and confidence. Being confident gets you a lot of love and lucre. A date or a job interview goes better if you're confident and not worried about "losing" it.
Well, it's not that simple, because there are men like Clooney and DiCaprio in "everyday" life too, who don't have wealth and status, but who do get most of the women swoon for them...
(And the opposite: people with wealth and status that only attract cheap gold-digger types, and women in general could not care less for).
No, it's simpler: It's just 'status'. I believe the men you describe are "alpha males" which is a form of status -- albeit it's generally considered a low-class form of status by modern educated professionals.
Wealth, I believe, is only interesting in this equation to the extend it confers status, or at least coincides with it. Beta-males/low-status guys who win the lottery typically gets taken advantage of, rather than swooned over.
>No, it's simpler: It's just 'status'. I believe the men you describe are "alpha males" which is a form of status -- albeit it's generally considered a low-class form of status by modern educated professionals.
Not always. It can be just the local barman or barista that women swoon for. Or just a guy in the office, with the same rank as 30 others. It can even be an unemployed bum. Heck, women went wild over some felon last year:
I think there is truth in this, but it is overused in an intellectually lazy way to "explain" group dynamics.
In other words, I think there are actually humans who are usefully described as "alpha", but they are rare enough that most people will never actually meet one in their lifetimes.
If that is true, thinking about this dynamic as useful in understanding the people they actually do interact with easily becomes misleading.
There are certainly many people who like to think of themselves as "alpha" but invariably in my experience they have been obviously, and demonstrably, wrong.
>In other words, I think there are actually humans who are usefully described as "alpha", but they are rare enough that most people will never actually meet one in their lifetimes.
Maybe not a full blown "alpha" (that would e.g. be their political leaders, CEOs, etc, so they will affect their lives, even if they don't get to meet one as a colleague/friend), but in most group scenarios there would be some people exerting much more influence than the others, even without a higher rank.
but in most group scenarios there would be some people exerting much more influence than the others
Sure, but that is what is meant by group dynamics. And it usually isn't one dimensional.
What I'm saying is that the alpha/beta modeling of this is lazy and misleading, and better avoided.
A very few politicians and a very few CEOs meet a useful definition of alpha, in my opinion. Your point about rank affecting influence is true, but I think irrelevant to my point.
There are leaders and followers. There are also people who just do their own thing and others that fluctuate from leading to following based on circumstance.
The "alpha"/"beta" wolf-pack dynamics were debunked a while ago. Packs are typically made up of parents (previously referred to as "alphas") and children (previously referred to as "betas").
Status is definitely important, but the alpha/beta/omega/gamma/delta/greek-anthropomorphism thing is a load of crap.
