A55 HOLE DEPTT

A professor from Europe told me, “My university is like an airport for assholes, one lands here every few minutes.” He said a big part of the problem was that rude, arrogant, and selfish faculty members were more likely to be offered and accept jobs at his university than civilized professors. Assholes tend to breed like rabbits because of what psychologists call similarity-attraction effects. As Robert Cialdini documents in his classic book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, there is far more evidence that “birds of a feather flock together” than “opposites attract.” That beleaguered European professor also described—much like that marketing manager who worked at the A$$hole Factory for seven years—how even when civilized faculty were hired, they soon started acting like the rest of the jerks.