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by dwallin 1483 days ago
Do you have any non-anecdotal information to support this theory?

It's definitely within reason to reframe ambition as "willingness to take risks to advance oneself." In which case your theory might be suffering from survivors bias. Given a number of people pursuing ambitious agendas the average and median results could be anywhere on the map but you would still have an outsized representation within "people who ascended hierarchies".

1 comments

Yes and just realized my first link was broken so have fixed that. The primary source for that post is here: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2012-11469-001

Robert Hogan and his team have also explored the topic quite a bit e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308730537_Where_is_... - their references include the previously study as well as others.

There is also a good amount of literature around "achievement motivation," which in many cases is a surrogate term for ambition in the research context although the argument can be made that they are not completely synonymous. However they generally reach the same conclusions. Also the underlying causal factors related to ambition - high conscientiousness and extraversion, low neuroticism, higher general mental ability, etc. - predict higher achievement outcomes in research as well.