I agree with some commenters (e.g. Taran [LW(p) · GW(p)]) that the one example I gave isn’t persuasive on its own, and that I can imagine different characters in Alec’s shoes who want and mean different things.  But IMO there is a thing like this that totally happens pretty often in various contexts.  I’m going to try to give more examples, and a description of why I think they are examples, to show why I think this.

Example: I think most startups have a “plan” for success, and a set of “beliefs” about how things are going to go, that the CEO “believes” basically for the sake of anchoring the group, and that the group members feel pressure to avow, or to go along with in their speech and sort-of in their actions, as a mechanism of group coordination and of group (morale? something like this).  It’s not intended as a neutral prediction individuals would individually be glad to accept/reject bets based on.   And the (admittedly weird and rationalist-y) CEOs I’ve talked to about this have often been like “yes, I felt pressure to have beliefs or to publicly state beliefs that would give the group a positive, predictable vision, and I found this quite internally difficult somehow.”

When spotting “narrative syncing” in the wild, IMO a key distinguisher of “narrative syncing” (vs sharing of information) is whether there is pressure not to differ from the sentences in question, and whether that pressure is (implicitly) backchained from “don’t spoil the game / don’t spoil our coordination / don’t mess up an apparent social consensus.”  So, if a bunch of kids are playing “the sand is lava” and you say “wait, I’m not sure the sand is lava” or “it doesn’t look like lava to me,” you’re messing up the game.  This is socially discouraged.  Also, if a bunch of people are coordinating their work on a start-up and are claiming to one another that it’s gonna work out, and you are working there too and say you think it isn’t, this… risks messing up the group’s coordination, somehow, and is socially discouraged.

OTOH, if you say “I like pineapples on my pizza” or “I sometimes pick my nose and eat it” and a bunch of people are like “eww, gross”… this is social pressure, but the pressure mostly isn’t backchained from anything like “don’t spoil our game / don’t mess up our apparent social consensus”, and so it is probably not narrative syncing.

Or to take an intermediate/messy example: if you’re working at the same start-up as in our previous example, and you say “our company’s logo is ugly” to the others at that start-up, this… might be socially insulting, and might draw frowns or other bits of social pressure, but on my model the pressure will be weaker than the sort you’d get if you were trying to disagree with the core narrative the start-up is using to coordinate (“we will do A, then B, and thereby succeed as a company”), and what push-back you do get will have less of the “don’t spoil our game!” “what if we stop being able to coordinate together!” nature (though still some) and more other natures such as “don’t hurt the feelings of so-and-so who made the logo” or “I honestly disagree with you.”  It’s… still somewhat narrative syncing-y to my mind, in that folks in the particular fictional start-up I’m imagining are e.g. socially synchronizing some around the narrative “everything at our company is awesome,” but … less.

It seems to me that when a person or set of people “take offense” at particular speech, this is usually (always?) an attempt to enforce narrative syncing.

Another example: sometimes a bunch of people are neck-deep in a discussion, and a new person wanders in and disagrees with part X of the assumed model, and people really don’t want to have to stop their detailed discussion to talk again about whether X is true.  So sometimes, in such cases, people reply with social pressure to believe/say X — for example, a person will “explain” to the newcomer “why X is true” in a tone that invites capitulation rather than inquiry, and the newcomer will feel as though they are being a bit rude if they don’t buy the argument.  I’d class this under “don’t mess up our game”-type social pressure, and under “narrative syncing disguised as information exchange.”  IMO, a better thing to do in this situation is to make the bid to not mess up the game explicit, by e.g. saying “I hear you, it makes sense that you aren’t sure about X, but would you be up for assuming X for now for the sake of the argument, so we can continue the discussion-bit we’re in the middle of?”

This feels like a TDT-style generalization of the linguistic concept of performative utterances. If there were no colloquium scheduled and I said "the colloquium is at 3pm on Wednesday", that would be a performative utterance. But if it were already scheduled for that time, then under the usual definition, the same sentence would not be a performative utterance. This seems weird.

In the generalized version, which you're calling narrative syncing, there is still a self-fulfilling aspect, but instead of being localized to a specific utterance, it's more like a TDT decision node, possibly shared between multiple people.

I don't really understand... Suppose I am a computer scientist who has just learned about AI risks and am eager to contribute, but I'm not sure where to start. Then the natural step would be to ask someone who does have experience in this area for their advice (e.g. what careers should I go into), so I can take advantage of what's already known rather than starting from scratch.

My surface question is about careers, but my true/implicit question is actually asking for help on getting started contributing to AI risk. It's not about wanting to know how to be considered a real member of the group? I would be annoyed by the first answer because it answers my superficial question while rebuffing my true question (I still don't know what to do next!). I am asking you for help and advice, and yet your response is that you have no answer. I mean it is technically true and it would be a good answer for a peer, but in this context it sounds like you're refusing to help me (you're not playing your role of advisor/expert?).

Answer 3 is good because you are sharing your experience and offering help. There's no need to make reference to culture. I would be be just as happy with an answer that says "no one really knows" (instead of "I don't know"), because then you are telling me the current state of knowledge in the industry.

A similar example:

When I asked someone who was teaching me how to cook how much salt I should add to the dish, they answered "I don't know". I was annoyed because it sounded like they were refusing to help me (because they're not answering my implicit question of how to decide how much salt to put when I cook next time) when they were the expert. It would have been better if they'd said that the saltiness varies based on the type of salt and the other ingredients and your own preferences, etc. so it's not possible to have a known, fixed amount of salt. What cooks do is that they try adding a bit first (e.g. half a teaspoon) then taste and make adjustments. Nowadays I would know how to rephrase my question to get the answer I want, but I didn't use to be able to.

feels weird to post this whole thing as a comment as on this essay, but it also feels weird not to mention here that i wrote it. here is a shortform post [LW(p) · GW(p)] that i made as a result of reading this, which does not engage at all with the content of the OP. it's a thing i felt i needed to do before i could [safely/sanely/consensually? intelligently? non-reactively?] engage with the content of the OP.

A possible limitation of “narrative syncing” as a term is when you’re syncing your own narrative. It seems to mainly suggest a social interpretation, but many such statements are intended to shape one’s own future behavior.

In general, the action being taken is a suggestion, model, or command for what to do or not to do, who’ll be in charge of directing those efforts, and how to communicate about it.

I might call this something like “leadership language.” It’s also imperfect. What I like about it is that it explicitly calls out the power dynamic. “Narrative syncing” suggests a neutral, computer-like update, while “leadership language” emphasizes that a person is exerting power and influence.

At the same time, “leadership” has broadly positive connotations, which I think is appropriate to the term.

This also suggests that leadership language interferes with epistemic when many independent and considered judgments are preferable to a uniform coordinated social action. When directing people toward independent thought, leadership language is appropriate.

Leadership language happens a lot in public statements by politicians and CEOs and activists, in Facebook posts, in the arts, and during ceremonies.

I kinda like the term "cheerleading" instead of narrative syncing. Kinda like "I define a cheer and y'all follow me and do the cheer".

Shameless plug here: I'm trying to get into alignment but struggling to get motivated emotionally. If any of you wants to do mutual cheerleading over a discord chat or something, please PM me. also PM me if you just want to hang out and chat and figure out whether you want information or cheerleading. I'd be glad to help with that too by rubber duckie-ing with you.

I'm doing this because I mistook my need for cheerleading as a need for information a while ago and had a very confusing 1-hour chat with a rationalist where he kept trying to give me information and I kept trying to look for inclusion/acceptance signals. I learned a lot both by listening to him and by reflecting upon that experience but I fear I've ended up wasting his time and I kinda feel sad about that. This is why I'm putting my email here.

>Note that in this example, the “me” character does do narrative syncing – but in a way that does not disguise itself as information sharing about AI.

Well, it's better, but in I think you're still playing into [Alec taking things you say as orders], which I claim is a thing, so that in practice Alec will predictably systematically be less helpful and more harmful than if he weren't [taking things you say as orders].

>How can a person shift things toward less confusing patterns?

[Tossing out ideas, caveat emptor]

You could draw attention in the moment to that dynamic, so that Alec can get introspection on the phenomenon, or metaphorically so that Alec can start to get a "brain-computer interface readout" on "right now I'm looking to be told what to do".

You could abstractly clarify the situation (which this post helps with, thank you!).

You could do improv-y stuff, playing low status, playing like you're looking for orders from Alec. (Warning, might be a kind of deception.)The supposed upside is to "shake things loose" a little so that Alec gets exposed to what it would be like if he was High and you were Low, so that when he's back to his usual Low play, he can know it's happening and know what's different about it.

You could refuse to answer Alec until it seems like he's acting like his own boss.

You could technically explain why you don't want to give him orders.

You could address why Alec locally wants to be told what to do.

>Is it something we should simply try to minimize if we want good epistemics?

My wild guess is that first-order minimizing narrative-syncing isn't that important, but being open to second-order corrections is very important, because that's what determines your trajectory towards correct beliefs vs. delusion. There's always a ton of narrative-syncing taken for granted, and primordially speech is corrections to that; just-trying-to-be-epistemic speech is a rarefied sort of thing. I don't know how to balance being open to corrections against "losing momentum", but the obvious guess is to not sacrifice any ability to correct at all, because subtle failures-to-correct can propagate as a narrative-sync to just not think about something. In other words, yay to simply minimizing pushes against correcting errors, boo to minimizing narrative-syncing.

>What’re some places where this happens a lot?  

This happens a lot with a power / status differential. This isn't a vacuous claim: one consequence is that I'm claiming that for each person Alec, there's a roughly 1-dimensional value called "power" (well, maybe it depends on social context...) that Alec assigns to each other person Berry, and this "power" variable predicts all of: the extent to which Alec imputes narrative-syncingness onto Berry's utterances; the extent to which Alec expects others to take Blob's utterances as narrative-syncing; the extent to which Alec expects Berry to take others's statements as narrative-syncing; the extent to which Alec, if so inclined, to punish deviations from those expectations.

>How can a person notice it?

If Berry "directs annoyance at" Alec in a way where the annoyance isn't hidden but the reasons for the annoyance are hidden, that might be because Berry expected Alec to coordinate in a narrative-sync but Alec didn't.

If Alec finds himself doing stuff on automatic, not really interested / curious / etc., that might be because he took orders from someone.

> “Why did I even sign up for this program?”

To say something maybe obvious, this seems like a great chance to pry your fingertips under the shield of narratives; why are you here Alec? You were expecting me to do something or know something? Here's a description of some of the tacks I've taken in trying to solve this thing, and why they can't work; what should we do?

I feel kind of conflicted about this post overall, but I certainly think using the concept fairly frequently.

I think a common term for something similar to this is performative speech. Essentially what you're doing in this case is announcing that something is true in such a way as to make it so in some sense. Or, more accurately, in such as a way as to make acting like it is so the norm. Every time a speech act like this is performed, the norm "we act as if this is true" is strengthened slightly.

Curated. I think the underlying concept here is valuable and if we can develop a good ability to notice and reflect on instances of it, this could both improve our collective epistemics and coordination. Kudos to Anna and everyone in the comments who are trying to flesh out the models.

I do think the concept is much the same as performative utterance and there might be some useful stuff in the literature on that, though mostly I don't care about the exact term used so long as we've got some shared handle for the concept. "Narrative syncing" does feel more likely to catch on in our community, maybe, so I'm happy to broadcast it.

As follow-up work, I would love to see someone (or multiple someones) collecting and fleshing out examples of the phenomenon. Or perhaps the best is for people to report their own concrete experiences. I might point to my wedding [? · GW] as a case where my wife and I synced the narrative about our relationship in a way that persists eight years later.

Yes, such sentences are a thing. Kendall Walton calls them "principles of generation" because, according to his analysis, they generate fictional truths (see his Mimesis as Make-Believe). Pointing at the sand and shouting "There is lava there!" we have said something fictionally true, in virtue of the game rule pronounced earlier.  "Narrative syncing" sounds like a broader set of practices that generate and sustain such truths – I like it! (I must say "principles of generation" is a bit clunky anyway – but it's also more specific. Maybe "rule decreeing utterances" would be better?).

Anyway, I could imagine naturally extending this analysis beyond make-believe games to etiquette. The principles of generation here would be generating truths of etiquette. 

And then, if you like, you could follow a (small) minority of philosophers in claiming that morality is constructed of such etiquette truths! See e.g.:
Foot, P., 1972. Morality as a system of Hypothetical Imperatives
Joyce, R., 2001. The Myth of Morality
Kalderon, M. E., 2005. Moral Fictionalism

possible other phrases that don't require inventing new word meanings, and will therefore be understood by people who have not read this article:

• "syncing"
• "setting the tone"
• "set the stage"
• "setting the script"
• "discussing plans"

could anyone help me refine these into a solid replacement? I worry that heavy use of "narrative syncing" will further separate idiolects at a time when we urgently need to be seeking to simplify the universal shared idiolect and avoid proliferation of linguistic standards. In general, jargon is a code smell, especially since there is no isolated group of world savers and ideas need to spread far quickly.

Scenario 3 bothers me. Did you really have to do the thing where you generalize about the whole social group?

Compare:

We try to have a culture around here where there is no vetted-by-the-group answer to this; we instead try to encourage forming your own inside-view model of how AI risk might work, what paths through to a good future might be possible, etc...

with

I don't think I have any specific best answer for this in general. My best suggestion would be to encourage forming your own inside-view model of how AI risk might work, what paths through to a good future might be possible, etc...

To me, the new version sounds more personal, equally helpful, and is not misleading or attempting to do "narrative syncing." (Maybe I just don't understand what's going on, because the first scenario sounded pretty reasonable to me, and seems to contain basically the same content as the third scenario, so I would not have predicted vastly different reactions. The first scenario is phrased a little more negatively, I guess?)

One concept which I think is strongly related is common knowledge (if we extend it to not only refer to beliefs but also to norms). 
I think that a good part of the difference between the scenarios for answering Alec is captured by the difference between sharing personal advice and knowledge compared to sharing common norms and knowledge. The latter will give Alec a lot of information about how to work together and cooperate with "the typical member of" the AI safety community, which is important information independently of whether it would be best for Alec's thinking to adopt the beliefs or follow the advice. At least he will be able to navigate working together with others in the community even if he disagrees with their opinions.

Of course there still can be the failure mode of just aiming to fit in into the group and neglecting the group's intended purpose.
I think one important aspect here is that mentally treating a group's  norms, behaviours and beliefs as being simple and uniform has huge difficulty advantages for establishing common knowledge [LW · GW] and makes it much simpler for an individual to navigate the group. "The Intelligent Social Web [LW · GW]" nicely describes this and also the pull that people feel towards acting out well trodden social roles.

Of course, AI safety might well be one of the topics where we really want people not to just adopt the patterns of thought provided by the group without seriously thinking them through. 

My thoughts for each question:

1. Depending on context, there are a few ways I would communicate this. Take the phrase "We are quiet here." Said to prospective tenants at an apartment complex, it is "communicating group norms." Said to a friend who is talking during a funeral, it is "enforcing group norms". Telling yourself you will do this before you sleep is "enforcing identity norms". You are sharing information, just local information about the group instead of global information about the world. All the examples given are information sharing.
2. Believing in an opinion can be a group norm, and this can be useful or harmful. For example, "We believe victims" may not be bulletproof life advice, but groups which have that group norm often are more useful to survivors of sexual assault than groups which try to figure out if they believe the story first.
3. I think motivations are complex and impossible to fully vocalize. Often I don't realize why I really want or don't want to do something until after I've had the instinctual response. Its possible narratives that obscure the full depth but feel true are good temporary stand ins in these cases. 
4. Communication and enforcement of group and identity norms happens everywhere all the time, but increases the more status is associated with the group or identity.

"Narrative syncing" took a moment to click to me, but when it did it brought up the connotations that I don't see in the examples alone. Personally, the words that first came to mind were "Presupposing into existence", and then after getting a better idea of which facet of this you were intending to convey, "Coordination through presupposition".

While it obviously can be problematic in the ways you describe, I wouldn't view it as "a bad thing" or "a thing to be minimized". It's like.. well, telling someone what to do can be "bossy" and "controlling", and maybe as a society we think we see too much of this failure mode, but sometimes commands really are called for and so too little willingness to command "Take cover!" when necessary can be just as bad.

Before getting into what I see as the proper role of this form of communication, I think it's worth pointing out something relevant about the impression I got when meeting you forever ago, which I'd expect others get as well, and would be expected to lead to this kind of difficulty and this kind of explanation of the difficulty.

It's a little hard to put into words, and not at all a bad thing, but it's this sort of paradoxically "intimidating in reverse" sort of thing. It's this sort of "I care what you think. I will listen and update my models based on what you say" aura that provokes anxieties of "Wait a minute, my status isn't that high here. This doesn't make sense, and I'm afraid if I don't denounce the status elevation I might fall less gracefully soon" -- though without the verbal explanation, of course. But then, when you look at it, it's *not* that you were holding other people above you, and there's no signals of "I will *believe* what you say*" or "I see you as claiming relevant authority here", just a lack of "threatened projection of rejection". Like, there was going to be no "That's dumb. You're dumb for thinking that", and no passive aggression in "Hm. Okay.", just an honest attempt to take things for what they appear to be worth. It's unusually respectful, and therefore jarring when people aren't used to being given the opportunity to take that kind of responsibility.

I think this is a good thing, but if you lack an awareness of how it clashes with expectations people are likely to have, it can be harder to notice and preempt the issues that can come up when people get too intimidated by what you're asking of them, which they are likely to flinch from. Your proposed fix addresses part of this because you're at least saying the "We expect you to think for yourself" part explicitly rather than presupposing it on them, but there are a couple pieces missing. One is that it doesn't acknowledge the "scariness" of being expected to come up with ones own perspectives and offer them to be criticized by very intelligent people who have thought about the subject matter more than you have. Your phrasing downplays it a bit ("no vetted-by-the-group answer to this" is almost like "no right answer here") and that can help, but I suspect that it ends up burying some of the intimidation under the rug rather than integrating it.

The other bit is that it doesn't really address the conceptual possibility that "You should go study ML" is actually the right answer here. This needs a little unpacking, I think.

Respect, including self respect or lack thereof, is a big part of how we reason collectively. When someone makes an explicit argument (or otherwise makes a bid for pointing our attention in a certain direction), we cannot default to always engage and try to fully evaluate the argument on the object level. Before even beginning to do that, we have to decide whether or not and to what extent their claim is worth engaging with, and we do that based on a sense of how likely it is that this person's thoughts will prove useful to engage with. "Respect" is a pretty good term for that valuation, and it is incredibly useful for communicating across inferential distances. It's always necessary to *some* degree (or else discussions go the way political arguments go even about trivial things), and excess amounts let you bridge much larger distances usefully because things don't have to be supported immediately relative to a vastly different perspective. When the homeless guy starts talking about the multiverse, you don't think quite so hard about whether it could be true as if it were a respected physics professor saying the same things. When someone you can see to see things you miss tells you that you're in danger and to follow their instructions if you want to live, it can be viscerally unnerving, and you might find yourself motivated to follow precautions you don't understand -- and it might very well be the right thing to do.

Returning to Alec, he's coming to *you*. Anna freakin' Salamon. He's asking you "What should I do? Tell me what I should do, because *I don't know* what I should do". In response one, you're missing his presupposition that he belongs in a "follower" role, as relates to this question, and elevating to "peer" someone who doesn't feel up to the job, without acknowledging his concerns or addressing them.

In response two, you're accepting the role and feeling uneasy about it, presumably because you intuitively feel like that leadership role is appropriate there, regardless of whether you've put it to words.

In response three, you lead yourself out of a leadership role. This is nice because it actually addresses the issue somewhat, and is a potentially valid use of leadership, but open to unintentional abuse of the same type that your unease with the second response warns of.

Returning to "narrative syncing", I don't see it so much as "syncing", as that implies a sort of symmetry that doesn't exist. It's not "I'm over here, where are  you? How do we best meet up?". It's "We're meeting up *here*. This is where you will be, or you won't be part of the group". It's a decision coming from someone who has the authority to decide.

So when's that a good thing?

Well, put simply, when it's coming from someone who actually has the authority to decide, and when the decision is a good one. Is the statement *true?*

"We don't do that here" might be questionable. Do people there really not do it, or do you just frown at them when they do? Do you actually *know* that people will continue to meet your expectations of them, or is there a little discord that you're "shoulding" at them? Is that a good rule in the first place?

It's worth noticing that we do this all the time without noticing anything weird about it. What else is "My birthday party is this Saturday!", if not syncing narratives around a decision that is stated as fact? But it's *true*, so what's the problem? Or internally, "You know, I *will* go to that party!". They're both decisions and predictions simultaneously because that's how decisions fundamentally work. As long as it's an actual prediction and not a "shoulding", it doesn't suddenly become dishonest if the person predicting has some choice in the matter. Nor is there any thing wrong with exercising choice in good directions.

So as applied to things like "What should I do for AI risk?", where the person is to some degree asking to be coordinated, and telling you that they want your belief or your community's belief because they don't trust themselves to be able to do better themselves, do you have something worth coordinating them toward? Are you sure you don't, given how strongly they believe they need the direction, and how much longer you've been thinking about this?

An answer which denies neither possibility might look like..

"ML. Computer science in general. AI safety orgs. Those are the legible options that most of us currently guess to be best for most, but there's dissent and no one really knows. If you don't know what else to do, start with computer science while working to develop your own inside views about what the right path is, and ditch my advice the moment you don't believe it to be right for you. There's plenty of room for new answers here, and finding them might be one of the more valuable things you could contribute, if you think you have some ideas".
 

When I first read this I intuitively felt like this was a useful pattern (it reminds me of one of the useful bits of Illuminatus!), but I haven't been able to construct any hypotheticals where I'd use it.

I don't think it's a compelling account of your three scenarios. The response in scenario 1 avoids giving Alec any orders, but it also avoids demonstrating the community's value to him in solving the problem.  To a goal-driven Alec who's looking for resources rather superiors, it's still disappointing: "we don't have any agreed-upon research directions, you have to come up with your own" is the kind of insight you can fit in a blog post, not something you have to go to a workshop to learn.  "Why did I sign up for this?" is a pretty rude thing for this Alec to say out loud, but he's kinda right.  In this analysis, the response in scenario 3 is better because it clearly demonstrates value: Alec will have to come up with his own ideas, but he can surround himself with other people who are doing the same thing, and if he has a good idea he can get paid to work on it.

More generally, I think ambiguity between syncing and sharing is uncommon and not that interesting.  Even when people are asking to be told what to do, there's usually a lot of overlap between "the things the community would give as advice" and "the things you do to fit in to the community".  For example, if you go to a go club and ask the players there how to get stronger at go, and you take their advice, you'll both get stronger and go and become more like the kind of person who hangs out in go clubs.  If you just want to be in sync with the go club narrative and don't care about the game, you'll still ask most of the same questions: the go players will have a hard time telling your real motivation, and it's not clear to me that they have an incentive to try.

But if they did care about that distinction, one thing they could do is divide their responses into narrative and informative parts, tagged explicitly as "here's what we do, and here's why": "We all studied beginner-level life and death problems before we tried reading that book of tactics you've got, because each of those tactics might come up once per game, if at all, whereas you'll be thinking about life and death every time you make a move".  Or for the AI safety case, "We don't have a single answer we're confident in: we each have our own models of AI development, failure, and success, that we came to through our own study and research.  We can explain those models to you but ultimately you will have to develop your own, probably more than once.  I know that's not career advice, as such, but that's preparadigmatic research for you." (note that I only optimized that for illustrating the principle, not for being sound AI research advice!)

tl;dr I think narrative syncing is a natural category but I'm much less confident that “narrative syncing disguised as information sharing” is a problem worth noting, and in the AI-safety example I think you're applying it to a mostly unrelated problem.

I find this a useful concept, but the term itself is a horrible misnomer? "Narrative syncing" is a poor way of describing what I would call "coordination" (as an activity - "he's in charge of coordination") or as speech-act (maybe "coordinative statement") - as in the "coordination problem": https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095637587#:~:text=A%20situation%20in%20which%20the,with%20what%20the%20others%20do.

This is an important misnomer! If you say something is "narrative syncing" as opposed to "information sharing", the implication is that the statement contains a "narrative" as opposed to "information" - whereas a "coordinating statement" can include only factual information but is for social purposes what you call "narrative syncing." I don't know how else to say this. To quote the author directly: “narrative syncing disguised as information sharing” - why use such language? "Disguised" implies that one isn't the other, except it clearly is? "Narrative syncing" or, as I would label it, "coordination" is why we communicate.  "Information sharing" is how we achieve our goals? If we didn't have a goal behind a sharing information, unless the goal is sharing information for its own sake, why would we bother spending the energy and effort at all? 

In short, I largely agree with AllAmericanBreakfast - it's "leadership language", but it's also just - language, meant to influence the behaviours and beliefs of others (which extends beyond leaders to every coordinative activity even from a subordinate's position). The confusion is almost academic - OP seems to be interested in how and why they are used is social contexts, and what effects result from it - which means that of course it depends on social context and culture. How the OP would argue about sentences being (linguistically) "narrative syncing" in say, a Chinese context, with (to make it more difficult for the OP) say tone and body language, as opposed to understanding it as speech-act (socially/politically) would be interesting to me.

If you are still looking for a different term for this phenomenon, I suggest “preaching” - persuasion by social pressure.