A leading psychologist reveals how our most misunderstood emotion—pride—has shaped our minds and our culture.
Why did Paul Gauguin abandon middle-class life to follow the path of a starving artist?
What explains the success of Steve Jobs, a man with great ideas but weak programming skills and a questionable managerial style? As Jess Tracy reveals, many superachievers were motivated by pride, an often-maligned emotion. Its dark, hubristic side is well known, but pride is also essential for helping us become our best, brightest selves.
Jess is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia and a Sauder Distinguished Scholar. She is a leading expert in the science of emotions, and her research focuses on self-conscious emotions like pride and shame, as well as social rank and hierarchy, morality, and meaning in life.
A story at the start of Take Pride, a forthcoming book by University of British Columbia psychologist Jessica Tracy, is a typical one of youthful aimlessness, at least at first. Tracy writes about her post-college life in the late 1990s, when she moved across the country to San Francisco and got a job as a barista in a cozy cafe. It was a pleasant life, filled with lots of people to talk to and lots of time to read, along with few anxieties or responsibilities. But after about a year, she started missing something she’d had in college…
For American voters and the rest of the world, the final weeks of the U.S presidential election campaign have become a spectacle to behold – or perhaps to turn away from.
For Jessica Tracy, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, it’s a research opportunity like no other…
If we in the West consider ourselves highly evolved, why do we take so many blowhard politicians seriously, even when they’re spouting blatant untruths? In her search to uncover the evolutionary lineage—and potential social benefits—of pride, Tracy cites a study that shows five-year-olds will believe people who show self-belief and certainty, even when they’ve been proven wrong. Adults, when partially distracted, are just as gullible.
At a basic level, it seems, all of us are hard-wired to pay attention to people who display pride…
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