How to Be a Dominant Man: What You Didn't Know About the 'Winner Effect'

Dominance is a touchy topic. It's positively loaded with cultural baggage - in the West, we're averse to both the idea of being dominant over others and of others being dominant over us. It has all kinds of ill-favored connotations that most would rather just avoid. I'm throwing all of that out today though and talking to you about how to be a dominant man, political correctness and sensitivity aside - and I'm going to teach you a lot of things you didn't know about dominance before today.

In the post on how to be an alpha male (without becoming a stereotype), we broke down the difference between what's generally thought of as "alpha" and what alpha actually is, and about the character of the nomad -- the man who's neither alpha, nor beta, nor any other role in a social hierarchy, but instead operates outside it entirely.

I've long noticed a failure to differentiate among "being alpha" and "being dominant" in those who discuss social dynamics. They're treated as one and the same -- if you're being alpha, you're dominant, and if you're being dominant, you're alpha.

But they aren't the same. Being alpha's about heading up your group.

Meanwhile, being dominant... that's about something else altogether. What that is -- that and the winner effect -- is what this article is all about.

 

Social Policing and Regular Joe

Can you be an alpha male and be dominant? Of course you can.

Can you be a nomad and be dominant? Yes, most definitely.

But how about this: could you be an alpha male and not be dominant? Well... as I'll show below, you can.

How about being a non-dominant nomad? Yes to that one too.

What then is dominance? How could a man be alpha but not dominant, or dominant but not alpha?

There's something out there called "society" that's more a web of social rules and regulations that are generally decided upon by the members of that society and used to keep one another in line with shame, guilt, and force when necessary. Elite members of society bend some of these rules and break others, but Regular Joes are expected to abide by them.

For instance, if you're a celebrity, you walk up to the front of a nightclub and get in and everyone's fine with it. "Oh, that's celebrity X," they all say understandingly. But if you're a Regular Joe dressed in Regular Joe clothes and you walk up to the front of a nightclub and you get in, the people waiting in line get angry. "Who's that guy?" they ask, "and why does he get to cut the line while I have to wait?"

This is a phenomenon I've touched lightly on here before under the name social policing. Social policing is when people you know or even people you don't know and have never interacted with before perceive you as equal to or lower in status than they perceive themselves interject themselves into your life to "help you out," "look out for you," or "set you straight." It's a justice mechanism, and it's how members of society reassure themselves that if they just follow the rules (like waiting in line at the nightclub to get in) then eventually they'll get theirs.

The basic rules of social policing are these:

• The stronger someone perceives you being or the stronger they respect you, the less likely they are to social police you
  
  
• The weaker someone perceives you being or the less they respect you, the more likely they are to social police you

So, when someone sees you as being equal to or lower than them, and they detect you doing something that they aren't doing that gives you an advantage, they get upset. Their world is being turned upside down, and they want to get things back in order again. They want the world to make sense and order to be restored, because they aren't comfortable or capable operating outside of it.

Examples of social policing are:

• Asking you to calm down when you're angry
  
  
• Trying to be overly polite to you when they're telling you "no"
  
  
  • e.g., a secretary telling you "I'm so sorry, but Mr. Lawson isn't able to see you today. If you'd like to leave your name and phone number however, I'll do my best to see to it that he gets in touch with you soon," when all she's trying to say is, "No, he can't see you."
    
    
• Looking at you sternly or confronting you when you break the social norms (e.g., approaching women on the street, pulling a girl into a hidden alcove, kissing girls in public, talking loudly, swearing, behaving any way that isn't considered "polite")
  
  
• Telling you to stop having a certain kind of relationship because it's "wrong" (e.g., you have a casual sexual relationship with a girl, and her girlfriends tell her to demand more from you, or your friends tell you you should be more serious, when both of you were otherwise happy and satisfied)

All these are forms of social policing. They're means that members of society use to get people operating within the rules that they themselves are accustomed to operating inside of.

You see this most clearly when you travel. Act like an American in Japan, and you're considered loud and boorish. Act like an American in China, and you get told repeatedly how polite and friendly you are. And if you stay in these societies long enough, and integrate, and surround yourself with locals, with time people will put more and more social pressure on you to follow the same rules that they follow. As you integrate with a society, that society begins to impose its social norms on you.

To an extent, this serves good purpose: by having generally agreed upon social rules that all follow, a society removes a lot of thinking and training and consideration from its adherents' minds. It also helps people know what to expect and the proper ways to interact with one another.

But these rules apply far less to dominant people. The elites of society. The celebrities. The government officials. The wealthy. The connected. The people with networks, resources, and respect.

Those people do whatever they want (within reason), and no one tries to social police them (unless they get so far outside social norms relative to their position in society that they become open game again, that is -- see Britney Spears shaving her head and not wearing underwear in public).

Why is this?

It's because they're perceived as more dominant, powerful, resourceful, and respected than the ordinary Regular Joes who make up society.

But wait, you might ask -- why would you even want to break social norms? Isn't that rude, impolite, or offensive?

It's an interesting question, and it ties in closely with the discussion about how to be a dominant man. Because learning how to be dominant is about a lot more than just learning how to do it -- it's about learning why to be dominant, and when you should be dominant and when you should not.

 

Why You Want to Learn How to Be Dominant

What if you could just follow the rules and get everything you wanted?

Society would have you believe that well of course you can!

If you work hard and do good, you can succeed at school.

And then if you work hard and do good, you'll get a good job and make a steady paycheck.

And if you do all that, then you'll find the girl of your dreams, get married, and start a family.

And then if you do all that, you'll get a mortgage, get your dream house, and save for retirement.

And for most people... that's what they'll do! Well, she probably won't really be their dream girl, and it probably won't be their dream job... in fact, after the honeymoon period, they'll come to hate waking up in the morning to go to work, and they'll dread Sunday, because Sunday means the weekend is almost over, and on Monday it starts all over again. And maybe they'll even come to resent their girlfriends and wives, because they didn't get the girl of their dreams... instead, they settled. And they know they settled.

That's life for the non-dominant person. A whole procession of events that occur outside his control that just happen to him. His life has been pre-planned by society, he follows the plan, and he gets a Regular Joe life. End story.

I won't tell you to get off that path entirely, because let's be realistic, most people are never going to do that. Most people don't want to do that.

But I bet you also don't want to settle for less than you could get. And if that's the case, then you need to start training up your dominance regardless, because dominance is how you get the things you want.

Things like what, you might ask?

• Dominance is how you get the women you want
• Dominance is how you get the job you want
• Dominance is how you get that job to pay you what you want
• Dominance is how you negotiate tough deals and make them go your way
• Dominance is how you get people to help you do stuff they refuse others
• Dominance is how you succeed where others fail

Now, dominance isn't the only factor in these -- your skill verbally plays a role, your presence plays a role, your precedent and relationship with the individuals you're interacting with plays a role. But dominance plays such a big role it can't possibly be avoided... and yet it often is. Telling someone they need to be more dominant scares the hell out of them.

But let's say you're an attractive, well-dressed guy who knows how to talk to women... but doesn't know how to be a dominant man. And let's say you try to invite her home, and she says... "Why don't we just meet up in a few days?"

Well, if you're a non-dominant man, you say, "Okay." And then, chances are, you never see her again, or she treats you like you're just a friend when you do.

If on the other hand you're an attractive, well-dressed guy who knows how to talk to women, and you're a dominant man, and you invite her home and she proposes meeting another day, what's going to happen then?

First off, you aren't going to accept meeting her another day as an option.

Second off, you're going to do everything you can to make it happen right then.

"Look, do you like me?" you ask her.

"Uh, yeah," she says. "I like you."

"Cool," you say, "I like you too. And let's be honest, if we go our separate ways now, are we really going to meet up in a few days?"

"Sure we are," she says.

"No, we aren't," you say. "People say, 'Yeah, let's meet up later, let's do it another time,' but another time never comes. If you like me and I like you and we want to spend time together, then we should spend time together right now, because if we don't we probably don't see each other again. On the other hand, if we spend time together now and really get to know each other and really have a good time together and really bond, then when we decide to meet up again later we will, because we'll already have something real. Come on."

Then you lead her out of there and pull her home.

That isn't going to work every time, but it's about 1000% more effective and consistent than saying, "Yeah, sure, let's meet up another time." Because I'll tell you, from years of experience -- that last one doesn't work very often.

Dominance is what lets you win. Dominance is how you close things out at the end. Dominance is winning and making the best possible outcome come into being.

Dominance isn't being an overly loud, coercive asshole, which is how society portrays it. Rather, it's how you achieve a satisfactory outcome in a situation in which other individuals are working to deny you the outcome.

Dominance is success.

 

Dominance, Victory, and Testosterone Levels

Want me to totally shock your world view?

Welcome into the rabbit hole. What I've got here for you are the big guns you were waiting for me to bring out on you - you've been leading your life all wrong.

Concessions: people make them every day. Your boss asks you to stay late. Your girlfriend tells you she can't make it and asks to reschedule. Your parents yell at you for racking up credit card debt and you take it. Random strangers tell you they're sorry but they can't help you, or that you can't get what you want, or that you need to get in line... and you do.

But what happens when you concede? Well, you just don't get what you want... right?

Not exactly.

There've been a raft of studies that've shown the effects of winning and losing on individuals' testosterone, and the subsequent effects on those individuals' confidence, dominance, assertiveness, risk taking, and even future success. Here's just a sampling:

From Alan Booth of the University of Nevada's Department of Sociology, et al.'s findings in "Testosterone, and winning and losing in human competition":

"After [tennis] matches, mean testosterone rose for winners relative to losers, especially for winners with very positive moods after their victories and who evaluated their own performance highly. Winners with rising testosterone had higher testosterone before their next match, in contrast to losers with falling testosterone, who had lower testosterone before their next match."

From Kevin D. McCaul of the Department of Psychology, North Dakota State University et al.'s findings in "Winning fights elevates testosterone levels in California mice and enhances future ability to win fights":

"The ‘winner effect’ has been studied in a variety of species, but only rarely in mammals. We compared effects of winning three, two, one, or zero resident–intruder encounters on the likelihood of winning a subsequent aggressive encounter in the California mouse (Peromyscus californicus). During the training phase, we ensured that resident males won all encounters by staging contests with mildly sedated, smaller intruders. During the test phase, the resident male encountered an unfamiliar, more evenly matched intruder that had experience winning an encounter and was larger than the resident. Testosterone (T) plasma levels significantly increased after the final test when they had experienced two prior winning encounters, and the probability of winning a future encounter increased significantly after three prior wins independent of intrinsic fighting ability. We hypothesize a ‘winner–challenge’ effect in which increased T levels serve to reinforce the winner effect in male California mice."

I'll put those in laymen's terms real quick.

From the first: winning a sports match increased testosterone in subjects, losing it decreased testosterone. From mice studies, mice with higher testosterone from previous victories won a lot more than other mice equal in all other respects except that their testosterone was lower from previous losses.

Think about that: higher testosterone levels from victory help you win more in the future, and something as small as winning or losing a tennis match can influence that.

But wait, it gets better.

From another study by McCaul, this one entitled "Winning, losing, mood, and testosterone":

"In two experiments, male college students either won or lost $5 on a task controlled entirely by chance. In both studies, winners reported a more positive mood change than did losers and, in Experiment 2, winners reported a more positive mood change than a neutral group that did not win or lose money. After the task was completed, winners exhibited significantly higher testosterone levels than losers. Levels of cortisol, a hormone associated with stress and arousal, did not differ among the groups, suggesting that a hormone-behavior response pattern for winning and losing is specific to testosterone. These data suggest that winning can alter testosterone levels in men and that mood may mediate such changes."

I bolded that sentence in there. But did you catch that? Even something as insignificant as a randomly controlled $5 payout had a significant impact on these students' testosterone levels.

Which, if humans are anything like mice in their reactions to high and low levels of testosterone -- and they are; they're dead similar -- something as trivial as winning or losing a random $5 can be the difference in whether those students go off to create a work of art that afternoon or pick up the girl of their dreams, or spend the afternoon staring at the wall or avoiding the gaze of pretty girls.

Do you get this?

Learning how to be a dominant man isn't just about "being dominant." It's about learning how to structurally correct your life so that you're putting yourself into a feedback loop of consistently winning, leading to elevated testosterone levels, leading to further winning, leading to further elevated testosterone levels, and so on and so forth.

This is the winner effect. Winners win more, and losers lose more. It's why when you have something good happen to you in the morning you often go off to have a killer day, and why when you start a day off on the wrong foot the whole day goes awry. It's why when you start meeting people the instant you go out you often end up having a great night and meet a lot of cute girls and maybe even take one home, and it's why when you go sit around and talk to no one for a while you often meet no one the entire night.

Here are a few more studies to pound this point home.

From the findings of J. M. Coates and J. Herbert of the University of Cambridge in "Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor":

"We found that a trader's morning testosterone level predicts his day's profitability. We also found that a trader's cortisol rises with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. Our results suggest that higher testosterone may contribute to economic return, whereas cortisol is increased by risk. Our results point to a further possibility: testosterone and cortisol are known to have cognitive and behavioral effects, so if the acutely elevated steroids we observed were to persist or increase as volatility rises, they may shift risk preferences and even affect a trader's ability to engage in rational choice."

Testosterone predicted traders' profitability.

Think about that.

Now that's not necessarily causation -- if a guy's been trading for a while and he's good, he'll be having more wins and his T levels will be up, and if a guy's been trading for a while and he isn't good, he'll have more losses and his T levels will be down. But I've consistently seen studies that point to trading being a lot more luck than skill, so my inclination after seeing this research is to posit that high testosterone traders are more aggressive in pursuing opportunities and taking the big risks that potentially offer big rewards.

So, not necessarily causation -- but here's one that indisputably is, entitled "Second-to-fourth digit ratio predicts success among high-frequency financial traders," again from Coates et al.:

"Prenatal androgens have important organizing effects on brain development and future behavior. The second-to-fourth digit length ratio (2D:4D) has been proposed as a marker of these prenatal androgen effects, a relatively longer fourth finger indicating higher prenatal androgen exposure. 2D:4D has been shown to predict success in highly competitive sports. Yet, little is known about the effects of prenatal androgens on an economically influential class of competitive risk taking—trading in the financial world. Here, we report the findings of a study conducted in the City of London in which we sampled 2D:4D from a group of male traders engaged in what is variously called “noise” or “high-frequency” trading. We found that 2D:4D predicted the traders' long-term profitability as well as the number of years they remained in the business. 2D:4D also predicted the sensitivity of their profitability to increases both in circulating testosterone and in market volatility. Our results suggest that prenatal androgens increase risk preferences and promote more rapid visuomotor scanning and physical reflexes. The success and longevity of traders exposed to high levels of prenatal androgens further suggests that financial markets may select for biological traits rather than rational expectations."

Yeah, you read right. The amount of testosterone you were exposed to in the womb has a bigger impact on your financial success as a stock trader than any other factor.

Did your eyes just open a little wider?

 

How to Be a Dominant Man: Training Yourself to Win

If you want to make a lot of money, do a lot of cool things, and sleep with a lot of pretty girls, this is probably one of the most important things you will ever do for yourself:

You need to learn how to be a dominant man.

If you weren't fortunate enough to have been exposed to a high dose of prenatal testosterone and have a naturally dominant personality, you're going to need to train it up. And that's going to mean you're going to have to get accustomed to going against your default programming.

You need the winner effect in your corner -- it's going to make every single thing you do work a whole lot better.

But how do you start training yourself to be dominant?

To start with, you need to know the most important rule of dominance, success, and victory: always find a way to win.

That means you can never concede. You can never give up. You must always get a success or at the very least do things on your terms.

• Your boss asks you to stay late: "I've really got to get out of here but I'm happy to do some work from home later tonight if it's mission critical or otherwise get on that first thing tomorrow."
  
  
• Your girlfriend tries to reschedule: "Okay, let's meet right now then and then you can go see your friends," or, "Actually I'm going to be booked up for the next week. If you can't make tonight let's reschedule after next week."
  
  
• Your parents yell at you for racking up credit card debt: "You guys are right, I should've been more careful, but instead of yell at me, what can you do to help or what recommendations can you make for me to get back on track?"
  
  
• Strangers say they can't help you: "Yes you can. You can help me. You're the only one who can help me -- how do we make this work?"

Being dominant isn't about being a loud-mouthed asshole. Learning how to be a dominant man is about learning how to control the situation -- how to get a satisfactory result no matter the circumstances, how to prevent others who are trying to dominate you from being able to, how to keep your testosterone levels high and keep the winner effect on and fight having your testosterone slashed and your will to win and confidence and assertiveness and risk taking broken.

Maybe you weren't dosed with tons of testosterone in the womb. I wasn't. My 2D:4D ratio is about on par with the average man; my ring finger is slightly longer than average compared to my index finger, which means I naturally have a bit more testosterone than average, but it isn't huge. But you can still have all the success with women, with money, with life that you want if you build wins into your life and fight concessions as if your life depended on it. Because your life might not depend on how often you win and how often you concede -- but the quality of that life, and the success you have within it, most certainly does.

Yours,
Chase Amante