Philosopher Michael Huemer writes:
There’s a stereotype held by men that “women are crazy”, and a stereotype held by women that “men are jerks”.
2.1. What are jerks?
I think it mostly means people who are overly self-centered. They think too much about their own interests and desires and not enough about others’; they have an overly high opinion of themselves, especially without justification; they tend to be too aggressive in interpersonal interactions.2.2. Why are there jerks?
Evolution. The genes we have are those that, in our evolutionary history, caused people with them to leave behind more copies of their own genes, compared to their alleles. In general, having a very strong focus on oneself causes one to serve oneself, which tends to enhance one’s reproductive fitness. So, to the extent that personality is heritable, we would expect jerkiness to spread.Surely few if any women would say that they like jerks. But they might prefer certain traits that are correlated with jerkiness.
First, it’s plausible that men who are higher in the social hierarchy are higher value mates, since they could give more advantages to their wives and children. But a certain degree of jerkiness probably enables men to climb the hierarchy. (Not too much, though.) So women might have evolved to be attracted to jerkiness, or they might have evolved to be attracted to status, which correlates with jerkiness.
Second, it is widely known that women desire confidence. Confidence may help one to succeed in life. Moreover, it is a sign of general success: The more you succeed in getting what you want, the more confident you feel. People who tend to succeed are generally going to be higher-value mates, so women might want to select confident men.
But that is a simplification. Actually, there are at least two reasons why someone might be highly confident:
Competence: Normal people start out with low confidence when they first start to do anything, because they know that they don’t know what they’re doing. As they gain skill and success (if they do), their confidence builds. This includes physical skills as well as social and intellectual skills.
Confidence hacking: Once other people have learned to associate confidence with competence, a personality type might develop to “hack” the system, so to speak, by just projecting confidence automatically, regardless of actual ability. These are people who are simply confident as a standing personality trait. This enables them to get the benefits of being perceived as competent, without actually needing to have high ability.
Aside: Why doesn’t everyone have this trait? Because it also has a downside: when you are overconfident, you tend to bite off more than you can chew and to take too many risks.
Confidence Hackers are likely jerks. They feel confident without basis, which means that they are at least a little narcissistic, and their personality type is an adaptation to manipulate other people. Of course, as with all of these things, they need not know what they are doing; they just find themselves feeling confident and feeling as though they themselves are great, without knowing why.
