The Dangerous Economist: You Don’t Have to Be a Jerk to Succeed

Sunday, February 11, 2024

You Don’t Have to Be a Jerk to Succeed

Pop-culture icons celebrated for their sheer nastiness may encourage the idea that bad behavior is the path to power. But research shows it’s often the other way around.

By Yascha Mounk. Yascha Mounk is a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time.

Adam Smith's "invisible hand" suggests that if you follow your own self interest, you will promote the interests of society. I have had some posts on this issue of being selfish vs. being altruistic and if they can actually be separated before. So those links are at the end.

Excerpts:

"But is the assumption that being a jerk will make you successful actually true?
There’s some reason to think that it may be. Psychologists have found that people who are high in the psychological trait of “disagreeableness” are more likely to enjoy success in certain fields, especially those with a heavy emphasis on creativity. Samuel Hunter of Pennsylvania State University and Lily Cushenbery of Stony Brook University, for example, asked 200 college students to come up with ideas for an online marketing campaign and then work together to select the best ideas. In a 2014 study, they found that the ideas of highly disagreeable students—that is, of people who tend to behave in ways that are “more argumentative, egotistical, aggressive, headstrong and hostile”—were more likely to be selected."
But it is important not to jump to conclusions from a few salient examples. As it turns out, other research suggests that, in most contexts, being disagreeable does not help you to get ahead—and may even be a serious disadvantage.
To rigorously answer the question of whether being a jerk makes people more successful, Cameron Anderson, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of California at Berkeley, decided to run an elaborate test. He measured the personalities of 457 college students and then followed their career trajectory over a period of 14 years. What he found was surprising: Contrary to expectations, disagreeable people were no more successful in pursuing power in the workplace than their more agreeable colleagues.
"disagreeable people did have one apparent advantage: “Disagreeable individuals were intimidating, which would have elevated their power.” But the advantage derived from their domineering behavior was offset by a concomitant disadvantage: “They also had poorer interpersonal relationships at work” and this offset “any possible power advantage their behavior might have provided.”
Anderson’s takeaway was unequivocal: “No matter the individual or the context, disagreeableness did not give people an advantage in the competition for power—even in more cutthroat, ‘dog-eat-dog’ organizational cultures.”"
"nobody wants to be surrounded by egotists with a completely inflated sense of their brilliance. Sometimes, braggadocio may help you get promoted; more often, it will make people do what they can to avoid having to be around you."
"Having power seems to inspire people to engage in selfish behavior. As Dean C. Ludwig of Lourdes University and Clinton O. Longenecker of the University of Toledo showed in a classic study in the Journal of Business Ethics in 1993, successful leaders don’t seem to act like jerks because they are especially immoral or face especially stiff competition. On the contrary, success provides them with privileged access to people and to information; gives them “unrestrained control of organizational resources”; and inflates their sense of invincibility. Their behavior, in other words, is a “by-product of success.”"
"Powerful people can get away with being jerks much more easily. But it does not follow that being a jerk will help to make you powerful."