Why unpleasant people are more likely to be successful

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Scientists have discovered why repulsive people are more likely to be more successful in their careers. In fact, the reason is ridiculously simple.

There are many examples in history of how unpleasant, oppressive and intolerant people with brilliance reached career heights. The first who immediately comes to mind is Steve Jobs, under whose leadership Apple was saved from bankruptcy and became one of the most successful companies in the world.

This happened even despite the fact that Jobs, to put it mildly, did not have much patience and a sense of tact when communicating with colleagues, regularly allowing himself to make derogatory comments about their work, heaped reproaches and curses.

You might assume that repulsive people are more successful than affable people because they are orders of magnitude smarter and more creative, but new research shows that this is not at all the case.

It turns out that unpleasant individuals are better able to defend their own ideas, even when they seem obscure to the majority or do not at all coincide with the generally accepted point of view.

In the study, which was featured on the British Psychological Society's official blog, scientists Samuel Hunter and Lily Cushenberry specifically focused their attention on people who were hardly pleasant. These included those who were characterized by absurdity, self-centeredness, stubbornness and hostility towards others.

First, about 200 undergraduate students took personality tests. Students were also asked to provide information about their GPA and the results of the academic assessment test they took when they entered the university. In this way, the researchers were able to measure their cognitive ability and assess academic achievement.

Then each student was given an individual task: in 10 minutes it was necessary to offer a solution to the indicated marketing problem. At the next stage, the researchers divided the students into groups of three people each and asked them to develop a marketing plan together in 20 minutes.

As expected, there were no problems with the "nuisance" during the execution of the individual assignment. However, when the groups were organized, the following happened: the ideas of the hard students were much more often used in the final product.

In the second phase of the experiment, the researchers wanted to find out if unpleasant people feel uncomfortable if they are placed in certain life situations. This time, the subjects were nearly three hundred students, who were instructed to come up with a gift for the university. Girls and guys were seated one by one at computers, they had to interact with two more people in an online chat. The participants in the experiment did not know that their chat partners also worked for the researchers: they were instructed to give an approving or disapproving assessment of the ideas of the subjects.

After the gift for the university was finished, a new task came: to come up with several options for how the rooms in the dormitory of the future would look like. Again, the other two chat rooms were fake people working for scientists. Only this time, in addition to feedback, they were instructed to share with students and their own ideas.

The results of the first experiment were confirmed … When the students came up with ideas on their own, the unpleasant character did not make itself felt. But when their interlocutors began to share their own thoughts and try on the role of critics, the subjects bent their own line.

Experiments have shown that repulsive and oppressive people are not embarrassed by criticism, but convinced of their own righteousness. The mechanism works the other way around: people who are positive in all respects are more receptive to positive responses.

Scientists admit that the research done has a number of limitations. First, the participants in the experiments were only young people studying at universities, and therefore the results cannot be applied to the general population. Secondly, it is not yet clear whether a bad character is beneficial in the long run, or then others develop immunity to despots and their ideas.

It turns out that it is not at all necessary that unpleasant people are smarter or more creative, something else is important here: they do not give up their ideas even under the pressure of negative responses. They have a lot to learn. You don't need to be an evil genius in order to succeed, you just need not to withdraw into yourself after every bad review that you hear in your address. You should be a little more persistent and believe in yourself and your own strength.

The truth is that tough people adapt better in a competitive environment, while delicate people - with their constant concessions and polite smiles - are left far behind. We are not encouraging you to become tyrants, but simply advise you to be a little more persistent.