In defense of the absent-minded, labeling it a "dominance" behavior requires several value judgements. One could readily read his examples to demonstrate, for instance, that once people attain to a certain level of status and respect (enough that they don't have to worry about people calling them "stupid") they're simply less uptight about a lot of things than other people are. They treat social chores and the location of parked cars as being precisely as unimportant as everyone feels like they are. The way the author talks about the habit- "everyone would love to be absent-minded", how people can or can't "get away with it," etc- makes it sound like absent-mindedness is the natural way of being. One could turn the whole idea around and criticize modern culture for requiring us all (those of us without professor-level cachet) to maintain a mandated level of neuroticism. Neuroticism that is unnecessary for real performance- since, if someone can operate effectively enough to attain tenure, "absent-mindedness" certainly hasn't crippled their professional effectiveness.
(In all of this, of course, I except the story about the guy who left the author rideless at the office. That was a 'dickhead' move.)
Finally, on the claim "they only forget things that benefit them," be very careful about confirmation bias. I, for one, show up at meetings early not infrequently- but when this happens, no one knows because no one else is there.
> Finally, on the claim "they only forget things that benefit them," be very careful about confirmation bias. I, for one, show up at meetings early not infrequently- but when this happens, no one knows because no one else is there.
Additionally-- that fuddy-duddy professor who left their colleague hanging to attend a conference may have done 100 other absent-minded things at the conference that were detrimental to their own career. These may include:
* being late to their own presentation because they went to the wrong building
* undermining their own presentation by forgetting every colleague's polite advice to not making gross sniffing noises or laugh like a hyena at seemingly random moments in their public speech
* being completely inept at getting their laptop to play audio/video excerpts or display a graph on a screen
* forgetting to exchange contact info with someone who would have helped advance their career
* give an earnest, brilliant, persuasive response in public to an egotistical and well-respected scholar on the hiring committee for a position coveted by the professor, who then silently takes offense and uses their power to keep the professor from being hired for that position
* forgetting to follow up with an appointment with well-respected scholar who wanted to help the professor publish something that would help their career, causing that scholar to silently vow to never again waste time with that professor
I work in technology in a very high scale environment. Tons of people, lots of new faces all the time, hundreds of emails, social media pings, birthdays, need to change the cat box, car overdue for an oil change, organizing a conference, my direct reports are being lazy and I have to find a good way to motivate them, oh shit I agreed to send that guy that thing in the mail, the sales guy is pissed at me because I accidentally talked to his customer and didn’t loop him, oh shit haven’t been into the office this week need to put in face time, ten LinkedIn invitations, oh what about that webinar....
Jesus just found a stack of business cards from that conference two weeks ago and this one person wanted to meet and I never got around to it. Did I complete that sexual harassment training? I just got four reminders saying I need to read some new policies. Oh look three calendar invites for meetings tomorrow I didn’t see earlier. Did we get that vendor under NdA? My admin in the back office is on vacation I need her to finally sort the statement of work. Fuck it’s almost Friday I need to write that monthly report. My boss calling me about that thing hold on...
Like me, A college professor is defined by having hundreds of students pinging them with shit all the time and it is a rolling cast of students and faces you can’t remember with a monotonous list of shit you can’t possibly keep track of.
A younger me wouldn’t have understood what this does to my brain. The older me walks around in a state of being near to burn out and fried all day long.
It’s the volume of requests and things to think about. Keep in mind most of these things aren’t event my job, they are just overhead I have to deal with before I can even do my job.
Your comment really resonates with me. Have you found a way to balance this? I counsel others that they should focus on prioritizing the infinite task list and working on the stuff that's going to make a difference, but it feels like a tough thing to track no matter what. Any tips?
None of your stuff sounds particularly high scale to me, seems more like normal every day life- chores, work tasks, team stuff, balancing a lot of stuff going on.
Typical adult life. Everyone in my circle functions with juggling the same task lists.
I'm not saying I have any grand solutions (I use One Note, Notepad and plain old written checklists), but it all sounds like standard routine daily workflow to me.
When I was in college I slept through four or five meetings with my advisor. But only because those meetings were scheduled months in advance, and since they were basically the only thing on my calendar, I'd just miss them unless I happened to look at my calendar the day before. But as soon as the iPhone came out I basically have never missed an appointment again, because now I can put things in the reminders app and can have events in there that are months or years in advance.
I wasn't magically dominant before the iPhone came out or more submissive afterwards, there just wasn't a good tool that matched my workflow. I'm not sure what the point of this story is, other than that it's hard to generalize from university-related situations since people in academic settings aren't always well served by mainstream scheduling and calendaring tools.
I've noticed something similar with my phone being my primary alarm as opposed to a traditional clock or radio alarm. Having more dynamic control over my tools has allowed me to rapidly craft and change that alarm to ensure the desired results. It seems like every time I've relied on a traditional alarm to wake me up it slowly and subconsciously becomes less and less effective. Once I've built up a certain "tolerance" to the sound of said alarm I'll hit snooze or turn it off altogether while still mostly, if not fully, asleep.
That said, the only sure fire method I've come up with to ensure a traditional alarm does the trick is to set the alarm across the room. This guarantees that I have to remove myself from bed, walk across the room, and then disable or snooze the alarm each time I choose not to wake up for good. In this "sure fire" case it's obvious to me that the tool itself is not sufficient and I've had to build extra steps into the process to ensure it helps me achieve my goals.
Initially I read this as you slept in the meetings, but I suspect you mean you were sleeping in your bed at the time of the meetings. I was wondering why your advisor just didn’t wake you up!
Lots of good replies. I'd like to add that incentives seem a better explanation than power:
The professor's incentives are entirely towards thinking up and pulling off big long-term projects. The tenure committee is not going to know or care about whether you seemed on top of your diary two years ago.
The incentives are much the same for graduate students too, another group known for sleeping through 11am teaching commitments. They clearly don't have any power, but they know damn well they won't get a job by being diligent about the small stuff.
The incentives for (say) lawyers or management consultants are massively different. Hence the firm handshakes and neat suits and always knowing what time the meeting is. Are these people less dominant, somehow?
I'd argue that they're 2 sides of the same coin. Understanding the differences in incentives between people gives you an idea of who has the power.
If you took a subsection of grad students and said that if they missed any teaching commitments, they'd be expelled, you can reasonably guess that those grad students wouldn't be sleeping through any 11am teaching commitments.
The hiring committee at their next job has real power. The administrators who could fire them have some power too (although failing to impress the former is almost as bad as being expelled by the latter). This power doesn't seem to explain who's sloppy very well.
The hot-shit lawyer has loads of power, right? And is never forgetful. But his life revolves around impressing people right there in the same room. He's been both selected and trained to be be good at impressing them.
But I am the victim of my absentmindedness, more often than others are. It's not some kind of power manipualtion bs like this article asserts, instead I am diagnosed with pretty severe ADHD.
There really are completely different explanations rather than it is all power dynamics.
For medical reasons I am not at the moment taking the meds I normally do, when I am medicated, my forgetfulness subside, and both my life as well as those I interact with improve.
This one dimensional - everything is a power dynamic - is rather reductionist bordering on insulting.
I think it's hard for the orderly types to relate to the absent-minded. For them, remembering things comes naturally. They project this onto absent minded types which leaves only one explanation for them being inconsiderate or forgetful -- that they're lazy or uncaring of others. As if they thought "Yes, I remember I'm supposed to do X, but whatever... it's not important."
As someone who's very absent minded I can say that there's never any dominance tactics or purposeful lack of consideration for others. I just forget things or don't think about them.
If, in the shower, I think "hey I need to remember to buy shampoo as soon as I get out of the shower", I will literally forget about it within the 2 minutes it takes me to get out of the shower and dry off. I'll be standing out of the shower trying to remember the thing I was supposed to remember. Oh well, I just move on with my day.
It's not an occasional thing. This happens to me 9 times out of 10.
So it's no surprise that when I tell someone "yeah I'll bring X the next time we meet" I never remember to bring it.
Luckily in my life I've got friends and family that understand that it's just the way I am and that it's ok. I get the fuddy-duddy professor treatment. I've had more than a few friends tell me I'm the dumbest smart person they know.
I am tired of this worldview in which every personal behavior that we don't like is actually a secret manifestation of power dynamics. Nothing ever means anything except as endless jockeying for social position. Nothing is good or bad or true or false or beautiful or hideous: only advantageous or disadvantageous. It's a terrible way of thinking about the world.
This nonsense is not conducive to building or maintaining a civilization. It doesn't create shared understanding: instead, it supposes that any shared understanding is actually some kind of ploy to reinforce privilege or something. It's an endless grievance machine that magnifies our worst mental impulses: suspicion, ingroup-outgroup double standards, and of course fundamental attribution error. This crap shouldn't be part of respectable discourse.
Basically every personal behavior is a manifestation of power dynamics. Whether you like it or not. It's just that we tend not to notice or complain about power dynamics that we like.
The tricky thing about power dynamics is that whenever you talk about them, people get uncomfortable - both the people with power (who either feel guilty or subconsciously fearful that that power may be taken away from them) and the people without it (who are reminded of their lack of power). And so you're right, it is an endless grievance machine that magnifies our worst mental impulses. This is why people usually shut up about power (think about it: the last guy who wrote a treatise on it - Machiavelli - got his name synonymized with "evil"), and it's only in times of shifts in the power balance that it comes out into the open.
I'm not claiming that the "dominance behavior" frame is "wrong" per se: I acknowledge that people in positions of authority or who have a positive social credit balance can get away with behaviors that others can't. That's a fact of life.
The trouble is that the article is worse than wrong: it's unnecessary and divisive. It promotes a worldview based on hostility and resentment by emphasizing worst-case explanations and ignoring benevolent ones. It encourages the reader to twist his or her worldview into one that jumps immediately to evil when looking at the world. That's what makes it an awful piece of writing.
"think about it: the last guy who wrote a treatise on it - Machiavelli - got his name synonymized with 'evil'"
Machiavelli was not the last to write about power. Foucault was famous for doing so, and Nietzsche before him.
To the extent that Machiavelli's name has a negative connotation it is it not merely because he wrote about power, but because people think he advocated a ruthless, self-serving wielding of power and, famously, that "it is better to be feared than loved".
If you look at what "machiavellianism" means, it is:
"the employment of cunning and duplicity in statecraft or in general conduct... In modern psychology, Machiavellianism is one of the dark triad personalities, characterized by a duplicitous interpersonal style, a cynical disregard for morality, and a focus on self-interest and personal gain."
Machiavelli is one of the most wrongly maligned thinkers in history. Reading all of his works, especially if read in the order he wrote them, and with an understanding of the context in which he wrote them, makes it obvious (at least to me) that he thought the best sort of government was the republic.
The damage done to his reputation by foreign writers (especially the English) is probably irreparable, though. It makes for a sad case study in intellectual prejudice.
I mean, the fact that in the Prince, he encourages the Prince to create a Republic as it's the best way to maintain the strength of the city (aka a good prince needs to put the body politic over his own desires, even the desire for power)...and the fact that Machiavelli's other great work (The Discourses on Livy) openly and fervently talks about how republicanism is the best form of government...yeah, I think you might be on to something there.
I think Machiavelli is commonly misunderstood by most people alive today, though. The bulk of The Prince consists of positive statements, not normative ones. In other words, Machiavelli is describing his conclusions from observing a number of powerful families. He makes few value judgments of his own, but rather the book is framed as a set of tactical advice: "If you seek power, these are a set of strategies that will help you attain it." At the time he wrote The Prince, Machiavelli was not particularly powerful - in fact, he'd just been stripped of office, imprisoned, and tortured, and the book was an attempt to curry favor with the Medicis, the new Florentine elites. It was largely successful in this regard, in that Machiavelli was allowed to live out the rest of his life on his estate without further interference.
"It is better to be feared than loved", as a factual statement, appears to be true. Take a look at the approval ratings for U.S. Congress, President Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping, Mugabe, or any other powerful figure and then tell me, with a straight face, that they are loved. People take offense because Machiavelli is describing true statements that we wish were not true, i.e. they judge the work on normative grounds when evidence from the framing & history of The Prince suggests that it was written as a set of positive statements.
Machiavelli is massively misunderstood. 'It is better to be feared than loved' is not the real message to be taken from that chapter.
A different phrasing would be "you are better to have a promise from another for which you can compel fulfilment, than a promise for which you can't compel fulfilment".
If someone promises you something out of love, and they do not deliver, you have no power to compel them to fulfil their obligation, and so you are left with an empty promise.
If someone promises you something out of fear, and they don't deliver, you can use the thing they fear to compel fulfilment, and receive that which was promised.
It's by no means saying that in all circumstances you should aim to be feared - and it explicitly distinguishes being feared from being hated.
"Returning to the question of being feared or loved, I come to the conclusion that, men loving according to their own will and fearing according to that of the prince, a wise prince should establish himself on that which is in his own control and not in that of others; he must endeavour only to avoid hatred, as is noted."
> Take a look at the approval ratings for U.S. Congress, President Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping, Mugabe, or any other powerful figure and then tell me, with a straight face, that they are loved.
Trump is demonstrably a historical aberration in approval terms in the US (and has been stunningly ineffective at implementing legislation); I doubt meaningful polling can be done in China or Zimbabwe, and Congress isn't a figure, while individual members of Congress tend, generally, to have fairly high approval in their own districts. So even though I agree that there is at least a sense in which Machiavelli’s statement is true, I don't think the specific thing you’ve asked people to look at does much to make the case for it.
I should probably revise that to "every personal behavior involving 2 or more humans is a manifestation of power dynamics".
Power, at its most basic, is simply the question of "Who gets their way? Whose will is reflected in reality?" When you have non-interacting people or people whose interests are aligned, then this isn't a very interesting question, because they can both get their way (subject to constraints of the natural world).
You'll almost never have two interacting humans whose will is completely aligned, though - that describes a sycophant or automaton, not a person. And so in practice, one or both sides will have to compromise: they'll get some of what they want, but give up other stuff that they'd like to see enacted in reality but presumably don't care as much about. And power dynamics is just about who compromises - when reality can't satisfy everyone's desires at once, whose desire is actually reflected? Who can assume that when they want something, they'll get it, and who will assume that their desires are normally thwarted?
If this were true, human relationships would be a perpetual nightmare. Your fundamental mistake is assuming that what humans want (or "will") is independent (except in the perverse cases of sycophants and automatons). In fact we constantly mirror each other's desires and emotions, and this is what makes harmonious social life possible.
Yes, I have been in relationships that were "power competitions" and those relationships are dysfunctional. Fortunately those are the exception, not the rule.
I think this analysis vastly understates the quantity and magnitude of common interests that people often have, and thus reaches the flawed conclusion that everything is about power dynamics.
Power dynamics are very important, but they don't dwarf _all_ other dynamics in human relations.
I don't want to minimize the importance of common interests or the ability to find positive-sum interactions that make everyone better off. They're certainly abundant, and when possible, people should take advantage of them (I certainly try to).
But as a topic for discussion, they aren't particularly interesting, because usually your course of action is pretty obvious when you've found something that benefits both you and others and has no known drawbacks. Do it. Duh. The interesting dynamics happen when peoples' interests are either non-aligned or only partially aligned, or when two parties find something that benefits both their common interests but harms a third party who isn't present. Then there are trade-offs involved, and big questions about whose will is enacted and who is ultimately harmed.
(Besides, aren't the vast majority of complaints - both here, on the Internet, and within the developed world in general - of that form? Two parties colluding to further their common interests, at the expense of a third party who isn't privy to the discussions? That's the bulk of entrepreneurial complaints about investors, of investor complaints about other investors, of employee complaints of favoritism, of minority complaints about discrimination, of citizen complaints about politicians, of citizen complaints about corporations, and so on.)
To clarify, you recognize the existence and significance of other dynamics in human relations, but you just find them far less interesting? This seems alright, as I can't fault you too much for what you find interesting.
But this does directly contradict your earlier statement:
"Basically every personal behavior is a manifestation of power dynamics."
It would probably save you some trouble if you would have said the other thing from the outset :)
Edit: Regarding complaints, I think by definition they are going to be about some form of human conflict! Textbook selection bias. It doesn't directly tell us anything about other human interactions.
Yeah. Except I don't find anything contradictory around the idea that people can cooperate to achieve common interests, AND there can be power dynamics at play within the cooperation. Few ventures concern just one issue: it's possible to both feel that the venture as a whole is highly beneficial for both of you, while being non-aligned on specific points within the venture. Mutual cooperation can govern the relationship as a whole, while power dynamics come into play for certain situations within the relationship.
Think of a startup taking venture capital: you both want the startup to succeed, and the startup is much more likely to succeed if it has money than if it doesn't. However, the investor may want you to spend that money quickly to grab market share, while the founder may want to shore up customer satisfaction first. You can do both, but they can't both be the #1 priority. Which activity takes precedence? That's dependent on the relative power dynamics between founder and investor, notably things like board control, personal relationships, trust, need for future financing, existing revenue, etc.
Fair enough, although interactions that occur in the professional sphere are only one slice of human life. It does seem likely that slice has a higher prevalence of power dynamics. I think interactions with family and friends are significantly less characterized by such dynamics.
Also, in both broad categories, I would imagine there is rather high variance in the extent and particularities of the power dynamics.
Think about being at a party that you hosted and 15 people are talking to you. You intrinsically will only hear those with the highest value proposition, a cute girl, an investor you invited, your friend. You might not be making a concious effort but your brain is.
Now if most interactions are value propositions from one party to another then it makes sense that your personal behavior will reflect your own power dynamics in order to increase your own value proposition to the other party. This includes things such as body language.
For years and years no one cared about this stuff, now its all coming out of the woodwork as a terrible thing to practice when its been practiced for years and written about by Machiavelli and Robert Greene.
You are pathetically capitalist. What if I believe that the best power in the world - is our society, and I would do anything in the world to make it a more powerful one? Even if that puts me in a less advantageous position?
Your “power dynamics” arument is now flawed - since I could argue both for the strengthening of my position or against (or even both, depending on the shape of the question).
What Machiavelly got right, on the other hand - was the fact that everyone is flawed. You could either take advantage of that or you could work with it.
He has nothing to do with the “winner takes it all” or “eat or be eaten” philosophy.
Saying nothing of this comment's contents, its tone is unnecessarily belligerent. For example, even something like, "This view is pathetically capitalist" is more of a discussion and less of a personal attack.
There are 0 humans who can fully comprehend taking he entirety of society into account. Way to many people and subgroups and conflicting opinions.
If you seek to lower your positioning temporarily for long term gain that falls under increasing your value prop. In fact, many Machiavellian writers recommend this strategy.
> think about it: the last guy who wrote a treatise on it - Machiavelli - got his name synonymized with "evil"
(1) Machiavelli isn't the “last guy” to write a treatise on power (even, specifically, political power.) In fact much of the field of political science is just such works (which are also found in other fields.)
(2) Machiavellian is basically used to mean putting the pursuit of power ahead of other (including moral) concerns; it's not synonymous with evil, though clearly lots of people see such an orientation as evil or at least amoral. OTOH, it's exactly what the advice in The Prince is directed at.
No, the advice in The Prince is directed at the fact that at political scales morals need to be reexamined.
For example: just the way our immune system would give up the antibodies in order to get rid of bacteria. We don’t ask the morality of it since we know our body is probably a higher being - and so is a society.
For all it is Machiavelianism is just a term having a very specific meaning; but which is not directly linked to what the author was writing about.
For example - we say “Platonic love” - but we rarely mean it in the same way Plato meant it, where he was speaking of divinity; rather than just the absence of sex.
Massive agreement. This kind of stuff is a total dead-end for your bran and your soul in my opinion. You're going to start getting mad at completely mundane things because you think everyone is trying to dominate you.
Isn't it sufficient to explain the author's data to say that academia is an environment with a high tolerance for flakiness? The fact that professors' flakiness usually works out in their favor just follows from people usually acting in a self-interested way. If I forgot about our meeting, on average I'm going to spend that time doing something that benefits me.
I've definitely had the experience of some academics using absent-mindedness for dominance, but that doesn't mean it always or even usually is.
A datapoint here is that in my experience fields that are larger and more practical/"applied" have a lot less absent-mindedness. (You could probably quantify this with e-mail response times.) But the hot fields are more competitive than the sleepy backwaters---if absent-mindedness were a dominance tactic, wouldn't we see more of it in the bigger fields?
> Isn't it sufficient to explain the author's data to say that academia is an environment with a high tolerance for flakiness?
Yep. Other environments with a high tolerance for flakiness include online dating - there are pretty much zero repercussions for flaking on a stranger you decide you don't actually want to meet.
Many guys who've tried online dating have stories of girl agreeing to meet up then flaking on them. Does that make it a "female dominance behavior"?
I get it, it sucks to be flaked on, whether by a professor or a tinder stranger, but I don't think it's limited to one gender.
Breaking social norms and getting away with it is an old trick to show dominance. When you are late you show the other person that you are the one to be waited for. Zuckerberg shows who the boss is with wearing a hoodie while everybody else is wearing a suit. Obviously this works mainly if you are already in a slightly dominant position otherwise you may be viewed as a jerk.
The better question I think is why wear a suit, ever. There are some people who genuinely enjoy wearing a suit (I know at least one), but in general it seems the only reason to wear a suit is to impress someone. (either because you want to, or the company who hired you wants to)
Who would Zuckerberg have to impress? And I honestly doubt Zuckerberg is impressed by someone wearing a suit. And especially with the latest generation where billionaire attire has went from traditional extravagance to show the world how well off you are, to comfortable attire where you tend to blend in.
And then there's also the social norms of suits, most of these have decayed outside of government and and fortune 500 C-level norms though. In our society right now, it would be not just "unimpressive", but also insulting if you went to a meeting with say, a president (trump or whoever) in shorts and a tshirt. And in the same way, it'd be insulting to most people if who you were meeting (the president) came to meet with you in a tshirt.
> No one ever shows up early because they forgot what time the meeting was at.
I do do that. But I have ADHD.
I endorse the author’s suspicion that the "absent-mindedness" being described here, has not much to do with the neurological kind. It might be a dominance behaviour, or whatever else, but it certainly expresses differently than the behaviours of people who genuinely forget things they want and need to remember.
I forget where I parked, but that's after attempting quite hard to memorize my location while leaving the parking spot. I suspect the author's father didn't bother to try to remember: quite a different experience!
Exactly. One I'd have a hard time explaining by this model is my comical ability to get lost while driving. This has almost always hurt me--occasionally others--but primarily me. I have the same problem navigating halls in a video game. I've worked at it and gotten better, but that weirdly specific deficit has always haunted me all the while Ive been perfectly adequate as a programmer, etc.
An interesting argument, but ultimately deficient. For one thing, our recollections are biased; we are probably more likely to remember instances of a behavior in which one is negatively affected than otherwise.
The author is free to form their opinions however they like, and personal reflections of this sort are really great for formulating hypotheses. But then, you need to get down to the serious business of actually systematically gathering data to test it, or at least go look into the literature.
Also, the author, casually asserts that its mostly men who do this. The author gives some good reasons why that might be. But again, this assertion of a matter of fact, is based on his own, situated, biased, unreliable, motivated recollection.
It could simply be an energy minimization strategy, since it has little or no consequence (perhaps due to pre-existing status or dominance) there's no point in spending energy on that.
In a sense, to succeed you need to choose what you are going to be bad at. It's impossible to be great at everything, so focus your energy on what's important, and let the unimportant slide.
Conflicted here. On the one hand, I agree that it's easier to say, "That's just the way I am, deal with it." On the other hand, folks deal with things like ADHD and depression and different cultural upbringings that make it more difficult for them to, say, remember things than "normal" people. Feels like the author is using his dad as a sample size of one as evidence for a broad statement here.
As a forgetful person, I would love it if it I could control it.
But no. Sometimes it is really bad - like feeling really engaged and consciously listening, then the person goes and forgetting what they said. More often it is more insidious than this unfortunately.
I can certainly be absent-minded. Lately, I've gone to a lot of trouble to start using various reminder and task applications in an effort to become less absent-minded. If I slip up, it's because I made a mistake, not because I'm trying to advertise my primate social dominance score.
This is truly an article that makes you reflect on the stereotypes and assumptions you have about people.
For instance, before reading this I had this unexamined generalization that Canadians are all kind and empathetic, but after seeing Prof. Heath's attitude towards his colleagues...
I've been working on my current job for 8 years. I've been a programmer for 30. In the last year, I've started feeling free enough to say "I don't know" or "I don't remember". Before that, I felt that I had to remember, or, if I didn't, I had to find out, because I felt that I was supposed to know. But now, I've realized that it's OK for me to not know everything.
That's not dominance behavior, exactly. I'm not deliberately not remembering to put co-workers in their place. I'm also not trying to skate on my responsibilities: "You figure it out yourself; I'm too important to do that." But it is a level of security. My image of myself as a good programmer isn't destroyed if I don't remember some detail amid the tens of thousands of lines of code. And I don't fear that my boss's image of me will be destroyed by that, either.
So maybe, at least some of the time, it's not a exactly dominance behavior, but it's a behavior that only those in secure positions can afford.
(In all of this, of course, I except the story about the guy who left the author rideless at the office. That was a 'dickhead' move.)
Finally, on the claim "they only forget things that benefit them," be very careful about confirmation bias. I, for one, show up at meetings early not infrequently- but when this happens, no one knows because no one else is there.