Out of Character Part 2

With love and jealousy at its disposal, your ant has quite an array of tools to guide you toward forming and keeping lasting relationships. Of course, these forces are constantly competing with the weapons on the gra.s.shopper's side. It's an ongoing tug-of-war to determine whom we bed and whom we wed. Thanks to all the tricks the mind plays on us, predicting whether love or l.u.s.t will ultimately win out can be complicated. As anyone who has ever been in a serious relationship knows, what we think we want in a partner isn't always what's best for us. While we have certain automatic impulses and mechanisms that have evolved to help us meet our romantic goals, they can be co-opted by context or overwhelmed by the forces working for the other side.

So which side to root for? There is no easy answer. Both can get you in trouble, and both can give you exactly what you want. Both can make you act in "good" and "bad" ways, and both are sensitive to information you are not consciously aware you have. How do you make the right decision? How do you know when to give yourself over to l.u.s.t and when to hold out for true love? Whether to channel Casanova or Ward Cleaver? The first step is to understand your goals. Are you looking for Mr. Right, or will you be happy with Mr. Right Now? Are you trying to stay faithful to the one waiting for you at home, or are you trying to find someone new? When you're in the moment, choosing l.u.s.t over love is relatively easy. That's not rocket science. But what about when you know you should choose love? How can you help yourself resist the powerful temptations of l.u.s.t? Well, the first step is to avoid situations where these temptations may arise. Sounds obvious, but think about how easy it is to succ.u.mb to temptations after five tequila shots.

Odysseus, the main character of Homer's epic The Odyssey, seemed to have this problem figured out. On his long voyage from Troy back home to Ithaca, where his wife, Penelope, was awaiting his return, Odysseus and his men pa.s.sed the island inhabited by the Sirens, the irresistible seductresses who used their mellifluous voices to lure men to death by shipwreck against the rocky sh.o.r.e. Odysseus understood that he and his men would be unable to resist the Sirens' song, so he had the crew fill their ears with wax and, as an extra precaution, had his men tie him to the mast of the ship so he'd be unable to steer them toward a rocky doom. It seems the Greeks knew something about character: that we can't count on being able to control our temptations by sheer logic or will.

So if your goal is smooth sailing in your current relationship, avoiding temptations might be the path to travel. Do a bit of soul-searching. Knowing your weaknesses-those cues that make you forget about your soul mate and unleash your inner playmate-will help you know when to tie yourself to the mast and when it's safe to go full steam ahead toward sh.o.r.e.

Of course, how a relationship turns out isn't always up to you. As they say, it takes two to tango. Problems can also arise when you want one thing and your partner wants another. When one person is looking for a fling and the other wants a life partner, all bets are off. This is when the green-eyed monster often takes over. As we've seen, the potential for jealousy resides in each of us, no matter how levelheaded we think we are. If partic.i.p.ants in our experiment felt jealous after only flirting for a few minutes, and if they were willing to cause pain as a result of that jealousy, imagine what can happen when the relationships are more established and meaningful. Very few of us will probably don a wig and a diaper to threaten our rivals at gunpoint, but most of us, whether we want to admit it or not, would probably take the opportunity to make life miserable for our partners and those who poached them. Our character can transform from caring partner to vindictive ex with ease.

4 / FROM PRIDE TO HUBRIS.

The deadliest of the seven sins?

Thomas Mapother had something of a difficult childhood. Ever since he was a young child growing up in Syracuse, New York, he and his family seemed on the move. His father worked as an engineer for General Electric, a job that required him to relocate the family quite often. Thomas and his three sisters must have felt something like nomads as they moved to Ottawa, Missouri, New Jersey, and then Kentucky. Such moves would be hard on any child, but they were all the harder on the Mapother family, as Thomas' father was not the kindest or most trustworthy of men. In fact, as Thomas would later recount, his father was so unpredictable and abusive that the kids' mother, Mary Lee, finally divorced him, taking the kids with her.

The months and weeks following the divorce were quite difficult both psychologically and financially-the family was living near the poverty line. Although the Mapothers accepted food stamps to help with meals, they refused to take welfare. They were a proud family and weren't about to take handouts if they could help it. So everyone went to work. Thomas in particular felt the burden, since even though he was young, he now felt he had to take on the role and responsibilities of the "man of the family." He got a newspaper route and put his weekly earnings straight into the family coffer. For better or for worse, Mary Lee married again relatively quickly-this time to a plastics salesman named Jack South-and the family was on the move yet again.

All the moving around was starting to take a toll. Thomas had attended fifteen different schools by the age of fourteen, and had been bullied in a majority of them. He was always the new kid, and as such, he always had something to prove. With each new school, he had to show his often unwelcoming peers that he was tough enough, and his always-demanding teachers that he was smart enough. To make matters worse, Thomas was quiet by nature and also suffered from dyslexia. He wasn't the kind of kid who became immediately popular, nor the kind who was instantly flagged as the cla.s.s brain. Yet he felt a deep sense of pride that drove him to work relentlessly, pushing himself harder and harder in an attempt to prove himself to others. He toiled for hours at night trying to make sense of the pages of his schoolbooks, a task made even more difficult by his dyslexia. When his family finally settled in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, for his last few years of high school, he joined a number of sports teams. He wasn't a gifted athlete, but he still managed to impress his coaches with his intensity, if not his ability. Thomas had pride in himself and in everything that he did, and it was infectious. It was hard not to root for him.

Thomas quickly was dealt a blow, however, when a knee injury from wrestling put an end to his athletic career. But as one door closed, another opened. He tried out for the school production of Guys and Dolls and was soon bitten by the acting bug. With sports now out of the question, he threw himself into acting with the same single-minded resolve that marked all his endeavors. He took great pride in his growing thespian skills and quickly set his mind to making it as an actor. At eighteen he moved across the river to New York City, where he began pursuing his new career in earnest. By day he took any job he could find-waiter, busboy, porter-and by night he took acting cla.s.ses. He auditioned for anything and everything he could find. He knew he could be the best, but he realized that the only way he was going to reach the top was through a single-minded focus and the highest devotion to his craft.

After many arduous years, this perseverance finally paid off. Thomas Cruise Mapother, who by now had shortened his name to Tom Cruise, was offered an audition for a one-line part in the movie Taps.1 He approached the audition with such intensity and such confidence that Harold Becker, the director, decided to give him a higher-profile role, with billing to match. From that point on, Tom seemed to be a golden boy. He won role after role, and soon became one of the most popular actors in America, with a resume and earning power that were the envy of his peers. A 1989 issue of Time magazine proclaimed, "With each adventure, audiences adjusted their estimation of the young man-from Most Likely to Succeed to All-American Dreamboat to Serious Actor worth taking seriously." As Jeanne Tripplehorn, his costar in The Firm, put it: "He's absolutely gotten better through the years-and seems to be evolving into a man of great character."2 Yet all the praise didn't seem to be going to his head. He was still just as dedicated to his craft, such a picture of pride and professionalism in his work that as Ron Howard, who directed Cruise in Far and Away, noted, he was never once late to set-he would even run on his way to and from the bathroom.3 He eschewed the normal movie star trappings such as luxury trailers, entourages of personal a.s.sistants and stylists, and outrageous prima donna demands. As Rob Reiner said of him: "He forgets he's a star. He just goes along like a normal person."4 And then something suddenly seemed to change. As Tom's career and popularity rocketed further into the stratosphere, it seemed his ego was finally beginning to catch up. Tom's interviews suddenly became defensive and dismissive. All traces of that humble, hardworking young man who had taken a paper route to provide for his family had disappeared. In his now infamous appearances on Today and Oprah, Cruise seemed quite simply to have gone off the deep end. By this time, Tom had also become a devout Scientologist-a religion, he was quick to note, that was only for "the enlightened" like him.

Once the favored actor of moviegoers worldwide, Tom Cruise is now more often a target of late-night comedy shows. Once lauded in the press for his professionalism and talent, he's now mocked in the tabloids for his egomaniacal showmanship. Once seen by Americans as coolly confident, he is now almost universally considered arrogant and out of touch. So what happened? It's easy to speculate that maybe he was an egomaniac all along. But based on what we know of his story, that doesn't seem to be the case. Sure, he was always driven by a sense of pride in his role and in his duties, but that pride didn't seem to translate to arrogance early on. To the contrary, it was his pride that drove him to work so hard helping his family make ends meet. It was his pride that kept him persevering at his schoolwork in the face of dyslexia. It was his pride that motivated him to work so hard to hone his acting skills and land his early roles. Without it, we probably never would have heard of Tom Cruise. Yet at a certain point in his career, pride turned suddenly to hubris, a hubris that was on very public display as he lectured Matt Lauer on his moral superiority, and as he "jumped the couch" on Oprah.

So what pushed him over that treacherous line between pride and hubris? Despite what some might think, Tom's seeming shift in character had nothing to do with his adopting the doctrines of Scientology. No, Scientology, with its message to the elite, was just a symptom, not the cause. When you think about it, it's a familiar story. Whether it's t.i.tans of Wall Street such as Richard Fuld, who rose from being a hardworking trader at Lehman Brothers to the arrogant CEO who was largely responsible for the company's collapse, or politicians such as former senator John Edwards, who rose from humble beginnings in a North Carolina mill town and ended up as the poster boy for self-indulgence, we've all seen how easily pride can turn into hubris when the temptations are ripe. What may not be so easy to accept, however, is that like the other character "flaws" we've been talking about, this can happen to anyone. How, when, and why pride turns into hubris is a complicated question. And as you'll find, it's one that has surprising answers.

Pride's PR problem.

Pride-it's got a bad rap. Those of you who spent any time listening to sermons (like we did) may remember that not only is pride one of the seven deadly sins, it's considered the deadliest of them all. And that's not just in Christian theology either. In Buddhist teachings pride is one of the ten fetters that prevent enlightenment, and the story is much the same in the Torah and the Tao Te Ching. Even modern-day secular texts paint pride as a moral failing. More than 90 percent of the synonyms for pride in any English thesaurus have a negative connotation: arrogance, conceitedness, being full of oneself, and the like.

Can this be right? Sure, sometimes pride can get out of control and land you in dangerous waters, but if pride is always to be avoided, some facts just don't fit. Yes, pride can lead to poor decisions if we a.s.sume that we can do no wrong; yet can't taking pride in our work actually motivate us to do a good job? Yes, we hate hubris in a leader, but (if the past few presidential elections are any indication), we also don't take to following timid wimps. The way to make sense of these seeming contradictions is to realize that pride may not be what you think it is. Like all the supposed character traits we're discussing in this book, pride isn't a fixed feature of our personality, nor is it always a vice. By the same token, humility isn't always a virtue. What may be even more surprising is that pride doesn't always come from within; it often emerges as a response to what's going on around us. So whether you exhibit pride or hubris, whether it helps you to lead or makes you despised, is all determined moment by moment as a result of the ongoing battle in your mind between the ant and the gra.s.shopper.

Pride and perseverance: Working hard or hardly working?

What motivates us to work hard? To persevere, like the young Tom Cruise, in the face of obstacles and challenges? One answer, we believe, often boils down to pride. If you were thinking the answer is a deep-seated desire to succeed or to be recognized, you're not entirely wrong. These desires are indeed linked to pride. But contrary to what you might think, pride doesn't always come from satisfying some goal we set for ourselves. No, pride, at least to start, stems from external factors in our social world. Put differently, what makes us feel proud isn't always up to us.

One of the biggest challenges we face in life is the universal quest for social status. Status is something we all want. After all, the higher you climb on the social ladder, the more desirable you are as a leader, friend, colleague, or spouse. In terms of long-term rewards, high status means you're golden. Yet making your way up the ladder usually requires a lot of hard work: developing skills as an athlete, getting top grades as a student, earning promotions at work, building a huge network of friends. Sure, it might be easier to sit at home and be a couch potato, but this option, although perhaps pleasant in the short term, yields few rewards in the long run. Gaining status, then, is a cla.s.sic battle between our dueling interests. While our inner gra.s.shopper just wants short-term pleasure, the ant knows that in the long term, when the playing is done, people look to, rely on, and reward the experts, the leaders, the ones who got ahead. But, of course, the way to be one of these admired few and to reap the a.s.sociated benefits almost always involves some level of perseverance. That's where pride comes in.

If our view of how pride works is correct, two things must follow. First, pride has to be socially determined to some degree. After all, if the whole point of pride is to make us valuable to the group, then the qualities that makes us proud would have to be something the group deems important. If this is the case, we should be able to make people feel proud of anything-even trivial things they've never cared about before-just by giving them a sense that these things are valued by peers. Second, this feeling of pride should motivate people to work harder and longer, even at things that are very onerous. If both these hypotheses turn out to be true, we'd have pretty convincing evidence that pride is the engine that drives you to cultivate and demonstrate the skills and abilities, whatever they may be, that will raise your long-term social standing.

Sculling to spinning: It's the pride that counts.

It was five o'clock on yet another gray and chilly morning in Portland, Oregon, when Lisa Williams was awakened by the shrill sound of her alarm. Though still groggy, she roused herself, and, as she did most mornings, dragged herself out of bed and into the cold morning to meet her sculling teammates on the banks of the Willamette River. By the time she returned to her apartment several hours later, she would have blisters on her hands, her arms and back would be sore, and her clothing would be soaked through. But there was no time for rest: it was on to a full day of grueling cla.s.ses at Lewis and Clark College.

Why this self-inflicted torture? That's a good question, and one that was on Lisa's mind when she arrived in Boston to join our lab group as a doctoral student. Sure, it was good exercise, but a workout at a more human hour, in the campus gym, with its music, television, and better access to a warm latte, would have been much easier. Yes, being on a college sports team looked good on a resume, but there were much easier ways to appear well rounded than waking at five o'clock every day to endure physical labor in the damp and cold. So what kept her going? Lisa had a sneaking suspicion that it had something to do with pride.

It was an idea that resonated with our group. The only problem was, how could we explore it experimentally? We realized that if we wanted to test whether pride motivated people to persevere at something, all we had to do was give people a difficult or unpleasant task, make them feel proud of their ability to do it, and then watch to see if they would work longer and harder at it as a result. Seemed simple enough, but there was a catch. The easiest way to induce pride is to tell people that they did well at something. But research by Albert Bandura at Stanford has shown that simply knowing you can do something well can increase your willingness to do it, whether you feel proud or not, as long as it's something that interests you.5 So if we were going to show not only that pride could be socially determined but also that it leads to perseverance, we had to be able to separate knowing you're competent at something from feeling proud about it. Luckily, Lisa came up with an ingenious idea.

We decided to create the following situation. We'd bring partic.i.p.ants into the lab and have them complete a long, difficult, and tedious task. We'd then do one of three things before asking them to work on a second onerous task that they believed tapped the same abilities as the first. We'd either tell them nothing about their performance on the first task, perfunctorily inform them that they obtained a high score on the first test, or give them the same information about their high score but add praise and acclaim. If Lisa's suspicions were right, then only the partic.i.p.ants who'd been given acclaim would persevere longer on the second task. That is, simply knowing they're good at a task wouldn't be enough to motivate them to spend more time doing a similar one if it was unpleasant-but pride would.

Here's how it worked. You arrive at our lab believing that you are going to take part in a study on something called visuospatial cognition. As you settle into your seat at one of the computers, Lisa tells you that you'll be completing several tasks designed to gauge how your mind processes spatial relations. If you're like most people, this statement probably translates as follows: boring. But it gets worse. "What will happen," Lisa goes on, "is that you'll see arrays of different-colored dots flash on your screen for two seconds at a time. Your job is to estimate how many of those dots are red." Sound like fun yet? After another internal yawn, you turn toward the screen of your PC. Different-colored dots, ranging from ten to forty in number, flash on the screen in various patterns, and after each trial the computer asks you how many of the dots were red. In actuality, there always were too many red dots to count in the time allotted, but not so many that people would feel that there was no way to produce a meaningful guess. Of course, we didn't care how many red dots people saw; our aim was only to give people a task that they believed measured some kind of trivial ability-a task that seemed difficult enough to be annoying, but not so hard that people wouldn't believe us when we told them they'd done well.

Now here's where the social factor came in. Our pilot testing showed that, as we suspected, most people didn't seem to care all that much about what their visuospatial skills were, let alone even know what the term meant. Nonetheless, we expected that if we could lead them to believe that people around them (i.e., Lisa) thought the skill was important, they would all of a sudden feel proud of this new ability they'd never known they had (remember, our theory is that pride, at its base, is a social phenomenon). So if you were in this third group of subjects, after you finished the tedious task of estimating red dots, Lisa would reenter the room brandishing a piece of paper and a very impressed look. As she handed you the paper with your percentile score near the top of the curve, she'd smile and shake her head a little in disbelief while saying, "Good job! That's one of the highest scores we've seen!" Then, after a few questions designed (unbeknownst to you, of course) to gauge how proud you were feeling, she would leave you with another task that again a.s.sessed your visuospatial ability. But before she left she would inform you that there were far too many questions for any one person to answer, and so people were only being asked to work until they felt like they had done enough; then they were free to go.

For the other two groups, the interaction with Lisa differed only slightly. In one, Lisa simply handed partic.i.p.ants the report that noted their superior percentile rank without commenting on the score. These people would know they performed well, but the ability wouldn't be marked as praiseworthy or socially valued.6 In the other, no feedback of any kind was given. Lisa just entered the room and started people on the second task.

This final stage consisted of mental rotation problems-the kind where you have to decide if one strange three-dimensional shape can be spun in s.p.a.ce to match the image of another. Let's just say that for most people this is about as fun as a root ca.n.a.l. Of course, what we ultimately cared about wasn't how well people did but rather how long they continued working before clicking the quit b.u.t.ton. In a nutsh.e.l.l, we wanted to know how long they would persevere.

The results couldn't have been any clearer. Not only did the people who received acclaim suddenly feel pride for a skill they hadn't cared about a few minutes before, but this pride-stemming from the simple fact that Lisa seemed impressed with their score-was all it took to make them work longer and harder on the awful mental rotation task. Those who were made to feel proud of their visuospatial abilities persevered much longer than those who knew they scored well but weren't made to feel proud or those who received no feedback at all. In fact, the more pride they felt, the longer they worked.7 What these findings clearly show is that pride and the resulting perseverance didn't have anything to do with the nature of the task or the ability it represented. The task was difficult and tedious and measured a skill that most of the partic.i.p.ants never thought about. After all, for most people, being good at visuospatial cognition is just about as important as being good at stapling. Yet simply because we marked this ability as socially important, by having someone care about and give praise for a good performance on it, our partic.i.p.ants suddenly felt pride and worked their b.u.t.ts off. Albeit on a smaller scale, we see pride working here as it did for Lisa in her morning sculling workouts and for the young Tom Cruise, giving them the focus, drive, and perseverance needed to reach their goals. In short, we see that pride can lead to long-term success, not just to sin and ruin.

Now, if you're like most people we know, a nagging question may be lurking in your mind. These findings clearly show that what makes you feel proud can be determined to a surprising degree by what others around you seem to value. But what about what you value? We all know some people who take pride in things that seem, to put it simply, odd. For example, every year at the Illinois State Fair, there is fierce compet.i.tion to be crowned the king (or sometimes queen) of the hog-calling contest. That's right, people spend all year suffering sore throats and splitting headaches as they practice getting their squeals to be just the right pitch. In South Cheshire in the United Kingdom, people come from as far away as Australia to compete in the World Worm Charming compet.i.tion, where they demonstrate their finely honed techniques for stabbing pitchforks in the ground to lure hundreds of worms to the surface. Granted, these may seem like ridiculous or extreme examples, but the point is that people can take pride in idiosyncratic skills or talents that few others care about. On a personal level, both of us know this to be true. We're academics, after all; we have colleagues who take pride in such things as a comprehensive knowledge about the reproductive habits of dung beetles, understanding the differences among the six flavors of quarks, or the ability to read Sumerian texts.

How can we square these very personal variations with our argument that pride is a function of those around us? The answer is simple once you take into account the difference between the older and newer parts of our brains. Remember that the intuitions and emotional responses that seem to emerge spontaneously in us are the results of the older mind's attempts to ensure our survival. Way back when, evolutionarily speaking, the abilities or attributes that were worth developing were the ones that would raise your status and value to the group, as this would help you build a strong social network to rely on to protect you from predators, share resources, and make you a more desirable partner. Laziness wouldn't be a wise long-term strategy, so pride, thanks to the mechanisms of the ant, would push you to get up and work. As the mind evolved, however, the notion of the self became more elaborate. We are one of the few species that have the ability to take a third-person view of ourselves and, thereby, the ability to construct our own social world. That is, we can see ourselves as we are seen by others-we can be our own audience. And as we noted in the introductory chapter, this capacity for abstract thought, which evolved fairly recently in the grand scheme of things, brought about a fundamental shift in how some psychological processes work.

When it comes to pride, what this concept of "self" means is that we don't need someone else to tell us what skills or attributes matter; we can now tell ourselves. This isn't to say that the regard of others stopped mattering, or that pride comes only from within. If this were the case, our experiment never would have worked. After all, who really cares about how good they are at visuospatial cognition? What we're saying is that thanks to the ability to reflect on ourselves, we now experience the pride that comes from within the same way we experience praise from others. We, in essence, can be our own peers. Remember, pride evolved as a way to ensure our social status and, therefore, success in the long run, and it still works this way. But it's important to remember that it's now both internal and external audiences that we care about.

Pride and status: Is he a leader or an a.s.s?

Mission accomplished-at least according to the banner hanging over the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, as George W. Bush became the first sitting president to land a plane on an aircraft carrier. The media coverage was impossible to miss. Here was the president, in full pilot regalia, strutting across the deck to give a speech proclaiming a military victory-the end of hostilities in Iraq. Everyone ate it up. Sure, you might expect gushing from the conservative pundits, but this time partisan ideology didn't seem to matter. Chris Matthews called Bush's appearance an "amazing display of leadership."8 Keith Olbermann proclaimed, "We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger."9 Even the liberal columnist Joe Klein had to admit, "That was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day."10 On that day, George Bush was the very embodiment of a proud leader of a proud nation, and we loved it.

Of course, it didn't stay that way. As it became clearer and clearer that the Iraq war wasn't near being won, and as other tensions flared in the region, what at first was a symbol of national pride became an albatross, a symbol of the president's hubris. By the time he left office, George Bush had gone from being one of the most popular to one of the most despised presidents in modern history.

Of course, swings in popularity aren't uncommon in politics. In November 2008, many Americans couldn't have been prouder to have elected Barack Obama, an African American man whose name had become synonymous with the call for change. Just a few months into his presidency, he was one of the most admired leaders of recent time, with over 70 percent of Americans reporting they saw him as a strong leader, a likable person, and a source of confidence for the country. Yet by the beginning of 2010, many of those same voters believed they'd made a mistake. They felt that Obama had been overconfident in his ability to bring about change, that he'd talked a big game. Having pushed hard for major changes in health care and environmental policy, he was cast by the opposition as arrogant, and his popularity had plummeted further in less time than that of almost any other new president in history, resulting in Republicans retaking the House of Representatives in the November 2010 elections. Of course, for our purposes, what one feels about either man's politics is irrelevant. The point is that in both cases, and in countless others, the very same quality-pride-that once seemed so virtuous in a leader had become a vice. It had become hubris.

Which brings up another question: Do we like proud people? Do we admire them or despise them? Or, to ask it slightly differently: is acting proud something that signals a "good" character or a "bad" one? We've just spent some time trying to convince you that, contrary to the common view, pride can be a virtue-it motivates you to work hard and persevere so that you can reap long-term social benefits. But if the overall goal is high social status, then shouldn't pride d.a.m.n well make people like you? After all, isn't that the whole point of navigating social life? We've already established that while in the short run selfishness can sometimes be beneficial, in the long term having friends we can rely on is something we can't live without.

So if pride brings status, why are overly proud people sometimes so detestable? We believe that the trick to untangling whether or not pride is an attractive element of character rests on one critical distinction: whether we're talking about pride that is earned (often termed authentic pride) or pride that is unearned (often termed hubris). Telling the two apart, and even controlling which one you'll exhibit in any given situation, is a complicated business. But before we tackle that question, we first have to prove that pride can breed liking in the first place.

The look of pride.

Close your eyes. Imagine something that makes you feel proud-maybe your golf handicap, or your killer homemade lasagna. Notice anything different? Did your posture just get a little straighter? Are you holding your head just a bit higher? Is your chest expanding just a tad? Believe it or not, these are all actual physiological changes that people have been found to exhibit when they're feeling pride. Why? Well, if pride is going to help raise your social status, it probably should have a physical marker, a visual shortcut of some kind, to let others know you have it. Just as Rolexes and BMWs are cultural signals of high status, the mind has imbued the body with certain physical signals of high status, cues that we all subconsciously use to judge whether someone is capable, confident, and leadership material or low on the ladder of importance and power.

Surely you've heard the common expression "puffed up with pride." Well, this is where it comes from. The fact that these physical changes do seem to occur spontaneously, often without us even being aware of them, suggests that they are fairly ancient markers-markers from a time when we didn't have medals, promotions, or Prada. Jessica Tracy and her colleagues at the University of British Columbia have conducted some of the best work doc.u.menting how we recognize pride in others. They were the first to scientifically identify the markers noted above and to show both their innateness and their universal link to perceptions of status. In a series of experiments conducted across various cultures, Tracy and her colleagues found that everyone from Canadian college students to members of an isolated West African ethnic group easily recognized and identified the expanded posture and head tilt as being signs of pride. These automatic expressions of pride are so innate and so deeply ingrained, in fact, that Tracy and her colleagues even found them to be exhibited by congenitally blind athletes upon winning events in the Paralympics.11 These athletes couldn't possibly have learned what pride looked like by watching others, yet they still displayed the very same physical signs.

Now, if people seem to show these signs automatically and universally, it follows that they must have some communicative power, or that others must recognize them for what they are. And indeed, work by Tracy and her group showed that not only do people agree on what pride looks like (and emit the same signals themselves when they are proud), they also intuitively link these physical expressions of pride to status. In another series of experiments, Tracy and her colleagues used a common psychological tool, the Implicit a.s.sociation Test (IAT), to find out what the mind automatically a.s.sociates with these physical expressions (as we noted in the previous chapter, psychologists consider measures such as the IAT, which require the brain to make speeded-up categorizations of stimuli, a much more accurate window into people's true beliefs than self-reporting measures such as questionnaires). What Tracy and her colleagues found time and again was that these physical expressions of pride automatically triggered a.s.sociations with words such as dominant or important, which clearly indicated perceptions of high social status.12 In other words, in the blink of an eye, without any other evidence to go on, these subtle physical cues are enough to make people see another person's character in a very specific light.

Now, keep in mind that while this study found pride makes people appear to have high social status, it doesn't say anything about whether it makes them seem more likable. As the victim of any bully or overbearing boss knows, being dominant doesn't necessarily make you attractive. But in the end, isn't that the goal, at least for members of a social species like us? All of which brings us back to the earlier question: are proud people likable? To untangle this question, we went back to the lab to see if people working in real groups and on real problems would follow and like proud people, or write them off as arrogant a.s.ses.

Follow the leader.

"Great," sighed Claire. "I hate group projects." Claire had arrived just a few minutes earlier to take part in an experiment advertised to investigate problem-solving strategies. She was now sitting in a room with two other women, Maya and Ashley. Like Claire, Maya was an undergraduate who'd agreed to partic.i.p.ate in our study. Ashley, on the other hand, worked for us, though naturally the other two didn't know it.

Our colleague Lisa, who was again leading the experiment, told the three of them that they'd be completing two spatial problem-solving tasks. One would be completed individually and the other as a team. "Okay," Lisa said. "Turn to your computers and complete the first task. When you finish, come into the next room one at a time for a vision test." The first task was a mental rotation task similar to the one we described earlier in this chapter. Much as before, computer screens repeatedly presented two partially unfolded Rubik's-cube-like shapes. The task was to decide if the one on the left could be rotated in some fashion to match the one on the right. After each person finished, she headed into the adjoining control room of the lab to find Lisa.

Maya was first. "Come in and have a seat," Lisa said, and guided her to a chair in front of a computer. On the screen was a vision test that took a few seconds to complete. "We're just having you complete this to make sure everyone is seeing the images in the same way," Lisa informed her. Then she sent Maya back into the room where the experiment was taking place. Next came Claire. Same test, same explanation from Lisa. But this time, as Lisa was finishing, the printer whirred and out came an official-looking score sheet. "Wow," Lisa said to Claire as she glanced at it, "you scored in the ninety-seventh percentile on that mental rotation test-that's one of the best scores we've seen! Great job!" And back Claire went into the other room, suddenly feeling proud because of the praise that, unbeknownst to her, had nothing to do with how she actually performed. Next came Ashley, who chatted with Lisa for a few minutes before going back into the room to continue the charade (Ashley, after all, wasn't really part of the experiment, so there was no need for her to go through the motions of actually taking the vision test).

Now it was time for the group task. Lisa sat the three women around a small table and showed them a wooden cube made up of twenty-seven smaller cubes attached by hinges. She then unwound it so that it was now a single string of twenty-seven adjoining cubes. As you've probably guessed, the new team was about to be given a task that involved spatial rotation-the very skill about which Claire had just been praised. "Your job," Lisa said, "is to put this puzzle back together in the next five minutes." Lisa returned to the control room to videotape what happened next.

Ashley grabbed the puzzle first (as we'd instructed her to do) and worked on it for a minute. "Can I try?" Claire asked rather insistently, reaching for the wooden figure. Claire worked intently, but soon Maya wanted to give it a go. Only after Maya asked for a second time did Claire hand it over. As Maya took her turn twisting and turning the pieces to fit them together, Claire pointed and gestured to guide her; it seemed she couldn't refrain from offering advice on what moves to try. When Maya hesitated, Claire quickly reached for the puzzle, offering to take it. And so it went, not just with Claire but with all the other partic.i.p.ants who received acclaim for their work on the original task. Overwhelmingly, the people we'd made to feel proud of their spatial abilities took charge of the group's efforts, monopolizing the puzzle for 2025 percent longer than their teammates.13 In many ways, this finding that inducing pride made people want to work longer and harder is just further proof of our earlier results. But what effect did this behavior have on how the others viewed them? Did the other members of the group respect them for taking charge, or did they resent them for being pushy and overbearing? To find out, at the end of the experiment we had all partic.i.p.ants rate two things: how dominant they felt the others in the group had been, and whether or not they liked them.

First, we found that the people who hadn't received any feedback viewed their proud partners as having had significantly more say in the group's efforts, and as a result saw them as the group's leader and as having higher social status. So far so good. People's perceptions were shaped by what the proud partic.i.p.ants did and how they looked. The most important question, though, remained: would these self-appointed leaders be liked and respected, or regarded as arrogant and annoying? To our pleasant surprise, the answer was clearly the former. Not only were they viewed as leaders, they were valued and admired for it. On average, those who demonstrated pride during the task were rated as significantly more likable by their partners than were those who didn't. And, significantly, their partners didn't just like them because the proud people did more of the work. Ashley, our confederate, always worked on the puzzle for much less time than either of the other two in each group, but she wasn't liked any less for loafing. No, the only factor that influenced how likable a person came off in this experiment was pride; pride made a person seem like a leader, and this in turn made that person a more desirable member of the group.

Taken together, this work shows that all it takes is a little praise or recognition to shift the scales of character; it not only motivates us to work harder but also signals to others that we are people to be liked and followed. When you think about it, it's an efficient process. It makes great sense that the systems of the ant would motivate us to develop skills that will cause others to like and value us, even if developing these skills means putting in grueling hours. It also makes sense that we would have ways to easily signal to others that we are people worthy of being liked and valued. But what happens if there's a mismatch and the pride doesn't seem justified? What happens when, say, the water boy for the football team struts around with his chest puffed out like he's the starting quarterback? Will people be fooled? In our experiments, we randomly chose who would feel proud by providing false feedback. It had nothing to do with their actual skills or performance. The "leaders" of our groups didn't really possess the skills that justified their pride and status at all. This was by design, as we wanted to show that pride and the ensuing behavior resulted from the praise we gave, as opposed to the abilities and status that people brought with them.

This strategy was useful for our experiment, but in the real world things aren't always so clear-cut. We're constantly sizing up one another's skills and performances, and more often than not comparing them against our own. We know too that many people often hold inflated views of themselves, and so take great pains to convince themselves and others that they are worth following. What, then, would happen if it became clear that the proud "leaders" didn't actually possess the abilities that they trumpeted? Would people continue to respect them, or would they dismiss them as frauds?

The naked emperor.

In Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes," a fashion-conscious despot is tricked into paying for a wondrous suit made from fabric so special (or so he's told by his tailors) that it is invisible to anyone who is unfit to hold his or her station in life. The tailors, of course, are swindlers. But the emperor is loath to admit that he cannot see the (nonexistent) clothes; to do so would be to admit that he is unworthy. So the emperor parades naked before his subjects, who at first go along with the charade; they don't want to admit to being unable to see the suit either. But after one child shouts the truth, that the emperor is in fact wearing no clothes, the proud emperor is soon outed as an egotistical phony.

We've all witnessed some version of this parable. And as we've seen, when a proud person's facade is shattered in this manner, they can go from loved and revered to reviled and derided seemingly overnight. It's one thing to project an air of pride and confidence, but if our skills and abilities don't justify our strutting, suddenly that pride becomes viewed as hubris-which sends an entirely different signal to those around us.

We suspect that the same would have happened in our experiment had it become clear that the puzzle-solving advice our proud people were giving wasn't especially helpful. Their leadership would be questioned, and their input would be seen not as expert a.s.sistance but as know-it-all bossiness. They would, simply put, be stripped of their status and likability. This is essentially what happened with Bush and Obama. Both project an air of pride and confidence, but whether they are celebrated as able leaders or dismissed as arrogant posers depends on whether the people doing the judging believe their performance backs up their strutting. Many Republicans believe Bush is a man of principle who kept the country safe, so to them, his pride is warranted. But the many Democrats who disagree see him as an incompetent ideologue-the poster boy for hubris. It's a similar case for Obama. If you believe he knows what he's doing, you love to hear him lecture the doubters. But if you believe he is still wet behind the ears, you see this as arrogant and off-putting. The same goes for Tom Cruise. Though the pride he exhibited as a young man led to masterly acting, once his career plummeted and he started pontificating about his religion and the meaning of life, the confidence and pride he projected weren't viewed as favorably. He had crossed the line to hubris.

So where exactly is the line between pride and hubris, and what determines whether we cross it? If hubris is so unlikable, why would someone overestimate his or her abilities or project pride for skills or achievements that simply don't exist? The answer is again to be found in the battle between the systems of the ant and gra.s.shopper. As we've seen, pride has two main functions: to motivate us to persevere, and to signal our worth to others. The end result-high social status-is definitely a desirable thing, both in the here and now and in the future. The problem is, in the short term we don't always want to put in the effort necessary to earn this position. So what do our minds do? The gra.s.shopper tries to lull us into a sense of false pride. It tricks us into scanning the environment for signs we excel at something even when we don't, and to take credit and exhibit confidence whenever possible, even when it's unfounded. In other words, it pulls us across the line into hubris.

Everything we've said to now seems to suggest that when this happens, it can only lead to trouble. But if that's the case, why is hubris still around? Why does the gra.s.shopper, who like the ant strives to protect our interests, act as it does? It must mean that hubris can have some redeeming value. Yet if this is right, you're probably wondering where the examples of good hubris are to be found. The answer is: all around you.

The man behind the curtain.

It was the last week of March 2009, and the United States was still in the grip of a ma.s.sive economic meltdown. Companies were hemorrhaging jobs, the welfare lines were long, and unemployment was at its highest level in decades. Now, generally speaking, being unemployed is not considered a source of pride. Nor does it confer particularly high status in our society. In fact, it's quite the opposite; often it can lead to shame, so much so that many people will cop to almost anything before admitting to being out of work.14 So you'd think that in March 2009, as unemployment hovered around 10 percent, countless Americans would be walking around with their heads hanging low. But they weren't.

As Ben Carey at the New York Times reported, something surprising was going on among the newly jobless. Many were still leaving the house in the morning dressed in business attire, commuting into town, and meeting with colleagues or business a.s.sociates (or, more accurately, ex-colleagues and ex-business a.s.sociates) for lunch. They'd then hold court at the local Starbucks, where they could get free Wi-Fi on their laptops. In essence, they were posing-they were living their lives as if their previous status were still intact. If you pa.s.sed one of them on the street (and you probably did), you wouldn't see a despondent, unshaven slouch in sweats; you'd see someone who appeared to be among the relative few who survived the crisis-someone who was clearly valuable enough to his or her company, and to society, to have held on to a job even in the tough times. What Carey wanted to know was, why was this happening?15 Carey called our lab to see if we could explain the psychology behind this behavior that, on its face, didn't appear to make much sense. To us, however, the psychological mechanisms behind this posturing couldn't have been clearer-it was an example of the gra.s.shopper at its best. These "Starbucks executives" were perfect examples of how projecting false pride can help us protect our social status, at least in the short run. Here they were, dressed in their office finest, typing on their BlackBerry with one hand and adjusting their Bluetooth headset with the other (maybe even using the fake-call app on their iPhone to seem in high demand). But where the kind of hubris shown by Tom Cruise, the fabled emperor, or the water boy who acts like he's the quarterback leads to disdain, for these folks it was actually a good strategy for success.

As we saw earlier in the chapter, physical expressions of pride automatically signal status and value. When we see someone who looks self-a.s.sured, who holds her head high, we a.s.sume she is important; after all, why wouldn't we? There is no equivalent signal for hubris-if there were, it would have disappeared long ago, as it would only serve to solicit ridicule. So in a brief encounter with someone about whom you know little, there is no way to tell if the pride and confidence he or she is expressing is justified. When a poser is strutting around looking important, we buy it. There is no way to know otherwise. And that's the point. By presenting the illusion of status and power, these people are positioning themselves to appear most attractive to potential colleagues and employers. Yes, it's an untenable tactic in the long run (like the emperor, they will eventually be found out), but in the short run it may provide an all-important compet.i.tive advantage that helps them get back on their feet. The gra.s.shopper's gamble may pay off.

Hubris, then, can function as a protective mechanism. It can help us preserve our social status and, to some extent, our self-worth. This is why we often overestimate our abilities, sometimes subconsciously, sometimes deliberately. It's why, for example, as work by Richard Gramzow has demonstrated, we tend to misremember how well we did on tests such as the SATs, but with the important caveat that our errors go in only one direction-toward higher scores.16 Gramzow has also shown that, just like the "Starbucks executives," people strategically present themselves in the workplace and other compet.i.tive settings to seem more accomplished and confident. What's most fascinating, however, is that this posing actually works to their benefit on many levels. Not only does it signal social value, as we've described above, but it has psychological and physiological benefits too, such as helping people stay calm during potentially stressful interactions. In one study, Gramzow and his colleagues Greg Willard and Wendy Mendes had partic.i.p.ants take part in an interview while a computer monitored their cardiac responses. Amazingly, the researchers found that those who exaggerated their abilities in the interview actually exhibited less physical stress and anxiety than those who didn't, and as a result, they had a more successful interaction with the interviewer.17 Is such hubris a vice? We think not, but again, it's going to be context that is the ultimate arbiter. In the short term, the hubris of posing or a.s.suming you're important can be hugely beneficial. If the gamble pays off, it can help get you into a position in which you'll eventually be able to feel authentically proud. On the other hand, if people see through you, you'll forever be branded a pompous fool. Remember, the ant and the gra.s.shopper both want you to be proud. But which opportunities they take to get you there and what they do with them are what tip the scales of character from one side to the other. Hubris can be useful for a short time, but on average the better strategy is to work hard to actually build the skills and achieve the goals that will make you legitimately proud.

5 / COMPa.s.sIONATE OR CRUEL?.

Looking into the mirror of the human soul.

The winter of 1914 was not a happy one for the British and German troops manning the trenches outside Ypres, Belgium. World War I was in full swing, and their only breaks from exchanging gunfire were when they would venture carefully into the no-man's-land between their camps to retrieve the dead. It was cold. It was dark. It was violent. And the British High Command was intent on keeping it that way. They had very deliberately conditioned their soldiers to regard the Germans as bloodl.u.s.ting psychopaths-the "evil Huns"-to ensure they'd have no qualms about taking as many lives as possible. And so, as Christmas approached, the opposing sides fought ferociously. But on Christmas Eve, something strange began to happen. As members of Britain's Berkshire Regiment peered across the fields, they started seeing small lights appear near the position of the Nineteenth Corps of the German army. At first they must have been frightened. Then they realized: the lights were candles the Germans had placed on small conifer trees in celebration of the holiday. Next the air began to ring with the sounds of German Christmas carols, to which the Brits replied by singing a chorus of their own.

Soon some of the men ventured into the s.p.a.ce separating the armies and began to fraternize. Gifts of food and other small items were exchanged. It was hardly believable, even to those who were there. "If I had seen it on a cinematograph film I should have sworn that it was faked," wrote Lieutenant Sir Edward Hulse. Corporal John Ferguson was equally incredulous: "What a sight; little groups of Germans and British extending along the length of our front.... Where they couldn't talk the language, they made themselves understood by signs, and everyone seemed to be getting on nicely. Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill."1 Upon hearing of this bizarre Christmas Eve detente, the British High Command was irate. How were they going to win a war if their soldiers suddenly became peaceniks? Accordingly, General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien issued orders to forbid all friendly communication with opposing troops. He then inst.i.tuted a policy of rotating troops so no one battalion could become too familiar or too friendly with their counterparts.

But they needn't have worried. The day after Christmas, the shooting resumed in earnest. Somehow, the soldiers suddenly had no problem whatsoever firing at the men with whom they had exchanged gifts and broken bread just a few hours earlier. What was going on here? How did these soldiers go from being mortal enemies to peaceful neighbors and then back to indifferent killers in less than twenty-four hours? It's difficult to understand. Imagine the cognitive gymnastics required by such a drastic turn of events. One moment you are willing to viciously take the life of another human being; the next you're sharing a beer and exchanging presents. You might chalk this up to the discipline of trained soldiers. Maybe the years they'd spent developing a stoic indifference to acts of physical harm enabled them to turn their aggression on and off at will. In other words, they're the exception, abnormal. No civilians would be able to engage in such violent aggression toward someone with whom they had recently forged a human connection, could they? Indeed, we might be wary of those who are able to turn their compa.s.sion on and off seemingly at the flip of a switch. We might question their character.

But the more we look around, the less anomalous this kind of behavior seems. Take the Ivory Coast, for example. In 2002, civil war broke out as the government lost control of the north to a rebel uprising. The violence between north and south continued for the next five years, with one brief interruption. In the early months of 2006, fighting between the rebel-held north and the government-controlled south was put aside as both sides rallied behind the national soccer team, which had just qualified for the World Cup. Incredibly, protests became celebrations as the team was held up as a symbol of national unity-that is, until the tournament was over. As soon as the final whistle of the final game blew, the two sides were back to killing one another. It was as though nothing had changed.

Similarly, in 1969, during one of the bloodiest civil wars in Africa's history, Nigerians agreed to a three-day cease-fire while Brazilian soccer legend Pele visited the country to play against local teams. For a window of time, hostilities were held at bay as all involved seemed suddenly able to shift their focus from the things that divided them to those that united them. Again, you might quibble about whether people are really able to turn their cruel instincts (or their compa.s.sionate ones, for that matter) on and off. Did the tension between these individuals really subside when the players took the field? Or were they just temporarily squelching their instinct to stand up and slaughter their cross-border rivals so as not to miss a moment of the game?

Humans' capacity for compa.s.sion and kindness is often underestimated (understandable, given the violence in the world). But consider the outpouring of caring and support in the days, weeks, and months after the attacks of September 11, Hurricane Katrina, or the earthquake in Haiti. People across the globe rallied together to offer the victims relief and prayer. Governments and individuals from warring nations temporarily put aside their differences to join in the relief effort, waving banners declaring "We're all Americans now." Yet after the initial shock of the disasters subsided and the photos of burning buildings, mangled limbs, and people trapped in rubble vanished from the headlines, it didn't take long for these same individuals to forget about the New York firefighters, the newly homeless of New Orleans, or the orphans in Haiti and go back to business as usual, even when there were still thousands of victims in need. How could all these people have displayed such compa.s.sion one minute, then be so cruelly indifferent the next?

That ordinary people-not just hardened soldiers-can shift so easily from cruelty to compa.s.sion and back suggests that these traits are more fluid than they seem. In fact, anyone who has ever lashed out at someone they care about in the heat of an argument knows the phenomenon we are describing. In your anger, you say something deliberately cruel or hurtful, but then the moment you see the pain register on the person's face or the tears well in his or her eyes, it's as if a switch flips, and your anger and frustration melt immediately into compa.s.sion and guilt. When we consider these situations, a soldier's ability to perform horrific acts of violence one moment and to shake hands with his enemy the next seems less like a disturbing character flaw than a fundamental property of the human mind. As we're about to see, the line between the psychological states that drive these drastically different behaviors does not appear to be particularly thick; we are equally capable of both types of responses, not just in times of war but in our everyday lives.

So what is it that determines whether we will be indifferent or caring, peaceful or violent, cruel or compa.s.sionate? As with other aspects of character, the potential for each lurks in all of us. Which one emerges at any give moment is, of course, decided by the struggle between our dueling systems. As we've noted before, both short- and long-term focused systems are absolutely essential for adaptive social functioning. Planning for the long term won't get you too far if you can't see the threat that's standing in front of you, and living only for the moment often won't do much for you past that moment. But when it comes to cruelty and compa.s.sion, exactly what is it that tips the scales from one to the other? What decides which side wins?

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the worthiest of them all?

A growing body of evidence suggests that an important factor underlying whether we show someone compa.s.sion or cruelty is the person's perceived similarity to us. It should take little introspection to realize that we feel the pain of those with whom we seem to share some commonalities. Countless studies have demonstrated that we not only consistently show more compa.s.sion to those we deem "like us," but that the mind makes judgments of similarity quite rapidly and spontaneously.2 You can see how this plays out in a setting such as a battlefield, where the opposing sides hail from different nations or tribes, speak different languages, wear different uniforms, and stand on opposite sides of clearly drawn (both physically and ideologically) lines. Such differences are likely why it was so easy for the British soldiers in our example to bludgeon and shoot their German counterparts in the first place. Those dastardly Huns, the British reasoned, were nothing like them. Yet, in the light of the Christmas candles, this "like us"/ "not like us" distinction got a little more muddled. Suddenly these enemies seemed more similar; they were fellow Christians who celebrated the same traditions and sang the same songs. And once they got to talking to one another, their differences receded even further. They weren't just "dastardly Huns"; they were husbands and fathers, just like the British soldiers were.

These same psychological mechanisms were at work in the case of the warring factions of the Ivory Coast, for whom it took the unifying force of World Cup soccer to allow them to see their reflection in each other. Same goes for the people who came out in droves to help the victims of 9/11, Katrina, and the Haitian earthquake-the crises shifted their focus away from all their squabbles and differences and onto their shared ident.i.ty as human beings. But once the worst was over and they slipped back into their "us/them" mentality, their compa.s.sion swiftly abated. It only takes a quick glance at the headlines to see that most conflicts-be they national, political, religious, or personal-often come down to this very simple and automatic "like us"/ "not like us" split.

How can such a basic distinction flip the switch between our most n.o.ble impulses and our most vicious ones? One answer lies in our evolutionary wiring. In the middle of the twentieth century, scientists were having a few problems explaining certain acts of altruism and compa.s.sion. After all, wasn't evolution all about selfishness and one's own survival? Once natural selection was understood to operate at the level of the gene, meaning that evolution not only favored behaviors that ensured we'd survive but also those that ensured we'd pa.s.s our genes to future generations, altruism toward family members was easy enough to explain. But what about the preponderance of evidence suggesting that we would also act altruistically toward perfect strangers? It was puzzling until the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers prop