In contemporary discourse hubris is usually adduced as a dangerous state of mind, a form of pride or over-confidence which leads to downfall. This has its origins in the view once conventional among classicists that for ancient Greeks hybris was an arrogant disposition, offending the gods by exceeding mortal limits. This did not accommodate the fact that in many Greek states hybris was the term for a serious criminal offence, usually involving violence or sexual abuse. My Hybris (1992) successfully located the concept within the category of ‘honour’, and it is now widely agreed that hybris involved both arrogance and dishonouring behaviour towards others. Disagreement, however, persists over the balance to be struck between the two. This chapter reviews the debate, partially revises my earlier account (which underplayed the dispositional element) and insists that other-directed behaviour is equally essential to the concept. Using case studies from Sophocles and Herodotus, it concludes by restating the crucial distinction between hybris and related, but not necessarily pejorative, expressions such as pride or ‘thinking big/unmortal’ thoughts.

Contrary to mainstream scholarship’s opinion, the Hippocratic corpus presents many cases of impaired consciousness, but only a few of mental illness. By looking at three study cases, this chapter describes how these doctors understood conditions where patients act weirdly or were not their usual selves, and how they construed the notion of disease.

In face of the difficulty of establishing clear biological boundaries between sleep and the other forms of impaired consciousness, the sociological and anthropological analyses can provide hints as to where those limits were set in real life. The terminological analysis suggested a common feature that persisted throughout the different authors and periods: different levels of consciousness (from drowsy to hyperactive, and from delirium to koma) where always related to the impairment of mental capacities, regardless of the way in which each medical writer grouped or understood them.

The analysis of total loss of consciousness illustrates the varied ways in which the different authors resolved - in their corresponding periods and contexts - the tension between body and soul. Despite their diverse approaches, all the medical writers under scrutiny took for granted the existence of a soul, its intervention in this kind of conditions, and its bonds to the body as determiner of the clinical presentation. Particularly, they grappled to organise the mental capacities and explain how they were affected in the different forms of impaired consciousness.

Unlike mental disease, which presupposes a strongly theory-laden concept, impaired consciousness or delirium is currently conceived in medicine as a cluster of symptoms. This chapter contrasts these two constructs, and discusses our current idea about the notion of disease.

CEO hubris is a vital construct in research on the psychology of organisational decision-makers. Hubristic CEOs influence strategic decisions, from acquisitions to product and geographic market entry. To date, research has mainly focused on how and when CEO hubris impacts CEOs and their organisations. I offer a framework in which CEOs predisposed to inflated self-evaluation engage in behavioural processes that yield overconfident strategic decisions associated with hubris. The framework reviews and summarises how such evaluations stem from CEOs’ psychological and social circumstances. It then links inflated self-evaluation to the three drivers of over-confidence that are associated with hubris: over-estimation, or the tendency to exaggerate prospective outcomes; over-placement, or the tendency to rank one’s capabilities and situation ahead of others; and over-precision, or the tendency to issue unduly bounded or narrow forecasts which tend to be inaccurate. The framework is illustrated by the case study of Elizabeth Holmes, formerly founder and CEO of Theranos, who was lauded as a celebrity entrepreneur before being convicted of crimes associated with her hubris.

In this chapter, we are concerned with ordinary hubris – what social and personality psychologists empirically study under the heading of self-enhancement. This umbrella term refers to both (a) the motive to augment or protect the positivity of the self, and (b) probable manifestations of that motive at a cognitive or behavioural level. We review five such manifestations: the better-than-average effect (regarding oneself as superior to others); the self-serving bias (taking credit for success but disavowing blame for failure); selective memory (forgetting one’s weaknesses but not one’s strengths); overclaiming (endorsing flattering falsehoods about oneself); and socially desirable responding (strategically acting to gain social approval). We also discuss the case of excessive self-enhancement: narcissism. This personality trait combines self-serving grandiosity with manipulative propensity. Narcissists irrationally over-exhibit all five key manifestations of self-enhancement but are likely to be over-represented among movers and shakers. We conclude with a nuanced consideration of self-enhancement’s costs and benefits.

This chapter seeks to introduce recent research on leadership hubris, particularly relating to political and business leaders. It offers an overview of key insights, concepts and theories suggesting three possible dimensions of the specific problem of leadership hubris and its consequences for leadership effectiveness. It also aims to highlight relationships and divergences between approaches and findings of classical scholars and of psychologists, neurologists and leadership researchers concerned with the experience and impact of modern, hubristic leadership. It aims to show how current understanding of hubris has developed from the ancient. While criminal charges may no longer be brought against those accused of hubris in their leadership roles, they may well be considered to be suffering from an acquired personality disorder. Alternatively, their dysfunctional leadership may be attributed to the negative consequences of a wider social process involving, in addition to the leaders themselves, a conducive context and followers rendered susceptible to such leadership by such processes of which both they and their leaders are victims.