Why it is good to be a jerk

Think of someone who seems to care a lot about having others look up to them. This person probably has (or wants to have) a leadership role of some kind. It should also be someone you don’t like, or at least have mixed feelings about. It doesn’t have to be someone you know personally, or even someone who actually exists. It could be a figure from a movie or show. Think about someone like that.

Now think about the kinds of things this person probably does on a daily basis. Do you think they lead by example, treating others as they would like to be treated? Or do they seem like they might be a bit of a crass ass? Do they humbly gather the opinions of others before making a decision, or do they declare what they know to be right without consultation?

Chances are, you thought of someone who uses the dominance strategy. Dominance and prestige are two broad strategies that people use to gain influence in their groups. These concepts are rooted in principles of evolutionary biology and cultural transmission.

Dominance is a very old strategy that humans share with their nonhuman primate cousins, as well as most other group-living species. Organisms that use dominance gain influence by forcing others to do what they want. In nonhuman animals, this usually means the biggest and strongest use intimidation and aggression to scare others into submission. Humans retain ancient mental circuitry that links dominance with physical size, facial masculinity, and muscularity. But we also live in new times (by evolutionary standards). Today, we can coerce others into doing what we want by saying things like “your performance review might not look so good if you don’t get this report done by tomorrow” and “I’ll give you a bajillion dollars if you take down that new bill about saving kittens in trees.”

Prestige, on the other hand, is much rarer in the animal kingdom (exclusive to humans, and perhaps some dolphins). People who use prestige gain the respect and admiration of others by demonstrating useful knowledge or skills. Transformative leaders like Gandhi and Mother Teresa had immense social influence not because they intimidated or coerced others, but because their extraordinary intellect, wisdom, and discipline naturally attracted millions of devoted followers.

Over the last 20 years, there has been a lot of great work done on dominance and prestige. We know about the things dominant people do to maintain power, the things prestigious people do to maintain respect, and the personality correlates of each strategy. We even know how effective each strategy is for maintaining social rank over the course of months and years.

WHY YOU SHOULD BE A BAD (GOOD) PERSON

However, there’s an interesting bias in the literature that I don’t think gets talked about enough. The bias is this: through their work, researchers have implied that dominance is bad. For example, there is an entire line of research dedicated to figuring out why people support dominant leaders. There isn’t a parallel group of scholars pounding out dissertations on why people support prestigious leaders, because to psychologists, the reasons are obvious.

And it’s true that compared to highly prestigious people, highly dominant people are less likely to have the desires of others in mind. People who are very dominant tend to be arrogant and selfish. Dominant people are more likely to possess “Dark Triad” personality traits—narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism (the tendency to manipulate others). Since society is built on ideas like reciprocal altruism,² cooperation, and the delay of gratification, it’s no wonder that dominance is bad and prestige is good.

But actually, I think dominance is good. Or at least, the constellation of traits and behaviors that correlate with dominance have real social value. Here’s why.

1. 1. Dominance is an essential element of a well-run society. At its core, dominance is about forcing others to do something against their will. In large-scale societies, it’s impossible to keep an eye on everyone, all the time. When people feel anonymous, they are more likely to shirk their duties and coast on the hard work of others. To incentivize cooperation and honesty, a large society needs to place moral value on formal authority. Many nations imprison far too many people for embarrassingly trivial things, but the truth is that the formal authority granted to responsible agents (e.g., law enforcement and judges) is necessary to keep things going smoothly. Indeed, research has found that dominant people are especially good at enforcing cooperation in groups.

2. 2. Dominance often leads to a whole hell of a lot of innovation. When you have power, others are dependent on you, rather than you on them. Power is often represented by having a lot of money. People who use dominance really like having power/money because it frees them up to, I don’t know, have a party on a yacht, or do whatever else they want, unshackled from the wants of others. People who use dominance are the ones creating new technologies, producing new medicines, and doing other world-changing things that make you a yachtload of money. I guess you could argue that people who use prestige also produce a lot of innovation, but I think the people who use prestige the most end up in academia, writing on Substack, rather than in Silicon Valley.

3. 3. Dominance is the dark of human nature that allows us to recognize and celebrate prestige, the light. This one is a bit more philosophical, but hear me out. Eventually, life will end for us and everyone we care about. That uncomfortable fact is what motivates us to love and form connections with others. The pain of loss and failure helps us cherish what we have. I can only speak for myself, but I feel that if I were immortal, my attachments to others would mean less. We seize the day because there are only so many days available to us. In a similar way, I think the best parts of prestige—the humility, skillfulness, and mentorship—are only meaningful when you consider how things could be different. Dominance is a strategy that is used by many, many species, which suggests that its evolutionary roots reach far back into the history of life on the planet. In that way, the dominance strategy might be like emotions. Sometimes emotions, like anger and fear, are hard to control. They occur automatically, without us consciously willing them to appear, because they are very old, evolutionarily speaking. In the same way that emotions can feel automatic and hard to control, dominance might be something that comes easy to us, and that we have to resist.

OK, DOMINANCE MIGHT NOT BE ALL BAD, SO WHAT

1. This matters because the lens through which we view dominance and prestige affects how we study it. For example, these constructs are usually measured with a self-report scale. The dominance scale includes items like “Some people are afraid of me” and “I am willing to use aggressive tactics to get my way.”

   Many people will refuse to admit these things, to themselves or to nosy psychologists, even if they are true. And even though the most dominant people might endorse these items, my guess is that a lot of people are unaware of how dominant they really are in their social lives. The items of the self-report scale (and its cousin, the peer-report scale) are not optimized to capture all of the ways in which people can be dominant.

PLAUSIBLY DENYING THAT I AM DOMINANT

1. Modern social norms discourage open displays of dominance. This tendency probably goes back to our roots as egalitarian hunter-gatherers, when cultural innovations like weapons and gossip leveled the playing field for smaller, more vulnerable people. On the African savanna, open displays of aggression might have been met by threats of exclusion from the group or even execution.

   But the interesting thing about human communication is that there are many ways to do it. Dominance can be displayed by physically beating someone up, but such bullying will often lead to severe consequences. Instead, over the last 2.5 million years, humans have found clever ways to act dominantly without getting caught.

   For instance, dominance can be expressed with vocal pitch. If you put some strangers in a room, ask them to work on a puzzle together, and record them, you will find that a negotiation of social rank occurs quickly and implicitly. Researchers have found that in a matter of minutes, some people’s voices dip to a lower frequency, while others remain the same or even increase in pitch. Later on, the people whose voices got deeper were rated by other group members as more dominant (using the peer-report scale I mentioned above). Highly dominant people (but not necessarily prestigious people) also simply talk more than others in group settings. Maybe it’s not what you say, but how you say it.

   And if you’ve ever felt the penetrating glare of a boss in a bad mood, you know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of nonverbal dominance. Although a dominant boss or disagreeable friend might admit to sometimes having a temper, they might not necessarily think of themselves as dominant because of the negative connotation.

   The idea that people might subtly use dominant tactics to influence others, even in a world that discourages it, is fascinating to me. How can they evade punishment? My guess is that some amount of plausible deniability is critical for dominance to work as often as it does. If people aren’t 100% sure that they just witnessed an act of intimidation or coercion, they might not call it out.

   All of this is to say that I think there’s a bright future for the study of dominance. I like the self-report measure that currently exists, but it could be revised to be more content-neutral. The Implicit Association Test, which you can take here, is most often used in psychology research to assess people’s automatic biases, but it could be used to get a better sense of how dominant people really think they are. With better methodologies, we will be better equipped to understand how dominance affects our lives—from the workplace, to friendships, to romantic relationships.

   Dominance is everywhere, especially in media—Logan Roy in Succession, Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones, Walter White in Breaking Bad. The next time you see it, appreciate it. Dominance causes a lot of problems in the world, but for several reasons, it’s hard to imagine life without it. So, we should do our best to understand it.