The ig status concealment game
I was having a discussion with my brother and needed some data so took to instagram. I ran a poll which has been replicated here for you to answer before reading on.
Now that you answered, I must confess to a rigged poll. You were ostensibly given three options but there were really only two.
I thought at least one person, some maverick edge-case vice signaler, would choose happy 😊. But no. No not even a single person!
The obvious question is why? Why did not a single person respond that she would be happy if I bought her 10k instagram followers?
The answer is hidden in option three, Indifferent 😐.
The vast majority of you chose this option. The first thing to know is this group is actually two groups disguised as one. Within the group, there is subset of people who are actually indifferent — the way they voted matches their true preferences. However, a significant portion of this group are hiding their underlying preferences. Their revealed preferences differ drastically from how they vote in public, or in this case a public simulated by your perception of me seeing and judging the way you answer. The fact that I get to watch you at the ballot box changes the way you cast your vote.
A preliminary question to elucidate this further is why haven’t you already bought 10k followers?
If you have NOT bought 10k followers already, you either:
1) do not want 10k bought followers under any circumstances
2) would, ceteris paribus, prefer 10k bought followers to not having 10k bought followers but deem it not worth the price in a general sense
I would argue that nearly all those who fall into category (1) would vote for the annoyed 😠 option. I find it difficult to believe that if you specifically do not want 10k bought followers, me buying them for you would bring your emotional valence up to indifference. Why? For starters, you probably don’t even know the cost of 10k followers. And lacking this knowledge, you cannot consider the financial aspect deeply enough for it to be a reliable basis for indifference. Even if you did, I would be skeptical of anyone who tries to tell me with a straight face that he actually weighed the economic transfer against his negative emotional sentiment toward having 10k bought followers and came out confident that the domain-specific value transfer cleared his hurdle.
So that leaves category (2), a category that suggests if you voted indifferent you actually have a preference for 10k bought followers assuming you didn't purchase them yourself. Does this imply it's just about the money?
I don't think so. Perhaps part of it is indeed about the money, in which case one would have to assume you know the price of 10k followers and decide against it just like you do the purchase of a nice watch or something else you desire. This could be true for some of you, but it cannot possibly account for all indifferent responders. Why? Because people do in fact buy followers!
This mismatch between voted preferences and those actually revealed suggests a hidden value. There’s something being concealed by people who voted indifferent. Something they are implicitly paying for even if they don’t recognize it. Specifically, they are paying for the ability to distance themselves from the decision to purchase followers. They wish to relinquish agency in an action they find shameful despite a result they would appreciate. They want the bought followers but without admission to having bought them. Should this be the case, these people would actually be happy 😊 if they woke up one day with 10k bought followers.
Looking at this from the lens of revealed preferences, I would rephrase the groups to represent the differences in your private and public preferences. Your public preferences are how you vote in public in an open ballot where someone can see how you voted whereas your private preferences are how you vote anonymously, in a blind ballot where no one is watching.
Group 1: Happy 😊
Public: Indifferent 😐
Private: Happy 😊
Group 2: Annoyed 😠
Public: Annoyed 😠
Private: Annoyed 😠
Group 3: Indifferent 😐
Public: Indifferent 😐
Private: Indifferent 😐
As you can see, there’s no group of people in this scenario who publicly vote Happy 😊. I ran a public poll, and so it comes as little surprise to see no votes for Happy 😊. The people who would be happy if I bought them 10k instagram followers all voted Indifferent 😐.
If you voted Indifferent 😐, ask yourself: would you still vote indifferent if no one was able to see how you voted?
Before I wrap up, there’s a further paradox worth mentioning. It doesn’t take much discernment to tell who has fake followers on instagram. What this tells me is that there is a group of people who do not want me to know that they would be happy if I bought them 10k followers but they would not care if I found out by looking at their instagrams. This is not just a matter of framing; it’s about the power of commission and the relinquishment of agency — where the act of choosing or not choosing and being seen doing either speaks volumes about our hidden desires and the lengths we’ll go to keep them concealed. And in terms of desires, social status may be the one that beckons loudest for concealment.
