Nobody voted on it. Nobody announced it. And yet everyone in the group could probably draw the same org chart, if you asked them to. Some people’s messages get answered immediately; some get absorbed into whatever comes next. Some people set the plan; others show up to it. This episode looks at the informal power structures that emerge in spaces with no formal structure at all and why hierarchy without a name can be, in some ways, harder to navigate than the kind that at least has the decency to announce itself.
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AI Generated Transcript:
Think about a group chat you’re part of — doesn’t matter which one. Old friends, family, a group from work that started as “just for logistics” and never died. Now ask yourself: if you sent a message right now, how long would you wait before worrying no one responded? And then ask a harder question — is that waiting time the same for everyone in that chat? Because if you think about it for even a few seconds, you probably already know it isn’t. Some people get responses almost instantly. Some people’s messages sit there for hours, sometimes get answered, sometimes just… absorbed into whatever comes next. Nobody designed this. Nobody voted on it. And yet everyone in that chat could probably draw you the same org chart, if you asked them to.
I’m Andrei Barburas, and this is The Unlearning Project — a podcast from barburas.com, where every couple of weeks we take one assumption that usually goes unexamined and we crack it open. Today’s assumption is that group chats — among friends, among family, in casual spaces with no formal structure — are flat. Egalitarian. Just a bunch of people talking. They’re not. They have hierarchies. And those hierarchies are often more rigid, and more consequential, than the ones we’re used to thinking about in formal settings — precisely because nobody acknowledges they exist.
Let’s start with where hierarchy usually gets discussed, because it’s almost always in formal contexts — workplaces, organizations, institutions with titles and reporting lines. In those settings, hierarchy is at least visible. You know who your manager is. You know who has the authority to make a final call. The structure is explicit, even if the dynamics within it are complicated.
Informal groups don’t have any of that explicit scaffolding. No one has a title. No one was appointed. And so there’s a natural assumption that, in the absence of formal structure, what’s left must be… nothing. Just people, relating to each other as equals, because there’s no mechanism that would make them anything else.
But hierarchy doesn’t require a mechanism. It emerges. And it emerges through some very specific, very observable patterns — patterns that, once you start looking for them, are almost impossible to stop seeing.The first and most obvious one is response time and response obligation. In any group chat, there’s an unspoken understanding of whose messages “count” — whose questions get answered promptly, whose jokes get reactions, whose plans become the plans everyone organizes around. This isn’t usually about who talks the most. It’s about whose input has weight. Two people can send structurally identical messages — “should we do Friday or Saturday?” — and one of those messages effectively sets the plan, while the other one gets acknowledged, maybe discussed, and then quietly overridden if the first person’s preference differs.
The second pattern is what happens when someone tries to change the subject versus when someone tries to set it. In any group, certain people can redirect a conversation and the group will follow. Other people can attempt the exact same redirection — bring up something they want to talk about, suggest a different topic — and it just… doesn’t take. The conversation continues as if it wasn’t said. This isn’t usually intentional, and it’s almost never discussed. But it’s one of the clearest signals of where conversational authority sits, because it shows you not just who gets listened to, but who gets to decide what the group is currently about.
The third, and maybe the most interesting one, is what I’d call the “ratification” pattern. This is when someone lower in the informal hierarchy says something — an opinion, a plan, a joke — and it gets a tepid response, or no response at all. And then, later, someone higher in the hierarchy says something similar, sometimes nearly identical, and suddenly it lands. People respond. It becomes “the thing.” The idea didn’t change. What changed was who said it. And what’s notable is that almost nobody in the group will register this as having happened — including, often, the person whose idea got effectively re-issued and then accepted. There’s no malice here, usually. It’s just that ideas don’t travel on their own. They travel attached to the social weight of whoever said them, and that weight isn’t equally distributed.
So where does this weight come from, if it’s not formal authority? A few sources, and they’re worth naming because they’re not always what you’d expect.Sometimes it’s about history — who’s been in the group longest, who founded it, who has the deepest shared context with the most people in it. Sometimes it’s about centrality — who has individual relationships with the most other people in the group, outside the group itself, so that their approval or disapproval carries social consequences beyond the chat. Sometimes — and this one is less comfortable — it’s about who would be most costly to lose. In any group, there’s usually an awareness, even if unspoken, of who could leave without the group really changing, and who couldn’t. And that asymmetry shapes behavior in ways that are almost entirely invisible day to day, but become very visible the moment that person actually expresses displeasure about something.
This is where it’s useful to bring in Erving Goffman again — not the imagined audience idea this time, but something more specific: his work on what he called “footing.” Footing is about the alignment people take toward each other and toward what’s being said in an interaction — who’s allowed to be playful, who’s expected to be serious, whose jokes land as charming and whose land as awkward, whose disagreement reads as healthy debate and whose reads as a problem. Footing isn’t fixed. But it’s also not renegotiated from scratch every time. It accumulates. And in long-running group chats — some of which span years, sometimes decades — footing can become almost completely fossilized. The “role” someone had in the group five years ago can keep shaping how their contributions land today, regardless of whether anything about them has actually changed.
Here’s where this gets genuinely interesting, though — because group chats aren’t just a curiosity. They’re often one of the most emotionally significant social spaces people have, especially as people get older and the more structured social contexts of school or early adulthood fall away. A friend group chat can be one of the primary places someone experiences a sense of belonging, of being heard, of mattering to other people. Which means that the hierarchy within that chat isn’t just about logistics — about who decides where everyone eats on Friday. It’s about something closer to standing. Whether your presence in the group feels like it carries weight, or whether you’re, in some quiet, never-discussed way, more of a participant than a member.
And because none of this is acknowledged — because the entire premise of these spaces is that they’re casual, equal, “just friends talking” — there’s no mechanism for addressing it. You can’t exactly raise it in a performance review. You can’t ask for feedback. If someone did try to name it — “I’ve noticed that when I suggest things, they don’t really land the same way” — it would likely be met with genuine confusion, not because people are being dishonest, but because the hierarchy is invisible from the inside to almost everyone except the person experiencing its effects from a lower position within it.
This is, I think, part of why hierarchy in informal groups can feel more painful, in some ways, than hierarchy in formal ones. In a workplace, if you’re not being heard, there’s at least a shared vocabulary for that — you can point to a structure, a process, something external to blame or to try to change. In a friend group, if you’re not being heard, the only available explanation, in the absence of any acknowledged structure, tends to be personal: maybe it’s me. Maybe what I say just isn’t that interesting. Maybe I’m not actually as close to these people as I thought. The structural explanation isn’t available, because structurally, there’s nothing there — officially. So the gap gets filled with something more self-directed, and usually more painful.
I don’t think the goal here is to walk away from this episode trying to map every group chat you’re in like some kind of org chart — that would probably make things worse, not better. But I do think there’s something worth sitting with in just acknowledging that these dynamics exist, even in spaces that are explicitly framed as equal. Because once you can see it, a few things become possible. You can notice when you’re the one whose ideas seem to “land” more easily, and use that — deliberately amplify someone else’s point instead of restating it as your own. You can notice when your own contributions seem to be met with that particular kind of polite non-response, and recognize that it might not be about the content of what you said at all.
Here’s the question I’d like to leave you with. Think of a group you’re part of — informal, casual, no titles, just people. And ask yourself honestly: if you had to rank everyone in that group by how much “weight” their words carry, could you do it? And where would you put yourself? And — this is the harder part — when’s the last time that ranking actually changed?
That’s it for this episode of The Unlearning Project. We’ll be back in two weeks with another one. Until then, pay a little more attention to who sets the plans — and who just shows up to them.
