I think the asshole behavior as expressed by the author (i.e. rude, dismissive, passive aggressive or even outright hostile behavior) is not the source of the benefits but are often seen together.
"Assholes" don't care what other people think and they don't seek validation from them. As a corollary they don't tone down their opinions nor do they mind confrontation. Since they express their opinions with confidence, they seem smarter.
Assholes can take advantage of people, since most people want to please others to some degree. There are also people who don't try please people, but don't engage in the anti-social behavior assholes do. It's not the Nice vs the Assholes.
In my opinion too much niceness can be a hindrance. Taking delicate care that you express your opinions in a way that doesn't upset or offend anybody is great for that warm good-feel between everybody but doesn't pave the way for real progress. People should learn to take harsh critique and not let it affect them too much personally. Likewise they should learn to give straight-up, even harsh critique.
> People should learn to take harsh critique and not let it affect them too much personally.
Well, my straight-up critique is that you're trying to pass your personal preference off as some sort of broad rule, and I think that's bunk. If you like being a jerk, godspeed. But other people get to think that you're a jerk and ignore you if they want.
> Taking delicate care [...] but doesn't pave the way for real progress.
That's the opposite of my experience. My simple model for it is "trust credit". If I'm generally kind and respectful, if I usually work to create good feelings, then I slowly build up trust credit. The more trust credit I have, the more people are willing to listen to difficult truths from me.
Today at work we did a project retrospective covering more than a year of work. There were a lot of difficult things to say. But what got us through was all the effort we put into building strong relationships as we worked together.
It seems to me that the reason you spend time accruing trust credit is to maintain your likability among people when you're obligated to do things that are unlikable. That's fine. But how much does that improve performance or enable progress? What is the optimal amount of likability for healthy workplace that performs well?
Let's take military bootcamp as a counter-example. People form strong friendships in a high stress environment where they might actively dislike their superiors. Their skills, abilities and tasks progress in leaps and bounds. Obviously this doesn't directly apply to normal workplaces, but provides an example of a situation where disregard for likability doesn't result in a bad work environment.
I believe the sense of belonging is a core human need, and people go to different lengths in making sure they have that. We all do at some level. What you do with "trust credit" probably makes your workplace a nicer environment, but I don't know how much it matters for performance.
The military is a terrible example. It is literally illegal to leave. If you leave during war, they can execute you. Boot camps are meant to deeply change how humans behave so that they can survive war, a deeply traumatic experience that often results in lasting psychological damage. When people apply boot camp models in civilian contexts, abuse is widespread:
> but I don't know how much it matters for performance.
Sure, we can agree that you don't know. Maybe you should try it and find out. But I'm saying that in my experience it has mattered a great deal, and as recently as yesterday.
You're saying that you want people to be different, to learn to take harsh criticism and subtract the harshness. I prefer to work with people as they are, which is as human beings who are sensitive to harshness, people who have a much easier time listening to people that they trust than people who are assholes to them.
I'm not particularly good at it. I'm arrogant and self-centered enough that I'd rather just say what I want in a fashion that is convenient and emotionally satisfying to me. But if I am going to work with other people, I often have to choose between the thing that is easy for me and the thing that makes change easy for them. Even if I didn't want people to generally do well and be happy (which I do), I just won't get very far in having the real-world effects I want if other people are indifferent or hostile to me.
Military bootcamp is a very specific experience that is not meant to represent the general life of being in the military, but is meant to prepare you for the differences.
It is a very poor example for any functional workplace because it really isn't one, even for elsewhere in the military.
You can only build up trust credit over extended periods of time.
In modern, globalised science, you often have to deal with people you've never met before, and may never meet again. This requires a different approach critique. What counts as an acceptable critique is part of the core methodology of each scientific discipline, and differs with subject matter. In mathematically oriented fields one can often come up with clearcut counterexamples as a way to criticise a statement. This is not so simple in humanities. One may wonder if the dismissal of critique as AH-behaviour may also be a social strategy to dismiss criticism.
It is not surprising that the author of the original article has a humanities background.
I'm not sure what position you're arguing here. But if it is that chest-puffing confrontational behaviour is less common or less effective at "winning fights" in areas which lack clear-cut standards of proof I think the opposite is the case.
> Well, my straight-up critique is that you're trying to pass your personal preference off as some sort of broad rule, and I think that's bunk.
Ehhh. I think it's just a consequentialist statement. "Everyone will be more effective at achieving their goals if they don't get offended by criticism." This says nothing about whether the other person is offensive; they probably are! But allowing that to determine to what degree you absorb the factual statements of their critique is a suboptimal game-theoretic strategy. No general ever won a war by ignoring information he didn't like the tone of. (But he still probably tried to get the source to be less offensive, both for the sake of that person's effectiveness at interacting with others who aren't as pragmatic, and for the sake of his own mental energy spent putting up with the offense.)
If people were independently operating, weakly interacting game theoretical robots of very modest capacity, this might make some sense.
But humans are enormously complex animals evolved to live in a highly intertwined society. Critique is used for all sorts of things besides helping other people do better at their jobs. No human motivation is rational; rationality just constrains and informs action. [1] It would be an interesting world where people could just turn off social and emotional response. But it's not the world we live in.
That means that people will (and should) evaluate every personal interaction in terms of what the other party's motivations are. Is this person critiquing me because they want to help? Because they are cranky and want to lash out at somebody? Because they want to discourage me? Because they want me to change behavior they they find inconvenient or aesthetically displeasing? Etc, etc, etc.
That doesn't mean they might not also later say, "Well, he is an asshole, but I guess he has a point." That's not easy and it takes work. So if I am going to take the time to tell somebody a hard truth that I really want them to hear, I might as well help do the work that lets them really hear it. If I'm not willing to do the work, I might as well just keep my mouth shut, because there's nothing particularly rational about me taking the time to say things that people won't listen to.
I get that wishing other people would be more rational seems pretty rational. But it's an irrational stance. People are people. If I'm going to work with 'em, I have to work with the actual thems, not the thems that in some ideal world would be convenient for me.
This sounds good when you say it. It also completely ignores reality: there's never clear factual content to anything, especially in tech.
Quite literally, unless your critique is coming from a presentation, with an outlined testing method, summary of results and a chart showing the problems with some method and the benefits of another, then you are almost certainly injecting a heavy amount of bias.
But wait you say, this is about someone's approach to a prob...let me stop you right there. If the criticism is now about how someone works and you think you're being or sound objective...
There is a pretty well documented bias that people tend to think that negative people are smarter than positive ones. I think the critical/dismissive breed of assholes are playing into that. I agree with the author that if left unchecked, this can result in a toxic culture.
I disagree. There is no correlation between "real progress" and "not upsetting people".
There is clear, documented evidence that toxic teams and cultures are less productive than teams with high diversity that listen to each other and are safe to express opinions in. I would link it but you're probably not going to read it or listen to anyone else's opinions so you can google it yourself.
It's Tragedy of Commons stuff: there are marginal benefits to the individual of behaving like an asshole, but the group suffers.
I'd be interested in reading about that. A brief search yielded research about effects of diversity on team performance, but I couldn't find articles on toxic or hostile cultures.
Living in Finland, I haven't always been thrilled about our extensive social welfare and the consequent high tax rates. This story reminds me that even though I don't benefit directly from social welfare, there are latent benefits on the societal level. Namely the ubiquitous sense of security, because the poor rarely have to resort to theft as the government gives them money to get by.
I don't really have to watch out for thieves. Of course they exist and you can never be too careful with these things. But occasionally having left valuables in view inside my car, or a bag at a cafe table while I visit the restroom, I've never had anything stolen. I'm not afraid to walk in the city at night.
A friend of mine was robbed at gunpoint in broad daylight in SF, which came to me as a big surprise. I couldn't imagine that could even happen. Obviously I need to travel more to broaden my worldview...
I think you may be looking at one factor too exclusively - You're also comparing a rather homognious culture with the mixing pot of America.
While there's downsides as seen here ( where personal property is not held sacrosanct by all cultures ) there are upsides as well that may outweigh the costs. For example: Americans get exposed to many unique cultures in the course of their daily lives. One could argue that this is
beneficial.
"Assholes" don't care what other people think and they don't seek validation from them. As a corollary they don't tone down their opinions nor do they mind confrontation. Since they express their opinions with confidence, they seem smarter.
Assholes can take advantage of people, since most people want to please others to some degree. There are also people who don't try please people, but don't engage in the anti-social behavior assholes do. It's not the Nice vs the Assholes.
In my opinion too much niceness can be a hindrance. Taking delicate care that you express your opinions in a way that doesn't upset or offend anybody is great for that warm good-feel between everybody but doesn't pave the way for real progress. People should learn to take harsh critique and not let it affect them too much personally. Likewise they should learn to give straight-up, even harsh critique.