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Comment by antareus | Hacker News Reader

So, after you're the "alpha dog," what happens? Do all the babes start liking you? Have you finally made it?

I realize that power has an effect on social relationships of every kind, but the these sorts of articles always strike me as addressing the symptoms of a problem (such as low self-confidence) rather than the problem itself. This is probably because the root of the problem is not a simple prescriptive fix. They also assume on some level that you should strive to have the upper hand in every encounter, which is unrealistic and off-putting. The need to be the "alpha dog" does nothing to abate feelings of insecurity, as you're still engaged in a constant cycle of judgment and one-upping others.

Why do we encourage people to remain in this cycle? Oh, right, we've all been told we have to be "alpha."

Whatever that means.

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That is certainly a valid way of looking at it. I have a different perspective, though.

I have been in the past, by nature, a shy kind of person. I was not into parties, I let things slide by that dug me in more deeply, I became what others wanted me to be.

Somewhere in high school, I learned the lesson in this article, and I am going to say some related things. How did the bullies, stupid as they were, gain followers? What was it about the way they acted that the strong moved with the strong instead of butting heads?

It's pack mentality. We have it, as social creatures. The posing makes a difference. Whatever you feel inside, you can move and shake things with the illusion.

Then, somewhere along the lines, you believe in the illusion, have molded yourself into it. You pretended to be an alpha, and then you became it.

Will the babes start liking you? You know it; many studies have shown a relationship between confidence (not necessarily over-confidence, not feigned confidence) and attraction.

Getting into the habit of a particular mindset CAN change you. Forcing a smile will eventually result in a real smile. Sure, your self-esteem can rise, purely on this.

And it does not have to be a practice of one-upping. Real alphas do not need to play that game. ;) We can respect the presence and domains of other alphas. You are talking about the yapping pups.

This sounds like my story, but it took me much longer. However, I don't view myself as alpha or beta, merely someone with confidence who will assert myself if necessary. I think I view the alpha term with derision due to pick-up artists elevating it to be the point of one's life. The emphasis on it reeks of someone needing social redemption of sorts; as if they've committed a heinous sin against society at large by not quite fitting the mold. I've seen a few people sacrifice parts of themselves at this altar; hell, I'm pretty sure I have, somewhere along the way.

Power dynamics are all bullshit (which practically begs for satire), but not playing is a guaranteed loss. I just feel like it doesn't have to be like this, but it is. It disturbs me on an aesthetic level.

I'm pretty sure not playing is a guaranteed win ;)

>The posing makes a difference. Whatever you feel inside, you can move and shake things with the illusion. Then, somewhere along the lines, you believe in the illusion, have molded yourself into it. You pretended to be an alpha, and then you became it.

I find this quite interesting. I'm curious if you have any articles/links to something that expands on this idea? Especially this:

>Getting into the habit of a particular mindset CAN change you. Forcing a smile will eventually result in a real smile. Sure, your self-esteem can rise, purely on this.

I only have anecdotal evidence to share, but, take it for what it is worth.

I'd noticed that many people aren't always good judges of character and will fall for illusory confidence. IMO, this explains why there is undue emphasis in certain areas of life on social litmus tests: actual character evaluation is time-consuming, difficult, and requires a certain amount of introspection. So the test becomes a heuristic that works more often than not, and is relied upon. (I like to "whimsically" mention my past history of LAN gaming on 3rd dates as a way to assess how judgmental/uptight they are.)

The upshot is that other people's perceptions of you are way more malleable than you might believe...as is your own perception of yourself.

Ultimately, social exchanges are something of a game, and can be exploited.

The way I interpret is as follows.

Forcing yourself to do something (like smile) when you don't want to is like erecting a tall building. The more you work on keeping the structure of the building steady the more the more you are required to consciously and unconsciously work on solidifying the foundations and the structural integrity of the building.

(This is just one outcome of course. Another is that you keep forcing it and it doesn't help you get the foundations in order.)

The problem is that most managers seem to prefer to hire and work with people who have high levels of confidence. Why is this? Personally, I have no idea. All other things being equal, I prefer hiring people with lower apparent levels of confidence. Aside from, in my opinion, simply being more pleasant and easier to get along with day to day, they tend to stick around longer at any given salary level. Confidence commands quite a bit of a pay increase in nearly all job roles, and in the roles I hire for, confidence doesn't really help you do the job, so people with less apparent confidence are quite often bargains.

Besides, I'm pretty good at faking confidence, so in the rare instances where that skill is demanded, I can just do it myself.

There's no tactful way to say this, so I'll just say it directly: what you're saying isn't very far from "I only hire people who aren't confident and assertive enough to demand the salary that they're worth". It might not be that bad (you might be afraid that a prospective employee who was more confident than you would negotiate out of you a higher salary than he was worth) but it's an ethical hazard to think in that way.

Yeah, you could put it that way. Personally, I prefer "I can't pay very much, so people who think they can earn more go elsewhere" I mean, hell, I'm only paying myself about $30K a year, and I'm located in Silicon Valley. You can get new people for that, but you can't keep experienced folks for that kind of money. Not here. I'm very conscious of perceived fairness, and try to pay people accordingly, so I'm not worried about a confident employee negotiating a higher that warranted salary. I mean, I acknowledge that they are worth more, and I'm not offended when they shop around their resume... but my budget is what it is.

I also tend to go for inexperienced people for the same reason. Do you think that's unethical?

I mean, I've told everyone who has worked for me that I will expect them to leave for more money at some point (unless my business grows fast enough to suddenly pay everyone 'experienced person' rates... but so far the experience of people who worked for me has grown quite a bit faster than my company's ability to pay, so people leave, and I give good recommendations.)

You are right that you should try to ignore attributes that are not relevant to the job at hand (including, in this case, confidence) and my own personal prejudices in the matter, I agree, make me look like an asshole who doesn't like dealing with other assholes (which, to be fair, I am.)

If you're completely upfront about that situation it sounds pretty good--to the point where I wouldn't mind working for you myself to gain experience. I suspect a confident person will, worst case, just tell you they're not interested from the outset. Not hiring confident people implies that you're less than upfront about the situation (edit: absent the other explanation you've given--right now I don't find that ethically questionable at all anymore).

Most of the people I've hired in the last five years have known oneanother socially before they worked for me, so if the first guy had a bad experience, it's likely that nobody else would have touched me.

As long as you're willing to train people up, this sounds like a great way of doing business. You get cheaper employees, with the trade-off of having to educate them (which costs time), and they get both useful skills and a reference (in exchange for taking a much lower rate of pay).

Definitely not a zero-sum game. :)

Yeah, that's the idea.

It is the only way to hire customer support people. people who have worked phone or email tech support at other companies are extremely difficult to train into any sort of a customer facing role. I mean, sometimes they will make fine SysAdmins or Programmers, but working phone support usually kills off that which is required to deal with customers like human beings, especially in introverts, and, well, most qualified SysAdmins and Programmers are introverts.

as for other roles, it has it's ups and downs. On the upside, you get things done your way. On the downside? well, if your way isn't the best way, well, in the worst case you think your way is the best way and you keep doing it until it ends badly. In the best case, you know your way isn't any good and you hire an expert for consultation. There are many projects where I look back and say "It would have been cheaper if I just paid someone who knew what they were doing $100/hr to come in and just make it work for us." but obviously, I keep doing it, so I think, overall, the approach works for me.

They can be, although in my experience, you can't put low-confidence people in roles that require a lot of self-direction. Low-confidence people are less likely to branch out and learn new techniques, as they prefer to play it safe with what they already know.

I've had problems before with a programmer who was terrified to do testing, because he didn't have the confidence that he could learn something new. He was otherwise a bright guy, but his lack of confidence severely hurt both himself, the team, and the company.

Eh, I think it just requires a different management style. You need to be much lighter on the stick with someone who is less confident, and to use verbal praise as the carrot (along with periodic raises) The easy mistake is to blow up when something bad happens. Generally speaking, people who seem to lack confidence have a difficult time dealing with that sort of thing, so you see them becoming risk-averse in ways that are damaging to the company. But, if you can avoid blowing up, my experience has been that they can take reasonable risks as well as anyone else.

Confident people, I think, usually require a more confrontational management style. Sometimes you /need/ to blow up to get them to do what the company needs rather than what they want to do (which is something I'm not particularly good at)

I can honestly say that I have never needed to 'blow up' at one of my employees. Ever.

If I had an employee that was totally unwilling to listen to direction, they would be an ex-employee very quickly. I'm not a dictator or a micromanager -- I do my best to hire smart people and let them do their jobs. But sometimes, someone needs to take charge and make a decision.

If someone's ego can't cope with that, they are bad for the business, and need to go.

If you have to bite someone's head off to get them to do their job, that's not confidence -- that's arrogance. Two very different things.

I've never gotten a clear explanation of the difference between confidence and arrogance, I mean, except as just a matter of degree. People tell me "well, that explains a lot about you" which, I'm sure, it does. but nobody seems to have an answer to the question that makes even a little sense.

As for "blowing up" what I mean is that you need to adjust the, ah "volume" or "intensity" of your feelings upwards, vs. managing a person who isn't very confident, in which case you want to seem very low key, especially when the shit hits the proverbial fan; as I was mentioning in a previous post, if your emotions seem too intense when there is a failure, you can inadvertently train your less-confident people to avoid risk more than you like.

I'm trying to say that more confident people will often ignore the less intense criticisms. they are more likely to assume everything is OK unless you make it very clear that it is not. If you try to be low key about it, a more confident person generally gets quite irritated, calling you "passive aggressive" (even if you are direct in a soft voice... it is the soft voice or soft framing, I think, that they find irritating.) and, well, getting quite irritated. My experience has been that an error on the side of too much emotional force usually has better results than an error on the side of not enough emotional force with the more confident sort of person.

The interesting thing, I think, is that you can almost say the exact same words to the two groups of people. Being direct is almost always a good thing. But with the two different groups, you need to frame it and communicate it very differently. Having an appropriate amount of emotional force behind your words is key, and that appropriate amount of emotional force varies quite a lot depending on what sort of person you are attempting to communicate with.

I'm approaching this problem from the perspective of someone who is naturally not all that aggressive, who has learned how to fake it, to some extent.

(and yeah, to tie this back to the article, one of the things I taught myself was to sit in a very relaxed and expansive way that takes up a lot of space. I got the idea because I read a lot of feminist literature as a youth, and that is one of the behaviours a particular author found irritating in men. "wow," I thought "I sit like a woman." because yeah, I tended to sit very compactly, to take up little space. So as I got older and tried to fake this confidence, I started to sit more, uh, expansively. To consciously take up more space than I needed to. It feels pretty natural now. The really funny thing about this is that other people are aware of it too. try putting your feet up on the table or otherwise visibly relax and take up more space while talking with a male who is of greater status. You will often notice them doing the same thing, sometimes to a ridiculous extent.)

so yeah, you are probably better at modulating your emotional force on the top end than I am, just 'cause that's not my natural state- that is something I learned. But my experience has been that even overdoing the emotional force by quite a bit usually results in more positive outcomes, when dealing with a confident person, than underdoing the emotional force, and looking like a wimp.

Really, though, I think the key to this emotional confidence is having that willingness to experiment, and to screw up. I have yelled at people (and yeah, it's almost always the wrong thing to do.) I've made people cry without really meaning to. I mean, it's not something I regularly do, and it's something I'll try not to do again, but for me it was part of this learning process.

Have to reply here, since there's a limit to nesting depth.

To me, confidence stems from knowledge and experience. A confident person can back up their assertions to a very deep level. They can explain and defend their reasoning. With this also comes the experience that the world isn't perfect, and that sometimes you just need to do something you don't want to do.

Arrogance, on the other hand, is nothing but ego and fear. Fear that anything that might threaten that huge ego. An arrogant man has little knowledge or wisdom, but plenty of bullshit to masquerade as such.

A confident man can lose well. An arrogant man can't.

>To me, confidence stems from knowledge and experience.

To me, this entire continuum from not confident, to confident to arrogant has to do with how you act when you encounter a new situation, or some other unknown, well, and how you act around other people in a social situation. Re-reading my posts, this is obviously most of what I'm talking about.

The guy I think of as the least confident guy I know is an absolutely awesome c++ programmer. Incredible. The man holds himself like he thinks you are about to punch him. He looks a good four inches shorter than he really is because of his posture. He speaks with such a soft voice that he's usually got to repeat himself several times when he orders food. In any sort of social situation, he looks pretty uncomfortable.

But if you talk about C++? He'll look you in the eye and say "I don't write segmentation faults" or "My code has no buffer overflows." and he believes it, too. (hell, after working with him, I believe it.) - but to me, that doesn't seem like confidence. that's just experience, and being obviously very, very good at something.

>A confident man can lose well. An arrogant man can't.

Logically, I don't think that is the whole story, but emotionally, I really like that definition.

I think thats precisely what confidence is. He makes statements that would be arrogant coming from someone less experienced, but since he can back it up, its confidence.

> Have to reply here, since there's a limit to nesting depth.

Not as far as I know, and if there is, a depth of 4 or 5 isn't it!

Sometimes the "reply" link doesn't appear and you have to reply via the permalink "link" instead.

In the business world, situations with a certain amount ambiguity arise where people with conflicting goals must confront each other to determine the path forward: resource allocation, strategic direction, etc. When the other party, through force of personality, pushes an agenda that's good for them but not for the business as a whole, you quickly decide that you must learn their tricks. Not to use these tricks all the time, but to use them when you need to.

You might be assuming that disagreements are settled with logic and data; in practice that's not really true.

Think of it like running an advertising campaign. You put on whatever show tweaks the target audiences' neurons and convinces them to do what you want them to do. If you don't learn these tricks, your competitors will.

>When the other party, through force of personality, pushes an agenda that's good for them but not for the business as a whole, you quickly decide that you must learn their tricks.

While I agree that this is the reality of the situation, it seems incredibly broken to me.

That's humanity for you.

It's why we have a military even though war is bad.

it seems more like a management problem to me. I mean, if I had someone working for me who bullied my other employees into doing things that harmed the company, I'd tell the guy to knock it off, and if he continued, I'd fire him (or her... I don't think this is a gender-specific problem.)

The problem is that in most companies, the people who own the place, who feel the actual profit and loss are so far removed from any decision making that all you have left is the personality of middle managers trying to advance personal goals.

it seems more like a management problem to me. I mean, if I had someone working for me who bullied my other employees into doing things that harmed the company, I'd tell the guy to knock it off

Unless he managed to convince you that he was actually helping.

>Unless he managed to convince you that he was actually helping.

Eh, in smaller companies, the truth usually comes out sooner rather than later. If the owner doesn't recognize the problem fast enough, the company dies.

That, and as the owner, I'm very directly concerned with the health of the company, and I'm involved with day to day operations. In a publicly traded company, the people who are directly concerned with the health of the company at best come to a meeting once a year.

Yeah, you can pay other people to look out for your interests, and sometimes that's even a good idea. But you are a fool if you think those people will put your interests above their own.

I'm trying to say that as the owner, you'd have to fool me. Possible, sure. But I'm going to work damn hard to prevent you from doing so.

In a public company, however, you don't need to fool your bosses; you just need to convince them that supporting you furthers their own goals better than firing you would.

You also have the problem of clever bullies who know how to play management.

"Not to use these tricks all the time, but to use them when you need to."

Or so you can recognize when they are being used, disarm them, neutralize your adversary, and steer the process toward understanding the big picture, defining the underlying problem/s, and collaboratively making the best decision for the business as a whole.

Agreed, this is a rather cynical self-cycle of self-doubt they're promoting.

In a few months I got myself a position of respect where I work, why? Because I can do what I do, I know what I'm doing and people begin to respect you for it. I didn't work to get respect, I got respect because I actually did work rather than play popularity and dominance games.

I think it's valuable to have the ability to see situations from every perspective possible. If you're someone who's not naturally "dominant", experiencing it can be fun, empowering, and educational.

That doesn't mean you have to 'become' that way. It's all (ha) a matter of perspective.

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