Why Jerks are more succesfull with women

Many people have covered this subject well, including Paragon who explained it from an evo-psych perspective. Basically it’s a correlation, not a causation. It is simply that men who are successful also happen to be jerks, but the trait itself is not attraction-creating. Jerks simply handle rejection better and are more assertive (among other things)…

StonerWithABoner brings up some research too…

Well, as anyone who visits this blog knows, I read allot of different things across the blogsphere in regards to gender. If you’ve been readings in similar circles as I, you have likely read about “Nice Guys TM.” I’ve been reading Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work by Paul Blabiac & Robert D. Hare. This quote on pages 318-319 jumped right out:

“….Research at the University of British Columbia suggests that jerks are sexually more successful than nice guys, who often tend to finish last. Psychologist Paul Trapnell defines jerks as “manipulative, arrogant, boastful, calculating, quarrelsome, and sly.” They are cold enough not to worry about their effect on others. But why are they so successful at attracting women? Part of the reason is that they have fewer social inhibitions, try harder, and sell themselves better than do the rest of us.

For example, most men whose advances to a woman are rebuffed will slink away, their ego and self-image validated or damaged. They are unlikely to try again, unless the signs of interest from a woman are unmistakable. a jerk/psychopath, on the other hand, knows he is perfect an is not worried about being rejected: “It’s her problem, not mine.” He simply moves on to the next woman.

The same principles apply to other aspects of human interaction, including attempts to scam or manipulate others.”

EasilyEnthused Responds with a nice personal anecdote…

I think that is a profoundly accurate quote to explain the “Nice Guy / Jerk” dichotomy.

As a former nice guy who struggled with women for much of my younger years, the single most-important mindset I had to develop was “If I’m rejected by a woman, it has zero bearing on my worth as a human being, as a man and as a mate. Statistically, if one woman rejects me it makes the next woman less likely to do so.”

It eventually just became a numbers game. Eventually I worked up the nerve to engage every woman I found attractive and within my “league.”

The next thing I knew – I hadn’t been dateless in months. The key change in my mentality was to stop taking rejection so personally – something jerks/psychopaths do naturally.

Paragon also has covered this when explaining the imbecilic “logic” of gamers. One of the dumbest things gamers do is mix up symptoms with causes. They rightfully observe confident men and jerks getting da wimminz, and wrongfully assume “confidence/being a jerk gets you women” when it’s a mere correlation, not causation.

There are only two quantities of value females consider in mate choice, genetic benefits(indicated in physical attractiveness), and direct benefits(indicated in investment strategies with respect to material resources, and paternal investment).

So, the onus is upon the ‘game’ community to unify agreement with either of these quantities(beyond a circular argument).

And there are obvious reasons why physical traits are an obvious confounder of ‘seduction’ competencies(ie. because relative deviations in physical characters can reliably signal developmental incompetence, from which sensory biases become fixed by evolutionary success).

In order to advance a similar argument(unified in a broad evolutionary synthesis) for vague(independent) seduction competencies(ie. ‘game’), you would have to show their basis in evolutionary success beyond a circular argument(ie. how did female bias for these seduction systems *evolve* – what advantages did they confer *before* they became correlated with male reproductive success).

Until gamers can show this, they are leaning on naive premises(and, dare I say, unmitigated bullshit).

Game is popularly interpreted as justified ‘confidence’(given the ‘congruence’ apology that is regularly appealed to when game techniques/methods are demonstratedly falsified).

The parsimonious interpretation is that ‘confidence’ is a dependent variable, adapted from justified expectations (with a basis in some history of prior outcomes).

In other words: confidence is the subjective consequence of an ‘expected value’ – derived of an obligate heuristic motif.

But, correlation does not imply causation.

It doesn’t just spontaneously organize within an empirical vacuum, and thus cannot be trivially acquired outside of ‘experience’.

So, what gamers(and their apologists) are truly observing (but not intelligent enough to infer), is not that women
are attracted to ‘confidence’ per se(as an independent variable).

But, rather that the men who tend to be successful with women in the first place(for whatever reason), also have a high confidence(justified expectation) of future(continued) success.

Also, evolution doesn’t really give a fuck how you rationalize your justifications for not reproducing – thus, in evolutionary terms, you are no different then the males you presume dominance over.

Which brings me to the whole spurious ‘alpha-male’ meme.

Male dominance implies subordinate status concessions – which no longer describes how mate availability is distributed in large, co-operative, and ecologically prosperous populations.

So implicating dominance mediated mate access is nothing more than spurious self-promotion spun by imbecilic gamers.

Now, where gamer theory may be useful, is in instructing otherwise unhindered males against displaying/communicating/signalling loser vibes(anomalous signals which deviate from normal with respect to Koinophilia), which may work to confound positive fitness indicators.

But, this will prove determinate to only a very small group of maladapted males, who are in every other respect, attractive to women(rendering the premise of ‘gamer’ self-determination, as false).