273: Take Pride [Book Notes]

I recently finished Dr. Tracy's book Pride: The Secret of Success* and have been raving about it to all who listen. As professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, she is one of the leading researchers on the emotion of pride: it's origins, expressions, and effects on our behavior.

We're often taught that pride is a negative trait. Think Draco Malfoy or Donald Trump. Greek myths like Icarus flying too close to the sun tell us pride can be our downfall while Christianity calls it the original deadly sin.

But far from being an expression of pure vanity or narcissism, new research has shown that pride can can serve as a powerful motivator for our most important endeavors.

According to social psychologist Jessica Tracy, human beings evolved two versions of pride that can drive us towards different goals: one version helps us compete against others and win challenging battles when it matters most. Another version drives us to explore, innovate, and share our insights with others, enabling our community to gain valuable abilities that increase our chances of survival.

One of the reasons I've been so excited about this book is that it validates one of the first and most important exercises in my coaching practice, where I explore moments of authentic pride in my clients.

But to really make the case here, this is what the author has to say about the importance of the emotion of pride:

I have spent much of the past fifteen years studying the emotions that shape human behavior, and the emotion I’ve focused on most closely is pride. One conclusion I’ve reached is that the desire to feel pride is one of the most important motivational forces propelling human achievement, creation, and innovation, and, as a result, all cultural inventions, from art and architecture to science, math, and philosophy.

Read on to learn how you can leverage pride in your own life.

Pride: The Secret of Success

By Dr. Jessica Tracy, professor of psychology at British Columbia

Check it out

The Universality of Pride

In her book, Dr. Tracy argues that pride is a universal human emotion—on par with happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. It's not just Western culture thing either but across many nations whose cultures are considered more collectivist (ie East Asia, South America, etc).

One important difference between pride and other emotions is that rather being identified through a facial expression like a smiling mouth or wide open eyes, pride is usually largely expressed through body posture: a broad, open chest, chin titled up, and hands on hips, or arms crossed, or fists up in the air. Even in blind athletes who win a competition will perform these gestures of who have never seen anyone perform such a gesture.

The ultimate proof? Even members of a remote West African tribe with very limited exposure to modern life (no TVs, cell phones, internet) could recognize expressions of pride:

"Of the forty Burkinabé participants Jean managed to recruit, 57 percent recognized pride. That rate, 57 percent, was a good deal lower than the recognition rates we had previously found in American undergraduate samples—about 75 to 85 percent, on average—but also much higher than the chance-guessing rate, which was 12 percent in this study. Just as important, the Burkinabé participants were no worse at recognizing pride than any of the other emotion expressions they viewed, except for happiness [best recognized]."

Multiple Conceptions of Pride:

Unlike other emotions, pride seems to come in two flavors. You can see the twin meanings reflected in our language: synonyms for pride include accomplished and confident but also arrogant and pretentious. It's not just English, you see this same pattern show up in many other languages (Italian, Spanish, Chinese) as well.

Researchers have dubbed these two types of pride Authentic Pride, and Hubristic Pride. A lot of these findings emerge from asking people to describe times in their life where they've felt pride and analyzing the results.

Authentic pride is the kind of feeling you get from working hard towards goals that are important to you, putting in the effort towards a controllable outcome. Meanwhile hubristic pride is about feeling superior to others for inherent reasons that are not controllable.

For example, I might feel authentic pride in completing a challenging Crossfit workout (the Murph with a weighted vest) because I'm not a great runner but I trained hard over many months to get better. But I could feel hubristic pride for better looking hair than my bald workout partner. His male pattern baldness is not his fault—I just happen not to have those genes.

In one very clear instance of hubristic pride, a participant wrote:

"I felt very proud of myself when I got a 4.0 GPA. I would initiate conversations by asking groups of people how they did last quarter. After hearing their response, I would obviously mention my success."

What's interesting is the personality traits that seemed to correlate with people who felt greater levels of achieving, confident pride vs arrogant, superior pride.

People who reported feeling a lot of authentic pride

Had high self-esteem
Outgoing, friendly, and popular
Agreeable, calm, and low anxiety
Liked to help and advise others and volunteer their time
More self-control
Community oriented and tended to be very satisfied with their relationships and life in general

While people who reported feeling a lot of hubristic pride

Were more likely to be narcissistic and low in self-esteem
Vulnerable to bouts of shame
Disagreeable, aggressive, hostile, manipulative
Tended to have fraught relationships and few close friends
Tend to act impusively
Experienced social anxiety and sometimes clinical depression

After reading a list like that it's easy to think "Damn, hubristic pride should be avoided at all costs." or maybe "I guess that's why powerful people seem miserable so often." But both of these versions of pride have had evolutionary utility.

Raising Status

Hubristic pride seems most evolved for helping us beat others and rise in social status—which like it or not, is important for most of us. Just ask high school students, founders pitching for VC funding, or content creators trying to win brand deals.

Pride’s ultimate evolved function, in other words, is to help us raise our social status. Pride gets us power, influence, and an ability to wield control over others. These outcomes are adaptive, because those who exist at the top of the hierarchy are more likely to survive and reproduce than those at the bottom.

And even the trait of narcissism, which is often castigated in popular media and social commentary, isn't necessarily bad. Tracy makes this point as well:

"To be clear, narcissists are not losers—in fact, in certain domains, like politics, narcissists tend to be quite successful. Bill Clinton, who never missed an opportunity to extoll his successes in office, was determined on the basis of personality ratings made by 121 presidential experts to be only the seventh-most-narcissistic president in American history (Lyndon B. Johnson was the first)." (Jessica Tracy, Pride)

And in fact, despite how despite how different these groups seem to be, people who experience either kind of pride frequently desire to get things done and have an impact on the world. They chase rewards and strive hard after their goals.

It reminds me of an aside made by Stanford GSB professor Jeffery Pfeffer in his book Power about how the managers that ultimately were rated most effective by their piers weren't the ones who were motivated to be liked (duh), or even motivated by getting results (surprisingly), but the ones who were motivated by acquiring power.

Tracy also explains that authentic and hubristic pride lead to two strategies for raising status: prestige and dominance. Prestige is about the honor that comes with being a valuable contributor to your community, particularly through discovering, developing, or inventing useful things.

High-status leaders are those who possess the most or best socially valued skills or knowledge. They know how to do things that others want to learn, and they contribute to their group by doing precisely those things, and then teaching others how to do them too. Really, this is the kind of status I’ve been talking about up to this point (though not explicitly); if pride displays are shown in response to an achievement, and communicate to others a deserved status boost, that’s because status is earned from achievements.

Meanwhile dominance is about using force or the threat of force and negative consequences (yelling, blackmail, extortion, etc) to get your way. Again, sounds bad but has its upsides:

"One study found that dominant undergraduates become particularly good leaders when their groups are forced to compete with others. Dominants thrive on competition. Unlike prestigious individuals, who seek cooperation both within and between groups, dominants are always on the lookout for a fight. This can be problematic when the conflict they’re creating is among those within their own groups, but it’s a boon for groups seeking to best each other."

Prestige and dominance as pride-driven strategies for earning status sound very similar to distinction made in the Peacetime CEO and Wartime CEO by Ben Horowitz.

Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win.

Peacetime CEO strives not to use profanity. Wartime CEO sometimes uses profanity purposefully.

Peacetime CEO thinks of the competition as other ships in a big ocean that may never engage. Wartime CEO thinks the competition is sneaking into her house and trying to kidnap her children.

Peacetime CEO aims to expand the market. Wartime CEO aims to win the market.

In a series of problem solving experiments, groups that were led by dominance-oriented (hubristic) people tended to succeed better at convergent tasks (ones that had a specific right answer) while those led by prestige-oriented (authentic) people tended to succeed better at divergent tasks (ones where you had to generate as many answers as possible).

But fundamentally, Dr. Tracy argues that prestige based strategies, ones driven by authentic pride, are the real reason human beings have become the most (ironically) dominant species on the planet. Our pride causes us to compete with each other to share insights with our community in exchange for status. And copying others is the fastest way to learn and replicate the benefits of that knowledge (think hunting techniques, medicinal herbs, and the steam engine).

As a result, social learning is the process that underpins humans’ cumulative cultural evolution; without it, we would have gotten no further than our ape cousins. And the emotion that enables social learning—and therefore makes cultural evolution possible—is pride. Pride is the emotional reason for our species’ success (emphasis mine).

So What?

There's so much more to this book that I want to share, but I think the takeaway for me, my clients, and my readers is straightforward:

Pride is an important emotion for motivating action in the face of hardship and uncertainty. Pursuing goals that will make you feel proud is a reliable way to stay engaged long enough to see results.
In particular, pursuing authentic pride via prestige strategies (discover or create something that is valued and celebrated by your community) is likely to lead to greater levels of happiness, recognition, and purpose that make for a fulfilling life.
But if you need to tap into motivation in order to beat an opponent, engaging in hubristic pride and choosing dominance strategies where you one-up your rival via showmanship and pressure can be effective.
Pride can guide you to make the most of your life if you can listen carefully to what it calls you to do, and stay aware of what the underlying form it takes:

That inner voice that tells you something is missing is also telling you how to find yourself—how to find the identity that feels most right to you. It’s the voice that makes you want to achieve, get more out of your world, and do things that mean something. That voice—your desire for pride—will guide you and push you toward what you need to do to become the person you want to be.

* I prefer the book's original title better: Take Pride: Why the Deadliest Sin is the Secret to Human Success. The new title feels like they stripped a lot of the nuance away and makes it seem way to simplistic.