested “smart” and “smart” students tested “dumb”. It’s a testament to the idea that we really live up to the expectations others project onto us, and the fundamental importance of the self-fulfilling prophecy in activating behavior. In Zen Poker, one of the rules is not to let your opponent’s expectations of difficulty fool you into erring where you otherwise wouldn’t; sometimes, due to social pressure, we have a tendency to cave into others’ expectations. The precise psychological mechanisms explaining this behavior are currently a mystery to me, but they are likely explored in greater depth in the literature. My intuition is that it’s a Transaction Analysis-style game in which we achieve a greater sense of safety by living up to the group’s expectations instead of pursuing individual glory. I am curious how appearance of this phenomenon – caving into others’ projection of false pressure – varies between individuals from collectivist versus individualistic societies.

Indeed, in Impro, Johnstone discusses other phenomena like how an actor with a cold will suppress all symptoms for the duration of the performance, or how putting on a Mask will activate unforseen behavioral characteristics. He insightfully observes, “Sanity has nothing directly to do with the way you think. It’s a matter of presenting yourself as safe,” a platitude with which I agree. It’s all about keeping group harmony. He also says, “I see the ‘personality’ as a public-relations department for the real mind.” Perfect!

Whatever comes out when you speak or act in an entirely unstifled stream-of-consciousness. This channels true creativity, divine inspiration, and flow. I feel like this fits into the paradigm I’ve been sketching. It’s a loss of the ego (self), and a connection to the true Self (“God”). Very few people are truly uncreative – instead, they stifle their creativity out of fear for being judged and made a pariah for their truest thoughts and intentions. People won’t improvise because they censor; they fear they are revealing ‘too much’. Thus Johnstone suggest it is the teacher’s responsibility to absolve them of responsibility for what they say, until they achieve greater self-knowledge and self acceptance, and are no longer embarrassed by their true nature. By the way, in hypnosis, people who are ‘normal’ are most suggestible. That’s why they became “normal” in the first place, because they are suggestible! People’s personalities are truly flexible, and I am very suspect of people who try to say that personality is a static thing. (There appears to be a general consensus amongst psychologists that personality is more reluctant to change after age 30 – perhaps because they’ve accumulated too many neural pathways, or perhaps because their entire sense of reality is predicated on certain axiomatic notions linked to their personality. I don’t know.)

The juiciest, and most fun part of the book for me, however, was Johnstone’s discussion of status. In human interaction, our status is always moving up or down in relation to others in our social environment. Always! This is reflected by our body language as well as our verbal language; the vast majority of status transactions operate outside the realm of conscious awareness. Our behavior is extremely affected as well as limited by our status. High status people are limited just as low status people are limited; they simply experience different constraints. By the way, please don’t confuse the notion of group status with cultural concepts of socio-economic status; perhaps due to cultural memory, socio-economic status can occasionally affect group status, but I believe it is simply a pretext (or frame) for group status. Despite our attempts to brainwash ourselves into thinking otherwise, status is a very real thing. Moreover, you cannot really fake status, and it is constantly being announced through our body language (vocal tonality, eyes, arm positioning, leg positioning, etc.). This is one reason why people become self-conscious of being photographed: their status is being broadcast in a very real way, and they compensate by crossing their arms (in attempts to appear neutral) or making goofy faces (in attempts to take themselves “out of the game”).

Check out this cool link for a description of high status vs. low status behaviors: http://greenlightwiki.com/improv/Status – you’ll notice how low status people move out of the way for high status people, and high status people don’t look at low status people. This may because status is regulated through dopamine levels, and as I discuss in this post on the practical neuroscience of Buddhism, attention is modulated through dopamine. The specific intricacies of the relationship have yet to reveal themselves to me in a collapsible theoretical model, but I’m working on it. By the way, status is often broadcast through space, and one of the reasons that people love going away and looking out the top of the mountain is that it allows for an uninterrupted projection of their personal space. Humans (and other animals) are incredibly well-adjusted to status projections, and our body language is often modified to adapt to the body language of people outside our range of vision. (Also, I suspect, we are sub”conscious” of this while sleeping, and our body-position reflects the complex interpretation of the presence of others, even in another room.)

Johnstone provides this excerpt from the book The Human Zoo, labeled “Ten golden rules for people who are Number Ones”:

1. Must clearly display trappings, postures and gestures of dominance.
2. In moments of active rivalry you must threaten your subordinates aggressively
3. In moments of physical challenge you (or your delegates) must be able forcibly to overpower your subordinates
4. If a challenge involves brain rather than brawn you must be able to outwit your subordinates
5. You must suppress squabbles that break out between your subordinates
6. You must reward your immediate subordinates by permitting them to enjoy the benefits of their high ranks
7. You must protect the weaker members of the group from undue persecution.
8. You must make decisions concerning the social activities of the group.
9. You must reassure your extreme subordinates from time to time.
10. You must take the initiative in repelling threats or attacks arising from outside your group.

You’ll notice that high status group members are required to stifle the expression of lower status group members. Ritualized displays of status, endemic to much corporate culture, is the reason that innovation is so scarce. People don’t improvise and they expend proportionally greater energy (as compared to say, a start-up company) on satisfying the whims of their superiors. A recent consulting trip brought me to visit a company based in Atlanta. The employees were too preoccupied with status transactions – trying to raise their rank – instead of aligning their behavior with intentions toward improved corporate welfare. This was a stark contrast to the culture of companies like NetFlix and Zappos, that have adopted a strategy that transcends status-obsession.

Finally, I’d like to conclude with some questions on the nature of happiness as it relates to status. I very much suspect that happiness is a social phenomenon, and that status plays a role in our own experience of happiness. However, status is simply a coping strategy. Some people become very good at acting out high-status roles, and some people become very good at acting out low-status roles; these are simply (arbitrary?) roles within a group that help serve both group and individual welfare. A healthy concept of self-esteem will allow you to switch between high-status and low-status roles as necessary; insecurity should not prevent you from taking on a high or low-status role, whether in the theater or real life. Well, according to the Bard, they’re the same thing.

Related reading: my notes on Delivering Happiness by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, my notes on the body language book What Every Body is Saying by FBI body-language expert Joe Navarro
LINK: Purchase Impro on Amazon.