This is a kind of repost of something I share on the LW slack.

Someone mentioned that "the ability to be accurately arrogant is good". This was my reply:

One aspect of arrogance is that it is how some competent people with a high self-esteem are ​perceived​ to be. I certainly was often perceived as arrogant. At least I got called that way quite often when I was younger and judging from some recent discussions which heavily reflected on that I probably made that impression for most of my life. I didn't and couldn't understand why. I certainly didn't want to give other people the feeling of inferiority. But I also did nothing to diminish my competence or my self-worth. Sadly doing nothing apparently is enough to give many other people the ​feeling​ of inferiority. And also apparently a natural response is to compensate in one of many ways:

• lashing out and trying to diminish the others self-worth by trying to make ​them​ smaller
• defensiveness and/or boasting: making self larger
• avoiding the competent person to avoid the feelings associated (being around high self-esteem competent persons is often un-fun)

I was unaware of these affects and being an introvert implied that it caused me little pain that I was avoided. People who knew me well knew that I wasn't arrogant per se and otherwise nice to be around but outside my circle I had to extensively rely on my competence to get things done. I played nice - but that cause little active reciprocation. Before I knew that arrogance - or signalling 'I'm smarter than you' - is a bad move Only recently did I acquire the language and experience to really notice and understand the impression I made - and was devastated. I don't want people to feel bad next to me. And I'm working on fixing that.

Note that other people who apparently fully understand the effects do sometimes choose differently. For example they might accept the impression they make as theirs and totally accept that they are shunned.

What do you think? Do others have this pattern?

<searching for refs> ...apparently they do: This post is about how dealing with this can fail.

See also this other post about another aspect of arrogance.