nice guys vs. jerks and representativeness

"Nah, I can't wear my glasses out. They make me look nice - and everyone knows girls don't want to date nice guys. Women like the bad boys."

This is my neighbor Andrew giving me that tired, woeful explanation for the seeming success of jerks that so many New York men (nice and not nice) take as gospel. After recovering from the profound despair such misconceptions hurl me into - I pulled out a pen, grabbed a napkin and marshaled the teachings of Daniel Kahneman to set Andrew straight. I thought it a worthwhile service for the single women of New York to likewise educate other men:

Women don't like jerks. They do like cool, confident. Ask any woman. This is god's truth.

What confuses men off is what Kahneman calls the Representativeness Heuristic. Men (and, yes, women) don't tend to think like statisticians; instead we make categorizations based on correlations. (In their most insidious forms these categorizations are called prejudices, but usually they're less harmful.) Andrew, like many of his sex, was categorizing "bad boys" (or "jerks" as I'll call them) as "cool" and "nice guys" as "uncool."

Andrew's View

Now, Andrew isn't necessarily wrong about this categorization. Let's even say he's right: jerks do tend to be cool and nice guys uncool.

But that still doesn't mean women like jerks. What happens is that nonconfident, uncool guys (the kind of guys women don't, in fact, like) almost always are nice. This is so because they don't really have a choice; if you're unconfident and a jerk, you don't even get a first date. Cool, confident guys, however, have a choice: they can be nice guys or jerks.

Let's say that the world is made up of 50% confident guys and 50% nonconfident. To keep our model simple, assume all of the uncool guys will be nice guys, but that 50% of the cool guys will be nice and 50% will be jerks. You get the picture below.


You can see that most of the nice guys, yes, do happen to be uncool, while virtually all of the jerks are confident. Thus the misleading heuristic of "nice=uncool".

But don't be fooled, gents. Ladies will put up with the cool, confident jerks, but what we all want - and what I humbly recommend you aspire to be - is the cool, confident, nice guy.

recent research

(Still) Catching up with Kevin Lewis' listing of recent research:

• If you're going to take away someone's freedom and not get flack, do it absolutely.
• Why some countries leave social welfare in the hands of the government vs. nonprofit organizations: it's a matter of individualism and trust.
• Go ahead, delude yourself - it's evolutionarily advantageous. As is social-emotional pain (although that's more advantageous to the group than to you personally.
• Happy people are helpful people.
• One way to reduce prejudice: get people to wash their hands. Another: make sure to mention the negative as well as positive traits of the "out-group".
• Are people defined more by their language or their race? It depends on whether the definer is a 5 year old or a 10 year old.
• US politics may have become more polarized over the past four decades - but political donors themselves have not.
• Could there be no connection between money and lobbying success? One researcher had a hard time finding one.
• Past presidents were just as partisan as today, but perhaps in an under-stated way.
• More evidence that the powerful are a little too sure of themselves.
• False memories are not only easy to make - but hard to fade. Yet we'll shift our memories when they disagree with anothers.
• How face to face interactions build faith in fellow man (especially if you're a man).
• Taking a moment to reflect makes Utilitarians of us all.
  
• We not only feel kinship with people who hail from our nation - we also are more likely to warm up to American robots.
• The uninformed: the gullible who are easily manipulated by passionate extremists? Maybe not.
• Worrying about disease may not only make us more prejudice (see "washing hands" above), but more conformist.
• We are all Zeligs.
• It still may not be clear why yawns are contagious, but it definitely has something to do with empathy - at least judging by how how much more our friends and family make us yawn.
• Are some people staying home on election day 'cause they're not sure their ballot is secret? Could be. But maybe there's no re-assuring them.
• Close elections aren't just good for turnout - they actually make us learn and think more.
• More evidence that larger voter turnout doesn't really change much. And an argument for why it's not a problem.
• Two studies on the modest - and variable - benefits of mail-in voting.
• Politicians' tweets can make them more likable - but only among the socially reserved.
• Democracies are, indeed, more transparent.
• Evidence that public participation initiatives can instill faith in local government - but primarily for those who aren't sure how they feel about government in the first place.
• Power corrupts - or makes us less self-interested - depending on a little thing called morality.
• Genes, personality and political preferences: another attempt to map their relationship.
  
• Daron Acemoglu and friends take on another momentous project: modeling the evolution of democracy.
• Murtin and Wacziarg, meanwhile, look at national stats going back to 1870 to find that primary education, more than anything else, predicts who will democratize first.
• As advice seekers know, it's easier to be an idealist when giving advice.
• We're motivated to uphold and justify the status quo - except when we think we can do better.
• A new theory on what's caused political polarization in the US: our global standing.
• One of the popular explanations for polarization is gerrymandering (the political process of carving up election districts; Masket et al say gerrymandering is not all that.
• Alvarez and Sinclair advocate a different way to counter polarization: blanket primaries.
• Pragmatists just like us: politicians try to appeal to their ideological base and swing voters at the same time.
• Advice to the newly elected politician: don't enact any policy if you want to get re-elected.
• Even more papers about polarization.
• From the persuasion files: triggering "loss aversion" is effective in political persuasion too.
• Media attention can put policy initiatives in the legislative fast lane, but more often it'll slog those initiatives down.
• It's not just a myth: people avoid political conversations in (politically) mixed company, though that's less true for some personality types.
• Maybe it's a European thing? Study shows that opposition parties do better when they moderate their positions, while incumbents win by going more extreme.