Empirical evidence that nice people don’t always finish last

Enlarge / Look at this jerk. (credit: Paul Sableman / Flickr)

Think your boss is a jerk? Wonder why the management of your organization consists of sociopaths? Some academic researchers suspect you're not alone, and they start their new paper with the statement, "We suffer no shortage of jerks in power." And they go on to ask the obvious question raised by this fact: "Does being a jerk help people attain power?"

To find out, the researchers set up a very long-term experiment. After administering personality surveys to undergrad and MBA students, they waited over a decade to follow up and find out which personality types had accrued power in the world of employment. The results suggest that jerks don't necessarily get ahead at work; instead, some of the consequences of being unpleasant offset the benefits that it might otherwise provide.

The technical definition of jerk"

Believe it or not, scientists have not developed a technical definition for "jerk." But they do have one for the next best thing: disagreeable personalities, which the researchers describe as "the tendency to behave in quarrelsome, cold, callous, and selfish ways." It's a set of tendencies that tend to remain stable over time and can be identified through some basic personality surveys. And it's those later two features that enabled the researchers to think long-term.

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