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.