For NT people, authority, or social position carries considerable weight. They are offered respect and obedience. Their ideas are better. Flaws may be overlooked. Even lies and crimes may be overlooked in service of social harmony. Social position overrides opinions.

My Experience: Status-Neutral

Since I lack Social Salience, I lack the ability to care about social position. Probably in many cases I can’t perceive the social position itself – I can understand jobs that give authority but people would seem to be peers are a flat hierarchy to me. I respect competence rather than power.

I do recognize that my manager and people up the chain to the CEO have the power to compel me to do tasks that I disagree with. If I think a task is unwise or will not get the desired result I will tell the person giving the order, or if they are not available, my manager. Given my position at work, I see this as my responsibility. Once informed, they are free to decide as they please and own the consequences – I could be wrong. If I have my wits about me, I will attempt to reduce friction by talking to them in private or using softening words. There is a hard wall when it comes to my Ethics – I won’t do something that I think is illegal, dishonest, or will hurt people. It doesn’t matter who gives the order.

For example:

• Working at McDonalds I am playing a role — manager defines tasks, I complete
  • I respect that authority because it logically makes sense
  • recognize the manager as a “Task Distributor.”
• For more skill based things I typically follow orders when I 1) understand and 2) agree
  • I may be the person with the expertise and I will question orders if they don’t make sense
  • At work, it is my job to do this – i need to get clarification if I think there is an error

I don’t consider authority when evaluating ideas: if a janitor and a CEO both gave ideas for fixing the problem, I would pick the better idea. If the CEO was an expert in the field and I was not, I might defer to their expertise, but not their authority.

• I would be in the stockade if I were in the army – funny, but maybe

I do not have any status vibes. I wouldn’t know a king from a pauper, except by dress.

Additionally, I have No Authority Bias in my ethics. In fact I feel the opposite:

• greater power requires greater accountability because the breadth of their impact is greater
• A leader who commits crimes or lies makes me very angry
• The inverse is also true: a person with very little power has less impact when violating rules – I still don’t like it but I am not angry