Pride sits atop the list of seven deadly sins; it is an honour that is thoroughly undeserved. Pride is the dullest of the seven. It doesn’t have the sexiness of lust, the riskiness of anger, or the blatant excesses of greed and gluttony. The proud aren’t dangerous or even very interesting. They are, if anything, simply annoying. So why number one?
Sensibly, it wasn’t always so. Pride has a rather strange history as a deadly sin. First of all, pride used to be two sins (pride and vainglory), not one, and although both were featured on early writers’ lists of nasty vices, they never fared very well in the rankings. The prides ranked sixth and seventh on the fourth-century list of the monk Evagrius Ponticus, barely scraping in at all. But in ad 590, Pope Gregory upped pride’s sinfulness by dubbing it the source from which all the other vices derived their wickedness. In fact, Gregory thought pride too insidious to rank with other deadlines, so he actually took it off the list, christening it both the root of all evil and the queen of sin. Vainglory, pride’s sibling, jumped to the number one spot. After a while someone got tired of the confusion (the difference between pride and vainglory was never clearly understood) and simply collapsed the two into plain old pride and sat it at the top of the list.1
At the heart of all this general confusion – worst sin of all or just deadly? one sin or two? – is a more specific confusion about definitions. When people think about pride they usually have one of two meanings in mind. And it’s the difference between pride’s two senses that makes all the difference in pride’s status as a sin.
How similar in meaning are these words?
Cocky and arrogant
Confident and victorious
Pretentious and achieving
Jessica Tracy, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, and Richard Robins of the University of California at Davis asked a group of students precisely this question about these word pairs and many others.2 The pairs – which also included words like ‘self-confident’, ‘egotistic’, ‘conceited’ and ‘haughty’ – were sampled from some of Tracy and Robins’s previous work and were chosen because they bear some resemblance to pride. When the similarity ratings were in, the researchers did some statistical analyses to try to uncover the hidden structure in the way people think about pride. Two clusters emerged.
triumphant
victorious
accomplish
confident
winner
And in the other:
arrogant
stuck-up
egotistic
boastful
The first kind of pride, marked by worthy achievement and success, Tracy and Robins called authentic pride. The second, with all its conceitedness and arrogance, they called hubristic pride.
This distinction is not particularly new – Aristotle hit on something quite similar in his Nicomachean Ethics – but Tracy and Robins’s demonstration was the first systematic, scientific exploration of the distinction.3 And this matters. The definitions that philosophers and psychologists use often don’t match up with the definitions that everyone else uses. (Think of guilt and shame, for example, or envy and jealousy – concepts often used synonymously by laypeople but considered quite distinct by psychologists.) For pride, however, there was a match.
What is even more interesting is that these two kinds of pride spring from predictable and different causes. Consider the following. How would you feel if:
You recently had an important exam and you studied hard for it. You just found out that you did very well on the exam.
And how would you feel in this scenario:
You’ve always been naturally talented. You recently had an important exam and you didn’t bother studying much for it, but it still seemed very easy to you. You just found out that you did very well on the exam.
If you’re anything like participants in another of Tracy and Robins’s studies, you’d feel authentic pride in the first case and hubristic pride in the second.4 Why? It turns out that the different prides come from different ways of appraising or explaining events. Interestingly, it’s not the kind of event that matters; whether it’s grades, athletic performance, personal achievements, or relationship success makes no difference. What does matter is how you explain such successes. Both kinds of pride come from seeing a positive event as central to one’s goals and identity and, importantly, as being caused by the self. But when an important success is attributed to effort and hard work, authentic pride is the result; your pride here is proportional and well earned. When success is attributed to more stable and global causes, like ability or talent, however, it’s cocky hubris that tends to follow.
So much for where the two prides come from. But we’re more interested in the consequences of the seven deadly sins and how we can use them to our advantage. So what does authentic pride do for us? What does hubris do? And are these incarnations of this queen of all sins good or bad?
To pride oneself on hard work
In 1993, Gore Vidal was asked to write an essay on pride for a collection of short literary pieces on the deadly sins. Vidal was a sensible choice. The writer Martin Amis once noted that ‘if there is a key to Gore Vidal’s public character, it has something to do with his towering immodesty, the enjoyable superbity of his self-love’.5 But on sitting down to write the essay, Vidal was a bit puzzled by the concept of pride as a sin. So obvious were pride’s virtues to Vidal that he began the essay: ‘Is pride a sin at all?’6
With Vidal we might concede some of the obvious merits of pride (this is authentic pride, now, the good kind). It’s associated with the better bits of personality: the authentically proud are more extroverted, more agreeable, more emotionally stable, conscientious and open to new experiences. The list goes on: less depression, social phobia, anxiety and aggression, and more relationship satisfaction and social support.7 The proud also have higher self-esteem, which itself has a few things going for it (greater happiness, for one).8
This is an impressive list, but a rather obvious one. It probably doesn’t surprise you that people who feel good about particular achievements also feel good about other things (themselves more generally, for example) and are happier, less depressed and so on. So rather than ponder the obvious, I want instead to focus on some of the less blatant boons of pride, some of the things that may not occur to you and may not have occurred to Vidal.
By definition, pride follows success. You do well on an exam, you feel proud; you clinch a deal with an important client, and you feel proud. Hard work, struggle and achievement come first; pride comes later. But does the causal river ever flow in the other direction? Does pride ever cause success?
Although I haven’t mentioned it yet, you might have correctly guessed that pride is an emotion. And when we social psychologists want to study how emotions work, we bring people into the lab, manipulate their feelings, and then sit back and watch what happens. There are many ways to induce emotions in the lab: ask participants to remember and relive an emotional experience, read a sad or funny story, watch a scary film clip, or maybe even pose an emotional facial expression. And like many good experimental manipulations in social psychology, emotion inductions usually involve lying to participants just a little.
Lisa Williams, a psychologist at the University of New South Wales, and David DeSteno of Northeastern University did a bit of this kind of lying in one of their studies.9 Subjects came into the lab and were told that they’d be doing some visual perception and mental rotation tasks. (This part was actually true.) The first exercise was a dot-estimation task. This is exactly what it sounds like: see an array of multicoloured dots, guess how many red dots there are. Participants did this ten times.
After the dot task, participants were led to believe that the experimenter was off calculating their dot-estimation performance scores. A little while later, the experimenter came back into the room with the following news for some of the participants: ‘You received a score of 124 out of 147, which is the ninety-fourth percentile. Great job on that! That’s one of the highest scores we’ve seen so far!’ Now, this part of the story was a lie. None of the feedback was true. In fact, this was the pride manipulation. These participants hadn’t really done well at all; they were just a random group of subjects assigned to the pride condition. To really sell the manipulation, the experimenter put on a little show while delivering the feedback, acting rather impressed by the subject’s masterly dot-estimating skills, smiling and gesticulating, and intoning her admiration into every word.
Other participants in the experiment were exposed to none of this: they weren’t told anything at all about their performance; no scores, no percentiles and no smiling or gesticulation. This was the control condition.
Next came the mental rotation exercise: a long and tedious task in which subjects had to judge whether pairs of 3D figures were composed of two identical figures, one of the pair simply a rotated version of the other. This task actually measures visuospatial cognition, but Williams and DeSteno weren’t interested in this. All they cared about was how long people would persist with this mundane activity. They told participants that they could work on the task for as long as they liked and that there was no obligation to finish it.
The question of interest: do the proud persist longer than controls? We know that pride often follows hard work, but does it also induce it?
The answer: yes.
Proud participants spent about seven minutes working on the task. Control participants, who received no smiling, gesticulating pride inducement, could stomach it for only five minutes.
Now, this might all seem rather contrived to you, manipulating emotions in a laboratory and seeing what comes of it. And it’s true that the lab contexts in which we run our studies often lack some of the complexity of the ‘real world’. But don’t concern yourself too much. The same thing happens in the very real-world context of Dutch insurance companies.
Willem Verbeke of Erasmus University in Rotterdam had a group of insurance salespeople imagine that they’d performed well at work, had been praised by their bosses and colleagues, and even had their successes applauded in the company newsletter.10 Later, when these same people were asked about their work habits, those who felt more pride about their imagined success showed more adaptive sales behaviour and reported working harder.
So pride makes us persevere both inside and outside the lab. But why?
Emotions, remember, are complex and multidimensional things – a rich blend of the physiological, experiential, behavioural and cognitive. It is this last component, the cognitive dimension, that turns out to be particularly important in understanding the workings of pride. Put simply, pride changes the way we behave because it changes the way we think.
Mary Herrald and Joe Tomaka, of the University of Texas at El Paso, brought participants into their Health Psychophysiology Lab to do a social interaction task.11 This involved chatting with an experimenter about their opinions on college-related topics (e.g. ‘Do you prefer large or small classes and why?’). While doing this task, some people got a pride manipulation. As in Williams and DeSteno’s study, this involved bogus performance feedback: ‘You’re doing a lot better than the other students’ and ‘You’re doing great; you brought up a lot of interesting points.’
All the while, participants were being videoed. Once the study was over, the researchers had independent judges code the videoed interactions for how well participants performed. And, no surprises here, just as in Williams and DeSteno’s study, proud subjects did better than controls (who received no praise during the task). Once again, pride improved performance. But why?
To answer this, Herrald and Tomaka went one step further. To get some insight into why the proud were better performers, they also asked participants what they were thinking just after the task. Subjects rated their agreement with the following statements: ‘I am responsible for how well things are going’, ‘I am very satisfied with what I am accomplishing’, and ‘Things are turning out well because of what I’m doing’. These statements measure feelings of control. They measure the extent to which success is a product of one’s own actions. And just as the researchers expected, the proud agreed with these statements more than those who received no pride inducement. Pride changed the way that participants thought about the situation. The proud believed that it was their own actions that brought about success, and these feelings of efficacy and control improved performance.
These results hint at the self-reinforcing nature of pride. Achievement breeds pride, which in turn changes the way we think, giving us a greater sense of confidence and control, which in turn makes us persevere, increasing the chances of further success and thus further pride. The emotion feeds off itself by encouraging cognitive shifts and behavioural changes that increase the likelihood of future successes.
Pride and leadership
Pride and leadership; chicken and egg. Do the proud lead, ascending through the ranks on the confidence that their successes have brought them? Or do leaders later, through their achievements, become proud? It’s probably a little of both, but the only way we can really know is to go back into the lab.
Consider another experiment by Lisa Williams and David DeSteno.12
You and another participant come into a lab. You are met there by an experimenter and a third participant. The three of you are told that this study is about vision and spatial ability. You will do a series of tasks in which you will have to mentally rotate objects, blah, blah, blah (yes, that old story).
The experimenter then takes the three of you off to separate rooms to give you an eye test, the results of which will be used to calibrate some of the other tasks in the experiment.
You then all come back to the central space and sit around a large table. On the table is a cube, something like a Rubik’s cube, a puzzle that the experimenter proceeds to unwind into a long rod with little cubes protruding from it. The task: spend six minutes working as a team, twisting and bending the rod back into cube form. It’s a mental rotation exercise.
This is what the experiment looked like to the participants. But as you might be starting to guess, things in this study weren’t all above board.
First, there were in fact only two real participants: you and the person you arrived with. The third, already waiting at the lab, was a confederate, there to make up numbers in the group task.
Second, surprise, surprise, the eye test had nothing to do with the calibration of other tasks. This was the pride manipulation. Just as in Williams and DeSteno’s pride and perseverance study, some participants got the ‘you’re better than 94 per cent of others’ routine, whereas others, the controls, got no feedback.
This time, Williams and DeSteno were interested in how proud participants would act in the group puzzle-solving task. So they filmed the puzzle-solving sessions and later coded the length of time each person spent working on the puzzle. The confederate was told beforehand to play with the puzzle for about one minute. This left five minutes to be split between the proud participants and their partners (who received no emotional boost). And did the proud chicken lay the leadership egg? Did the proud adopt leadership roles?
Yes. Participants in the pride condition spent about a minute longer working on the puzzle than did the control participants.
(It’s important to note that, from a methodological perspective, the effects were due specifically to feelings of pride, not just positive mood. Doing well on a test may make one proud, but it also generally puts one in a good mood. To really implicate pride in these effects, Williams and DeSteno had to control for general positive feelings. When they did, it was clear that pride was doing all the work here.)
This fits nicely with the perseverance work. Pride induces feelings of self-confidence and control, which promote effort and even success. And this I think I can mind-set nudges people towards taking the lead in a group activity.
All this is fine, but you may be thinking that the real problem with the proud is that no one really likes them. Yes, they persevere and lead, but they may be reviled for their achievements. Just as no one likes a know-it-all, few may warm to an achieve-it-all. It’s not that the proud don’t get the job done; they do, as the studies covered above show us. The problem is that others might get a little resentful of these high achievers. But what does the research say? Are the proud liked or disliked?
To answer this we can take another look at Williams and DeSteno’s leadership study.13 Recall that after doing the eye test, which served as the pride manipulation, participants did the group puzzle-solving task. Following this exercise, participants rated their impressions of the other people in the group. Each answered questions like, ‘Did you perceive your partners as having high ability?’ ‘How much did they contribute?’ ‘How dominant were they?’ When these ratings were combined and analyzed, perhaps not surprisingly, people in the pride condition were perceived as more dominant.
Of course, this makes perfect sense given that proud participants took the lead on the puzzle task. But the interesting question is: were the proud liked? Well, Williams and DeSteno’s subjects liked the proud just fine, rating them as significantly more likable than controls and confederates. And this fits with other work by Jessica Tracy and her colleagues, which shows that people who tend to experience pride – of the authentic variety, that is – have higher relationship satisfaction and social support, suggesting that they are quite popular with others.14 So, far from being social pariahs, the proud are actually quite attractive. We not only recognize their abilities and their leadership tendencies, we like them all the more for them.
Is altruistic pride an oxymoron?
As one of the so-called self-conscious emotions, pride might be excused for being rather preoccupied with the self. Can pride ever benefit others?
In 1995, the Midlife in United States survey, conducted by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Midlife Development, shone a psychological spotlight on forty-eight of America’s fifty states.15
Among other questions, the participants telephoned for the survey were asked to rate their agreement with the following statement: ‘When I think about the work I do in the community, I feel a good deal of pride.’
They were also asked about their charitable behaviours: did they spend any time volunteering, and if so, where? Was this work health-related or school-related, political, or something altogether different?
Daniel Hart of Rutgers University and M. Kyle Matsuba of the University of Missouri at St Louis took this survey data and considered how feelings of pride were related to charity work.16 If the proud are the selfish, conceited, arrogant jerks that some believe them to be, then we would expect pride to be linked with lower volunteerism rates. In fact, the exact opposite was the case: the more pride people took in the work they did for their communities, the more hours of volunteer work they reported doing. Impressively, this was true even when accounting for personality factors that might influence both pride and volunteering. Regardless of how friendly or agreeable people were, the more pride they felt, the more charity work they did.
How to BIRG
Despite all the good that can come from pride, there is one obvious downside: in order to feel it, you have to first experience success, which usually means being good at something, or at least being willing to work rather hard. This may come as unwelcome news to many (especially those prone to that other deadly sin, sloth). But take heart, sloths: thankfully, for those of us too lazy to do any of the hard work ourselves, there’s a loophole.
During the 1973 collegiate football season, Robert Cialdini, then assistant professor of psychology at Arizona State University, and a group of his colleagues visited seven colleges in the United States.17 From Ohio State to Notre Dame, from Michigan to Pittsburgh, Cialdini’s colleagues were a fixture at introductory psychology classes. Each Monday during the football season Cialdini had confederates monitor the fashion quirks of intro psych students. Of particular interest: were students wearing the college colours to class? Were Notre Damers donning Fighting Irish T-shirts? Were Ohio State students wearing the red and white of the Buckeyes?
But Cialdini was interested not just in what these students were wearing but also in when they were wearing it. The pertinent question: were college colours more likely to make an appearance in Monday’s psychology class if the university’s football team had won at the weekend?
Cialdini’s study was based on the idea that people happily take pride not only in what they themselves do, but also in what others do. It’s in this sense that parents are proud of their children and we, as Australians or Americans, for example, are proud of our troops. When others who are in some way similar to us do well, we happily take some of the credit.
So did this kind of vicarious pride show itself in freshmen fashion? It certainly did. Students tended to flaunt their college affiliations more after their team had a win than after they had a loss. Moreover, the larger the margin of victory, the greater the number of students flying the proverbial college flag.
What we have here is what Cialdini called BIRGing: basking in reflected glory. And it’s not just sports teams that are the targets of BIRGing. After Barrack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, Obama supporters kept their campaign stickers up for about five days post-election; McCain supporters took theirs down after only three.18
Why do people do it? To feel better about themselves, of course. In studies following up his college football demonstration, Cialdini showed that people tend to BIRG in an attempt to secure esteem in the eyes of others. Using a variety of experimental techniques, he found that people who were made to feel bad about themselves subsequently claimed greater affiliation with a winning team. Allowing the halo of similar, successful others to cast some light our way makes us feel a little better about ourselves.
The advice here is straightforward: if you can’t beat them, identify with those who can, and BIRG.
The myths and realities of narcissus
We have considered authentic pride up to this point; now let’s turn to the bad kind: hubris. This, remember, is the arrogant and conceited pride that fancies itself a little too much. It comes about when one attributes success not to effort, but to stable internal causes such as talent or skill or, indeed, good looks.
People inclined to hubris tend to be more aggressive, more socially phobic and more anxious than those who aren’t.19 They also tend to have poorer relationships and feel less supported by those around them.
And, as if this list weren’t bad enough, according to Claire Ashton-James of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, the hubristically proud are more prejudiced. In a paper that could only be called ‘Pride and Prejudice’, Ashton-James and Jessica Tracy report inducing hubristic pride in participants by having them recall a time when they had ‘behaved in a self-important manner, or felt pretentious or stuck-up’.20 When participants were later asked to form impressions of an out-group, by rating them on traits such as ‘friendly’ and ‘mean’, they were more negative in their overall evaluations than were controls. (And while we’re on the topic, another point in favour of authentic pride: participants induced with this good kind of pride showed no increase in prejudice.)
We can get even further insight into the nature of hubris by considering a close psychological relative: narcissism.
You probably know the myth of Narcissus, at least in broad terms. Good-looking Greek mortal goes down to a lake, takes one look at his reflection in the water and is hooked. He loves it. Loves it so much, in fact, that he can’t bear to look away. So there he sits, lakeside, staring at his reflection until he dies of starvation (or drowns, depending on the version; either way, you get the point).
Narcissus is the embodiment of hubris. And although from the psychological point of view hubris and narcissism aren’t quite the same thing, researchers consider hubris to be the emotional core of the narcissistic personality. And just like hubristic pride, narcissism looks less than virtuous at first glance.
As you might expect, the narcissist is confident, and although such confidence has its perks (most obviously, it feels good), it also has its drawbacks. Narcissists tend to perform poorly in academic contexts and also underperform in a range of tasks when performance is private.21 When the narcissist has no audience, he won’t bother trying. And just like those who tend towards hubris, narcissists also have long-term relationship difficulties, often being less liked by others.22
Admittedly, things don’t look good. But not so fast. There is a detail of the Narcissus myth that you may not remember. After Narcissus died, the nymph Echo took pity on him and turned him into a flower: daffodil is its English name; its botanic name – Narcissus. It’s true, of course, that this flower is poisonous, but still, it is rather pretty. So is there anything pleasantly floral about everyday narcissism?
Yes, according to an extensive review by W. Keith Campbell and Laura Buffardi, psychologists at the University of Georgia.23 Although narcissists perform poorly in some instances, if performance is tied to an opportunity to self-enhance, they do remarkably well. And although they may get into relationship difficulties in the long run, the attractiveness of their confidence and charm ensures that narcissists are successful in initiating relationships.
So the story of hubris and narcissism is a little more complicated than that of authentic pride. There are downsides – more aggression and anxiety and relationship troubles – but there are also positives. Narcissists persist and their charm often pays off. Even this kind of pride isn’t always so bad.
We have up until now been looking at pride from the inside. We have considered what it is like to experience the sin, how this experience changes our thinking, and how these mental shifts change our behaviour.
But the story from the inside is only half the story. To get a full understanding of what pride does for us, we need to take at look at this emotion from the outside. We need to consider the functions not of experiencing pride but of expressing it. And to do this, we need to turn, naturally, to the judo tournament of the 2004 Olympic Games.
Pride’s true reflection
It’s not often that scientists turn to the martial arts for answers to the big questions, but it does happen. At the judo competition of the 2004 Olympic Games, Jessica Tracy and fellow emotions researcher David Matsumoto, from San Francisco State University, had an official photographer for the International Judo Federation take pictures of athletes both during and right after each match.24 Snapping with shutter speeds of up to 1/500th of a second, the photographer produced moment-to-moment records of each judoka’s reactions to winning or losing a bout. Once all the photos were in, Tracy and Matsumoto had them coded by trained raters. They were interested in whether or not each photo contained evidence of the following:
Why? Because this is what pride looks like. In previous work, Tracy had shown that people everywhere, from North American college students, to the inhabitants of isolated rural settlements in Burkina Faso, to four-year-old kids, consistently classify people displaying these markers as expressing pride.25 This near universal recognition of pride was, by the way, a remarkable finding in itself. Although researchers had for some time acknowledged that so-called basic emotions (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust and surprise) have universally recognizable expressions, no one had really considered pride a candidate for widespread recognition.
What Tracy and Matsumoto were expecting in the judo study was that pride’s head-tilts and expanded chests and the like would be expressed more so after a win than after a loss. This seems a rather obvious prediction, and indeed they found what they expected: all six of the pride markers were displayed more often after a win.
But things get particularly interesting when you consider that they did the exact same study with blind athletes at the Paralympics. Judo has been a fixture at the Paralympic Summer Games since 1988. The rules are similar to sighted judo and the competition format is much the same. Again, the researchers had a photographer chronicle the moment-to-moment reactions of winners and losers. And, remarkably, even athletes blind from birth showed a consistent pride display after a win. These athletes couldn’t have learned the display via visual cues, of course, which lends weight to the notion that the pride expression is innate.
This finding is particularly striking because it, along with the fact that people all over the world recognize the emotion, suggests that pride may have developed to serve a particular evolutionary function. Like other emotions, pride communicates. From an evolutionary perspective, emotions are not only feelings (the inside angle), they are also non-verbal messages to others (the outside angle). When you see an angry face, you know you’d better walk the other way or get ready for a fight. And much like the snarl of anger or the raised eyebrows of surprise, the expanded chest and arms akimbo display of pride says something specific about the expresser. It says simply: I’m successful, I’m high-status. Had the judges at the Paralympics been confused about who to give the gold medal to, they had simply to consider the angle of head tilt to be sure.
And why precisely is signalling status via the pride expression evolutionarily functional? Well, people with high status get benefits that those on the lower rungs do not. Expressing pride lets people know that you’re an appropriate target for deferential treatment, respect, mates, resources, and all manner of other things that increase the chances of your passing on your genes to the next generation. If you’re winning judo tournaments or bringing in big game from the hunt and no one knows about it, chances are that social approval, women, resources and respect aren’t going to come your way.
All, even football, is vanity
On 29 June 2004, New Jersey introduced the United States’ first vanity tax. Writing on the tax in the Journal of Legal Medicine, lawyer Michael Ruel points out that what is officially known as New Jersey’s Cosmetic Medical Procedure Tax is essentially a levy on any procedure aimed at improving a person’s appearance without meaningfully promoting the proper functioning of the body.26 The legalese surrounding the tax is a little obtuse, but in essence it is a levy on merely cosmetic, as opposed to medical, procedures.
And it’s not just the Garden Staters who have come down hard on vanity. Minnesota and Hawaii followed suit in 2006. Arkansas tried in 2005 and failed. This raises the general question: should people be dissuaded, via taxes or otherwise, from taking a little pride in their appearance?
The answer: not if they are quarterbacks in the National Football League (NFL).
The NFL has an intricate system for keeping track of player performance. There are team stats and defensive line stats and, of course, individual player stats. One can track the sacks and interceptions made by defensive linemen or the fumbles made by punt returners. And then, of course, there are the quarterback numbers: completions, touchdowns, first downs, yards gained . . . the list goes on.
The point of all this statistical pedantry is to track performance. The numbers tell the story. A player’s worth is in his stats and, in theory, the stats should go part way, if not all the way, to determining the value of a player. The quarterback who makes passes and gains ground gets paid. End of story.
Well, not quite. The story is actually a little more complicated than this, according to David J. Berri, an economist from Southern Utah University.27 Berri and some of his colleagues were interested in whether there was anything more to player value (read: ‘player salaries’) than objective performance.
To do this, they began with headshots of 312 NFL quarterbacks taken between 1995 and 2006. They fed these into a program called Symmeter, which measured the facial symmetry of each quarterback. They then predicted salaries from symmetry (which, as you may have guessed, is a measure of attractiveness: symmetrical = attractive) as well as a bunch of objective measures of performance, including previous season’s passing yards, career pass attempts and Pro Bowl status.
As expected, the objective measures predicted salaries: more passes and more Pro Bowls mean more money. But so did attractiveness. Over and above the impact of a range of statistical measures of performance, players with more symmetrical faces were better paid. In fact, a player with a symmetry score of one standard deviation above the mean (that is, a score higher than 84 per cent of others), gets paid 12.8 per cent more than an average-looking quarterback.
So pretty quarterbacks get more money. But such effects aren’t restricted to the football field. At school, homely-looking kids gets get poorer grades than their attractive classmates.28 And in the workplace there is a similar ‘plainness penalty’: the most homely get paid up to 10 per cent less than those of average looks.29 (That’s in the United States. In the United Kingdom and Australia, the plainness penalty is at least twice as big.)30 Plus, if that’s not unfair enough, the uglier you are, the more likely you are to turn to crime.31
Some other benefits of being attractive: more dating experience, more sexual experiences, better physical and mental health, more occupational success, more popularity, more self-confidence and better social skills.32
Of course, a lot of the positive consequences of beauty stem from what other people will do for you if you have a pretty face. Attractive kids get better grades in large part because teachers favour the good-looking. Even strangers will do the beautiful a good turn. If you’re easy on the eyes, people will sign your petitions, give you directions, run errands for you and, of interest to social psychologists, participate in your studies.33
You may have detected a sleight of hand in all this talk about attractiveness. Does he really expect me to believe that beauty and vanity are the same thing? No, I don’t. But I had to make the point clear: as much as we’d like it not to be true, the beautiful get breaks in life that the rest of us just don’t.
Now back to vanity. Despite what our mothers say, not all of us are beautiful. But this needn’t condemn us to a life of general misery and incompetence, poor social skills and unsigned petitions. With a little work (and I don’t just mean of the surgical kind), the rest of us can also cash in on the attractiveness halo. We may not be able to easily alter our facial symmetry, but we can put vanity to work for us. We can comb our hair and clean our teeth and polish our shoes, maybe add a little lipstick or straighten our ties.
Because yes, grooming matters. And it may even trump natural good looks. Michael French, a sociologist from the University of Miami, and some of his colleagues made the most of a large data set based on about twenty thousand adolescents’ responses to various interview questions about health and school and related topics.34 What French was interested in was the impact of personal appearance on academic performance at high school. As expected, he found that physical attractiveness (measured by interviewers’ ratings of interviewees) predicted grade-point average.
At first glance, the results seem to tell the familiar story: beauty brings benefits. But an interesting (and comforting) pattern of results emerges when you look at the data more carefully. When French took grooming into account, he found that the effects of physical attractiveness per se disappeared.
Another important point to note is that vanity is not just about the face. It’s also about clothes and, thankfully, shirts and dresses are a little easier to change than faces.
Our clothes go a long way to defining us. Entire identities are tied to a leather jacket, a bolo tie, or a Stetson. But clothes not only constitute identity, they also communicate it. An outfit or even a single piece of clothing can tell others anything from what music we like to where we’re from or where we work.
Samuel Gosling, a social psychologist from the University of Texas at Austin, has spent the better part of the last decade carefully studying the messages encoded in people’s possessions, their walks and their clothes.
He can tell you that people with inspirational posters on their bedroom walls are neurotic, that people who swing their arms when they walk are extroverted, and that those with uncluttered offices are conscientious.35
On the sartorial front there are the following encryptions: dark clothes = neurotic; formal dress = conscientious; messy and unconventional clothing = open to new things; cleavage and expensive clothes = narcissism, at least in women (male cleavage signals something altogether different).36
But clothes have a mystical power beyond constituting and communicating identities. They are persuasive signals, and while they may not entirely maketh the man, they do maketh the men (and women) around one change their behaviours in interesting ways.
Imagine standing at a set of traffic lights waiting to cross the street. Next to you stands a young man, about thirty, wearing a freshly pressed suit, white shirt and polished shoes. The walk signal flashes Don’t Walk but the young man crosses anyway. So you ask yourself the question: to jaywalk or not to jaywalk? When Monroe Lefkowitz, Robert Blake and Jane Mouton of the University of Texas staged this exact scenario in the commercial district of Austin, they found an interesting pattern of results attesting to the persuasive power of clothing.37 When their confederate was dressed in the high-status attire of suit, shirt and shiny shoes, 14 per cent of unwitting participants (pedestrians who just happened to be standing at the lights at the time) jaywalked when the confederate did. But when the confederate was dressed in the low-status getup of scuffed shoes, dirty pants and denim shirt, only 4 per cent of participants followed him across the street.
The unpleasant fact is this: the way we look matters. Our faces, our bodies, our skin, our clothes. All these things make a difference in how we are perceived and what we can achieve. And while a little pride in appearance probably can’t get you from a lowly ‘1’ to a perfect ‘10’, it might, via a primp here and a straighten there, get you a better grade in school or help ward off poverty.
Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens used to play a word game that involved coming up with book titles that never quite hit the presses: The Big Gatsby, Good Expectations and Mr Zhivago were some of the favourites.38 Equally unpoetic and flat, but nowhere near as witty: Prides and Prejudice. Second-rate, but rather apt, given what actually happens in Austen’s novel: Elizabeth Bennett slides back and forth between love and hate for Mr Darcy, alternatively admiring his honour (read: authentic pride) and loathing his conceitedness (read: hubris).
There are two prides in Austen’s novel, just as there are two prides in the work of social psychologists. Austen touches on some of the goods of pride, but misses others that have since come to light through the work of scientists. The proud work hard and achieve; they take the lead and are liked.
Still, she sees the big picture. There are two kinds of pride, and the key to making the most of this queen of the deadly sins is to indulge the good and resist (at least for the most part) the bad. And if you want to get good grades and have strangers give you money, a little pride in your appearance can’t hurt either.