The Gervais Principle

Sketches out a tendency for certain types of behaviors/personalities to arise in specific strata of organizational hierarchy (and how those who already have those behaviors/personalities tend to end up in those strata in the first place).

• Sociopaths, whose actions and inactions end up being amoral and harming, in the interests of extracting value for the organization or directly for themselves.
• Clueless, whose loyalty to the organization/to the cause is disproportionately high. In doing so, they set themselves up to be repeatedly victimized.
• Losers, who do the minimum necessary to get by, neither burning energy to extract value, nor giving more than they’re given.

Also predicts social dynamics when members of any two of these personality types has a discussion, in terms of who has what to gain or lose out of the interaction.

Claims that social groups are powered by the members having social status not discernibly different (called “status illegibility”); suspension of status games thus keeps a group alive, but social capital/social proof can drive a member to become excluded (if their status is legible as lower than that of the group) or to end up spending their time in higher status groups instead (if their status is legibly high enough to permit them to do so).

Sociopaths use ambiguity and plausible deniability to engineer Heads-I-Win-Tails-You-Lose situations; where they can take most of the credit for successful projects/efforts, but take a small share of blame (if any) for failures.

Bureaucracy exists to make certain and efficient those things that serve the Sociopaths, and to make cumbersome and failure-prone things that hurt the interests of the Sociopaths.

Altogether, this leaves Sociopaths in the position to frame real facts in layers of fictional internal PR that serves their purposes, which the Clueless and the Losers may not fully trust, but lacking alternative explanations, are likely to largely accept.

My take

The model makes a ton of sense to me, although a lot of the reasoning feels very specious. I don’t think any of this is innate tendency as much as reinforced. To focus on sociopaths: in my experience, a lot of people in high ranks are required to make hard decisions in the first place–where it’s easy for any decision to result in a concrete harm or a perception of harm. What makes them seem like sociopaths has more to do with the way these harms get framed, and the fact that it is almost play-for-play like gaslighting (cherrypicked messaging; opacity; diversions; downplaying).

At higher-ranks, you only have indirect influence on outputs/outcomes, so I get that it’s very tempting to focus your time/energy on perception management in order to fend off encroachments and challenges, even just as a matter of diversifying what you have going for you. I genuinely believe that sociopathy in upper ranks is mostly the result of feeling painted into a corner, trying to stay alive. Maybe they even use rationalizations¹ to sleep at night. But of course, whether what you do is for good reasons or not, violations of norms, lack of empathy, and deceitfulness account for about half of the diagnostic criteria for sociopathy (Antisocial Personality Disorder). Maybe I’m a bit of a hippie, but I think most of these people start off sort of normal, and then corrupt themselves slowly and unintentionally.