Men need some hierarchy to be able to compete/fight to get to the "top". Especially when young. And in many ways that can be a good thing.
Well, at least that's my take based on a life of observing life 😅
Discussion
So the idea here is that comparison is good for men... as in males specifically?
Please give me some evidence here.
men will make these hierarchies and place women at the bottom.
I don't have a great soundbite evidence, but I can roll out the argument through indirect evidence:
- Hierarchy has direct effect on health (cardiovascular system, cortisone levels)
- Hierarchy can be effective way to divide goods and labor
- Male and female hierarchies are different - male are more strict structure (shown in mice and some studies on primates/humans)
- Social comparison has worse effects for women
- Countries pushing for gender equality resulted in more psychological differences between men and women.
This psychology journal explored hierarchy from different directions, but especially the effects on health:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/current-opinion-in-psychology/vol/33/suppl/C
The results (e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352250X19300946 ) show that the people on top of hierarchy end up being healthier, less stressed, etc. Fairly believable imo, matches my personal experience.
Further, hierarchy can be effective way to divide goods and labor (shown in
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5494206/#:~:text=Importantly%2C%20the%20organization%20of%20social,and%20labor%20among%20group%20members. with further evidence)
There is way more research in mice and monkeys, but not sure how much you believe that translates into humans, e.g. showing differences between male and female hierarchies: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43747-w#:~:text=Female%20mouse%20hierarchies%20exhibit%20several,directional%20consistency%20than%20male%20hierarchies.
Now to the point, this shows one example where social comparison is notably worse for women compared to men: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21642850.2024.2390939#references-Section
And just to highlight, if the countries/nations push more towards gender equality (in some dimension, like work), it actually ends up in causing larger psychological difference in personality, values, and emotions between men and women (as shown in https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2007-07951-011 ), which presumably would make the social comparison effects more pronounced.
When I was "researching" this I tried my best to ask neutral questions, like "effects of social comparison on different gender", to make sure I don't just find the results that support my view.
It's debatable if hierarchy is good for those at the top with primates, it can be very stressful to maintain that status. And certainly hierarchy is very bad for those at the bottom.
Also, humans are not chimpanzees... thankfully, and even more so, even Baboons are not doomed to hierarchy. here is an interesting case study.
Humans are not chimps, and human progress comes from cooperation, not from domination.
Here is a lovely article on the topic, https://freemansperspective.com/i-like-jordan-peterson-but-hes-wrong/
"The dominance strategies of animals generate animal results.
The cooperative strategies of humans generate human and humane results."
Where do you want humanity to go from here?
I agree with the push for cooperation & collaboration. We are on the same page there.
And on the note, Peterson, especially the recent version, is drunk on symbolism, saying stupid points with his "lecturing" voice and generally close to impossible to listen to. The initial lectures were really good though, made some good points that I have not heard before.
Have you studied religion, or philosophy, or psychology? If you dig into any of these, they all point to comparison being the bringer of misery. And, unfortunately, given the state of most of the world in the past few thousand years, nearly all of that work was done by men(as in males).
I have not studied any of these.
If we were all ants dying for the glory of the ant queen, perhaps we would not feel misery and be eternally happy, but I'd rather be free with a small side dish of misery 😉
Oh this one is also interesting specifically about competition difference between men and women: https://sci-hub.se/10.1257/0002828041301821
"The results confirm the initial conjecture: competition
enhances the performance of males, but not
females."
I think this is the most direct evidence for your question I could find.
Are you a religious or spiritual person at all?
I don't think we can deny that there are animalist aspects to humans. I have a friend that likes to joke that humans are what you get when a an angle and a chimp have a baby.
Humans have the ugly zerosum primate instincts, but we also have more enlightened more cooperative instincts too. So the question is... where do we want to go from here? Which of our sets of instincts do we want to lean into?
Collaboration and cooperation is beautiful and I think I'm the least competitive person I know, I'm not at all good and competitive sports, because I'm happy for the other team to win. I always try helping others, often work with companies in the bitcoin space, etc. I think we should push towards collaboration as much as possible, create communities with shared interests and help each other.
What I tried to say in my reply is that I believe it's useful, especially for young males, to have a place to compete, to compare themselves in a hierarchy - for example being the best in sports. Or trying to be the best in building the best product. Or becoming the expert on some topic. Or helping the most people. Or speaking the fastest (😉)…
As part trying to be the best they learn to overcome hardships and they get better at that skill. They get a goal to aim at. Also if you know you are good at something, it gives you confidence and peace (at least for me).
In all of this women and men are really similar with only small differences in the average women vs average men. Based on the quick "research" I did today there is some evidence that on average the competition may be more useful for men than women, but that's of course only talking averages. Different people are different. Some men will hate social comparison, it will make them depressed, miserable, etc and some women will love it and grow thanks to it. I do not see competition as a zerosum game. There is a huge value gain on the way.
In other replies you also brought up the global situation, presumably around wars, competition of countries, dictators, etc. All those are horrible things, but that's imo a separate topic, not caused by hierarchy/social comparison. I don't think if we would completely eliminate hierarchy and social comparison it would eliminate wars, dictators, etc.