What do you want in life? There’s an innate, evolutionary basis to the basic desires we all have. For example, we all want people to like us, think of us highly, and treat us with respect. This is our ‘social status’, and even if our internal monologue doesn’t use that term, it’s something we think about all the time. We also spend a lot of time thinking about sex, romance, and attractiveness: and we want to be attractive to others.
Our preoccupation with these things makes sense: evolution shapes our minds as well as our bodies, and given that humans need to stick together to survive and pass on their genes, you’d expect evolution to have made us concerned about social and romantic dynamics.
But the actual views and behaviours (to use a term in social psychology, the ‘norms’) that lead to social status and desirability aren’t so clear. There are actually some universals here, but we’re not really aware of them. Different societies, cultures, and subcultures have different norms, and have different ideas of what they think makes us successful, status-ed, and sexy.
Take, for example, the phrase ‘nice guys finish last’. You might have heard this before, or you may even believe it yourself. ‘Nice guys finish last’ is the worldview that being dominant, outcompeting others, and being traditionally masculine is what gets you ahead in life, and it’s what women look for. Conversely, being ‘nice’ – being socially submissive/subordinate – means you get exploited by others, and strips you of any respect from both men and women. The well-known description of ‘alpha males’ and ‘beta males’ essentially divides men on whether they are exploiters (‘dominant’) or exploited (‘nice’).
This is a viewpoint expounded by influencers in various online subcultures, such as the manosphere, pick-up artist culture, and other male-dominated spheres, and is quickly absorbed by the audience, drawing them deeper within these spheres and instilling more and more of the subcultures’ ideologies.
The speed at which the ‘nice guys finish last’ worldview can get internalised makes sense from a scientific perspective. It is a universal desire among people to be liked, respected, and considered attractive. Many who frequent these online spaces are people – often teenagers – who haven’t received guidance on how to be perceived in the way they desire. Schools generally do not teach their pupils about how to meet basic needs like being liked and having status: in short, how to live.
Teenagers and other potentially vulnerable people may therefore turn to the manosphere as a source of guidance on how to meet those needs (often only semi-consciously). The phrase ‘nice guys finish last’ is ultimately a code on how to perceive the world and how to behave. In the absence of legitimate, educational teachings on this, online influencers have filled the gap that many people feel keenly. ‘Nice guys finish last’ is not merely a throwaway phrase, it’s a framework teaching heterosexual men how they can be happy.
Whether this viewpoint actually works (i.e. makes heterosexual men feel liked, respected, attractive, and happier) is ultimately a question for science. Status, popularity, and attractiveness are all scientific concepts that we study in anthropology, psychology, sociology and so on, which means we have empirical data. Evolution is not a caring force. It doesn’t select for happiness, or justice, or palatable values: it selects for what works. So the fact that niceness and altruism exist in our species at all is both fascinating and telling. Altruism, by definition, is doing something nice for someone without expecting anything in return. It’s exactly the kind of behaviour that the ‘nice guys finish last’ worldview would discourage. However, ‘guys’ would not have evolved at all, and their ancestors would not have survived, without altruism. Niceness is an evolutionary adaptation, a psychological mechanism to make humans work together and cooperate with each other.
People who think ‘nice guys finish last’ might argue that while cooperation is important, you still need to be socially dominant to ensure you don’t get walked all over. This misses two important things: firstly, aggressive competition for social dominance inhibits cooperation, and as a result evolution has given us a spate of adaptations to get round this problem by tying social status (and thus attractiveness) to different things. And secondly, it’s entirely possible to stand up for yourself without being aggressive: this is called ‘assertiveness’, and it is in fact universally tied to our social status.
Let’s look at point one first. People who say ‘nice guys finish last’ often point to primates like chimpanzees to show the importance of social dominance. But these primates are entirely at the mercy of a planet-ruling humanity for a reason. Humans still have social dominance, but it does not dominate human psychology and social dynamics in the same way. Chimps gain social status by dominance and aggression: they are nearing extinction. Meanwhile, humans have evolved to gain social status by ‘prosociality’ – doing things that benefit their group – and humans are the ones doing the extinguishing.
Prosociality can take many forms. For hunter-gatherers, it’s bringing back lots of food for the group. For soldiers, it’s defending their comrades. For band members, it’s turning up to practice. Prosociality universally involves being ‘nice’ to other members of the group, because social dynamics (such as friendliness, trust, harmony) are essential for cooperation. And in our society, while it is true that people with higher social status are seen as more attractive, that social status is not gained through dominance and aggression. It’s gained through niceness. This is not a fringe or political view: it is a repeatedly validated scientific consensus (Egilmez & Naylor-Tincknell, 2017; Kafashan et al., 2014; Wentzel, 2014).
The idea that niceness leads to being trodden on is one of the greatest scientific misconceptions in our society: niceness, and building connections, gives you the social support and allies to prevent you being trodden on. You cannot rise to the top by yourself; humans are not and have never been that way. Of course, standing up for yourself and being assertive is important, but the view that ‘nice guys finish last’ conflates assertiveness with aggression.
Missing in much of this line of thinking is the obvious question: what do women look for? In other words, what do empirical, scientific, peer-reviewed studies tell us about what women perceive as attractive and what makes men seem desirable? Considering that prosociality and assertiveness are the bases of social status, the answer isn’t surprising. Women consistently say that they prefer more altruistic partners and that they perceive altruistic people as more attractive (Barclay, 2010; Farrelly et al., 2007). And empirical data has shown that people who do more altruistic things (and thus behave more ‘nicely’) get more attention and attraction from the opposite sex, and have more sexual partners (Arnocky et al., 2017).
Hunter-gatherer societies also show similar results: for example, hunter-gatherers who share more food have more sex, and more partners (Smith, 2004). This is essential as it tells us that the prosociality-status/attractiveness link isn’t just an artifact of our modern values, but reflects something real and deeper about human nature. Computer simulations modelling different kinds of human behaviour using game theory (a kind of mathematics) have repeatedly shown that the best strategy for people to survive is by being nice to each other, but by being able to stand up for themselves and stop the niceness if they’re taken advantage of (Tobin, 2025). All of this provides multidisciplinary evidence that social status comes from prosociality and assertiveness: not dominance and aggression.
Ultimately, a lot of it comes down to common sense. Women are human beings, and human beings like it when people are nice to them. Human beings do not like it when people are aggressive to them. All the evidence and science centres around that one simple point. Being cool and likeable can, in fact, make you more attractive. Trying to be ‘dominant’ will prevent you from being either of those things, and the arguments presented by manosphere influencers don’t make scientific sense. Even the source of the alpha/beta male typology, comes from a flawed study in wolves that has since been disproved: wolves do not have hierarchies in this way.
So the idea that ‘nice guys finish last’ is not a scientific one: it can be disproven anthropologically, psychologically, mathematically, and empirically. As ever, it is better to get your views on human nature from actual science than from online influencers who are trying to rile you up so they can sell you their solution.
References
- Arnocky, S., Piche, T., Albert, G., Ouellette, D., & Barclay, P. (2017). Altruism predicts mating success in humans. British Journal of Psychology, 108, 416-435. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12208
- Barclay, P. (2010). Altruism as a courtship display: Some effects of third-party generosity on audience perceptions. British Journal of Psychology, 101(1), 123-135. https://doi.org/10.1348/000712609X435733
- Egilmez, E., & Naylor-Tincknell, J. (2017). Altruism and Popularity. International Journal of Educational Methodology, 3(2), 65-74. https://doi.org/10.12973/ijem.3.2.65
- Farrelly, D., Lazarus, J., & Roberts, G. (2007). Altruists Attract. Evolutionary Psychology, 5, 313-329. https://doi.org/10.1177/147470490700500205
- Kafashan, S., Sparks, A., Griskevicius, V., & Barclay, P. (2014). Prosocial Behavior and Social Status. In J. T. Cheng, J. L. Tracy, & C. Anderson, The Psychology of Social Status (pp. 139-158). Springer.
- Lu, T., Li, L., Niu, L., Jin, S., & French, D. C. (2017). Relations between popularity and prosocial behavior in middle school and high school Chinese adolescents. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 42(2), 175-181. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165025416687411
- Smith, E. A. (2004). Why do good hunters have higher reproductive success? Human Nature, 15, 343-364. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-004-1013-9
- Tobin, J. (2025). The Prisoner’s Dilemma. Retrieved from Heritage Project | University of Michigan: https://heritage.umich.edu/stories/the-prisoners-dilemma/
- Wentzel, K. R. (2014). Prosocial Behavior and Peer Relations in Adolescence. In L. M. Padilla-Walker, & G. Carlo, Prosocial Development: A Multidimensional Approach (pp. 178-200). Oxford Academic.
