Why are people so arrogant? Arrogance – what is it? How does pride manifest itself? Adolescence: mastering adult roles

The origins of the definition of “arrogance” go deep into the history of mankind, in those times when nations were ruled by emperors and kings. One of the most important symbols of power was the presence of the ruler on a throne standing on a hill, before which the subjects had to prostrate. Thus, the difference in status and rank between the king, who was superior to others in every sense of the word, and ordinary people was emphasized.

Nowadays, an arrogant person is no longer a ruler, but rather an inveterate proud person, a person with high self-esteem and a habit of boastfully showing off his advantages. Psychologists are well aware that arrogant people are often deeply unhappy inside, but under no circumstances will they admit it. In the article we will consider in detail the causes, signs and problems that are generated by this character flaw.

Signs of arrogance in people

Arrogance can be easily identified by such characteristic signs manifested in human behavior as:

• selfishness and peremptory attitude towards other people, such an individual does not forgive any mistakes and reacts to them inappropriately, as if it were a personal insult;
• arrogant people most often ignore or subtly humiliate an interlocutor belonging to a lower social rank in front of others;
• own point of view on absolutely all things in the world and a complete inability to respect other people’s views and thoughts;
• pride, they hate to apologize for their own misdeeds and do not accept any authority;
• arrogance is expressed through facial expressions, which demonstrates disdain for others; such people often walk with their heads held high and very emotionally express their dissatisfaction, playing to the public;
• arrogant people are extremely hot-tempered, react violently to criticism addressed to them, not wanting to hear other people’s opinions;
• these people are constantly under the influence of codes and engrams.

Reasons for appearance

It should be understood that arrogance is not an innate, but an acquired character trait. It is formed both in early childhood and in old age. The reasons for its appearance can be a variety of factors; let’s consider the most important ones.

Luck. An individual may be born into a rich and respected family, or suddenly become rich by receiving an inheritance from an uncle. Awareness financial independence And high position in society inspires him, hence the contemptuous attitude towards his more “unsuccessful”, in his opinion, fellow tribesmen. The same applies to those individuals who were lucky enough to be born beautiful.

Poverty, ugly appearance. Oddly enough, but the lack of money and physical beauty also causes arrogance. This happens because a poor person tries to compensate for his own “inferiority” by humiliating those around him, thereby psychologically protecting himself from others. Staging constant squabbles and scandals, he quickly gains fame as a “difficult” person with a difficult character, who is not welcome anywhere.

Possession of some “higher” knowledge. Among scientists there are often arrogant individuals who consider themselves to be the center of the planet. This pride comes from how highly they value their acquired wisdom. They love to teach other people, guide them on the right path, enlighten them, and at the same time treat them condescendingly, like children who do not understand anything in this world.

Publicity. Fame is an excellent breeding ground for arrogance, which is why most pop stars, actors and artists behave provocatively with their own fans. Being on stage in the spotlight, in front of a huge crowd, extremely quickly develops in them a painful conceit, which they transfer to everyone around them.

Flattery. Individuals who are accustomed to pleasing those in power often become the reason for the development of arrogance. Various policies and public figures they do not notice that they are simply being used for selfish purposes, and truly believe that they deserve all the honors bestowed upon them.

Upbringing. Psychologists know that there are parents who consider it advisable to instill in their children disdain for other people. They believe that this will elevate their child and accustom him to the position of a boss. This often happens in eminent families that have a long history and consider themselves an aristocracy.

Codes and engrams can become an imaginary protection of a person from psychological rudeness, arrogance and external pressure from others; a person is afraid to show his weakness, thereby creating a unique type of arrogance.

The Flaws of Arrogance

the main problem arrogance lies in the fact that a person possessing such an unpleasant behavioral trait does not value the people around her. It is because of this reason that it is difficult for such an individual to establish long-term intimate contact with individuals of the opposite sex, communicate with colleagues at work, make new friends, communicate and live. It is extremely difficult for proud people to build a career, as they react inadequately to the claims of their superiors, ignore work routines and try to rise at the expense of others. As a result, they have conflicts with them and are often fired.

Psychologists who have worked with pathologically proud people note that it is difficult for such individuals to be the first, they have an unbearable character and rarely want to truly change. An arrogant individual needs to understand that by arrogant behavior he destroys his own reputation and complicates life. Without accepting responsibility for your actions, it is impossible to change ingrained behavioral patterns, especially an arrogant attitude towards other people.

This is confidence in one’s superiority and significance; disdainful attitude towards others, arrogance, arrogance.

Arrogant - contemptuously arrogant (dictionary Ozhegov S.I., Shvedova N.Yu.). Arrogance is a form of pride.

Arrogance involves expecting people to treat themselves negatively. If the “man on the throne” only admits the possibility that his mother, father, friends, colleagues love him, then the desire to devalue them will disappear. And if not:

« Why do you need me?

To adjust the crown when it slips...

And I thought it was to remind you that you’re not wearing any crown when you start delirious again...»

If we put ourselves above someone, then someone will come who will put himself above us. It's only a matter of time. The main problem of arrogance is suffering from other people, the unsatisfied need for the attention of others and their recognition.

When faced with other people's arrogance, it is useful for us to remember that it often only appears so, for example, as a consequence of our own feelings of unworthiness. If it seems to you that the behavior of another is arrogant, this is not necessarily so.

How is arrogance useful and what does it save from? In other words, why try so hard to rise above others or “turn off” others?

Arrogance gives a feeling of invulnerability, freedom from criticism and the right to criticize yourself. Internal text: “I am better than you who dare to judge me. I am better than anyone who can judge me. It is I who can pass judgment on them! I must criticize others before they criticize me. I have the right to this because I am better than them.”

There is a desire to be better than others, which can lead to academic success and career development. An arrogant person is very critical of himself. He examines those around him in search of an answer to the question: what exactly do they like about a person? He considers what others like to be his advantage, and what they don’t like is his disadvantage. Hence the very high adaptation. Arrogance may well be an assistant on the path to success. It is impossible to get happiness only by achieving success, because there is no time, you have to try to be better!

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— The concept of arrogance according to John Stevens.
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External manifestations: Demonstration of conceit, narcissism, selfishness, boasting, complacency, pomposity and arrogance.

Internal manifestations: Timidity, shyness, indecisiveness, constraint, lack of faith in one’s own strength.

In fact, an arrogant person is one who is in great need of love. He was hungry for her. He is lonely and suffers from this more than anything else.

And without sparing himself, he does everything to please people. Becomes different. But at the same time he is afraid of people, because... they may find out that he is different, “not like that” and hurt him. It can be assumed that: “A person who is in dire need of love and is unsuccessful in this, chooses the tool “arrogance” to achieve the goal.”

External characteristics and manner of presentation. People affected by the dragon of arrogance may appear cold, distant and perfect, treating everything with contempt. On the other hand, they may look rather timid, shy and as if looking for an opportunity to disappear unnoticed from everyone, to disappear into thin air.

An arrogant person will never go back on his words. And if you point out to him that his words are far from the truth and demand that he renounce them, it will seem funny to him. He is hurt by the wits and jokes of his opponents, sometimes he perceives them as some kind of insanity and inappropriateness.

Such people rarely apologize, even if they are not one hundred percent right; they believe that this is beneath their dignity.

Signs of arrogance are readable in facial expressions that demonstrate contempt, disdain, indifference, lack of compassion and arrogance.

The speeches of such a person always sound rote and understated.

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— Why arrogant behavior is dangerous and harmful.
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Many people believe that arrogant people are not only uninteresting, but disgusting to communicate with! An arrogant person is unpleasant to others, he has few friends, his work colleagues avoid him, and he often doesn’t get along in his personal life (partners run away). And this is understandable, will anyone really like it when they perceive him as a primitive substance, will someone agree to be recorded in the “gray mass”, and only because someone imagines himself to be a god.

Arrogance creates an obstacle to friendly communication; it can cross out any, absolutely any advantages.

An arrogant person, trying to convince himself that he is the best, the most worthy, and should always be at the very top, falls into a trap. Firstly, he cannot allow himself to relax, so as not to lose his brand; he must show his importance and significance everywhere. After all, the more a person loves himself, the more he depends on other people’s opinions. Secondly, life is a fair thing and punishes arrogant people by trampling them into the dirt. Thirdly, a proud person painfully endures failures, losses and falls - “How could this happen to ME?” - after all, he must always be at the very top; for him, defeat is always a tragedy.

Arrogance can negatively affect a person's financial situation. Here is a quote from the book of the famous investor and entrepreneur Robert Kiyosaki - “With what I know, I make money. Because I don't know something, I lose money. Every time I show arrogance, I lose my money. When I'm arrogant, I truly believe that what I don't know isn't particularly important." Read.

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— How to deal with an arrogant person?
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Remembering that arrogance is just a protective function of consciousness, you need to make it clear to the person that you respect his achievements and will not allow yourself to infringe on his rights. The best way- this is to praise a person, even for no reason. The reason in such a situation, as always, is his unconscious tension, which provokes inadequacy in behavior. You can often hear about tyrant bosses who no longer control themselves due to internal strife.

Intense movement along the path of life and career requires a lot of strength, especially for people with a heavy unconscious load that accumulates while still in the womb. For them, any achievement in life is very significant, so they value every micron of energy spent. Imagine how highly officials who have achieved or held the position of chief exalt themselves! But an ordinary person will not allow his achievements to be belittled, so, just in case, he will behave somewhat arrogantly. It’s another matter when we come across the arrogance of a person who, even without achieving anything in life, can behave defiantly simply because some energy or character trait will push him to do so. Especially if such people are constantly in struggle and striving to achieve new heights on the path of life. So to them we may simply seem like sleepy flies or children in a sandbox, of course, in a figurative sense. In the relationships of an achiever with other people, his selfishness often manifests itself. Or rather, what is perceived from the outside as selfishness. For him, this is not the case. He believes that when he achieves his goal, those close to him also benefit. But this does not make it easier for loved ones, because a person striving for a goal spends not only his own resources. It also captures strangers. After all, attention and care, and even morning tea prepared with love - all this helps him achieve success.

However, since such people are often proud of their plans rather than real achievements, it is easy to put them in their place. If you depend on such a person, it is clear that he will like your submission, but if he depends on you, then it is in your power to make your goals become common. Dependency is not a very good position for a person striving for self-realization; he will resist it, while demonstrating exactly that same arrogance. Remember that this is just protection and do not make mistakes in communicating with him so that he stops being defensive:

1) do not try to clearly subjugate him or point out his dependence;

2) do not put a spoke in his wheels, especially when he rushed towards his goal;

3) do not insist that he is wrong, recognizing that it is human nature to make mistakes.

If you manage to turn off the defense, then you will remove unnecessary tension in his subconscious, and his arrogance will recede, revealing more pleasant traits of his character.

The material was prepared by Dilyara specifically for the site

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Arrogance looks unattractive on the outside (an upturned nose, a protruding lower lip, an upturned head - such a caricature of pride) and lonely on the inside. An arrogant facial expression stops any desire to get closer and make friends, and the experience of arrogance inside leads to Pechorin’s proud loneliness. Being caught in arrogance is unpleasant, and in some situations, such as among people striving for general equality and justice, even dangerous. But if there is such a phenomenon in nature, if there is a word that denotes it, then it is worth looking for the tasks that this experience serves. Maybe this will help us be more stable and free when meeting the “Habsburgs” and “Napoleons” and be more understanding of our own Napoleonic habits.

I will not consider the personal meaning of arrogance: each of us, without much effort, can justify why he is more beautiful than everyone else at one time or another. I’d rather consider the functions and tasks of arrogance.

Childhood: a conflict between two forces

I suggest starting from childhood, when a person grows quickly, becomes stronger, tougher, more resilient, constantly learns new things, becomes smarter and more skillful. Mastering some actions comes easily and naturally, while other things require some effort and self-control, especially at the beginning. Using a potty is more difficult than using a diaper, eating pasta with a fork requires more effort than using your hand, and reading a book can be quite exhausting before you get any pleasure from it. And walking upright itself requires efforts of the whole body, efforts of will and spirit, so as not to get on all fours or at least not to slouch. And a person finds himself at a point between those to whom all this is given easily and simply, who already possess the secrets of cultural life, on the one hand, and those who live well without this culture and without these efforts, unenlightened savages, on the other. The child finds himself between adults who have already assimilated cultural patterns of behavior and identify themselves with them, and younger children who have not yet mastered these patterns and can easily behave more directly. Two attractive figures appear in the child’s field of vision: the skillful, ideal elder, the bearer of a cultural model of behavior, and the free younger, unencumbered by efforts and restrictions. And so the child finds himself in a situation of conflict between two forces: the desire to perform an action in a simple and natural way (for example, bury his head in the pulp of a watermelon, immediately communicate his emotions with loud joyful cries, use his elbow and heel to drive away a competitor from the prey...) and the desire to mobilize the will and act in accordance with the cultural pattern. Until this cultural mode of action is assimilated by the child, while he is just learning, he needs a lot of special voluntary efforts to retain ideal model behavior. It is necessary to use some way to separate, to delimit oneself from the seductive mode of behavior with which the child recently identified himself. And here the primary arrogance of the elder in front of the younger comes to the rescue: “don’t come near me” (or “let him move away”, “little ones can’t come here”, “I’ll be the first”). The child’s task is to organize spatial and temporal distance, not to be at the same time close to someone who demonstrates a more “primitive”, “outdated” way of behavior. The closer this method of action is to the child himself, the more violently the younger one is rejected. The adult’s argument “You yourself only recently did the same thing” brings the child into shame and rage, since these examples undermine the foundations of his new identity, based on new cultural models of behavior.

And starting from senior preschool and junior school age, that is, from the time the child begins to actively and quite consciously participate in teaching himself, when he tries to appreciate his achievements and be proud of them, arrogance towards classmates allows him to reward himself for the efforts spent on writing smoothly, sitting quietly when in fact the body wants to run or lie on a desk, and thoughts are also somewhere far away. Arrogance turns out to be an effective tool of self-support when the child does not have enough ways to regulate the load, recognition, consolation, admiration: everything that he needs to continue the work of self-cultivation.

Adolescence: mastering adult roles

And in adolescence, we can observe manifestations of arrogance associated with the development of adult roles. Someone earns money, someone can overwhelm everyone with one left, someone is more beautiful than anyone in the world. At this moment it is again impossible to allow oneself to be together with the younger ones, although the temptation to merge with a simpler and in a safe way existence is great. At this point of growth, it is impossible to receive the usual support from younger ones through merging, dissolving in the native group, because for this you need to recognize yourself as the same as them - children, spontaneous, to some extent asexual, dependent. And in order to receive support from juniors in the form of admiration, respect, obedience, you need to separate from them and establish yourself in a new status. Full recognition from your elders is also unattainable, because you have not yet reached their level, you are not yet quite an adult, not quite a man, not quite a woman, not quite independent. At the same time, the acquired mode of behavior (sexual, professional, social and mental) is extremely important for one’s own identity (“I am worthy of respect”), so there is a need for such a resource as self-support.

Arrogance as a way to protect one's values

In adult life, there are also situations in which people defend feelings self-esteem by distancing yourself from other people, affirming your values ​​as meaningful and important. For example, finding yourself in a different cultural space, when the rules and traditions of the majority differ from the norms and traditions of one person, family or group, and boundaries and distance are necessary to preserve these norms. Thus, in some situations, the manner of people washing their hands before eating, saying a prayer or saying “thank you,” reading books, or wearing clean clothes could be perceived as a manifestation of arrogance and conceit. The strange attachment to the cherry orchard is incomprehensible and illogical, but without this, the lives of some strange people lose their meaning.

At the same time, of course, arrogance has a significant disadvantage - it creates a rather rigid frame that does not allow a person to get close to others, even when there is a real need for them. Does not allow you to take help or advice from a “junior in rank”. Often it does not even allow us to recognize the need to find a different way of behavior. So when we encounter our own or someone else’s arrogance, we have a choice: to pay attention to the values ​​​​hidden behind this arrogance and look for them to treat ourselves with respect and care - and then we can find a path to mutual understanding. Or focus on the very manifestation of arrogance and maintain distance.

Natalia Kedrova, psychologist, member of the European Association of Gestalt Therapy (EAGT), teacher at the Department of Child and Family Psychotherapy at Moscow State University of Psychology and Education.

Arrogance is a quality with which a person tries to protect his personality from various unwanted and unacceptable manifestations. It makes an arrogant person feel more self-important. But others don’t really like this - and the feeling of rejection in this case is quite fair, because no one wants to feel worse than the other. Is the word "arrogance" synonymous with pride? And what is full meaning this word?

Synonym of pride, analogue of consumerism

Psychologists believe that arrogance is always associated with consumption. An arrogant person is one who expects constant praise, special treatment, and recognition from others. A person’s credo in communication is “we are for each other.” Motto arrogant person can match the following words: "you are for me." A vain person always wants to feel like he is in a leadership position. These people differ from others in that they tend to constantly teach and instruct others, as well as make comments. People of this type, without a twinge of conscience, make choices for others, because they consider themselves experts in all areas of life. However, psychologically, arrogance is carefully built over time. life path defensive reaction.

An arrogant person is one who uses such behavior to protect himself from feelings of worthlessness. He consciously chooses a type of behavior that helps make his existence more comfortable. Arrogance makes it easier for a person to control the world. Since arrogance protects the sense of self-worth, in this type psychological protection people who have experienced serious humiliation or shame are in great need.

Treatment for arrogance

Thus, it turns out that an arrogant person is not who he is trying to pass himself off to others. At the same time, people of this kind are much more likely to cause contempt for themselves on the part of others. With their sense of arrogance, they constantly hurt the pride and self-esteem of their interlocutor. An arrogant person is one who constantly alienates those around him, because through his actions he sows coldness in communication.

For such a person, it is important to be able to accept his own imperfections and learn to show respect for people. He needs to master the ability to notice his own value, as well as appreciate those around him. From vertical relationships with the world, where an arrogant person occupies a position at the top, he must gradually move into horizontal ones, where communication occurs on equal terms.

Causes

In fact, pride is the opposite of nothingness. In other words, it is the antonym of low self-esteem. The way an arrogant person behaves is an extreme that can hardly lead to anything good. Often arrogance can be a consequence of improper upbringing. This happens when parents from the very early years They say to their child: “You are the best, the smartest, the most beautiful, you are better than others.” This affects the child’s self-esteem to the greatest extent when the parents’ words are absolutely untrue. They are in no way supported by his own actions. In other words, the child does practically nothing good, makes no effort, but at the same time constantly receives praise. Arrogance develops when a child receives an undeserved reward.

There is another case of the formation of arrogance. A person becomes arrogant when he does not know how to work with his self-esteem, cannot accept his own shortcomings, treat them properly and gradually eliminate them.

Solve problems at the expense of others

So we've looked at why people are arrogant and where this problem comes from. People who have no peace of mind try different ways make up for your mental anguish at the expense of those around you. Arrogance often arises when a person feels pressured by his own psychological problem, however, he is trying his best to contain this pressure. The proverb "rags to riches" indicates that arrogance is a fairly old problem in the human world. If a person remembers who he was recently and what he did, but begins to be ashamed of his past and tries to forget it, then he has psychological difficulties.

What to do with the proud?

How to deal with an arrogant person? Psychologists do not recommend trying to subjugate him or pointing out dependence. Often an arrogant person boasts not about his actual achievements, but about his plans. In this case, it can and should simply be put in place. Arrogant people are said to have “high standards.” These people have a high level of aspirations. However, the disadvantage is that these claims are not based on anything. Many rightly consider arrogance a mental illness. This character trait deprives the owner of humanity and alienates him from reality. An arrogant person cannot see the real state of things, because everyone around him seems unworthy.