The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 174: Jessica Tracy - Pride: The Secret To Human Success

Episode Date: November 10, 2016

Episode 174: Jessica Tracy - Pride: The Secret To Human Success Jessica Tracy is a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where she also directs the Emotion and Self Lab. Her research focuses on emotions and emotion expression, and especially on the self-conscious emotions of pride and shame. She has published over 80 journal articles, book chapters, edited volumes, and reviews, and her groundbreaking work on pride has been covered by hundreds of media outlets, including ABC's Good Morning America, NPR's All Things Considered, the New York Times, the Economist, and Scientific American. Tracy was born and raised in Washington, D.C., and now lives in Vancouver with her daughter and her partner. Her book is: Take Pride: Why the Deadliest Sin Holds the Secret to Human Success. It has received rave reviews by some of the brightest minds in the world Episode 174: Jessica Tracy - Pride: The Secret To Human Success Subscribe on iTunes  or Stitcher Radio The Learning Leader Show "Good pride = Authentic.  Bad pride = Hubristic." In This Episode, You Will Learn: Jessica's initial interest in Pride - Started studying in grad school in 1999. Managing the challenge of others caring about us -- At an evolutionary level. We need authentic pride Sharing on social media - Pride in "likes" -- only posting the 5% best aspect of our lives It's a slippery slope caring too much what others think The "over sharers" on social media -- what it really means Lance Armstrong initially had authentic pride -- an incredible work ethic... Then is grew to hubristic pride and he doped/cheated JJ Watt -- Hubristic pride? The "log cabin" story Pride in the workplace - Power and Leadership Authentic Pride -- Leads to prestige Bosses: The "do what I tell you or you'll be fired" are bosses who have hubristic pride. Insecure, people dislike them and typically will quit. Prestigious leaders are well-liked and respected bosses. Secure in themselves Donald Trump = Hubristic pride The story of Dean Karnazes - successful businessman -- At 30 realized something was missing. Became a runner Good pride = Authentic.  Bad pride = Hubristic. Execution Common themes of excellence = Growth mindset -- Intrinsic goals vs money/fame Continue Learning: Read Jessica's book: Take Pride: Why The Deadliest Sin Holds The Secret To Human Success  Follow Jessica on Twitter: @ProfJessTracy To Follow Me on Twitter: @RyanHawk12 You may also like these episodes: Episode 078: Kat Cole – From Hooters Waitress To President of Cinnabon Episode 071: Nate Boyer - Green Beret, Texas Football, The NFL Episode 073: Jay Bilas - World Class ESPN Basketball Broadcaster, Toughness, Fixing The NCAA Episode 107: Simon Sinek – Leadership: It Starts With Why Did you enjoy the podcast? If you enjoyed hearing Jessica Tracy on the show, please don't hesitate to send me a note on Twitter or email me. Episode edited by the great J Scott Donnell The Learning Leader Show is supported by  Mizzen and Main: Performance fabric menswear. The most comfortable/durable dress shirts you will find on the market. I personally own 22 of them. To get free shipping, use the code "ryanhawk" -- To get $50 off when you purchase three shirts, use the code "ryanhawk3" -- Thank you for your support!

What we found is that authentic pride basically motivates people to want to work hard to achieve, as I mentioned. And then the result of that is people who are really, who are successful, who achieve a lot, you know, who are driven by authentic pride, they end up becoming the kind of leader that we call prestigious. Are leaders born or are they made? Our host, Ryan Hawk, believes that leaders can be made through determined, focused work on learning the art and science behind the makeup of other successful leaders. Now it's time to inhale knowledge and exhale success. You're listening to The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk. Hey, and welcome to The Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk.

Thank you so much for being here. Before we get to tonight's episode, I want to remind you to please join us in our closed Facebook group, the learning leader community. We've had some incredible conversations. I love the dialogue amongst the people in the group. It's growing like crazy. Love to have you join us. Go to learningleader.com slash group. Learningleader.com slash group to join.

And on to tonight's episode. It's with Dr. Jessica Tracy. She's a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and the leading expert on the emotion pride. Best-selling book is titled Take Pride. Her groundbreaking research on the science of pride has been published in leading psychological journals and covered by hundreds of media outlets.

A few of the topics we got into. We discussed the difference between hubristic pride and authentic pride, and which leads to more success. the answer may surprise you. And we talked about Lance Armstrong. And you know that person that we all know who constantly post selfies on social media

and what that person and Lance have in common. Followed up by how pride can help us implement and execute on our most important objectives in our daily lives. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a great one with Dr. Jessica Tracy. All right, Dr. Jessica Tracy, welcome to the Learning Leader Show and thank you so much for being here.

Oh, yeah, thank you for having me. So let's get it gone. You've been conducting scientific research on the emotion of pride for over a decade. I'm curious, how did you first get interested in this topic? Well, you know, when I started grad school, which was in 1999, I knew I was really interested in emotions. And emotions were kind of a hot topic back then in the 90s. It was sort of a big deal in social psychology, which is what I went into in personality psychology. Everyone wanted to study emotions.

And I was one of those people. And for me, it was mainly because I saw emotions as kind of the basic building blocks of everything that we do, right? And so I was really interested and I am really interested in social behavior, how people relate to each other, why people are different from one another. But to me, emotions are kind of the core thing that guides all that. Everything we do is driven to some extent by a feeling or a desire to feel something. And so I really wanted to kind of wanted to study that. And when I got to grad school, my research supervisor and my advisor, Rick Robbins, his expertise was in the same. And so I really wanted to study that. And when I got to grad school, my research supervisor and my advisor, Rick Robbins, his expertise was in the same. And so. He's, he self, things like self-esteem, self-enhancement, how we come to see ourselves and understand ourselves. And so sort of putting our heads together, we realize that the emotions that are most important to our sense of self, are these emotions that we call self-conscious emotions. And these are emotions like pride, shame, and guilt. They're all about how we feel about ourselves. And in order to experience them, we need to think about ourselves, how we feel about ourselves, basically evaluate ourselves and decide whether whatever we're doing right now is what we should be doing in order to

kind of achieve a certain sense of self that we all want to achieve. And that's kind of how my research on self-conscious emotions in general started. And once he and I got into it, we realized that while there was a good deal or at least, you know, a small cluster of research that had been happening on shame and guilt, the negative self-conscious emotions, there really was almost nothing out there on pride. And when you discover something like that as a scientist in any field, I think, you sort of realize, well, that's where I'm going to go, right? I want to do what's, what's open, what no one has really touched on yet. I want to see if I can figure that out. So what is pride? Pride is a positive self-conscious emotion, which is to say it's an emotion that's all about the self and results

from making a self-evaluation. But it's a good one, which means it generally feels good. And we feel it when we see ourselves as meaning or even exceeding some goal that we have for identity, for the kind of person we want to be. So pride's what we feel when we feel like, hey, you know what, I'm doing something or becoming something that I really want to be. So there are a couple types of pride. There's good and bad. So the bad would be hubristic pride and good would be authentic pride. Can you explain the difference between the good and bad versions of pride? Yeah. So this was one of kind of our major early findings that pride is not just one thing. And I think this creates a ton of confusion, you know, in English language, because we use the same word, pride, to refer.

refer to both these things. And that's why, you know, many people think of pride as a deadly sin and something we shouldn't experience. That's because they're thinking of hubristic pride in particular, this one kind of pride that really is all about a sense of superiority. It typically goes with feelings of arrogance, conceitedness, egotism. And when we feel it, when people feel it, they tend to, they tend to want to behave in sort of antisocial ways. So feeling hubristic pride makes people feel like they're better than others and makes them feel like they should put others down as a way of sort of feeling good about themselves. And so we see that people who feel hubristic pride tend to do just that. They tend to be aggressive, often manipulative, basically

using others to kind of get ahead in the way that they want to. Authentic pride in contrast is really different. That's the pride that's more about a sense of confidence, genuine feelings of self-worth, accomplishment, achievement, productivity. And it's the pride that we feel when we work really hard to accomplish something. And we know that we're working hard. We know that we're kind of putting in the effort that we need to put in to achieve a particular goal. And it doesn't just have to be about accomplishments in the domain of work or school. It could be about, you know, being a good partner, being a good parent, right, doing good for our community. All these kinds of things can make us feel the sense of authentic pride. But the key aspect is it's about feeling a sense that, you know what,

I'm on track toward becoming the kind of person I want to be. And it's less about thinking about what others think of me and more about thinking, am I becoming the kind of person I want to be in terms of my own sense of identity. I'm glad you hit on that part, Jessica, because I think this is very common. And I've spoken with a few great leaders on this podcast about this. I think of Sarah Knight, I don't know if you know her work. She used a lot of bad language, but her message is actually quite important, I believe, but that we have this intense feeling or sense of,

of need for others to accept us, others to like us. We care a lot about how we're viewed. How does pride in that type of mindset interact? And what is in order to live a life of sustained excellence, of happiness, of success, as some would say, how do we manage those difficult challenges? Yeah, well, I think, you know, that's absolutely right. We do care a lot about what others think about us. And we evolved to care about that.

we evolved to have these reputations that we want to protect and enhance. And that's really why we experience both kinds of pride is because in an ultimate sort of evolutionary level, we want to make sure that we're the kind of people that our social group likes, saps, doesn't reject. And then eventually that we're the kind of people that can get status in our group that can climb the social ladder and get influence over others in power. And that's ultimately adaptive. And both kinds of prides help us get there. But they do it in really different ways. And hubristic pride really kind of stays focused on what others think. It stays focused on getting praise from others. And it doesn't really matter whether that praise is based on something real and genuine to ourselves. To feel the hubris

pride, we don't have to feel this genuine sense of, wow, you know, I deserve the praise that I'm getting. And often we don't. Often hubris do pride is driven by kind of underlying feelings of insecurity and shame and the way that many people cope with those feelings because they're really awful, right? Shame is one of the worst emotions to experience. We don't like experiencing shame. So we cope with it by kind of burying those feelings and instead convincing ourselves and then trying to convince others that we're actually really great, that there's no need to feel insecure because we're the best. But because there is this underlying insecurity, the feelings that result, those great feelings, aren't genuine, right? And that's why we sort of make this distinction between authentic pride

and hubristic pride. And we call the other one authentic pride because it's more based on an authentic sense of self, that the pride we feel when we're feeling authentic pride really is more about actual accomplishments and achievements and the kind of person we're actually becoming, whereas hubristic pride is more based on this inflated and grandiose sense of self that we've built up in order to regulate these other feelings that are more negative and problematic. I'm thinking of social media right now. I know this is a topic that you've covered. And I'm interested in the hubristic pride of maybe why it's functional when it comes to you know, we all post the best 5% of our lives on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, whatever it may be.

And could you explain some of the science behind? I mean, I'm certainly in that boat. I don't, like, post negative or boring or bad-looking pictures of my life. I mean, usually it's fun things with my family or maybe travels or vacations. Not really that much, but or people post, like, good-looking meals of all things. So I'm curious, like, what's the science behind that need for the, like, potentially maybe, perhaps the dopamine rush of likes and shares and comments? How does that all work? Yeah.

Well, you know, I think when we feel pride, when we feel good about ourselves, one of the things that we kind of automatically are motivated to do is share that with others. And that's the case, I think, for both prides, right? Authentic pride also, we want to celebrate it. We want to, you know, show our pride expression in our body. we expand our posture, you know, sometimes we raise our hands and put them in fists. And we want to publicize ourselves, right? And often in today's culture, that means posting on social media in one way or another. And it's a way to kind of make sure that everyone else knows about what we did and why we had that success. And it is also a way of maximizing those

pride feelings, right? That the more praise we get from others, the more that we can kind of enhance those feelings in ourselves. And I think that is a large part of why people post, you know, on Facebook or on Twitter about all other great things, because it does enhance those feelings and it is a way of kind of maintaining the pride experience. The thing is, it becomes really complicated because there's sort of a limit to how much we can do that before it becomes hubristic, right? Because, you know, it's one thing to feel, you know, I have a huge success. I'm going to let my friends and family know. I want to make sure, you know, I get some praise from others, great, you know. But once you start focusing only on that praise and only on sort of, I'm just, all I care about is

making sure others think I'm great. And not so much. on, wait a minute, I still need to make sure I think I'm great myself. That's a really slippery slope, and that is where things convert to hubristic pride. And, you know, the example I give of this in my book is Lance Armstrong. Because he's a classic example of someone who, you know, clearly early in his life, he was motivated by a desire to feel authentic pride. You know, anytime we see someone putting in all kinds of work and effort when it's just unbelievably painful and tiring, which, you know, riding your bike for hours and hours

every day has to be, you know, at some point it's fun, but then that quickly changes. that's because he wants to feel good about himself. There's really no other explanation for why people, and people in many, many domains of life do this, go well beyond what they need to do. To just get by, to survive, you don't need to be the fastest cyclist in the world. The desire to be the fastest cyclist in the world and put in all those hours in the bike,

even when it's painful and tiring, that's driven by this desire to feel authentic pride, to become a certain kind of person. And it's really admirable. But then we know something changed. Once Lance reached a particular level, and I don't know exactly when it happened, And he decided that rather than base his sense of self-worth off how fast he genuinely could go,

he wanted to give himself something extra, right? And we know he started doping and cheating in various ways. And once a person does that, then their success is no longer based on their authentic sense of self, right? Just by definition, if you're cheating, then any praise you're getting, any success that you're achieving isn't based on who you really are, right? It's based on this artificial or deceptive sense of self. and that's heuristic pride. So the pride that you get can't be based on your real successes or how good a cyclist you actually are.

It's instead based on how good a cyclist other people think you are. And that's really the critical shift that Lance decided, rather than try to be the best, I want to make sure that other people think I'm the best. And that's, I think, a really important difference. And, you know, it can start with posting on social media in a really simple way where, you know, rather than, hey, I had this great achievement, now instead of thinking about the next big achievement

I can have, I'm just going to think of more ways to publicize my success from this achievement. And so you can see the shift there, right? Where it's not so much about achieving and becoming the best, but all of a sudden it's shifting to making sure other people think I'm the best. And again, it's a slippery slope, but I do think that's where the shift starts from authentic to heubers to pride. I think of this, I don't know why that Lance Armstrong's story made me think of perhaps

people in relationships who post an insane amount of pictures about their significant other. and then you'll notice, I don't know, maybe months or even years down the road that it all of a sudden stops. And we see why it stops. And that's because they once had this facade of this relationship. They were working really hard to project to show how happy they were. And then, uh-oh, it goes away because maybe it wasn't authentic. And the Lance type of behavior made me think of that for some reason because we, Everybody listening here knows of a couple or many couples who are currently doing this.

And you kind of wonder, like, I think, because I personally think it's great to every once in a while, show some authentic pride in your spouse or even your relationship at certain big moments. If they accomplish something like, I don't think you should just completely keep that in the dark. But when it's just overwhelmingly, like, constant, it always makes you kind of turn your head and wonder, like, what's going on here, you know? Yeah. Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I think, you know, you make a great point because if you're genuinely happy in your relationship and just really excited to be with your partner, then, you know, sure, you want to tell your friends about it. You want to, you know, make sure your friends get to know this person and you're absolutely excited for your partner when he or she has successes.

But if you're constantly posting about how great they are, it's sort of like, wait a minute. What are you doing here? Because is it that you need to be happy with your partner or is it that you need to make sure others think your partner is great? Right. Because once that becomes the focus that it's not just about, hey, I feel awesome in my partner and I don't really care what anyone thinks. But instead, it's really important to me that everyone thinks my partner's awesome. Then that raises questions about how awesome you actually think your relationship and your partner is, right? Yeah, exactly.

And I know you talk about the pride distinction in like political figures or athletes slash celebrities. And I have a background. I played football growing up and played in college and after. and so I think of, I look at professional athletes, specifically football players, and I think of, do you follow football much? Not that much. Okay, there's a guy who plays for the Houston Texans by the name of JJ Watt. Have you heard of J.J. Watt? I haven't.

Sorry. No big deal. I want to share the story. I want to get your feelings on him real quick. So he has been at times critical of younger players in the league for, you know, taking selfies or putting a lot on social. media, but then when you go and look at what he does, he shares a lot himself. And then he also had this really, this incredible story about the fact that in one of this off seasons, he was going to go live in a cabin in Wisconsin and just train like crazy, almost like a story like the movie

Rocky, you know, when he goes to Russia and trains, like saying, that's what I'm going to do. And then when when people actually dove in and studied it, they went, they went and found this cabin in Wisconsin. And it was this gigantic mansion. It was made out of wood, but it was this gigantic mansion with more in it than you could ever imagine, like one of the greatest houses you could ever find. And so it almost felt like, and I respect him. He's one of the best players in the league. I think, you know, he does, he is a polarizing guy, but it's, it almost felt like he's trying to create some sort of storyline like a rocky type story. And there's a lot of social media to follow it.

But then when people dig in, they're like, wait a second. And is this a facade? Is this fake? So how does pride, what distinction is it there when it comes to a professional athlete? That's really interesting. Yeah. You know, I mean, I think that the hubristic pride, it's always this factor that kind of is underlying our motivations for everyone.

And I think once someone becomes famous, that it becomes even more of a risk factor, right? Because, you know, it's one thing to be working really hard to be, you know, you're playing football with your friends as a kid, maybe in high school, maybe even university college. and it's really just about being the best player that you can be. And working with your team to get wins, right? I mean, that's really, I think, what it is. But then once you start to get the attention that fame brings, right, it's just, I think, really hard to maintain that focus on,

no, wait a minute, I want to work on my, I don't know what the football skills would be, but I want to work on becoming the best at those particular skills. I want to work on making sure my team has what we need to do to win because there's so much attention that you get as a famous person on everything you do. it and it goes beyond your football skills, right? I mean, as you're as you're kind of pointing out, people become interested in every aspect of your life. And we are all motivated to, you know,

want to feel good about ourselves and feel like everyone around us thinks were great. Right. I mean, that's a huge motivational force because because it's adaptive. It's in our genetic heritage, basically. We evolved to want to build a sense of self, not only that we feel good about, but that others look up to and respect and think is really great because that's what ultimately gets us things like power and influence, which bring adaptive benefits. So, Being famous, you know, you start to feel that. Wait a minute. Wow, I'm really, people think I'm awesome.

And it's just incredibly, you know, captivating. And it's really hard to sort of say, no, I'm going to set that aside. I'm not going to think about what others think about me. I'm going to, you know, turn down all these calls to fame and all this attention that I'm getting to really focus on my stuff and who I want to be. I mean, that's a really hard thing to do. And so I think it makes sense, you know. Yeah, this is a really interesting topic. I wasn't quite sure, Jessica, where we would be going here.

And so I find your knowledge base and. the research that you've done fascinating. So I have a lot more thoughts on this. What about pride in a lot of people listening, like I told you as we, before we started recording, I think work in some type of company and corporation, some really intelligent people who listen based on the emails that I get. What about pride in the workplace? Specifically when it comes to leaders, managers, bosses, whatever it may be, the ones who, I guess the difference between hubristic pride and authentic pride when it comes to people who manage others or other people report to them and the difference between maybe a great boss, a great leader,

and the poor ones. Yeah. Now, this is another big area of research that we've kind of done with pride. And what we found is that actually the two kinds of pride are linked to two very different kinds of leadership styles. And it's sort of fascinating because both styles actually get people power. So both, you know, are, I guess you could say, effective ways to lead just in the sense of like being seen as a powerful person and actually having influence over others. But they're incredibly different in terms of the behaviors that these leaders engage in and how they're seen by others and what the long-term outcomes are. So to sum up, what we found is that authentic pride basically motivates people to want to work hard to achieve, as I mentioned.

And then the result of that is people who are really who are successful, who achieve a lot, you know, who are driven by authentic pride. they end up becoming the kind of leader that we call prestigious. And these are leaders who get power because they have a lot to contribute. They know a lot. They're very skilled. They're competent in whatever domain is relevant. And they're nice. And this is really important.

They care about others. And we found that when people feel authentic pride, not only do they feel good about themselves, but they also tend to feel a greater sense of empathy toward others, especially people who are different than them, maybe people who are, you know, their followers or not as high status as them. And so what this results in is you have this leader. who is doing great things, but also wants to help the people who work for him or her, right, and wants to sort of make sure that they learn. And that's actually why we have prestige,

that it's this way of making sure that the people who have the most to teach get power, which results in other people learning their skills, you know, learning from them, and that in turn spreads various knowledge and skills throughout the society, which is really important, kind of from an evolutionary stance. Now, people who feel hubristic pride, the kind of power they get is really different. These are people who feel superior, they think they're better than everyone else, and they tend to engage in behaviors that are not pro-social, they're not nice to others, they're actually kind of mean to others. They're aggressive. They often will put others down and insult others in order to feel good about themselves. And the leadership, the results from this, is called dominance. And these are people who get power, not because they have something of value to offer or they're teaching others, they're nice to others, but because they control some resource that everyone wants, perhaps it's wealth, maybe they're just physically stronger. You can think of this with chimpanzees. And they wield that control in a really aggressive and manipulative way, essentially threatening people and basically telling followers, listen,

you need to give me the power that I want or else there will be negative consequences for you. Right. So this is the boss who basically says, do what I tell you or you'll be fired, right? People who literally lord their wealth and power over others, forcing others to give them control. And others defer. We find that followers actually give these people power. They see them as powerful and they will treat them as powerful, but it's not because they want to. It's not because they like these people.

In fact, they tend not to like dominant leaders. They actually dislike them and are afraid of them, but it's because they're afraid of them that they end up giving them power. So how do these leaders that are like that, these dominant, you know, I think domination is like as a former athlete, that's a word that was a big positive to me. We always look to go out and dominate. We use that word quite a bit. but I think of the dominant in the workplace. How do those types of leaders, one, get the jobs and how do they keep those jobs? Yeah, that's a great question.

I think of takers, like Adam Grant's takers, I know he's comment on your book and spoke very highly of it as well. But that's what I feel like. That's the first word that came to mind when I think of that. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think, you know, his work is really important in showing that like even though both these kind of leaderships exist, we can choose, right? And there are lots of reasons why people in business places, may want, and I would say should want to go for prestige, right? There's a lot of value in that because prestigious leaders, you know, they're well-liked, people respect them. And I think it's really important

to know, we found that when people, when we assign people to work in groups and we assign a leader and then we figure out whether that leader happened to gravitate toward a prestigious style or toward a dominant style, and there's lots of factors that determine which style people naturally gravitate toward, the groups that were led by someone high in prestige, they enjoyed themselves so much more, right? They really liked being part of that group. They respected their leader. They felt good about themselves. They felt a sense of pride in their own accomplishments. People who worked for a dominant leader didn't like their leader, didn't like the group, didn't really like the task. So there's lots of reasons why we might want to foster prestige in a workplace for that

reason. In terms of your question, why dominance get power, even though everyone kind of hates them, really it's because they make their followers feel that they have no choice. And it's kind of amazing this works. I agree with you. We actually did a study where we had college students come into the lab and work together on a task. We didn't assign any leader. We just kind of naturally looked at who became the leader as just sort of an organic process. And that's what happens when you have a group of people working together. You just naturally get a hierarchy. Someone takes control.

Other people kind of fall online. We video recorded these interactions. And then afterwards, we had everyone tell us who is the most influential, who are the most power over the group. Then we had outside observers watch the videos. And they told us the same thing. Who do you see is the most powerful? Then we measured actual influence over the group in terms of who led the decision making, whose views about how the task should unfold actually kind of carried the day. And what we found was that

the people who were seen as dominant. So that means the people in their group said about these people, I don't like him. I'm kind of afraid of him. You know, it's easier to let him have control than to fight him for it. Those people were just as powerful in every dimension that we measured, you know, in terms of how others saw them, how outside observers saw them and actually having influence over the group as were the prestigious people. So this is an effective way of getting power, right? And I think it's because the people, people who work with them simply feel I can't fight him, right? You know, you can think of this like, you know, chimpanzee culture where it's literally, you know, physical fights and the dominant leader is the one who's bigger and stronger. You know, in our human study in these undergrad, there was not going to be any

physical fighting. I can promise you that. But you can still imagine a leader who clearly is making it clear, I'm going to make your life really difficult if you don't give me what I want, right? Maybe I'm going to yell at you. Maybe I'm just going to be kind of a jerk to you. Maybe I'll belittle you. but all these tactics end up giving the person power. They're not well liked, but others who are in their group feel I can't take him on. He actually is going to be, you know, he's going to make my life too difficult. If I don't give him power, it's easier just to let him get his way. And then these people end up getting actual institutional power.

And they really can do things like, I will fire you if you don't do what I want. You know, Steve Jobs is a great example of someone who really used to wield this dominant strategy and people who worked with him really didn't like it much because he was a very difficult person to work for. he would threaten his employees. He would tell them, you know, if we fail, it's because of you, you know, directly kind of belittling, insulting people who work for him. And, you know, it was effective in terms of making sure that he kind of stayed in power, at least for, you know, that sometime, I think there were negative consequences eventually because people didn't like him. And so he eventually lost power. And that is what happens with dominance because they never are liked by the

people who follow them. People will eventually sort of form a coalition or find a way to get rid of a dominant leader, whereas a prestigious leader, no one's ever really looking to get rid of. So long-term, you know, prestige is going to win out. But in the short term, dominance do get this power. Yeah, again, interesting. And I know we've discussed it and you suggest in the book that these people who feel hubristic pride, they don't feel great about themselves. And deep down, they're quite insecure. there are a few people who come to mind immediately.

We're out in the public right now. We're very out in the public right now. I'll let you take it from there. I'm curious about explaining in detail the people. I think, again, we all know people like this who have the false sense of pride, hubristic, but we can tell even by just being around them that there's actually a deep level of insecurity. be. Yeah. No, I think that's absolutely true. And, you know, this is, this is the case with narcissists. And narcissists are people who feel a lot of to pride. And, and, and there's been a lot of evidence to suggest that what's going on with these people, the reason they need to constantly tell you how great they are, constantly brag. And also put others down, right? And this is, I think to me, that's the most telling part of it is, if you genuinely think that you're so great, why would you need to attack others? Right. There's really, you know, if you genuinely have a sense of, listen, I'm, I'm the best. And someone insults you or someone critiques you.

you know, people with genuine high self-esteem, their response to that is whatever. You know, that person, they can attack me all they want. I know I'm great. I have a secure sense of my own self-worth. I don't need to kind of get into it with them. It's the narcissist, the people whose sense of self-worth is very fragile and underlying it is these, are these feelings of insecurity that are kind of threatening to come out. So if they get attacked, they need to respond really harshly.

And studies show this. There's all these neat studies where they have people who write an essay. And it's just, you know, you're in an experimental study for college credit. You know, you're not, this isn't the essay that's going to, like, determine your life outcome. It really doesn't matter. You spend five minutes on it. It's not something to really get hung up on. But they write this essay, and then they get feedback on it.

And they're told the feedback is from another student. But of course, it's actually from the researcher. And the feedback is pretty harsh. You know, it says things like, oh, this is the worst essay I've ever read, you know, all marked up and read. And here's an example where someone who genuinely kind of feels good about themselves is going to see that negative feedback and probably think something like, well, you know, I didn't really work on the essay. I spent five minutes on it. Or even that guy's a jerk. Who cares? You know, like he makes he's jealous because my essay is better than his. I'm going to let it go. But what narcissists do is they can't really handle that negative feedback. It just sort of goes to their core.

Even though, you know, it's an essay they spent five minutes on. They don't really care about. And so in the next part of the study, they are told they get to play a game, a video game, with the person who just gave them feedback. And whenever the person does something wrong in the game, they get to blast them with loud noise. And they get to choose. how loud they want to set the noise or how often they want to blast. And what these studies find is that the more narcissistic people are, the more loudly they will blast these other people with noise, basically punishing them physically for that negative feedback. So it sort of suggests that narcissists can't handle being critiqued. They have to sort of punish these people when that happens and show, no, look, you know, you're wrong, I'm right. It's this real aggressive response that we see

in dominant leaders. You know, and I think the only way to really make sense of it is that there is this underlying defensiveness going on. You have to protect, you know, this fragile sense of self. It felt to me like you were describing to a T Donald Trump. Yeah. Seriously. I mean, I think of like everything that's happened. Yeah. I'm not sure when we're, this one will be released. So it's not going to be today when we're recording this. But so something, so who knows what's going to happen between now and then? But it, but still, I think people could understand that it just felt like any time. I'm, I don't know.

And think something happens. There's just this insane response that is unbecoming of a leader to me. Yeah. No, I agree. And I mean, it's funny. You know, I've used, so Trump is, is it someone I've used as an example of hubrisic pride and dominant leadership for years. He comes up in my book a lot because he's just a great example.

I mean, rare to see a public figure so blatantly demonstrate that kind of grandiosity on such a regular basis. So he's sort of the perfect example. And, you know, of course, I wrote the book before he was. running for president. So it's been fascinating to see all this stuff play out at the highest levels of leadership, which really is where he is now. I absolutely think he's used these tactics to get ahead. You know, you can look at how he won the primary election. And it really was by threatening and intimidating anyone who wanted to critique him. And that worked really well when he

was just going off against people who also needed Republican votes because he had such the stronghold of Republican voters who really loved him. And so the result was that anyone who wanted to critique him whether it was an opponent in the Republican primary or, you know, just a Republican activist who didn't like what he was doing or the way he was saying things, he would, he would berate them, he would humiliate them on Twitter, you know, he would insult them, he would call them names. And it was incredibly effective because what these people found was the punishment wasn't worth it, right? Basically, they were losing the support of, you know, the Republican stronghold that they felt they needed for whatever reason. And so you see people like John McCain, who is attacked

to really, you know, just outrageously, I think, by Donald Trump saying, you know, he was a prisoner of war. I want, I want people who didn't get captured. I mean, to me, a shocking thing to say. And McCain should come out and say, okay, I can't support this man. This is not the kind of leader we want, but he feels he has no choice, but to go ahead and support him anyway, because he's so afraid of what Trump might do to his reputation. So it's a perfect example of how these dominant tactics actually work. And then I think, you know, I don't know if you saw the debate that happened the other night, that this is, I guess, since we don't know when this will. air, the third and final debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. But she really played this,

this narcissism, I think, to a T where, you know, like I said, the way to get a narcissist riled up is to critique them and attack them. And she went after him again and again throughout that debate. And you saw he really tried to remain calm. He tried to keep his composure and seem presidential, I think, more so than in any of the other debates. But by the end of it, that last insult where she said to him, you know, she kind of made fun of him, maybe he would get out of paying his taxes, is something that he's acknowledged doing, you know, admitted to doing before, he just couldn't handle it and he had to call her a name. And I think, you know, nasty woman has now become like a Twitter meme and has done wonders for her campaign. And it's just a great example of how she sort of used his narcissism

against him, I think. Yeah. I just the first thing I thought of and, you know, I don't, I try not to go, we don't really talk about politics much, but it's hard not to, um, just given the landscape of what's going on right now, especially with your topic. It's fact. fascinating to learn about why people act the way that they do. And you have to wonder how we've got here. I mean, it seems to me the biggest complaint I see on social media is there's so many complaints on both sides, on both choices that we have to make. And I'm not, we'll end the politics talk here. But that's what I found fascinating. And I think that the debate, the last debate was an interesting look into the dynamics of how to handle somebody who is a narcissist

and I found that to be fascinating as too. So discuss the, I don't know, what are some of the most interesting topics or things that you learn that maybe surprised you when it comes to your research over the last 10 years of looking at pride? Sure. So, I mean, a number of things have been surprising. I think, you know, the things that we've talked about so far, just the fact that dominance is an effective way of getting power in, you know, college student groups, not, you know, prisoners. I think, you know, we stereotypically think of people who live in worlds of violence. Sure, it makes sense. But, you know, the fact that we brought in undergraduates to our lab to do a task together that involve critical thinking, you know, working together. These are people who aren't violent at all, really. And we still saw that the people who used the dominant strategy got ahead just as effectively as people who used to prestige strategy, that was pretty surprising to me. That's one thing, I think. Another surprising finding on this same kind of debate is in the other study, I briefly mentioned where we had people

working groups and we assigned a leader, I should say, and then we just sort of tried to figure out, you know, what happened to the groups where the leader happened to be prestigious and what happened with the groups where the leader happened to be dominant. I mentioned before that the groups led by someone having prestige, they really enjoyed their experience much more than the people led by dominant. What I didn't say, which was even more surprising, or I guess much more surprising, was that we actually looked at how the groups did on the various tasks that we gave them. And there were four different tasks that these groups had to do. Three of them required kind of analytical thinking, problem solving, basically reaching a solution together, working together

to solve a problem where there was pretty much one correct answer. Then there was one task that required creativity, requiring, you know, people to think outside the box. And this task, actually the goal was to think of as many uses for a brick as you can. And so you can imagine, you know, you get a lot of creative answers. You can come up with all kinds of things. You know, how do you use a brick? Someone said, I think a coffin for a Barbie, that's sort of a classic creative. I was not to cut you off, but I was asked this question during an interview at one point, my career.

Yes. Well, I don't know how you did. I think I did okay. I was timed. I had 30 seconds. I remember the phone sitting on the desk. And it was like, go. And I was like, oh, okay, you know, you're kind of caught off guard.

It was a little bit of surprise. It was interesting. Yeah. Yeah. No, it is because it really sort of puts you in that position. And can you, do you, does your mind go to all kinds of crazy things? Or do you know, if it was me, I'd probably say building a house. Yeah, that's the first thing I said.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right. So you see real differences there, which is kind of neat. In any case, what we found was, you know, we thought, okay, the groups that are working with a prestigious leader, they're going to enjoy themselves much more. They're going to do better on all these tasks. But in fact, what we found was that,

those groups did better on the brick test. They were more creative, right? So prestigious leader encouraged out-of-the-box thinking, probably made people feel comfortable kind of spitballing answers. And that's what you need when you're doing that kind of task that really requires what we call divergent thinking, thinking of lots of different answers. For the other tasks that required more convergent thinking coming up with one answer, the groups that were led by a dominant actually did better on all of them than the groups that were under prestige. Yeah. So, I mean, it's sort of upsetting in many ways because here we are, you know, we want to say like, you know, you mentioned Adam Grant's work, we want to say, no, it's the people who give, who care about

others. Those are the good leaders. And I think that's very much true. But in this study, that's not what we found, that in fact, the groups that were led by someone high and dominant, they actually outperform those other groups. And my thinking of why that happened is because you have a limited amount of time to solve a problem. Someone who's high in prestige, one thing they care about is reaching consensus, right? They really want to hear from everyone. They want to honor everyone's opinion. And there are times where that can really slow things down and where what you really need is someone who's willing to say, okay, I'm done hearing from you. We're going to go with what this person said. Or here's the answer. End of story. Right. You need someone who's willing to

do that at certain times in order to achieve, in order to reach that solution. Now, I would like to think that, you know, again, this was a study where we brought people in and kind of randomly decided who was leader. And they knew that. They knew that they were all equal. And we just sort of said, hey, you're going to be the leader. And that's not how things typically work in the real world. right? And so it's possible that under those conditions, someone who tends toward prestige feels particularly disinclined from kind of ruling out people or not hearing from everyone, right? You can imagine if you're in that situation, you're told you're the leader, you know, you're going to feel really kind of uncomfortable saying, no, no, I don't want to hear from you.

Whereas maybe in real life when a prestigious leader is where he or she is because they've earned it, right? They've worked really hard and they've gotten to that position. Then they might feel more comfortable kind of saying, okay, you know, thank you for your opinion. I'm really glad we heard from you, but now we're going to go with this decision and kind of doing that as needs to happen at times. So that's my kind of optimistic spin on that study. But yeah, we were surprised to find that the groups led by dominance actually did really well. Reminds me of Lauren Michaels. I think it was Jonah Berger's work that he was talking about, no, it's Charles Duhigg. He was talking about the fact that Lauren Michaels has created this incredible environment and culture of Saturday Night Live to be inclusive

of all the cast members' ideas. And it creates just like psychological safety amongst the group to listen to all. And that's why, and I would consider that a creative pursuit, it makes a lot of sense and goes in line with your research to say that he, Lauren Michaels has done from a leadership perspective, he has a lot of prestige and has created the environment that has put out some of the most incredible work for certainly an extended period of time. Yeah. example. And if you are leading a team of creatives, I think it absolutely makes sense that you'd want to go for prestige strategy. Yeah. I was speaking with Andrew Warner, another great podcaster at one point. He talked to me about Dean Carnassus. And I obviously see that you've discussed Dean. I want, if possible, before we wrap up,

I love for you to discuss pride in the story of Dean Carnassas. Yeah. He's such an inspiring example, I think. And so, yeah, this is a story that comes up early on in my book. And the reason I think he's interesting is because, so he's someone who, he was a successful businessman. You know, he kind of, he got his MBA. You know, he then went on and had a successful career living in San Francisco. He was married, very happy guy. And then when he turned 30, he kind of woke up with a shock, right? He sort of just woke up with this feeling that something was missing from his life. And to me, this really resonates. I think so many of us have gone through this. experience where things are fine, right? We're successful, or at least we're on route to becoming

successful. We've got a job. Maybe we've got a partner. Everything is sort of in place in terms of where we think our life should be. And yet, we all of a sudden get this sense that something is missing. Something isn't quite right. And typically that's because we're not finding a way to feel a real sense of authentic pride and the kind of self we want to be. And so Dean sort of didn't know what was going on. He went out, you know, he told his wife, I'm having this little crisis. I don't know what's happening. Went out that night with friends to celebrate his birthday, ended up drinking a bit too much,

and almost kind of had, you know, he was flirting with a stranger after his wife left and realized, okay, what is happening with my life right now? And he sort of had this moment where he thought, okay, the couple times in his life where he had experienced a real sense of pride in himself weren't when he was working in his corporate job, they were when he did something that was physically punishing.

So he talks about when he was a child and he decided to ride his bike from his parents' house in Los Angeles. to his grandparents in Pasadena. I think that's about 40 miles. And he was 10 years old, had no idea where he was going, but he did it. And he just felt this incredible sense of pride after getting there being on his bike for 10 hours. He talks about a time when he ran a particularly grueling race on the track team when he was in high school. And that was this moment of real pride. And so he realized that being physical and physically punishing himself, that was a huge part of

who he was in terms of feeling a real sense of the kind of self that he wanted to be. And so having this moment of epiphany, literally that night in the bar, probably around midnight, he just, he left the bar and he just started running. And he ended up running all the way from his home in San Francisco down to Half Moon Bay, which is about 30 miles away. He ran basically all night long. And this is someone who literally hadn't run, like he wasn't a jogger at that point in his life at all. He hadn't run in, I think, 15 years. So you can imagine how his legs felt the next day. I think he probably couldn't walk for weeks. But he knew he had this epiphany while running that this was what he wanted to be doing with his life, that this was sort of what he had been missing, this ability

to feel pride in the sense of self that to him was really who he most truly wanted to be. And he ended up then, you know, I think a lot of people would have that epiphany and decide, okay, now I'm going to start running marathons or now I'm going to start running on the weekends. For him, it went even further. And he managed to find a way to give up his business career and actually become a full-time runner and support himself off that, which that took several years, but he managed to do it. And, you know, I think those kinds of epiphanies are so important because they really are those moments of transition when we realize I'm not feeling the sense of pride in my

myself that I'm craving. And the reason that we crave that is, is again, because of evolution. We all evolve to want to crave those feelings. And so those feelings or that awareness that we're not getting them is just incredibly important because that's what guides us and tells us, okay, we need to change. We need to change who we are. We need to change what we're doing with our lives and figure out who we really want to be and how to get there. And so I think he's a great example of someone who really listened to that feeling and responded. And that's kind of my, that's, you know, if there's a take-home message to my book, that's really what it is. listen to those feelings and use them to try to figure out how to become the best kind of person that you want to be.

I think that sounds like a great idea and I love it. However, the implementation and execution is something I talk about a lot on this show. People know, and this is a common theme and question for me is sounds good, took the note down. Now, how do I actually do that? How can I implement that into my life? especially if I have a spouse, a mortgage, kids, car payments, the like. Like, how can I do that? Because it sounds a little bit like, go follow your passion type talk, which I get. And if anybody who's going to say that, it's going to be me. That's why this podcast got started. And so I'm curious as to the execution side of things when it comes to Dean Carnassas or other stories like that.

Absolutely. know, and I think you raise a really important point that, you know, it's easy, it's easy for Dean Carnaz as someone who's already successful and financially stable to make this massive career shift. It's not so easy for people who, like you said, you know, are working, you know, day-to-day hour to hour to pay off a mortgage or, you know, supportive family. So it's a totally different situation. What I would say in those cases, though, is it doesn't mean it can't be done. And I think there, it's just a matter of how you find that sense of pride, right? So, you know, if you're not getting at your work, but you need that job, You can't give up that job for various financial reasons.

See if there's a way that you can find that sense of pride outside of your work. And really, this is going to differ for every person, right? For people for whom it is something physically punishing, I actually think that in many ways is the easiest because, you know, it's not that hard to find time on the weekends to get in that early run or get up early in the morning and get in that hard run, train for a marathon. You know, thousands, maybe millions of people every year, train for a marathon for the first time. And that is, I think, largely because they've really really. realize that's a way to feel this incredible sense of pride in themselves that they're not getting

in other domains of their life. You know, the people who are lucky enough to get a sense of pride in their work, I think most people aren't in that position. I think the large majority of people work at a job that is fine. You know, maybe it's interesting from time to time, certainly gives them a paycheck, but isn't giving them a real sense of pride. And I think people who manage to find a job that does that, those are the lucky ones. And I would love it if everyone could do that, but I completely hear you, it's not always feasible, you know? So in those cases, I would say, seek some other way. You know, maybe it's something artistic. Maybe, you know, that's your real calling. You see your stuff as someone who needs to be creative and you're not getting that outlet in your

work. And so then is there a photography class or a pottery class you can take on the weekend? Can you buy a set of paintbrushes and paints and get into that? You know, I would say eventually if there's a way that you can shift things career-wise to get that sense of pride in your work, yes, that's the ultimate goal. I think that's, you know, wonderful. But I also understand it's not always feasible. and even when it is feasible, it's not feasible in the short term. Often it takes months, even years to try to shift things around in that way. Absolutely. So over the course of your research and study of people specifically and the time you spent around other high performers,

people, leaders who have sustained excellence in your life, if you had to pull out, deconstruct perhaps a couple themes or common characteristics those people all seem to share, the ones who sustain excellence, what would you say those few themes would be? You know, I think based on my research, I think it's going to be really that focus on hard work and achievement and sort of the growth mindset rather than a performance mindset. This is, you know, Carol Dwex language making this distinction between people who are working hard for intrinsic goals, goals that are important to them to their sense of self, versus extrinsic goals, people who want to achieve for things like money or fame or because

other people, you know, care about it. Other people want you to do it. And lots of studies have shown that when people are motivated by more intrinsic goals, sort of a desire to become a certain kind of person, that leads to much greater success than when people are working hard or doing something because their parents told them to or because they know, well, this is a prestigious thing to do. And so that's why I'm going to go to this school. There's really need studies of West Point Academy, you know, the toughest military academy out there really where this is the case, where the West Point cadets who are there because of the prestige of the school don't end up doing as well years later as the West Point cadets who are there because they want to become a certain

kind of person, whether it's I want to become an officer who's really great or I want to, you know, become a kind of person that this economy is going to give me the training that I need to become. Those people are the ones who do better. One study even found that people who have both kinds of goals, you know, I want to become a certain kind of person, but I also am happy to have a career that's high prestige. They actually did worse. So even just the presence of these extrinsic goals, even if you also have intrinsic goals, can kind of mess things up and make people less successful in the long run. And to me, that's all about authentic pride, right? Because that's the kind of pride that we feel when we're accomplishing goals that are intrinsic to our nature,

to the kind of person we want to be. As soon as we start focusing on extrinsic goals, that's where it comes about hubristic pride. And as I mentioned, there's lots of negative consequences of seeking hubristic pride. I love it. Well, Jessica, thank you so much for being here. Where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online? Yeah, well, if they are interested, they can go to my website. My website for my lab, where all my research is done is www.

www.ubc-emotionlab.com. And then if they want to learn about the book in particular, it's the same website, click on the link for Take Pride, that's the name of the book, or go www.UBC-emotionlab.com, backslash, take, dash, pride. A fascinating topic. Take Pride, why the deadliest sin holds the secret to human success by Dr. Jessica Tracy. Thank you so much for being here. Recommend people go and pick it up, especially if you enjoy this conversation because there's a lot more to get to. And Jessica, I absolutely want to continue our dialogue as we both progress. I really appreciate it. Good. Thank you. Well, thanks. It's been great talking to you.

Right. Thanks. This episode of The Learning Leader Show is over, but we have plenty more to keep you locked in until next time. Head over to LearningLeadershow.com for more information and to request your favorite entrepreneur, CEO, world class athlete, or anyone else that inspires you. You can also talk to Ryan directly by reaching out to him on Twitter at Ryan Hawk 12. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time on The Learning Leadership. show.