Ego is a big pilot thing, lets face it, flying takes a lot of confidence and is attractive to type-A personalities. What you experience is often the negative side of that, and hopefully restricted to a few idiots.
However, this hierarchical desire is not only directed at spotters. let me for example suggest that flying a light twin piston, in IMC, single pilot, can be a lot trickier than the big boys, with their stable platform, advanced avionics, autopilots and autothrottles as well as someone else in the cockpit to bounce off of, the cabin crew, engineers loaders, despatchers, schedulers, flight planners etc etc that exist in their team... let me suggest that.... light the blue touch paper...and stand back !!