The Asshole Principle
All golfers know The Asshole Principle. You may not know it by name, but when I explain, you’ll smile and nod in agreement.
If you show up to a golf course with fewer than four people, you have a good chance of being paired with strangers. It’s one of the coolest benefits of being a golfer. You have a perfect excuse to spend a few hours with a perfect stranger. It’s like rolling the dice in Yahtzee! You could end up with anything from a pair of twos—the socially awkward middle aged hack—to a full blown Yahtzee—the golfing equivalent of the Dos Equis most interesting man in the world.
Usually you end up with an average roll. A couple normal dudes—average golfers with interesting jobs and passable social skills. By the end of the round, you have an inside joke and you’ve shared a couple beers. Maybe you’ve traded business cards or connected on LinkedIn. Then you have one more beer in the clubhouse before parting ways, happy you made a new friend.
Here’s where we run into the dissonance. If almost every person you get paired with at the golf course is a pretty good person, why is every group in front and behind you full of assholes?
It’s a tale as old as time. Charles Slack spells it out beautifully in his book, Blue Fairways:
The group behind are the pushy, impatient assholes who don’t realize that your group is not the one holding things up. No, that’s the fault of those slow, inconsiderate assholes ahead.
All the strangers are assholes, but everyone you meet is wonderful.
Of course this isn’t a coincidence. If by some chance the person you got paired with was a few minutes late, he’d be in the group behind you. And instead of becoming your friend, he would be the asshole pushing you down the fairway.
It isn’t the fact that, by some divine intervention, you always get paired with the only other golfer who isn’t an asshole. It’s the idea that it’s hard to hate up close.
Sharing a cart, sharing a conversation, sharing some shanks into the sawgrass—these things all create a bond. You know what else creates a bond? A common disdain for the outgroup. As Slack writes:
Establishing the Asshole Principle helps one’s own foursome coalesce from a party of strangers into a cohesive unit, us against the world.
But luckily for us, the out group can become the in group very easily. Hop in a golf cart together. Sit down for a beer together. Sit in the stands of your childrens’ basketball games together.
All we have to do is share the things we have in common.
In April of 2017, Heineken released their “Worlds Apart” commercial. It begins by showing short clips of people voicing their opinions on polarizing issues.
“Feminism today is man hating,” says one participant.
“I would describe myself as a feminist 100%,” says another.
“I do not believe that climate change exists,” one man proclaims.
“We are not taking enough action on climate change,” declares the next.
Unaware of each other’s opinions, the people were paired and given a set of instructions. Each pair worked together to build two stools. Then they sat together on the stools for part two of the experiment.
The pairs opened envelopes with the following prompts:
Describe what it is like to be you in five adjectives
Name three things you and I have in common
After in-depth discussions, obvious connections formed. Then the participants followed their next set of instructions, which led them to build a bar, find a cooler full of Heineken, and sit down at the bar with their beers.
Before cracking the beers, the moderator told the participants to stand for a short film. As the participants stood next to their newfound friends, they watched the clips of each other’s opinions on the polarizing topics. Each person looked uncomfortable.
As the clips ended, the moderator left them with a choice: walk away, or sit, share a beer, and discuss their differences. Each pair sat down together to share a beer.
Without the common bond of building the stools, the partners would’ve been assholes in each other’s minds. Just like without the common bond of sharing a tee box, fairway, and green, the golfers outside your group are assholes in your mind.
But what we learn from these arbitrary pairings of people—golfers in one case and strangers building stools in another—is that all our values don’t have to align to get along. We just need to have a tiny bit of “value overlap.”
And in both of these examples, the values are essentially made up. Either, “I want to play an enjoyable round of golf,” or “I want to build this stool and drink some beers.” It’s very easy to find shared values with strangers.
Now, why is this important?
According to Ray Dalio’s study of societies throughout history, widening values gaps are a major source of conflict within civilizations. As he writes in his book, The Changing World Order,
When under stress, people with greater values gaps also proved to have greater conflict. They frequently demonize members of other tribes rather than recognizing that those other tribes, like themselves, are simply doing what is in their self-interest in the best ways they know how.
That last line stands out to me as a golfer—they are simply doing what is in their self-interest in the best ways they know how.
I’m simply trying to get that damned ball closer to the hole without losing it. That’s basically the same thing every golfer is trying to do. And for some strange reason, we as golfers extend grace to the strangers we get paired with but not to the strangers in front of or behind us.
When Slack wrote about The Asshole Principle more than 20 years ago, he was touching on a deeply human truth—the same truth Heineken shared in their commercial and Dalio wrote about in his book. We all have things in common, and if we focus on the commonalities rather than the gaps, our golf courses, bars, cities, states, countries, and continents become more pleasant places to live.
So next time you get angry with someone, remember The Asshole Principle. Most people aren’t assholes. It’s probably your perspective making them look that way. And a perspective is a pretty easy thing to change.
Photo by Dan Congdon on Unsplash
