Kent Blumberg (who
writes a very thoughtful blog on leadership, strategy and performance) wrote me
a couple emails this morning about the Fox TV show House. If you’ve seen it, you will recall it is about the grumpy
and sometimes downright abusive Dr. Gregory House, who
uses evidence-based medicine to find causes and cures where other doctors fail. Kent sent me this great snippet of dialog (from an episode called “Sex Kills”) that
demonstrates how and why we continue to let assholes get away with their
demeaning ways.
He wrote me:
“I just listened to the
dialogue again, and wrote it down a bit more accurately than I had remembered
it. The husband of a patient is talking with one of House’s team members:
Husband: “I assume that House is a
great doctor.”
Dr. Chase: “Why would you assume
that?”
Husband: “Because when you’re that
big a jerk, you’re either great or unemployed.”
I’ve written before about
how, in many organizations, if you are really big star, you are allowed to get
away with being a really big jerk. But Kent’s dialog reminds me that, if you
look at the evidence on the kind of people that we see as powerful and
intelligent, that –- independently of how smart a person actually is –- when
they act like an asshole, they are seen as smarter. This “Brilliant but Cruel” effect was demonstrated
in a study by Harvard Business School’s Teresa
Amabile. She did a controlled experiment with book reviews; some reviews
were nasty and others were nice. Amabile
found that negative and unkind reviewers were seen as less likeable but more
intelligent, competent, and expert than those who expressed the same messages
in kinder and gentler ways. She
summarized her findings by noting, “Only pessimism sounds profound. Optimism sounds superficial.”
I chafe against the notion
that mean-spirited reviewers seem smarter than nice reviewers, but it also
rings true. I confess that I’ve always admired the wit displayed in the
nastiest book review I’ve ever read: Professor David P. Barash’s attack on
Professor J. Philippe Rushton’s Race,
Evolution, and Behavior,
published in Animal Behavior about 10
years ago (Volume 49, pages 1131 to 1133 if you want to look it up). Barash trots-out numerous factual criticisms,
but the review is filled with delightfully snide comments, some that border on
personal attacks. Take this gem “Rushton argues at length for what he calls the
‘principle of aggregation,’ which, in his hands, means the pious hope that that
by combining numerous turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a
valuable result; but, in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile
of shit.” Or take the very last sentence, “Bad science
and virulent racial prejudice drip like pus from nearly every page of this
despicable book.”
I don’t know about you,
but I find these sentences brilliant, but cruel!
So, if you want people to
think you are smart, apparently you can feed their stereotypes by demeaning others. In Barash’s case, the attack might
have been justified, but there are other times when people turn cruel for no
good reason, except perhaps for personal gain. I should also warn you that
although unleashing your inner asshole may help persuade people of your
intellectual superiority, we also show in The
Knowing-Doing Gap and Hard Facts that
the climate of fear created by such nastiness undermines team and
organizational effectiveness. Potential
victims become afraid to try (or even mention) new ideas and hesitate to report
mistakes or problems out of fear that the resulting anger and humiliation will
be aimed at them.
PS: The reference is: Teresa
Amabile, “Brilliant but Cruel: Perception of Negative Evaluators,” Journal
of Experimental Social Psychology, 19 (1983), 146-156.
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