Arrogance

Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Realms

Salman Akhtar, Ann Smolen, Salman Akhtar, Ann Smolen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429770685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Arrogance as a specific constellation of affect, fantasy, and behavior has received little attention in psychoanalysis. This is striking in light of the enormous amount of literature accumulated on the related phenomenon of narcissism. Rectifying this omission, the book in your hands addresses arrogance from multiple perspectives. Among the vantage points employed are psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology, cross-cultural anthropology, fiction, as well as clinical work with children and adults. The result is a harmonious gestalt of insight that is bound to enhance the clinician's attunement to the covert anguish of those afflicted with arrogance.

Part I
Developmental realm

Chapter 2
An evolutionary hypothesis on arrogance

Kathryn Ann Baselice and J. Anderson Thomson, Jr.

Arrogance wins. Look no further than the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The winner, Donald J. Trump, now the forty-fifth president of the United States, is a supremely arrogant man. Why is he that way? Why is anyone arrogant? What is arrogance, and how did it become a common feature of human nature, especially male human nature? Why are we distressed by it, yet arrogance flourishes?

We will argue that arrogance is a product of women’s preferences in a mate. During our long evolutionary history, those women who chose men who could acquire and commit resources to them and their offspring left more descendants. Men are a long breeding experiment by women.¹ Men were shaped by the women whose choices let some of them pass muster and gain sexual access. Since the traits that mark a man’s ability to acquire resources and hold those resources into the future are indirect, it opened the door for men to deceive women about their abilities, and ultimately to self-deceive and exaggerate even more effectively about their resource generation and holding potential. Women chose men with high resource-holding potential as well as men who deceived and self-deceived about their capacities, and we are left with the human phenomenon of arrogance. Arrogance also allowed men to intimidate stronger rivals and secure allies and followers, which further enhanced their reproductive success. The capacity for arrogance must have emerged early, because there has been enough time for detection and dislike of arrogance to evolve and cultural rituals to contain it.

We will begin our argument with a definition of arrogance and then build our hypothesis of arrogance’s origins with reviews of natural selection, human evolution, evolutionary psychology, sexual selection, parental investment theory, selfdeception, and the evidence of arrogance’s success in humans and other animals.

Arrogance is applied to the sense of superiority that comes from someone who claims, or arrogates, more consideration or importance than is warranted. Arrogance is an attitude of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or in presumptuous claims or assumptions. The word “arrogance” derives from “arrogate,” which means to claim or seize without justification, or to make undue claims to having. Arrogate comes from the Latin, arragatus, past participle of the verb arrogare, which means to appropriate. The Latin verb in turn comes from the prefix ad (“to” or “towards”) and the verb, rogare, (“to ask”). “Arrogate” is similar to the more familiar “arrogant,” and there is a relationship between the two words. Arrogant comes from the Latin arrogans, the present participle of arrogare. Arrogant is applied to that sense of superiority that comes from someone claiming, or arrogating, more consideration than is due to that person’s position, dignity, or power. Arrogance has two parts: overconfidence and an air of superiority. Arrogance is often accompanied by contempt for presumed inferiors.

A brief review of evolution

Evolutionary theory was born in 1837 after a five year circumnavigation voyage taken by the young Charles Darwin (1809–1882) on HMS Beagle.² Three months after his return to England in 1836 Darwin gave his collection of birds from the Galapagos Islands to John Gould, the bird expert of the London Zoological Society. Gould reported that three of the four specimens of Galapagos mockingbirds were distinct species, new to ornithology, and different from all known mockingbirds. Gould also concluded that Darwin’s collection contained thirteen or possibly fourteen species of unusual finches, all so closely related that Gould put them in a single group. Twenty-five of the twenty-six species Gould judged to be new to ornithology and unique to the Galapagos Islands. Darwin realized that if Gould was correct, the long believed, immutable, God-built barrier between species had been broken. Gradual evolution through geographical isolation was the only workable explanation (Sulloway, 2009). “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in the archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends” (Darwin, 1845, p. 380).

In the spring of 1837 Charles Darwin began to search for a mechanism that could explain this evolutionary change and the puzzle of the highly adaptive nature of each species to its environment. In September of 1838 he read Thomas Malthus’s 1826 Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus asserted that populations grow geometrically, the food supply is limited, and most offspring fail to survive, swept away by predators, famine, and disease. Darwin had finally discovered the mechanism. In the struggle for existence beneficial variations would be naturally selected, and they would confer increased survival and increased adaptive traits. It was a natural process similar to an animal breeder’s choice of desired traits in the animals he selected to mate. Darwin also had an unexploded bombshell. He had a natural explanation for complex adaptations, the design features of nature, with no need to invoke a god or an intelligent designer.

At age twenty-nine, Charles Darwin had the most important insight ever to occur to a human mind (Dennett, 2009). He gave us the only workable explanation we have for the design and variety of all life on earth, and the only workable explanation we have for the design and architecture of the human mind. Yet, for fear of the likely firestorm with the idea’s publication and his deeply religious wife’s reaction, Charles Darwin sat on the idea for two decades. In 1858 an obscure naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, sent him a manuscript that contained the same idea, also derived from reading Malthus’s essay. Only then did Charles Darwin take frantic steps to publish his great idea.

His remarkable theory was published in 1859 in his seminal work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. This book was groundbreaking. It challenged the theory of special creation, known now as Intelligent Design, and everything people thought they knew about the human race (Sulloway, 2006).

What Darwin discovered was that a species’ environment plays a role in shaping characteristics of that species over time. Individuals within a species who have characteristics that are best suited for the particular environment or challenges they encounter on a day-to-day basis will not only survive but will thrive. In contrast, those individuals whose traits are less able to provide them with the necessities of life will not only struggle to survive but will often fail to reproduce. Over thousands of generations, the more desirable traits, passed on from successful ancestors between generations, slowly become the norm. The less desirable traits, which led to daily struggle and failure for the ancestor who possessed them, died with those unsuccessful ancestors.

Darwin died without knowing the biologic mechanism by which these traits were passed from parent to offspring. It was not until the discovery of the nature and function of DNA and genes, and the merger of this new knowledge with natural selection, that humans fully understood how evolution works. This merger has been deemed the Modern Synthesis. It is because of this Modern Synthesis that we continue our discussion about evolutionary theory with DNA.

It is important to remember that DNA and genes are extremely complex in both structure and function. For the purpose of our argument, however, a simple overview of basic mechanisms will suffice. DNA or deoxyribonucleic acid is composed of two strands of nucleotides wound together in a double helix. The nucleotides are labeled A, C, G, and T based on their structure. DNA is the blueprint of life. In the nucleus of all of our cells, sections of DNA called genes are transcribed into RNA. This RNA is transferred to another portion of the cell and is translated into proteins.

Aside from making proteins, DNA replicates. This process involves many troubleshooting mechanisms, and errors seldom occur. But, DNA replication remains an imperfect process. Errors do occur, like an A placed in the strand instead of a G. This usually occurs in DNA regions called “non-coding” regions, or areas of DNA that are not translated into proteins. These errors go unnoticed. However, errors sometimes occur in coding regions, areas of DNA that are transcribed and translated into proteins. Because of this error, the structure and function of this protein may or may not be altered. Sometimes this has deadly consequences. Sometimes it improves proteins, whether their job is to channel molecules, to signal other cells, or perhaps to turn “on” and “off” areas of the DNA itself.

Why do we review the details about DNA and imperfect replication? Though the proteins that derive from DNA are small, they can cause specific changes in that individual’s behavior, appearance, or abilities, especially when changes occur in numerous interconnected proteins over time. In the case of humans, that person might be a faster runner, might be stronger, or might be better able to perceive the emotions of friends and neighbors. Overall, he or she may be better suited for the environment, both physical and social, and the pressures that those environments present. These traits remain with the individual and may be passed on to that person’s offspring who will gain the same benefit, repeating the cycle for thousands of generations to come.

Evolutionary psychology

We want to return to Darwin for a moment. It is crucial that one appreciate the dislocating sweep of Darwin’s achievement. Tooby (2002) states:

The discovery of natural selection, the austere logic of reproducing systems, was only Darwin’s first step. He used this new logic to span three seemingly unbridgeable metaphysical chasms. He showed how selection united the nonliving and the living, the nonhuman and the human, and the physical and the mental into a single fabric of intelligible material causation. If one could accept the price, the prize was a principled explanation for the history and design of all life. Unacceptably, this included the architecture of the human mind, all that now remained of the soul: our cherished mental life was a naturally selected product of organized matter, just one downstream consequence of the uncaring immensities of time and chance. The mind with its moral sense was taken out of the authoritative domain of clerics and philosophers. For Darwin, the responsibility for its investigation would be in the hands of evolutionary psychologists, of which he was the first.

(“The Greatest Englishman Since Newton,”
New York Times Book Review, October 6, 2002)

We will continue in this tradition. We will provide an idea about arrogance’s origins that may unsettle the reader and disturb what he or she thinks might be pathological about arrogance and its place in human psychology. Let us first turn to modern evolutionary psychology.

The fibers that make our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors began to slowly emerge as humans did, approximately five to seven million years ago when hominids first split from our closest ancestor, known as the last common ancestor of humans, bonobos, and chimpanzees. Our own species, Homo sapiens, is a relative latecomer among the hominids, appearing approximately 300,000 years ago.

Our brains are designed to grasp the timescales of our own lifetimes: seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years (Dawkins, 1998). We start to stumble at the prospect of comprehending larger timescales and fall when we attempt to grasp the eons of evolution, even human evolution. It is hard to truly comprehend, but here is one thought experiment: Imagine that each hour is 100,000 years. We will take a day as representative of 2.4 million years. At midnight our genus Homo appears in Africa. At dawn some leave Africa for the first time. By lunchtime some have reached present-day Europe. At dinnertime our most immediate ancestor, Homo heidelbergensis emerges in Africa. Some of them migrate to Europe and become the Neanderthals. Anatomically modern humans emerge in Africa from the remaining heidelbergensis population about 9 PM at night. Fully modern humans, our species, emerge about 11:20 PM. It is not until six minutes before midnight, 11:54 PM, that we start to settle into early agriculture communities in the Near East. For all that time, from midnight until almost midnight the following evening, we lived in small, kin-based hunter-gatherer bands in Africa. All seven billion people on the planet today arose from a small number of those hunter-gatherers in Africa. That is the physical and social environment that shaped all of us.

The disappearance of the rainforests around this time forced us to adopt the African plains as our home (Walter, 2013). On these plains, the threat of predation and starvation was ever present. Early humans found that cooperative group living provided better protection and access to resources than single living. Those who were predisposed to group living and navigating the social environment flourished, while those who chose solitary lives perished. Thus rudimentary societies emerged.

The social and physical environments that shaped the human race can be viewed as a lifelong camping trip with extended family and relatives, with limited resources and an unending concern for safety (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992, 2013). Because evolution requires tiny changes in DNA over innumerable replication cycles, and because it is often more than one alteration that leads to a beneficial trait, it takes tens of thousands of years for adaptations to form. Therefore, we must look to those early hunter-gatherer societies on the savannahs of Africa when examining how our current traits are adaptive. Those early years are referred to as our “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” or EEA (Bowlby, 1969).

. . . the only relevant criterion by which to consider the natural adaptation of any particular part of present-day man’s behavioral equipment is the degree to which and the way in which it might contribute to population survival in man’s primeval environment.

(p. 59)

And as Cosmides and Tooby (2013) point out, the behaviors, cognition, and emotions that made sense in our EEA often fail to fit in our ever-changing world. In fact, our environment has changed so much that what was once an advantage to our ancestors can seem downright maladaptive today. Murder could mean survival tens of thousands of years ago, while today it carries a sentence of life in prison or execution. Evolutionary psychology seeks to examine human cognitions, behaviors, and emotions in the context of this EEA.

Because everything about humans, from the way we act to the way we look, has evolved to aid our ability to navigate and reproduce in the EEA, understanding these factors requires that we analyze how they aided our survival and reproductive success in the past. This includes everything from mate choice to personality features. If personality traits such as arrogance served a purpose in at least a small subset of situations encountered by our ancestors, it would have afforded those who possessed it with reproductive success, propagating the feature through generations upon generations of individuals. With this in mind, we now consider the factors that make one reproductively successful.

Sexual selection and mate choice

Sexual relationships and mate choice are vital to understanding the evolution of all traits, including arrogance. They puzzled Darwin and seemed at odds with his theory of natural selection (Buss, 2004). He was so perplexed, that he created a separate theory, which he deemed “sexual selection.” This theory was first proposed in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and was later refined in his 1871 publication, The Descent of Man. As in much of evolutionary theory, the theory of sexual selection is complex, and we will take a basic view of it, with a focus on two key aspects – intersexual competition and intrasexual competition (for a full discussion see Buss, 2004; Dawkins, 1986, 1989).

Intrasexual selection occurs within one gender of a species. In humans, men compete against other men to attract a woman and vice versa. We will focus on male intrasexual competition because it is a building block of arrogance. In some animal species, the competition is physical, such as lions fighting to control a pride of lionesses. The winner gains access to the territory and the females that make up the pride. In humans the competition is often more subtle (although remnants of such instincts to literally fight over the opposite sex can be seen in drunken bar fights wherever young males gather). If a male possesses more traits that a woman wants or can outcompete his male counterpart, then he will be able to reproduce. In reproducing, he will pass on these desirable traits to his male offspring. Furthermore, the female will pass on a preference for those traits to her female offspring. Over thousands of generations this trait in males and preference for it in females will replicate and spread throughout a species. Those traits possessed by the loser of intrasexual competition will fail to replicate and will disappear from the gene pool.

Intersexual selection looks at what one gender of a species desires in the other. A frequently cited example is the peacock. It often surprises people to learn that the more decorated gender of this species is the male. A peahen is quite drab by comparison. Females prefer males with large, bright plumage as this is correlated with male health – a good immune system and low parasite load. These males are selected by females for copulation and reproduction. Over time the genes that allowed bright and robust plumage would have been passed down more frequently, as males who possessed these genes were chosen more often by females. Males with dull feathers would not have been as successful at mating and, over time, the genes for dull feathers would have slowly disappeared from the gene pool.

It is important to remember that if a certain organism is better suited for its environment, it will likely survive and prosper. The mere fact that an individual survives longer and spends less time struggling to navigate the environment means that that individual will likely be more successful in procreating. The better the traits that an individual possesses, the more likely he is to find a mate and procreate. The more offspring an individual has, the more those genes are replicated in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the editor and contributors
• Introduction
• Prologue
• PART I Developmental realm
• PART II Cultural realm
• PART III Clinical realm
• Epilogue
• References
• Index