Hubris

Hubris [hyoo-bris, hoo-], noun: excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance.

The thing I like best about Survivor is that it provides living examples of the many varieties of human behavior. Watching it can show how one person’s behavior can affect the rest of a group, how many people prefer to simply follow someone else’s lead and how others overestimate their own strengths. Most striking though, is how, season after season, so many people fail to understand how their actions are viewed by others.

Those of you who don’t watch Survivor should know that each season, or game, starts with two teams known as “tribes”. The tribes compete against each other in challenges similar to, but more elaborate than, the ones we do in PE. Some challenges are “elimination” challenges. The tribe which loses one of these must vote out, or eliminate, one of its members from the game. Once the eliminations bring the total number of players in the game down to 10 or 12, the tribes merge and become one new tribe.

At the time of the merger, one of the former tribes usually has more members than the other, giving them an advantage for the remainder of the game. If the old tribe mates stick together, it is fairly easy for one of its members to win the game. But, therein lies the problem. Only one person can win.

So, each season of Survivor begins with two tribes working together in order to get to the merge with more surviving members than the other. After that, everybody is playing for him or herself.

This season, Russell Hantz played strictly for himself from the first day.

He went in with a Machiavellian (see the post called “The Prince”) strategy of lying, cheating and stealing his way to the merge and used it very effectively.

The thing is, that strategy will usually only work for as long as people go along with it. Once people figure out that someone is using machinations against them, they will revolt against her/him. It’s usually only a matter of time.


The first part of Russell's strategy was to demoralize his own tribe mates. By stealing water from, burning the clothes of and lying to the members of his own tribe, Foa Foa,

he destroyed the tribe’s confidence. By remaining strong and confident himself, Russell emerged as the tribe's leader.

As I watched Russell’s machinations unfold I wondered if his short term gain, control of his tribe, would hurt his long term chances to win the game because Foa Foa's lack of confidence hurt its ability compete against the other tribe, Galu.

Indeed, Foa Foa came to believe that it was a victim of bad luck. They became very discouraged and worse, very hungry. They lost almost every challenge. At the time of the merge, they had only 4 remaining members. Galu went to the merge with 8.

At that point, it looked like 4 members of Galu would have an easy path to the final four because they had a seemingly insurmountable 4 player advantage. All they had to do was vote together at Tribal Council and they could eliminate Foa Foa one by one. Then a funny thing happened. Over the course of next several episodes, almost all former Galu members were eliminated and one switched sides. The former Galu had completely lost control of the game.

How did this happen?

Two reasons.

First, Galu’s leader, Russell Swan

suffered a medical emergency and had to leave the game. This didn’t seem important at the time because Galu had such a big numbers advantage. But, Russell was a true leader who made every effort to keep the tribe working together. After he left, nobody replaced him effectively.

Second, Galu was overconfident. They went into the merge believing they could do whatever they wanted and that the former Foa Foa people wouldn’t put up much of a fight. There is a word for this. It is Hubris.

Hubris means overconfidence, or arrogance, combined with presumption. Presumption means believing that something is true, even though it might not be. Hubris, especially when one is overconfident based on a presumption that is false, can get one into trouble.

Galu’s hubris lead them to make the following questionable decisions:
• The voted out one of their own former tribe mates at the first Tribal Council. They did this because they presumed that all former Galu members would vote together in future Tribal Councils, so even after eliminating one of their own, they’d still have a 3 player advantage. The problem with that thinking was:
• They’d been completely disrespectful of one of their tribe mates throughout the first part of the game. Yet, despite treating her like dirt, they still believed that she’d vote with her old tribe. She didn’t. Would you?
• In one stroke of good luck, Russell played his Immunity Idol before he needed to. Nobody even knew he had it, because he found it without using any clues. After he played it, nobody on Galu seriously considered that he might find it again. He did. At the next Tribal Council, Galu tried to vote Russell only to find that Russell had found the idol again. Galu lost a former member instead. Galu discovered that their vote advantage was gone, when the tribe mate they treated so badly voted against them.

By the time Galu figured out that one of their former tribemates had switched sides, it was too late. Their hubris had cost them the lead. Now, they were doomed.

Foa Foa, the tribe which never won a single elimination challenge and whose most prominent member, Russell, was using everybody against everybody else, was now in control of the game.

The question now became: would Russell’s Machiavellian tactics win him the game?