"Roy, if you could maybe put the other perspective of what a women really wants from a man..."
Roy Masters: "Listen, I'll give you a simple answer there. She wants a man not to need her. She wants a man to be so full of love that he doesn't need any from her. You know what happens then? A women will love a man who doesn't need love, so he gets it anyway."
See this guy? Many of us recognize him. He's the classic jerk: narcissistic, selfish, thrill-seeking, and chauvinistic. And he probably just stole your girlfriend. The most recent incarnation of this common archetype takes the form of Tucker Max: self proclaimed asshole. In his own words (taken from his website TuckerMax.com):
"My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole. I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead. But, I do contribute to humanity in one very important way. I share my adventures with the world."
Nice guy, huh? Up until recently, his stories have stayed in print format, on his blog and in his collection of stories I Hope they Serve Beer in Hell. On September 25th the movie based on his first book was released. So far, the reviews aren't stunning: Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 24%. His book was a best-seller, so something was clearly lost in translation. But another book is on the way. And the title? Assholes Finish First (at least he's consistent). This is a bold empirical claim Tucker is making here. Is he right? Do assholes really finish first?
The allure of the bad boy has been a mystery to me for a while now, both personally and empirically. Personally, I had a friend in college who is just like Tucker Max. To be sure, he was fun to hang out with. But I was always shocked by how much he got away with, especially with women. And even more shockingly, beautiful women seemed to gravitate toward him. Like a magnet.
Empirically, evidence for the benefits of being bad keep popping up in my datasets and in my literature reviews. I first noticed it in 2006 while I was analyzing a dataset for a presentation I gave at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society Conference that year. While I was doing all sorts of fancy mediation analyses to see how schizotypy, creativity, and mating success were linked, one striking direct path to mating success stood out to me: low agreeableness; the lower the agreeableness, the more sexual partners. Interestingly, this link held only for the men in my sample. When I looked into the literature, I saw others pretty much found the same thing. Daniel Nettle has reported a significant negative correlation between agreeableness and number of sexual partners in a sample of 545 people. And other researchers such as David Schmitt and David Buss have found across cultures a relation between low agreeableness and more infidelity, more sexual partners, and less loyalty to mates.
Things don't stop there. When you branch out and look at all the other traits comprised in the construct "asshole" (I am here and now operationalizing this word!), you see they also do a good job predicting number of sexual partners. Like conscientiousness. In the words of Nettle, "Less conscientious individuals favor immediate opportunities, with little regard for their future consequences. They are impulsive about pleasures and procrastinate about work. In mating, they are more promiscuous, more likely to be unfaithful, and more likely to have impulsive, unsafe sex under the influence of alcohohol or drugs." Tucker Max. Tucker Max. Tucker Max.
Or take the so-called "dark triad" traits: narcissism, thrill-seeking, and Machiavellianism. Peter Jonason found in a sample of 200 college students that those who who reported higher dark triad traits also reported having more sexual partners and more desire for short-term flings. In the terms of Psychology, the "asshole" consists of the following traits: High Extraversion, Low Neuroticism (perhaps), Low Conscientiousness, Low Agreeableness, High Openness to Experience, and a bit of a dip into the dark triad traits (those with an extreme dark triad profile aren't considered sexually attractive).
So it appears that Tucker Max's bold statement is in fact correct. That is, if you conceptualize winning as racking up a lot of different sexual partners. If your personal definition of winning is finding a high-quality long-term mate and making the relationship work, then research does show there are advantages to being conscientiousness and agreeable (along with other research, my own research bears this out in a large-sample dataset I am currently analyzing). Clearly, the answer to the question posed in this post depends on what you really want out of your life at each point in your life.
After my conference presentation in 2006, I filed my findings away and the paper based on the presentation is still unpublished. My interest in the topic had a resurgence recently though at the latest American Psychological Association Conference. After a talk, I found myself chatting with the great behavioral geneticist Thomas Bouchard and the great Psychology Today editor Matthew Hutson. Bouchard was expressing his utter confusion as to why women's preference for the bad boy still exists in our gene pool. He found this an utter mystery. Why in the world would women want a man whose genes scream "bad", he wondered. Why would a women's genes want to pass on such bad genes to her offspring?
This seemed like the biggest mystery of Bouchard's career (I'm not even going to speculate why Bouchard found this topic so fascinating). Matt responded that perhaps being a jerk is a fitness indicator: those who take-risks and and are bad despite the costs do so because they can afford to. And this is a signal of good genes. I think there is definitely something to this: bad boys tend to have lots of positive traits that come along for the ride of the badness such as good looks, confidence, creativity, humor, charisma, high energy, and good social skills-- all things women find attractive (my research with Glenn Geher and other researchers on Mating Intelligence does suggest that these traits by themselves along with some other skills of the asshole such as mind-reading, self-deception and other-deception can be predictive of number of sexual partners as well as college "hook-up" behaviors). And for the jerk, these traits can mask the shallowness that lies beneath (although the truth almost always eventually comes out).
