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Listing dominance moves

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Poppy98

Active Member
- keeping someone waiting while you take your time
- talk to the hand: putting your hand up when the person is talking but then making an obviously untrue or unfit statement
- putting up your finger when someone starts a conversation with you and avoiding eye contact to further avoid you
- saying something untrue and easily disprovable and then saying "I'M NOT GOING TO ARGUE WITH YOU."

-insulting someone and unconvincingly saying "just kidding" so that you can pretend any aspect of your middle school behavior was acceptable
- waking people up knowingly
-blatantly ignoring people when they ask you to be appropriate
- slamming doors hard enough to shake the moon and stomping like an inebriated rhino because if you're not slamming stuff like a tot noone would think of you wouldn't get attention when you want to dominate from afar
-cutting someone off verbally
-consistently yelling over someone
- punishing boundaries: going off on someone for having boundaries
-nitpicking
-excessive and (intentionally) pedantic questioning
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Those aren't all dominance moves, or aren't always dominance moves. Context matters.

For example some of them are regularly used by people who are genuinely delusional (which includes probably 25% of the adult US population) to defend their false beliefs. You can think of them as routines used to deal efficiently with cognitive dissonance.

In general that's not a dominance game. It's people who have a mild mental illness who are protecting their illness.

It's like someone who's over-committed in an argument, shown that they're wrong, and can't back down and apologize or withdraw: a version of the "sunken cost fallacy" in a slightly different context.

(Slightly off topic):
Defending false beliefs is so much a natural human behavior that it probably has some evolutionary value (e.g. perhaps it's good for cultural coherence and consistency over time).
Which would make it interesting for Aspies, because that's one of the things that interferes with ND/NT communication and (IMO anyway) drives early ND masking).
 
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