Connection Dynamics Inside Communities: The Break of Social Hierarchy

After five years and over a million social and professional matches at Intros AI, clear patterns emerged in how different kinds of community members interact and how those dynamics vary by community structure. One interesting find — that goes against the typical understanding of "social hierarchy" — is how community members often break these hierarchical structures when connecting with others.

Social hierarchy is typically viewed through something called "Status Characteristics Theory (SCT)," which essentially states that groups quickly and almost unconsciously sort members into a rank order.

This theory intuitively makes sense, but when you look at how members actually connect with each other, it breaks apart.

I've been chipping away at an essay on this topic, but in short, effectively all communities (especially professional-leaning) have some combination of the following "personas". These personas are defined by their interest to connect with others and the interest of others to connect with them.

• The Intern: Just happy to be there. Wants to meet everyone else, but few people want to meet them.
• The Salesperson: Only wants to connect with others for a specific purpose. They don't need to be selling something, but their appetite to connect with someone else is directly tied to a goal (e.g. fundraising, getting a question answered, etc.).
• The Networker: They want to meet others, and others want to meet them. May have multiple reasons to be there.
• The High Achiever: Most people want to meet them, but they'll only meet others if there's a clear angle for them.
• The Mentor: Willing to connect, but never proactively. They only engage if reached out to first, for a specific reason.

These personas get a whole lot more interesting when you factor in:

• How different communities have varying distributions of personas.
• We can be interns in some communities, and mentors in others.
• We shift in and out of the different personas based on phase of life, or shifting goals. When we join a community, we usually start as an intern.

There's infinite scenarios where the typical view on social hierarchy starts to break — like when a historical High Achiever connects with an Intern, or when a Salesperson shifts to a Mentor. We can each hold different personas within the same groups.