If I told you that the same mechanisms in language that signal deception in interrogation in official business documents and business talk have the capacity to signal competence and authority, would it be a surprise? Because it’s not really a true contradiction. Different situations demand different approaches. In business, it all comes down to convincing people that we are competent, have the knowledge, and should be treated not only as a valid source of advice but also as authorities.
We tend to think, though, that our past achievements and experience make it obvious that we should be trusted and so should our judgement, no matter the situation. But there is also a caveat. Closeness and ingroup belonging blind us to the capabilities and authority of our own inner circle – we trust outsiders more. If you’re not convinced, try to recall the last time you got advice from someone close only to do the exact opposite, despite the advice being the best thing that could have happened to you.
So how do we bypass the evolutionary twist to become the source of advice for others, and can we use language to do it well? I suggest we can. But first, we need to know where it all comes from and why we do not understand competence the same way in all people. And most importantly, why competence is not always enough to become an authority.
The Big 2 Scanning
To understand it, we have to go back to the evolutionary software running in our brains every time we meet someone. And according to the research of Abele and Wojciszke, along with the stereotype content model, this all goes down to just two dimensions of social cognition. Whenever we meet someone, our brain is sizing them up on two very specific tracks: communion and agency. (Abele et al., 2021; Abele & Wojciszke, 2007; Locke, 2020)
Communion is essentially the ‘getting-along’ dimension. It evaluates warmth, morality and, most importantly, intent. Agency is the ‘getting ahead’ dimension. It’s where we measure competence, ability, assertiveness, and, most importantly for the rest of this post, status. But the crucial part of this research isn’t just that these two dimensions exist; it’s how our brain prioritises them and what happens later.
We don’t process communion and agency at the same time. Instead, it’s a two-step scan.
Step one is always the ‘friend or foe’ check, i.e., are their intentions benevolent or malevolent? Only after establishing other’s intent, we move to step two, which is the agency scan. It’s where we ask whether the person is competent enough to actually carry out whatever intentions they have – good or bad.
So if we’re meeting a new client today or going on a first date, we’re essentially running that same old, necessary-for-survival script. We scan for warmth and morality first. Their resume, their intelligence, their skills – none of that registers until our brain decides they aren’t a threat.
Then, when that stranger becomes a trusted friend or a partner, the rules change. We develop what researchers call in-group asymmetry. Once someone is securely inside our trusted inner circle, we make the communal assumption unquestionable – our brains stay anchored in assuming other people’s benevolence (until they violate that, of course). We expect them to be warm and loyal. We don’t want to be constantly scanning our spouse to see if they’re a literal threat.
Surprisingly, we also stop scanning for agency and competence at that stage explicitly. Instead, we start scanning for ingroup status and hierarchy signals that agency brings. Michael Dufner and his colleagues show the difference in how communion and agency function within a group dynamic.
The Zero-Sum Game
Dufner suggests that communion is a non-zero-sum principle, so there’s an infinite supply of it in groups and relationships. If one person is kind, it doesn’t stop the other from being kind. We can all be warm, and everyone wins. For the group, it is even better if everyone is communal, moral, gentle, and safe. (Dufner et al., 2016)
But agency, and therefore also competence, status, and dominance, operates on a strict zero-sum principle. In any social hierarchy, there is a limited amount of status to go around. If one person is the most competent in the room, by definition, the other is less competent and less of an authority. Their dominance intrinsically requires someone else’s subordination. There is no way to win easily against the social hierarchy script we have.
We might not feel it when people show competence in areas outside of our own identity, but it’s also much more visible if they are competent in the area where we feel competent. This is where Abraham Tesser’s self-evaluation maintenance (SEM) model comes into play. Tesser ran experiments looking at how we react to the success of their close friends. He found that if our friend excels in a domain we don’t care about, say, they’re a brilliant piano player and we don’t play music at all, we will happily brag about them (in fact, knowing them increases our social status). (Tesser, 1988)
But if we are both ambitious about our careers or we both pride ourselves on being the smart one in the friend group and our close friend suddenly demonstrates incredible competence in that shared domain, it is no longer a neutral observation – it’s a threat to our position in the friend group. That person becomes the new authority in the group. To protect our own self-esteem and our relative standing, our brain actively looks for ways to downplay them. Which is exactly what happens when a new person comes into the group and starts showing a lot of competence – they are treated as if they were bossing around.
So beneath the surface of all our warm communal friendships, there’s this twisted zero-sum competition for status and influence just waiting there. And it stays perfectly hidden, managed by our social graces, until one specific thing happens. Until someone tries to help us by giving us advice.
The Invisible Fight
According to studies by both Bo Feng and Eran Magen, relational closeness directly correlates with giving unsolicited advice. In fact, they found that in approximately 70% of supportive interactions with close friends, people volunteer unsolicited advice at the very early stages of the conversation. (Feng & Magen, 2016)
Giving advice makes the advisor feel incredibly useful, capable, and powerful. It’s an ego boost. A massive boost to the advisor’s own feeling of agency – my personal observation suggests that advice-giving can even substitute action-taking, goal achievements, and the actual doing while still making the advice-giver feel like they are very agentic.
But while the advisor is feeling great about solving the problem, they’re completely oblivious to the psychological bomb they just dropped on the recipient. Because receiving advice doesn’t feel like receiving help. Sociologists refer to unsolicited advice as a face-threatening act. In social interactions, face is the public identity or self-image we are trying to maintain. Unsolicited advice attacks that identity on two fronts.
First, it threatens our positive face, which is our desire to be seen as competent and capable. And second, it threatens our negative face – our desire for autonomy. It’s our fundamental freedom to choose our own path without someone else’s imposition.
When an advisor pushes in with a prescriptive course of action, they’re applying social pressure that restricts our freedom. So we want to react quickly to get rid of that pressure. That is what psychologist Jack Brehm defined as psychological reactance. This is a theory from 1966 – one of the oldies but goodies.
Brehm argued that whenever humans perceive that their behavioural freedom is being threatened or reduced, they experience an intense aversive motivational state which entire goal is to re-establish the threatened freedom. This leads to the famous boomerang effect from that research. (Brehm, 1966)
When participants were aggressively told they must choose a certain option, they would routinely choose the opposite – even if the forced option was objectively better for them – to prove to themselves and to the advisor that they are a free agent.
This reaction makes perfect sense when we map it back to those two relationship dimensions we discussed earlier, i.e., communion and agency. Researchers divide relationship dynamics into two corresponding categories. We have communal relationships, which are based on that mutual, non-zero-sum support, and we have exchange relationships which are entirely based on tracking status, power, and zero-sum reciprocity. (Clark & Mills, 1979)
Now, because the act of giving advice inherently makes the advisor feel powerful, it is classified as a dominance behaviour. So the moment our friend or loving partner gives us unprompted advice, they are suddenly yanking the relationship out of that safe communal dynamic and thrusting it into a competitive zero-sum exchange dynamic. The same dynamic is something we constantly experience at work, no matter the number of integration trips our team has gone on.
At Home And At Work
What’s fascinating here is that attribution shift that follows the category change. Exchange relationships, the status-based ones, turn a rescue mission into a status war. Because of the autonomy threat and the psychological reactance we’re experiencing, our brain simply stops evaluating the actual content of the advice. So instead of evaluating if their advice is correct, we start obsessing over their intentions. And not just their intentions in general, but specifically malicious or self-serving intentions in this specific situation.
In a low-conflict state, if our partner or coworker does something annoying, we usually give them the benefit of the doubt. We attribute it to external factors. But when reactance is triggered by intrusive advice, the cognitive narrative shifts to ‘They’re trying to micromanage me’ or ‘They don’t trust me.’ So the irony is, they might be offering the exact piece of advice that would solve our problem, but we ignore it because we keep fighting a phantom war over our own autonomy. We are also literally blinded to their potential.
And there’s also a social performance aspect that makes it even worse, which involves the concept of strategic self-presentation. Studies have shown that observers tend to view people who accept advice as being very warm and communal, but slightly less capable. Conversely, people who actively reject advice are evaluated by observers as being highly competent, independent, and possessing strong agency. So because I am trapped in the zero-sum game for status with my close friend or a coworker I feel threatened by, I actually want or reject their advice just to perform independence.
I’m sabotaging my own life just to look like I don’t need help.
This self-presentation drive completely overrides the task-orientated utility of whatever they are recommending. If we zoom out and look at this entire mechanism, it becomes really interesting.
So the way it works with friends and at home is this: we feel close to someone, so we feel responsible for them. That empathy drives us to offer unsolicited advice. But because of how human hierarchy works, that advice threatens their positive face, their competence, and their negative face, their autonomy. Which triggers psychological reactance and moves the relationship from communal to exchange. The recipient undergoes a mode of attribution shift, completely ignoring the quality of the advice to focus defensively on the advisor’s intentions and strategically rejecting the advice just to prove they are an independent, competent adult.
And the unfortunate result of this loop is that the people who know us the best, who have the most context on our lives, and who often possess the exact wisdom we desperately need… They are the very people whose competence we systematically ignore. We go out into the world and pay a life coach or consultant thousands of dollars for the exact same advice our spouse gave us for free six months ago. Just because the consultant isn’t a threat to our in-group status…
If at this point it reminds you of a situation when you were employed to offer your competence only to have it ignored and see external consultants get hired to see the same thing you’ve been saying for weeks or months, you are right. This is the same mechanism at play.
We get hired for competence, but the moment we become part of the group, the invisible status war starts, and our advice (or, in fact, the decisions we make) starts to be evaluated not as signals of competence but as signals of autonomy threat. So, unless of course we are the designated leader the group already accepts as such, we can get constantly undermined and contradicted. The question now is how to break out of this, especially when our competence gets ignored at work.
The Language of Authority
In order to reverse the process, and in order not to be evaluated through the social hierarchy lens, we may need to remove ourselves from the group. And this is what language does help with – we don’t have to quit immediately to make it happen. Stripping away all the signals of our own involvement in the outcome and showing lack of intentionality is one way to do it. We can do it by removing ourselves from the statements.
We can also use the language to limit the autonomy threat to the other person as well as not push ourselves as the source of the knowledge, in a way abdicating the advisor position and shifting it to someone or something else. This way we remove signals of judgement of the other person’s competence or social hierarchy.
In fact, this is the exact language of consulting and academic writing.
Impersonalisation
The first tool is impersonalisation. It is a deliberate structural avoidance of explicit reference to persons. We can use it to manage the flow of information by foregrounding the state of affairs and backgrounding the actors involved, ourself included. So instead of looking at a colleague and saying, ‘I’m unhappy with the report’, which is almost a guaranteed way to trigger reactance, we would use what linguists call a ‘dummy subject’, words like ‘there’ or ‘it’. So we say, ‘It seems an error was made, or there is a problem with the report.’ By utilising that dummy subject, we shift the cognitive focus from who did the action or from us as the judge of the competence to what currently exists.
Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory points to this kind of indirectness as a face-saving strategy. It coats the interaction in a gloss of objectivity. Social harmony is maintained, and our authority remains intact because we are still addressing the issue. The psychological mechanism at play here is about increasing psychological distance. (Brown et al., 1987)
The passive or impersonal voice increases the psychological distance between the listener and the event. The greater the psychological distance, the more abstractly and less emotionally the listener processes the information, which is the key to bypassing reactants.
The instruction no longer sounds like a bossy command from a rival in our inner circle but more like an objective factual statement. As such, it is processed as an environmental reality that just happens to exist.
Nominalisation
A related move is nominalisation – instead of erasing the actor, we freeze the action. We can use grammatical metaphors to make subjective opinions sound like unchangeable realities. (Devrim, 2015) It happens when we take a dynamic process, like a verb, and we freeze it into a noun. As verbs represent processes happening in time, they are inherently fluid and debatable. And nouns represent entities existing in space. They are processed as concrete and established.
The sources provide a really great example of this shift. (Hardjanto & Roselani, 2022; Khamesian, 2015; Zhang, 2018) Consider the active verb-heavy sentence of ‘Our CEO spoke wonderfully, so the audience applauded.’ The problem with it is that it’s a subjective evaluation – we can easily argue with that, questioning if the applause was loud or not, forced or not. For example, the person could mumble, and the applause was just a signal of politeness. We are debating an interpretation of an event because of the verbs.
Now, if we apply nominalisation and turn those verbs into nouns, we get ‘The CEO’s wonderful speech resulted in applause.’ And by turning those subjective actions into static objects, we alter how the brain evaluates the sentence. We are no longer describing a debatable behaviour but are simply reporting on a causal relationship between two pre-existing entities – a speech resulted in applause. This becomes significantly harder for the listener’s brain to argue against, because arguing against the existence of a noun requires much more cognitive effort than debating a verb. This applies to modality metaphors as well. For example, if we say ‘the government should support renewable energy’, the word ‘should’ highlights our personal subjective evaluation and an opinion. But if we swap that modal verb for a noun and say, ‘it is the government’s responsibility to support renewable energy’ we turn a personal opinion into a concrete fact. The debatable ‘should’ is replaced by the established noun ‘responsibility’ so the sentence projects a much higher degree of authority and objective truth simply through syntax. When the instruction isn’t coming from us but is stated as a fact, we are no longer a rival for someone else’s rank, and they do not have to downplay our authority.
Hedging
Another element is a bit paradoxical. It is apparently better when we are not entirely certain of the facts and do not express our opinions as the ultimate truths. A calibrated expression of doubt actually enhances our credibility in the language of authority. This is the function of hedging by using words like ‘may’, ‘might’, ‘perhaps’, or ‘it seems’.
Hedging serves two critical functions. First, it protects the speaker from being easily contradicted. If we state ‘This strategy will double our revenue’, and it only increases revenue by 20%, our credibility can be undermined. But if we hedge and say ‘this strategy may double our revenue’, our statement remains technically true regardless of the exact outcome.
But the second function of hedging is more important, as it is tied to social cognition and face-saving. Hedging creates a cooperative discursive space. When we say, ‘It seems to me that…’ or ‘Perhaps we should consider…’ we are actively lowering the threat level to the listener’s negative face. We are presenting an observation while explicitly leaving room for their autonomy. It invites peer validation rather than demanding compliance. The paradox is that the less absolute the opinion, the easier it is to agree with it for others. (Hyland, 1998, 2005) It is a strategy to push a solution through a group resistance hole but never to present it publicly in a convincing manner.
Epistemic Modality
There is more we can do in terms of certainty. The English language has a hierarchical scale of verbs to express levels of certainty. From the most certain to the least certain, we have know, believe, and guess. This scale is used to make evaluations sound more natural, something that everyone would make. It can be combined with adjectives, like ‘certain’, ‘possible’, and ‘likely’, to make the ‘certainty’ more certain. (Alindra et al., 2025; Kiss, 2019; Warchał, 2010)
But we should be careful here not to signal it wrong, as there are two different ways of presenting likelihood: subjective scaling and objective scaling. (Thomson et al., 2008)
Subjective scaling is internal and personal. Think of the phrase ‘I think it will rain.’ Because we are using the word ‘I’, we are making a personal comment, stating our private opinion. And because it is anchored to us, it is easy for someone else to debate with.
However, we can shift this into objective scaling to make the probability seem like a public, interpersonal fact consistent with physical laws. Adding nominalisation and using that “it” as a dummy subject, we can state it as an uncontroversial, pre-existing fact. Instead of saying ‘I know this is wrong’, which highlights a personal act of judging, we say, ‘It is certain that this is wrong.’
This changes the power dynamic of the sentence and discourages disputing the conclusion because it isn’t being presented as an instruction from a human rival. It is being presented as an objective necessity that was already there before the sentence even began.
So when using the strongest claims, like ‘know’ and ‘certain’, make it objective by using ‘it is a known fact that…’ or ‘given the above, it is clear that…’ The more objective the statement, the less reactance we will trigger.
Appraisal Framework
To make the tone even more objective, we can suppress personal emotions and avoid moral evaluations of people. And this is where the appraisal framework comes in.
The framework itself maps how we evaluate information, dividing our attitudes into separate categories: primarily emotional affect, which covers raw internal feelings, and social valuation, which measures the worth of external processes or things. (O’Donnell, 2013; Phan, 2025; Zheng, 2025) What we need to remember is that professional discourse prioritises social valuation over emotional affect.
Think about a standard, raw reaction: ‘I am deeply worried about these chaotic results’. That is an explicit admission of an internal emotional state, meaning it is personal and very much anchored in the result of an action. By suppressing the emotional affect and leaning entirely into social valuation, the sentence becomes ‘The data is highly complex, presenting a significant analytical challenge.’ We have swapped the internal feeling (worried) for an evaluation of an object (complex data). The evaluation is no longer processed as a personal feeling; it becomes a trait of the object being observed. As such, it shows that the result of the action is not really a concern for the speaker, implicitly signalling that the speaker is not part of the group. This is the classic ‘external consultant’ stance.
To strip away subjectivity entirely, we can also externalise evaluation, as if the conclusion were coming directly from the physical evidence rather than from our minds.
To do that, we can use abstract rhetors. Consider the difference between saying, ‘I conclude from this graph that the experiment failed,’ and ‘The data indicates a failure.’ By choosing an inanimate noun as the subject, we attribute agency to the evidence itself. The writer is completely removed from the cognitive act of judging, allowing them to abdicate personal responsibility for the claim.
We can also adopt the ‘reporter voice’, where explicit moral judgements are prohibited. (Thomson et al., 2008) If an evaluation must happen, we can use grammar to delegate it to an outside source. The author becomes a passive channel for facts rather than an active interpreter of those. So instead of saying ‘This policy is terrible’, we can say, ‘According to the opposition, the policy has flaws.’
Because the human speaker is erased from the text, the findings appear to speak for themselves, and the statement can bypass psychological reactance, as the evaluations do not feel as though they are debating a human rival for status. Instead, they seem to be the inevitable results of empirical evidence, representing what any rational observer would conclude when presented with the same concrete blocks of data.
These are the academic techniques we can use in everyday life too, to increase the probability of our advice being appreciated at work and in our exchange relationships.
But what about the communal ones? It would be kind of weird to say, ‘It is necessary that the trash be taken out’ to the spouse. Or instead of ‘turn left’, say, ‘The map suggests that the most optimal route requires us to take the next turn left.’ But there is still some advice we can use and turn the above techniques to our advantage.
Giving Advice to the Loved Ones
If we are the one giving advice to a loved one, we have to recognise that our good intentions may be processed as a dominance behaviour. In order not to trigger it, we have to actively preserve their negative face. Asking permission is a good way, or simply saying, ‘I have a thought on this, but only if you want to hear it’.
Another way is using language that reinforces their autonomy and signal our own subordinance, i.e., ‘You know your industry much better than I do, but what if you tried this?’ This way we keep the interaction anchored in the communal zone, reassuring them that their status is not under attack.
And instead of using the epistemic modality and stating facts as the laws of physics or social proof, we can try removing ourselves from the equation a different way. When offering advice, try to point to existing research or an article, or use a friend as a source of knowledge.
Alternatively, if brave enough, you can just have an open discussion with your loved one, stating your intentions and asking what they really want – to be helped or to be listened to. This would make staying in the communal relationship category even easier.
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