0:14

Hello,

0:14

everyone. Watching on YouTube and

0:16

associated or listening on

0:19

associated podcasts. I'm

0:21

here today talking to a colleague and

0:24

compatriot of mine, Dr. Dell

0:26

Polis, from the University of British Columbia.

0:29

He's a personality researcher whose

0:31

work in so called dark

0:33

personality traits via a

0:35

variety of measurement methods has

0:37

yielded measures of the dark tetrad,

0:41

psychopathy, narcissism, machiavellianism,

0:44

and last but not least sadism

0:47

has worked, has also validated measures

0:49

of socially desirable responding, perceived

0:51

control, free will and determinism, and

0:53

overclaiming. His work has been published

0:56

over hundred and fifty articles in books,

0:58

and his current citation count which

1:01

is the number of times other scientists

1:03

have referred to as work and the cardinal

1:06

marker, I would say, of of evidence

1:08

and influence among scientists exceeds

1:11

forty three thousand. So,

1:13

Dr. Paulhus is definitely one of the world's

1:16

most outstanding psychometric

1:20

personality psychologists, that is personality

1:23

psychologists who specify who specialize

1:25

in the field of of mathematical measurement

1:28

of of behavioral and

1:30

conceptual traits. Hi,

1:33

Dale. It's good to see you. I

1:35

want to let everybody who's watching and listening.

1:37

No. Doctor Paulhus

1:39

from the University of British Columbia

1:42

is a researcher and personality, as his

1:44

bio indicated, our work

1:46

in some ways ran in parallel methodologically.

1:49

I was very interested for years in

1:52

statistical analysis of

1:54

linguistic descriptions of

1:56

personality, I concentrated mostly

1:59

on trying

2:01

to further develop the

2:03

idea of the big five on the statistical

2:06

front. The five fact personality model,

2:08

extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness,

2:12

and openness. Doctor

2:15

took a turn that was

2:17

very interesting to me though as well.

2:19

He's spent a number

2:21

of decades studying

2:24

What what came to be known as the Dark

2:26

Triad and later the Dark Tetra had

2:29

originally when the corpus of adjectives

2:32

was generated to extract

2:34

out a five dimensional description

2:37

of personality from language. Judgmental

2:42

adjectives were

2:44

eliminated from the corpus. The

2:47

idea was to produce a set of descriptors

2:49

of normative and non pathological personality

2:53

independent in some sense of morality.

2:55

And there was some utility in that I think

2:57

because it gave us a picture of normative

3:00

personality, but the downside was

3:02

We didn't develop as detailed an understanding

3:05

as we might have of the dark side

3:07

of personality. And that seems to be where

3:09

your work which is re which

3:11

is receiving increased public attention, I

3:13

would say, perhaps, in the in the days

3:15

of of Internet misbehavior

3:17

That's where your research really came into its

3:20

own. Is that a reasonable initial

3:22

summary? Yeah. A good summary.

3:26

So do you want to start by explaining

3:28

to people? Let let's walk through your

3:30

your research on the dark

3:32

triad. How did you become interested in this?

3:34

And And how did you develop the measurement instruments?

3:36

And what do you measure? Well,

3:39

like a lot of academics, my

3:41

research can be traced back to my

3:43

adviser who was

3:45

Richard Christie, the

3:49

inventor of MACqueville

3:51

Sadism as a trait. And

3:54

he did something very clever. He

3:56

went into the books of Nicoleo Macqueville,

3:59

who's an adviser to politicians way

4:02

back when. And

4:05

he took the statements and

4:07

ministered them to undergraduate

4:10

students and simply ask them

4:12

how much do you agree with these statements

4:15

like you have to get

4:17

to know important people. And

4:21

always be prepared for the worst

4:23

in people. And

4:25

the amazing thing was the

4:28

huge variance in the

4:30

responses. And that's

4:32

what personality research is all about.

4:34

We look for and

4:37

wallow in relish the

4:39

fact that people give different answers.

4:42

And apparently, A

4:44

lot of people agreed totally

4:46

with the statements that Machiavelli made

4:49

in the fifteen hundreds.

4:51

Others were horrified by

4:53

them. And so that inspired

4:55

Richard Christie to make

4:58

a questionnaire. The

5:01

MAC for the most popular

5:03

version of these questionnaires was

5:06

administered to subject

5:09

pools at his university,

5:12

Columbia University, and elsewhere.

5:15

And it wasn't

5:17

just self reports and predicted

5:20

actual behavior. So he

5:22

could show that people scored

5:24

high on the Mac four manipulated

5:27

others in a

5:30

a room in a laboratory.

5:32

So they would try to squeeze

5:34

money out of other people by tricking

5:37

them and all of this

5:39

could be recorded. And

5:42

published. Hence,

5:45

Richard Christie is forever associated

5:47

with Machiavellianism. So I

5:51

I was I

5:56

I thought that was a fabulous way

5:58

to do research I

6:01

moved on then and took a real

6:03

job at the University of British Columbia

6:05

and met up there with Bob

6:07

Hair sort of the the emperor

6:09

of research on psychopathy, another

6:12

averse of trait. And

6:16

of course, he has done it all.

6:19

But what he didn't do was compare

6:21

it to Machiavellianism. And

6:23

I've also done some research separately

6:28

on narcissism, which

6:30

captured attention of researchers

6:32

in the nineteen eighties, because

6:36

It seems to resonate. Everybody knows

6:38

narcissists, people who

6:41

want a lot of attention and

6:43

think they are superior to

6:45

everyone else. Everyone

6:47

can resonate to knowing such people.

6:50

So we have three

6:52

personality variables. Then

6:55

when the student, Kevin Williams, came

6:57

along. And

7:00

typically, in my career, I go

7:02

with what the students want to do,

7:05

we decided to figure

7:07

out whether there were more, are

7:09

there more averse

7:11

of personalities So

7:14

we searched the literature and we did

7:16

as much as we could back then

7:18

early two thousands. To

7:21

cover all the literature and see

7:23

if there were more personalities

7:26

that that were at

7:28

the level of narcissism,

7:32

machiavellianism and psychopathy.

7:35

We call them the dark triad because

7:38

they seem to dominate the literature. There are

7:40

already hundreds of studies On

7:42

each one of those, the

7:45

unfortunate results,

7:48

fortunate in the long run, I suppose,

7:51

is that the literature has overlapped

7:54

so much. You could barely

7:56

tell the difference if

7:58

you took all the literature, and narcissism,

8:00

all the literature, and multivalentism, and

8:03

psychopathy, you could

8:05

see the same things coming up.

8:09

And that was the original

8:11

problem. We wanna parse

8:14

the dark side of traits.

8:17

But you can't really do much

8:19

with the literature because of

8:22

this phenomenon that we

8:24

called construct creep,

8:26

and that is a researcher doesn't

8:30

have the ability to research everything

8:32

at once. So they focus on one

8:34

variable. But it

8:36

creeps wider and wider

8:38

until it overlaps with other

8:40

variables. And

8:42

that's a problem because you don't know which

8:45

one you're actually studying when

8:47

you put it into a

8:49

research

8:49

program. Which one

8:51

is responsible for the action

8:53

you're seeing. Right.

8:55

Right. Well, we we wanna talk about that

8:57

in some more detail too because I'd

8:59

like to find out a bit more about

9:02

how you feel, I know that the

9:04

dark triad has morphed into the dark

9:06

tetra to some degree, and I'm

9:08

also curious as to what you have

9:10

to say about the overlap between the dark

9:12

Tetra ed qualities and

9:14

personality disorder categories, especially

9:18

historic, anti social, and narcissistic

9:20

categories. Obviously, that shades into personality

9:22

pathology. And so, can

9:24

I define the three

9:27

traits and have you correct my definitions

9:29

if you would? So the Machiavellians, as

9:32

you pointed out, Machiavell was

9:34

a an adviser to Prince's

9:36

who was really interested

9:38

in some sense in the outright

9:40

maintenance of instrumental power.

9:42

I wouldn't say he was driven by any

9:44

intrinsic ethic. It was Matthew

9:46

Valley gave advice as to Prince George who

9:48

wanted to maintain their position

9:51

by by hooker, by

9:53

crook, let's say. So Matthew Valleyians

9:55

are willing to use manipulation

9:57

to obtain their personal

9:59

ends. And narcissists seem

10:01

to be driven by a

10:04

high desire to to

10:07

obtain unearned status

10:09

from others. And the most important thing for

10:11

them is not status in relationship to

10:13

competence. Let's say, or in relationship

10:15

to performance, but just in

10:17

status for its own sake.

10:19

And then the cycle paths

10:21

I spent a lot of time looking at hair's research

10:24

and thinking about relationship to the

10:26

big five, psychopath seemed

10:28

to be something approximating paracitical

10:32

paracitical predators. And so

10:34

they're very, very low in agreeableness, and that

10:36

makes them kill us and non

10:38

empathetic. And then they also

10:40

seem to be very low in conscientiousness. That

10:42

seems to accord reasonably

10:44

well with the two factors of the psychopathy

10:46

scale. And so a real psychopath is

10:48

someone who is willing

10:50

to take what you have, let's

10:52

say, and use it, and that might be the predatory

10:54

aspect, and also to live off

10:57

the earnings and efforts

10:59

of others, and that's also an element of

11:01

criminal behavior. And so you're looking

11:03

at the nexus of all three of those,

11:05

machiavellianism, narcissism

11:07

psychopathy. And recently, you

11:09

and other researchers have added, I

11:11

think this is so interesting because I think it

11:13

was a real lack. You

11:15

you You added sadism to

11:17

that, which is positive, delight,

11:19

and pleasure taken in the suffering of

11:21

others. And so

11:24

is Can you expand at all upon the

11:26

definitions of Machiavellianism, narcissism,

11:28

and

11:28

psychopathy, and we could segue into sadism.

11:31

Yeah,

11:32

I agree with all of your definitions.

11:34

So, though, what we did

11:36

was spend a lot of time trying to

11:38

find what's different among

11:41

each of the characters and

11:44

what the overlap is.

11:46

Why is it that the literatures and

11:48

the measures that were available always

11:52

overlapped to

11:54

a dangerous degree. In

11:57

trying to understand what's

11:59

going

11:59

on. So the

12:02

key thing for psychopaths

12:05

in our opinion is impulsivity

12:08

and sensation

12:12

seeking, which which is what gets them

12:14

into trouble. They may not

12:16

have worse motives than

12:18

the others, but they

12:20

can't help it. That's why

12:22

they at the extreme levels

12:24

spend their lives in prison.

12:27

They can't help responding

12:31

to temptation. Whatever

12:33

the temptation is, they go for

12:35

it, and often

12:37

they get what they want right away

12:40

and they keep on doing it

12:42

until they get caught and

12:45

they don't seem to learn from it. So

12:47

that answers just

12:49

a qualification to

12:52

the definition of

12:54

psychopath Now, what's underlying

12:56

it we think is callousness

12:59

for all of them. They're overlapping

13:01

because at the

13:03

core, is a

13:05

a failure to have empathy.

13:08

And if you have a deficit

13:10

in empathy, you it

13:13

seems inevitable that you're gonna exploit

13:15

other people in one way or another

13:17

because you're not you're not getting

13:19

the feedback that people with

13:21

empathy get in seeing other

13:24

people suffer

13:26

at your hands. And

13:29

the story of sadism is is quite

13:31

a long

13:31

story. But if you want

13:34

me to get into the details

13:35

Sure. You do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Please do.

13:37

Please do. Yeah.

13:40

I don't know whether I'm more sensitive

13:42

to these things than other people,

13:44

but in I

13:46

started seeing sadism in

13:48

regular people. And

13:51

not only is

13:53

it there and every day

13:55

people, but people

13:57

seem to wallow in it

13:59

when the circumstances will

14:01

allow it. For example,

14:03

violent sports. One

14:06

of my favorite sports

14:07

hockey. It's

14:10

kind of a static watching a hockey game. The

14:12

cheers are larger larger for the

14:14

fights

14:14

and for the goals. People

14:17

love to see their fighter

14:20

puzzle the fighter of the other team or

14:23

puzzle anyone. And the

14:26

cheers that go up in a hockey

14:28

stadium are incredible. And

14:30

the cheers only stop when

14:33

the victim

14:35

falls to the ice and starts

14:37

twitching and a hush

14:39

follows over the

14:41

crowd showing the dual

14:43

nature of positive

14:46

and negative motivations

14:49

that human beings have. But

14:51

the fact that they love

14:53

seeing the fighting no

14:56

matter how much blood

14:58

is and teeth end

15:00

up on the ice, is

15:03

disappointing in a way. And we

15:05

learned a long time ago from the

15:07

Europeans. They don't have to

15:09

do that to make hockey

15:12

a wonderful sport. That

15:14

was just one, but then

15:16

watching the undergraduate students

15:19

at UBC University of British

15:20

Columbia. What are they doing for

15:23

fun?

15:24

Well, if you'll recall way,

15:26

way back, They used to

15:28

play these archive games

15:31

and there were some gentle ones,

15:34

Pac Man, asteroids. I

15:36

don't know if you remember those. But

15:40

going down into the arcade,

15:43

you see that people are gathered that

15:45

gathered around one of

15:47

the arcade games. And

15:50

so I wondered over to see

15:52

it. it was something called mortal

15:54

combat, which by

15:56

today's standards isn't

15:58

that bad, but

16:00

the heads are torn

16:02

off and the blood spurts

16:04

out. And that's why

16:06

the crowd was there because

16:08

was so much more appealing than

16:11

the silly little Mario

16:13

brothers stuff.

16:17

And it just struck me as

16:20

the beginning of my

16:23

interest in what people do especially

16:25

young males when

16:27

they have time on their

16:29

own. So if

16:31

it's not born and It

16:33

seems like it's violence and

16:38

it's somewhat horrifying but

16:42

it's gotten worse. I don't know

16:44

if you've been following the video

16:46

games. That are

16:48

now available on your home

16:50

computer. You don't need to go to an

16:52

arcade and be embarrassed

16:54

by what you're playing. Because

16:56

you can sit at home and and

16:59

play whatever games you want. And

17:01

so now, what's it

17:03

called grand theft auto? You can

17:05

kill innocent

17:06

bystanders, step on

17:09

their heads, etcetera, and

17:11

there are actual torture sites where

17:13

you can go and torture

17:14

people. You

17:15

can torture animals.

17:17

It's all there. And

17:19

so people are paying to

17:21

do this stuff. They pay

17:23

for violent sports, They

17:26

pay for violent movies. What's the

17:28

most popular television program

17:30

these days? It's called

17:32

Game of Thrones. And it's

17:34

the most sadistic kind of

17:37

television program that you've

17:40

ever seen. People

17:42

are paying for this in one way

17:44

or another, and they're attracted to

17:46

it. They relate stories with

17:48

their friends. So this

17:50

Putting this picture together suggested

17:53

to me that some

17:55

not all. In fact,

17:57

the variance again is there, which

17:59

sites of personality researcher. Some

18:02

people are highly attracted to

18:04

this stuff. Other people

18:07

are

18:07

horrified. I know that

18:11

neurophysiologically, anger

18:15

is a multidimensional emotion.

18:17

It activates positive emotion

18:20

systems and negative emotion systems

18:22

simultaneously. And so you

18:24

can think about that perhaps as the

18:26

core element of something like

18:29

aggression, at least maybe

18:31

both defensive and predatory aggression. And

18:33

then you could imagine that people are

18:35

wired differently as individuals so

18:38

that for any given person, being angry

18:40

might be associated with a predominance

18:43

of of approach, motivation. Right?

18:45

Positive emotion, and a

18:47

relative decrement of negative emotion for

18:49

other people that would be reversed. Like,

18:51

I'm trying to account for what the positive

18:53

pleasure is in the observation

18:55

or participation in the aggression. I mean,

18:57

you could associate it with hypothetically,

18:59

you could associate it actually

19:01

with predatory behavior with hunting.

19:03

And with combat, but it

19:06

also might be a consequence

19:08

of differential wiring at the

19:10

neurological level in relation ship to the

19:12

balance between positive and negative emotion, experienced by

19:14

having any given person with anger.

19:16

Now, can I you you see this variation

19:18

in people, you know? I mean,

19:20

I know some people who are real fighters,

19:23

let's say, on the political front, and

19:25

some of them really enjoy a good

19:27

scrap. Right? It really seems to

19:29

get them motivated. And this isn't a

19:31

criticism of them necessarily. And

19:33

then other people, and I think I fall more into

19:35

this cap. I'm not really very

19:37

interested at all in in

19:39

conflict. It bothers me a lot.

19:41

Although I don't like delay in conflict, so

19:43

I'm likely to engage in it, you

19:45

know, relatively

19:45

upfront. But

19:47

we could go into that. Like, what do you

19:50

think what do you think is the

19:52

fundamental biological and then

19:54

also ethical difference between people who

19:56

are taking positive delight

19:58

in aggression and those who

19:59

aren't. And and,

20:02

well,

20:02

I guess

20:03

we could start with those questions. Yeah.

20:07

That's the fundamental query,

20:10

a puzzle in a way.

20:12

Why would human beings

20:15

have to have a sad sad, at least

20:17

some people. And as you mentioned,

20:20

predatory very often, so

20:22

one can

20:23

speculate that it helps

20:28

animals. Our carnivores

20:30

especially hunt if

20:32

They know not only are willing, but

20:35

enjoy the killing,

20:37

and that could have been carried over to

20:39

human beings. Mhmm. Also,

20:42

a little more instrumental

20:46

explanation would be that it

20:48

helps dominance. That is if you can

20:50

scare off your

20:54

competitors, whether they're

20:57

competitors for mates or

20:59

for

20:59

territory, than being

21:02

sadistic about it. That would be a niche

21:04

theory in some sense, I guess, is

21:06

that I I know that the

21:08

worldwide prevalence of psychopathy ranges

21:11

between one and five percent, hovers

21:13

around three. And

21:15

what it seems to indicate because it's

21:17

relatively stable is that

21:20

although being a psychopath isn't

21:22

a particularly successful strategy,

21:24

in that ninety seven percent of people don't take

21:26

that route. In a cooperative

21:28

society, a niche does open up

21:30

for people who are willing to use manipulation

21:33

and impulsive behavior

21:35

and sadism to dominate

21:37

and use power impressively,

21:40

to at least what would

21:42

you say carve out for themselves

21:44

some degree of success, and then now

21:46

and then some spectacular success,

21:48

I suppose, which would be the case

21:50

with people who are extraordinarily successful

21:52

at being tyrants. And so

21:55

so you so we have two arguments there in

21:57

some sense. One is like a

21:59

neurobiological difference in

22:01

response to the balance of

22:03

positive and negative emotion in anger. And the other

22:05

one is while there's a niche that

22:07

opens up for people who are willing to

22:09

use power and manipulation and

22:11

so forth to attain the

22:13

rewards of social dominance. And

22:15

psychopath seemed to do that. Right? Because they'll

22:17

manipulate. They often have to move from

22:19

place to place because people figure them

22:21

out. But they will use short

22:23

term dominant strategies. Think you've

22:25

related that too as well, the dark triad

22:27

to to short term mating

22:29

strategies as well. Right? Which is

22:31

an interest. That's another thing that we could

22:33

concentrate on right on what the dark triad

22:36

predicts. The dark tetrad interested me

22:38

particularly because The literature I read on

22:40

psychopath did describe them as

22:42

impulsive, so they're willing even to

22:44

sacrifice their own futures to the pleasure

22:46

of the moment. But there was

22:48

obviously a subset of psychopaths who

22:50

delighted in being cruel. And the

22:52

standard explanation of

22:54

carelessness say, which is merely lack

22:56

of empathy, didn't seem to be enough. Right? Because

22:58

it isn't merely that people

23:01

are lacking empathic and

23:03

empathy It's that sometimes there

23:05

are people who take a positive delight in

23:07

cruelty and that there's a new term

23:09

that's used to describe

23:12

online mobbing behavior

23:14

or bullying behavior,

23:16

troll behavior which is lulls. Right?

23:18

I just did it for the lulls, which

23:20

is the plural of LL, laugh

23:22

out loud, and to do it for

23:24

the lulz is to

23:27

go after someone on the net.

23:29

Often anonymously merely for

23:31

the purpose of making them miserable

23:33

and retchered and put them in

23:35

pain just so that you can

23:38

enjoy that. And certainly, that's not

23:40

mere psychopathy. Right?

23:42

That's not mere impulsiveness. There's there's

23:44

an additional component that's worth

23:46

concentrating on.

23:47

Alright. So you

23:48

covered a lot of ground there.

23:52

Picking up on the argument

23:54

for psychopaths being impulsive

23:57

Just to remind

23:59

viewers who are not that familiar with

24:03

evolutionary theory, The

24:05

simple argument is you got

24:07

to get mates to

24:09

maintain your genes

24:12

in in the gene pool. And

24:14

there are many ways of doing that. Right?

24:16

One is to grab and

24:18

and run with whatever you

24:21

want. Using force if necessary.

24:23

That will sometimes get inmates

24:26

more strategic Macchiavellians

24:30

find ways of manipulating others

24:32

to get their genes into

24:34

the gene pool, narcissists,

24:38

seem to attract mates

24:41

partly because of their

24:42

confidence, even if it is overconfidence.

24:47

Say

24:47

this a little harder to

24:50

see why would

24:53

being sadistic get

24:55

you romantic and

24:55

sexual partners. Well,

24:58

I think I touched on the only

25:00

explanation

25:03

I could

25:03

think of. And I think you mentioned it too

25:05

and that is, well,

25:08

you scare off your competitors. And

25:12

you even scare off your mate

25:14

into doing what you want by

25:17

hurting them and in a very

25:19

public way. So you're

25:21

deterring you're deterring

25:24

reactions from other people and that

25:26

may be of benefit

25:29

in some circumstances. And

25:31

then you you went into the the

25:33

niche theory or niche

25:35

as some people say, Yeah,

25:37

there's a lot of niches out there for

25:39

dark personalities. Each

25:41

one may require very

25:44

select kinds of traits.

25:48

But if you want a job as an

25:50

enforcer and on a

25:52

hockey team, you better done well,

25:54

be able to and willing

25:56

to and like to

25:58

hurt other

25:58

people. It don't it also

26:01

might be So I I know someone quite

26:03

well. So I talked to

26:04

him. He he he was often hired by

26:07

corporations to fire people.

26:09

And he's a very disagreeable person, but

26:11

he's very high in conscientiousness.

26:14

So I was talking

26:16

to him at one point in my lab

26:18

because I was struggling with a few students and who I eventually

26:20

let go. And I I

26:22

really realized that I probably had

26:24

kept them in the lab longer than I should

26:26

have and that their poor performance

26:29

was de motivating some of

26:31

the people in my lab who are very high

26:33

performers and they were just producing a

26:35

decrement in the overall quality of

26:37

our work. And part of the reason I think I failed

26:39

to take action is because I

26:41

am a rather agreeable person

26:43

and I find

26:46

firing people, let's say, very

26:48

distasteful. And so I talk to

26:50

my

26:50

associate, my friend, about firing

26:53

people. And he said, I enjoy

26:55

it.

26:55

And I said, that re surprised me. And

26:58

this someone I admire in respect, a very

27:00

competent person, by the way, I

27:02

said, well, why is that? He said, well,

27:04

you know, I go into corporations and

27:06

I faired out the people who are

27:08

kissing up and kicking down.

27:11

I faired out the narcissists. I faired out the people

27:13

who, as I alluded to, take

27:15

credit when they haven't done anything.

27:18

And cast dispersions on others when they have

27:20

done something, and who are clearly not

27:22

doing their job. And then also,

27:24

I go after people who

27:27

for whom it would be better in some

27:29

real sense to be off doing something

27:32

else. And his continual

27:34

pattern of employment for multiple years because

27:36

he was particularly good at this was he'd go into a

27:38

corporation that was failing and start to

27:40

fire people at the bottom and then climb the hierarchy.

27:42

And then when he got too close to the top,

27:44

they'd fire him Of course. But, you

27:47

know, it was really interesting to me because

27:49

it's also possible that some of these

27:51

traits, the more psychopathic traits,

27:54

have a positive utility,

27:57

socially, even speaking morally,

27:59

when they're combined with other

28:01

personality traits. Right?

28:03

But that are particularly like, maybe it's not so bad

28:05

to be low in agreeableness if you're high in

28:08

conscientiousness. But maybe it's really bad

28:10

to be agreeableness if you're

28:12

really high in neuroticism or

28:14

really low in conscientiousness. And

28:16

so you could see that that that

28:18

tilt towards less empathy,

28:20

which might make you capable, for example,

28:22

of enforcing rules, might

28:25

be Well, as I

28:27

said, might be extraordinarily useful,

28:29

even pro socially under some

28:31

circumstances, but very pathological under

28:34

under

28:34

others. Yeah, there's

28:36

a movement now. I think to

28:39

question the absolute

28:41

positivity of empathy this fellow

28:43

balloon from Yale University.

28:46

I'm not sure if you

28:48

haven't interviewed him yet,

28:50

you should. Because he

28:52

he points out the

28:56

overuse of empathy or

28:58

inappropriate use of empathy like

29:00

letting a stranger into your door is

29:02

a simple example. But

29:04

having traits that

29:06

make you react,

29:09

overreact, say to blood

29:11

and guts is gonna prevent you

29:13

from being a surgeon. You've got to

29:15

be able to get your your

29:17

life in there and slice people up.

29:21

And to some extent, ignore

29:23

them if well,

29:25

up to a

29:26

point, if they're complaining,

29:30

Right. Yeah. So there

29:32

are jobs in which

29:33

too much empathy is

29:37

going to impede your

29:39

ability to success. So

29:42

he he goes through a a lot of examples

29:44

like that. I suppose one

29:46

of the first things they do at boot

29:49

camp is to

29:51

try to impose

29:55

certain kinds of motivations in

29:58

soldiers that are joining the

30:00

army and make sure they

30:02

understand that if you

30:03

don't chill first, they're gonna kill

30:06

you or they're gonna kill your

30:08

buddies. And that should

30:10

be the way you think. When

30:12

you're you're in a war. And

30:14

if you don't have that ability

30:16

to reframe

30:18

gentle personality than

30:21

you're in the wrong place? Right.

30:23

Well, and it's it's clearly the case that people

30:25

who are very high in trade

30:27

empathy, so very high in agreeableness. They are

30:29

easy to take advantage of, and

30:31

they also tend to become resentful and

30:35

bitter least that's been my clinical observation

30:37

because it's very difficult for them to stand up

30:39

for themselves, right? And so you

30:41

need a certain amount of capacity for

30:43

aggression and then there's an there's an

30:45

interesting twist here too. I don't know. I

30:47

read a book a while back called

30:49

a billion wicked thoughts. It's a very,

30:51

very interesting book. It

30:53

was written by Google engineers. And one of the

30:55

things they did was analyze

30:57

pornography use between men and women.

31:00

And on and and with billions of searches

31:03

literally. And they found, which is not

31:05

surprising, that men

31:07

preferred visual pornography. But

31:11

females preferred literary

31:14

pornography. And they found

31:16

the classic literary

31:19

pornography plot,

31:21

which was something like

31:25

relatively innocent but

31:27

undervalued and attractive

31:30

but not so obviously attractive

31:32

young woman stumbles

31:34

across this sort of

31:36

commanding man who has

31:39

many women at his disposal and over

31:41

time despite his

31:43

relatively high levels of aggression he

31:45

finds himself attracted

31:47

to this woman and then

31:49

forms a sexual relationship with

31:51

her. It's a beauty in the beast plot

31:54

essentially, but one of the things that's so interesting about their

31:56

analysis was they they

31:58

listed the top five occupations

32:00

or characters for female

32:05

sexual literature, and

32:07

they were pirate,

32:10

surgeon, billionaire, vampire,

32:13

and pilot. And so those are all

32:15

males who, I would say, are

32:19

marked by or no, not pilot,

32:21

werewolf. Werewolf was the fifth

32:23

one. And so I

32:25

think it reflects, to some degree, this

32:27

conundrum that women have. They use

32:29

because women have to pick a man who has

32:31

the capacity for aggression, enough

32:33

of the capacity for aggression to

32:35

protect himself and others and to move out

32:37

into the world against a fair bit

32:39

of opposition, but who's also simultaneously

32:43

empathic or perhaps

32:45

conscientious enough to to

32:47

be caring and share. And you can imagine that's a real

32:49

knife edge. Right? Because you need a bit

32:51

of a monster in your man, let's say, to keep

32:53

the real monsters away, but you don't want so

32:56

much monsters so that relationship

32:58

is impossible. And so then you could also imagine

33:00

that there's overshoot on both

33:02

sides of that target

33:05

so that some men become too aggressive,

33:07

but can appear attractive in the short

33:09

term because they have the confidence

33:11

associated with that. And some men become

33:13

too agreeable, and so they

33:15

look easy to get along with and so forth, but

33:17

they can't put themselves forward and stand up

33:19

for themselves. And so Another explanation

33:22

for the potential emergence of,

33:24

say, sadism and psychopathy is

33:26

that there's this narrow target for,

33:28

especially for men to hit

33:30

doesn't account for female psychopathy, but for men to

33:32

hit, and it's easy to overshoot in either

33:34

direction. And there's gonna be variability in

33:36

women's choice as

33:38

well. Yeah. One of

33:40

the issues that underlies

33:43

my work

33:45

in connection with clinical

33:48

psychology which you're the expert

33:50

in, and I'm not. I

33:52

try to stick to so called subclinical

33:55

levels. In other

33:57

words, student bodies or

33:59

workers. These are people who

34:01

are managing to get along

34:03

at everyday society

34:05

and they're available in large numbers, so

34:07

you can take surveys and

34:10

try to tease apart

34:12

the various aspects of the dark

34:15

side but I do

34:18

not, I'm very reticent to

34:20

venture to the clinical

34:22

side. And I

34:24

think that's been the source of

34:26

criticism from of

34:28

me from clinical

34:30

psychologists that I'm

34:33

touching on areas that really belong

34:35

to them and did

34:37

not belong to me because I'm

34:39

not a clinician. So when we get

34:42

into sexual

34:44

sadism and criminal sadism,

34:46

which in sense was

34:50

all people associated with sadism up

34:52

until recently. It was the

34:54

only way that people thought

34:58

about it. And interesting interplays

35:00

between sadism and masochism.

35:02

Why would it be, to some extent, the

35:04

same people, who

35:07

are into both. I can ask these

35:09

questions and surveys, but I

35:12

hesitate to to try to be

35:14

an

35:15

expert and accept what people are

35:18

saying. Well, it's not as

35:20

if it's not as if

35:22

the clinicians have

35:24

been any more careful than the personality theorists in

35:27

elucidating the actual nature

35:29

of their diagnostic categories. Right?

35:31

I mean, one of the reasons I'm a clinician and

35:33

a personality psychologist. I mean, one of the reasons I

35:36

find your work interesting

35:38

and compelling is because you do

35:40

the psychometrics properly. And

35:42

that's not always obvious to

35:44

be the case with clinical diagnostic

35:46

categories because They're basically

35:48

holdovers from the psychiatric

35:50

enterprise, and they weren't derived. They

35:52

weren't extracted out of a primarily

35:54

statistical model. And so

35:56

on the downside for the clinical

35:58

psychologist, it's not obvious at all that we

36:00

have our noseology, our

36:02

diagnostic category

36:04

system straight. And so, I'm and and I mean, I

36:06

I'm not saying that in a cynically

36:08

critical manner because it's actually a very

36:10

difficult thing to do. Right?

36:12

But it seems to be that your work isn't unfairly,

36:18

what, poaching on the grounds of clinical

36:20

psychologists because

36:22

somebody has to do the basic psychometric work. It's well, what are

36:25

the basic categories of, let's say,

36:27

predatory and parasitical behavior?

36:30

Now, you can imagine that there's a place where that becomes clinically extreme and has to be

36:32

dealt with in another manner, but there's absolutely no reason not

36:35

to look at it, some clinical

36:37

manifestations as well. One

36:39

of the reasons wanted to talk to you

36:42

now is because I've been reading a

36:44

number of papers. I I got really

36:46

interested in this idea

36:48

that virtualization enables,

36:50

well, maybe psychopathy, but

36:52

maybe more broadly dark tetrod behavior.

36:55

You know, because one of

36:57

the open questions is, If you're

36:59

dealing with someone who has these personality proclivities that

37:01

you described, Machiavellian, narcissistic,

37:05

psychopathic, and sadistic, They

37:08

obviously lack a

37:10

Freudian superego in some sense. They

37:12

can't regulate their own behavior. It

37:15

is social man. Left to their own devices,

37:17

they will exploit and hurt. And so then you

37:20

might say, well, what keeps people like that

37:22

in check?

37:24

And one of the answers to that would be, well, the same thing that keeps

37:26

the rest of us in check, which

37:29

is mechanisms built

37:32

into the neurobiology of our face to face contact. Like, we know

37:34

that if you put

37:36

people in a

37:36

car, they'll be rudeer to

37:40

each other

37:41

to someone

37:41

in another car, then they would

37:43

be face to face on the street.

37:46

Like, there's a lot

37:49

of direct inhibition built into our social

37:51

interactions that keeps psychopathy and

37:54

narcissism under control.

37:56

But then what you see

37:58

online is that all of that disappears,

38:00

hey, and I don't think that there's

38:02

any real price to

38:04

be paid for dark cat trap behavior

38:06

online, especially if it's anonymous and that's

38:08

made me think more recently, especially

38:10

as our

38:12

culture tears itself apart as a consequence

38:14

of the battle between extremes

38:16

on the political spectrum It's

38:20

made me wonder how much of that's

38:22

actually driven by the virtualized enabling of

38:25

psychopathy and narcissism. Sadism,

38:28

you know, it's it's always a problem. One of the things

38:31

people might not understand who are

38:33

watching this is the

38:36

incredibly high

38:38

cost that biological organisms bear in

38:41

relationship to parasitical behavior. So

38:43

that'd be associated, let's

38:45

say, with psychopathy. There is good

38:47

evidence, although I wouldn't say it's canonical, that the reason

38:49

that sex itself evolved

38:53

was so that we could stay

38:56

ahead of the parasites. If you

38:58

just clone yourself, the

39:00

parasites can chase your

39:02

genome down the generations. But if you mix

39:04

your

39:04

genes, then the parasites have to adapt rapidly to

39:06

keep up. You can stay ahead of them. And so,

39:09

sex

39:09

itself was driven

39:12

by parasites. Critical behavior. And

39:14

so what that indicates is that the presence

39:16

of parasites as well as

39:18

predators throughout our entire

39:20

biological history has presented a

39:22

canonical threat to our very

39:24

civilization. And now if

39:26

it's true that

39:28

virtualization enables the psychopaths and the narcissists, then it seems

39:30

to me that that

39:32

produces a cardinal threat once again. And there's

39:34

been a spate of research

39:36

more recently using

39:39

the dark Tetrade measures to investigate

39:41

such things as narcissistic

39:43

self promotion on

39:46

on TikTok and Instagram, but also trolling an

39:49

online bullying. And so maybe

39:51

you could tell us a little bit

39:53

about what's been found on that

39:56

front. Yeah. Well, again,

39:58

you covered a lot of ground there, but the

40:00

central point I have

40:02

to totally agree on and

40:05

we got into a specific

40:08

aspect where sadism plays

40:10

a big role and that is

40:13

the trolling online You get to say anything you

40:15

want without repercussions. If you said that to the

40:18

person's face, you'd be

40:20

in trouble for various

40:21

reasons, legal,

40:24

physical reasons. But

40:26

we we tried to delve

40:30

into asking these people

40:32

who engage in trolling

40:34

online. Why do you do

40:36

it? And we ended up with the

40:38

title of our paper trolls just

40:40

wanna have fun because

40:42

that seemed to be the most common motivation.

40:44

It's just fun poking

40:47

at people. You find the website where

40:49

people are all happy

40:52

and

40:53

enjoying it. I don't know, a gardening

40:56

group, and you mess with

40:58

them. And that seems to

40:59

be a lot of fun for

41:02

certain individuals. We

41:05

correlated an interest in doing that with the dark

41:07

titrad measures and sadism stood

41:10

out as the best

41:12

predictor of

41:13

to mess with happy people.

41:16

So having the Internet

41:20

has put us into trouble

41:24

politics is an obvious

41:26

example, but just being

41:28

nasty to your fellow humans,

41:31

is now That's

41:35

a sport. Yeah. It's a sport.

41:37

It's a hobby. It's a

41:40

past time. And these people tend to spend a lot of their

41:42

time engaged

41:46

in various

41:49

similar activities. The Right.

41:52

Well, we know that one percent

41:55

of the criminals commit sixty five

41:57

percent of the crimes. And so it's a prorito distribution like

42:00

almost every other form of,

42:02

let's say, creative production. And so

42:06

It's also the case in all probability that

42:08

a very large proportion of

42:10

the pathological online behavior comes from

42:13

a relatively small proportion of

42:16

committed dark tetrad types. And

42:18

given that they're not only

42:22

not inhibited, by the

42:24

normal mechanisms of social

42:26

discourse, they're also rewarded because

42:28

they get a tremendous amount of

42:30

And I would say, I think it's reasonable

42:32

to also point out that that attention

42:34

is monetized in some sense and expanded

42:36

by the internal operations

42:38

of social media networks themselves.

42:40

It's certainly not the case that the trolls pay a price being provocative.

42:43

In fact, I think there's good

42:45

reason to think that they're their

42:48

attempts are more likely to be multiplied rather than inhibit it.

42:51

And that that could be depending on

42:53

the degree to which we virtualize.

42:55

We not could pose a

42:58

real a signal threat to our to the integrity

43:00

of our peaceful political

43:05

arrangements, let's say.

43:07

Yes, it's out of hand and it's hard

43:10

to track down individual

43:14

contributors

43:15

to level rents online, but

43:19

one could blame it on

43:22

media poll vendorization,

43:24

just the the need to

43:27

attract customers to help

43:29

that people don't

43:31

like moderate. Media sources.

43:33

They won't turn to

43:35

that channel. They'll

43:36

turn to

43:37

a channel where they can feel

43:39

warm and toasty, because

43:42

the other people on that channel agree

43:44

with them on everything. So that I don't get

43:46

to hear other points of

43:48

view. And many years ago,

43:50

perhaps you and I were there

43:52

at the time of Walter

43:54

Cronkite and there were a

43:56

few There

43:57

are a few corporations online, two or

43:59

three that everybody watched, and

44:02

they were more or less down

44:04

the middle

44:06

If those were put online now,

44:08

nobody would watch. People wanna

44:10

watch the extreme version

44:12

of their own

44:14

politics. And that's

44:17

unfortunate development and

44:19

technology. Yeah. Well, there is some, you

44:22

know, there are some exceptions to that. I would say,

44:24

I mean, I've had a lot of success, let's

44:27

say, with long form dialogue

44:29

on YouTube and other people have done

44:31

the same thing. And you know,

44:34

inviting people like you to have discussions the

44:36

last ninety minutes or so and that's a

44:38

pretty comprehensive discussion and it

44:40

rewards a long term

44:42

attention span But it's

44:44

definitely the case that there

44:46

are selective pressures in

44:48

relationship to attention to gather

44:50

as much impulsive attention as

44:52

possible. And of course, there's a

44:54

a profit motive behind that often because if

44:57

you can gather people's attention, you can advertised

44:59

to them and I'm not saying this cynically. I'm just trying to

45:01

observe the way the system is working. If

45:03

you can gather people's attention

45:05

by whatever means, you

45:08

can almost instantly monetize that. And so we

45:10

also have this new technological problem,

45:12

which is that we have acknowledges

45:15

that can really reward

45:18

impulsive information gathering and

45:21

simultaneously monetize it. And that

45:23

means that that's fertile territory for the psychopaths and the

45:25

narcissists and the Machiavellians and the sadists to

45:28

exploit. And I think they're actually

45:30

I think there's enough of that to

45:34

actually undermine public trust in general because it

45:36

it makes like, my actual

45:39

life is way less contentious

45:41

than my online life. You

45:44

know, they're not even in the same universe in some sense as

45:46

that sense of polarization. It

45:49

it's really very difficult to tell now

45:51

in the modern world how

45:53

much of that is a mere consequence and

45:55

a mere appearance of virtualization and

45:58

how much it actually reflects some

46:00

fundamental disquiet. I mean, I know they

46:02

loop, but

46:04

We have no way of really knowing. And if it is true that virtualization

46:07

enables psychopathy, then that's a

46:09

that's a real that's a real

46:10

conundrum. That's a real tough nut to

46:13

crack.

46:13

Yeah. And it's scary in

46:15

a way to think

46:18

that

46:18

in a way you're getting

46:20

closer to what people are

46:23

really like in anonymous

46:26

responses. We know that from

46:28

questionnaire work, that the

46:30

more

46:31

anonymous responses the less desirable the answers that you

46:34

get from people are.

46:36

But

46:37

it's, yeah, it does sound very

46:39

cynical to think that the

46:42

nasty stuff you see online is really the

46:45

human

46:45

condition, which is Well, I'm

46:48

more

46:49

I'm more Well, I'm more optimistic about that, you know, because of this

46:52

Perito distribution phenomena. I

46:54

think I'm pessimistic because it

46:56

looks like

46:58

A VERY SMALL NUMBER OF BAD ACTORS CAN CAUSE

47:00

WAY MORE TROUBLE THAN WE WOULD HAVE THOUGHT.

47:03

RIGHT? AND THAT'S A Pessimistic

47:05

IDEA IS THAT yeah, it's

47:07

only three percent who are dark

47:10

tethered types or maybe five percent. It

47:12

depends where you put the cutoff,

47:14

let's say. And that means ninety five percent of people are

47:16

going about their business in a decent

47:18

manner. But and that's a very

47:20

positive thing. But the downside is, yeah. But

47:22

that five

47:24

percent can caused a god awful amount of trouble. I mean, I talked

47:26

to Andy know

47:28

about antifa, you know? And I'll

47:30

I'll tell you how that came about.

47:33

I I was working with a group of Democrats

47:35

in the US to to help pull

47:37

the Democrat Party towards the

47:39

center. And I did that for a number

47:42

of years And there was one

47:43

topic that we used to come to a fair

47:46

bit of disagreement about, and

47:48

that was the

47:50

reality of antifa. And

47:52

the Democrats I was working with were

47:54

absolutely convinced of the absolute

47:56

reality of four chan and the right wing

47:58

conspiratorial groups but they didn't believe

48:00

that there was really any such thing as

48:02

antifa. And I thought, well, these

48:04

were smart people. And I thought, well, why the hell did they

48:06

believe that? And they said, well, there's always been race

48:08

riots in the United States. And

48:10

the degree to which Antifa has organized

48:12

is blown out of proportion, and they're not really

48:14

a formal organization and and

48:16

so on and so forth. And

48:18

I thought, Well, that's interesting because some of that's true, but you could

48:20

say the same thing about the

48:22

hypothetical right wing conspiratorial

48:24

groups. So

48:26

But then I talked to Andy, no, who's done more to cover

48:28

Antifa than any other journalist.

48:30

And I said to him,

48:32

Andy, how many Antifa cells

48:36

Let's say, do you think are operating in the United States? And he thought,

48:38

Farah, and he thought, well, maybe forty.

48:40

I said, well, how many

48:42

full time equivalent employees so

48:45

to speak, you think each of those cells

48:48

have? And he thought,

48:50

well, maybe

48:52

twenty. And so if that estimate is

48:54

vaguely

48:54

accurate, that's eight hundred

48:56

people in the entire United States as

48:58

population of three twenty million.

49:02

It's really one person in four hundred thousand.

49:04

Right? And that's sort

49:07

of statistically equivalent

49:10

to zero. you

49:12

know, that's why the democrats can say, well,

49:14

that antifa doesn't even really

49:16

exist, but the counterargument

49:18

is, yeah,

49:20

There aren't very many of them, but a small number of

49:22

people who have these dark tetrack motivations.

49:24

And I'm not saying that's unique

49:27

to Antifa, by the way. I'm

49:29

talking more about the riotous troublemakers who love

49:31

to dance in the street. You

49:34

know? If it's only one in four

49:36

hundred thousand people, that's just an

49:38

indication of how much trouble,

49:40

someone who has no

49:42

internal sense of restraint

49:44

can make manifest if they're free of

49:46

all

49:47

external social controls.

49:48

Yeah, I don't have too much to say about that, but

49:51

I would like to

49:53

talk a bit about extreme

49:57

niches that you

49:59

brought up before and where

50:01

these people end up. If

50:03

they have the proclivities for

50:06

one of the dark tetrad,

50:09

the proclivity for narcissists

50:12

would be in the realm of

50:15

politics because they

50:17

want attention and they get

50:19

it, whether it's positive or

50:21

negative, It seems to work

50:23

for them. The Machiavellians,

50:25

I think, are among the

50:27

most interesting though. Stock

50:30

markets, financial

50:32

organizations and

50:36

Although we just saw this fellow Santos made up

50:39

his CV to get elected --

50:41

Right. -- or violent. An

50:44

example of a politician who's both narcissistic

50:48

because you have to be

50:50

a politician. And

50:52

a Machiavellian, but Martie

50:54

Madoff was the

50:55

classic. He was the most popular

50:58

guy in his building on

51:00

Fifth Avenue,

51:00

big smile on his face all the time. Happy

51:03

go lucky and stealing money

51:05

from thousands of

51:08

people far

51:10

more money that he could ever use

51:12

as a billionaire, one

51:15

of more billions. But that's a

51:17

niche in which Machiavellianism will

51:20

help you get to the

51:22

top. You

51:24

have to manipulate

51:26

and hide and do

51:29

it relatively low key

51:31

unlike the narcissist. So I think we already

51:34

talked about the psychopath

51:36

and the sadist, but

51:38

it does

51:40

play out in the occupations that one

51:43

chooses to to

51:45

suit your your niche.

51:47

can

51:48

also see there that that makes the issue

51:50

of leadership a complicated one. Right?

51:52

Because -- Mhmm. -- we know that

51:55

The big five personality profile

51:57

of narcissists is something like

51:59

high extroversion

52:01

and low agreeableness. And so you you can see

52:04

there that someone whose low in

52:06

agreeableness is gonna put their

52:08

viewpoint forward

52:09

in a pretty aggressive manner and someone who's extroverted is

52:12

gonna be enthusiastic and captivating.

52:14

And so, and you

52:16

need those

52:17

You can understand that there might

52:19

be situations that cry out for

52:21

genuine leadership where both being

52:24

extroverted and being disagreeable would be an

52:26

advantage. And you know, that might

52:28

be a situation where you hope like hell that your extroverted disagreeable politician

52:30

is also extremely high in conscientiousness.

52:34

So that even though they might like attention and even they might be

52:37

less empathic than that their relative

52:39

lack of empathy would pose a certain

52:41

risk that their proclivity to

52:45

abide by a set of ethical principles would override that. But then

52:47

you get people who fake

52:49

that conscientiousness and fake

52:51

competence, which is Partly

52:53

what psychopath do when they entrap

52:56

women is

52:57

to to fake that competence and

53:00

then to look like you're abiding by

53:02

the rules when you're just being

53:04

Machiavellian and narcissistic and

53:05

manipulative. Yeah. That's fascinating

53:08

to think about different combinations.

53:12

And of

53:12

the big five, but also

53:15

of the dark the

53:17

dark tetrahed. I wrote a

53:20

paper on Steve

53:21

Jobs, for example, some time

53:23

ago. It helps to be a

53:26

genius, of course, but If you're a

53:28

a full narcissist who believes you

53:30

have the right idea and

53:32

the entire world is wrong

53:34

about

53:34

it, Everyone

53:36

disagreed with them, and

53:38

he

53:39

was right. Right? Well, that that's a

53:41

good example of that hyper successful niche. Right? So

53:43

so that's a good That's a

53:45

very interesting case because you're gonna get the

53:48

odd situation where someone

53:50

is narcissistic and hyperintelligent

53:53

and correct. In their their narcissism

53:55

and their carelessness in

53:57

some sense is absolutely what's needed

53:59

to bring forth that whole

54:01

set of

54:02

ideas. Well, in fact,

54:04

he was fired by his own company

54:06

after having proved himself to

54:08

be a genius and changing the

54:10

world in so many ways. His

54:13

own company said he was

54:15

too obnoxious. So they let

54:17

him go. Eventually, the company kind

54:19

of faded out. They had to bring

54:21

him back. But Right? How can how can you be

54:23

so super successful and fired by your own

54:25

team? Class

54:28

a case? Well, you know, I knew

54:30

people who I know people who worked

54:32

with jobs and one of the

54:34

things they told me was that

54:36

he was

54:37

he was on airing in his ability

54:39

to

54:39

cull. You know, so he had a

54:42

very high eye for quality,

54:44

but he he also didn't let empathy stop him from

54:46

killing projects he thought were

54:48

counterproductive. And that's a tough one, right,

54:50

because you can imagine

54:52

you can't

54:54

say that if you're running a company and

54:56

you're attempting to produce something,

54:58

that keeping a faltering project

55:02

going because you don't want to hurt the feelings of the employees by

55:04

bringing to a halt is a

55:06

moral virtue. It's not a moral virtue.

55:08

And the reason for that as far as I can tell

55:10

is that you're just

55:12

prolonging the agony and

55:14

awaiting the inevitable death.

55:16

Right? So you have the evidence in

55:18

some sense at hand, but you're

55:20

unwilling to draw the

55:22

appropriate conclusions from it. And there is

55:24

that same necessity

55:27

for discrimination and and

55:30

elimination

55:31

that might also be driving the

55:34

capacity, as you pointed out earlier, of a

55:36

surgeon to go into someone's body and to get rid

55:38

of the

55:39

cancer. Right? Independent of the fact that they have

55:41

to deal with the blood and the gore and the

55:43

and the pain and the fear and all of that

55:45

and they can't let that

55:47

stop them. Yeah. Agreed totally with with everything you

55:50

just said.

55:52

I

55:52

wanted to get back to the

55:55

psychometrics just for a moment. I

55:58

know you worked in-depth

56:01

on the big

56:03

five and separated into

56:06

aspects and broke it down. And that's

56:08

in a way characterizes

56:11

a certain approach

56:14

to personality. I

56:16

call the distinction

56:18

lumpers and splitters and

56:21

that's,

56:21

to some extent, been

56:23

the pro and con of my

56:26

approach trying to

56:28

tease apart or parse

56:30

the the dark side is

56:33

an approach that just made

56:35

sense to us given the

56:37

overlap in literatures that

56:39

I mentioned earlier. But

56:42

there's also a tendency you

56:46

mentioned earlier the evaluative

56:48

sense to lump together

56:50

good with

56:52

other good traits, the so called halo

56:55

has its correspondent devil

56:58

effect, and that is If you

57:00

learn something bad about somebody, you

57:03

naturally assume it's it's hard

57:05

not to to think that they have all

57:07

the other big

57:09

bad traits Mhmm. And so

57:12

that there's a lot

57:14

of in a way competitors out

57:16

there working on the

57:18

dark side

57:19

who are trying to lump

57:22

it together and call

57:24

it the d factor, the dark

57:26

factor. So it clops them

57:28

all into one. And you

57:30

can array people on this one

57:32

dimension that never appealed

57:34

to

57:35

me. I think

57:37

It's a lot more interesting to break

57:40

things into their components.

57:43

But

57:44

How how inter correlated how we're inter

57:47

correlated are the four scales

57:49

on average? And does it,

57:51

can you extract out a

57:54

single factor? How much of that

57:56

factor account for?

57:58

Yes, excellent question. We

58:01

started off with correlations between

58:04

point three and point five with

58:06

the dark triad. And that is

58:09

definitely all positive.

58:11

They're never negative

58:12

correlations. But

58:14

to some people that was

58:16

too high, especially point

58:19

five or means, why why don't you just add

58:21

them together and call it something

58:24

else? Yeah. And that's what

58:26

the the so called de factor people

58:28

have done It

58:30

just seems such a silly

58:32

simplicity to me that you

58:34

could look at your fellow human

58:37

beings and call them place

58:40

them at a certain

58:43

position on this

58:46

single darkness when there's so

58:48

many ways of being dark.

58:50

There might be one way of

58:52

being a good

58:53

person, but there's many ways of

58:56

being dark. The approach that we took? Well,

58:58

technically, what you'd

58:58

want to show is that

59:01

your multiple measures interestingly

59:04

predict different outcomes and differentially.

59:07

And you talked a little bit about

59:09

occupational choice. I mean, the the rubber

59:11

hits the road basically by

59:13

having you demonstrate that

59:16

your multiplicity of categories

59:19

adds predictive power

59:22

to in some interesting way to the solution of some complex problem. I

59:24

mean, it certainly seems to me to be useful,

59:26

at least in principle, to

59:29

distinguish something like Sadism and

59:32

positive pleasure taken in the suffering

59:34

from others, from mere impulsivity. You

59:36

know, even though both of those

59:39

can be problematic, I'd also like to suggest

59:41

something else to to the

59:44

listeners. We we might ask

59:46

ourselves why

59:48

in some fundamental

59:50

sense are these behaviors,

59:52

these dark tethered behaviors

59:55

properly regarded as pathological. And I think,

59:58

especially given that you could make the case

1:00:00

that they have some reproductive benefits, at

1:00:02

least compared to certain other

1:00:04

strategies. But I think the

1:00:06

issue here, you tell me what you think about

1:00:08

this, it has to do. And this

1:00:10

is like a biology of ethics in

1:00:12

some sense. It has to do

1:00:14

with utterability. And so,

1:00:16

there's this famous study set

1:00:18

of studies by York

1:00:20

Panczepp, where he analyzed

1:00:22

the the play behavior

1:00:24

of juvenile male rats.

1:00:27

And what he showed was

1:00:29

that if you put two juvenile rats together, and

1:00:31

one outweighs the other by ten

1:00:34

percent. There's about a ninety percent

1:00:36

probability that the bigger rat

1:00:38

can pin the smaller

1:00:40

rat. And so if you just do

1:00:42

that once, the conclusion you would

1:00:44

draw if you

1:00:46

were up. Like a zero sum biologist and someone interested in

1:00:48

dominance is you'd say, well, the bigger,

1:00:50

stronger, meaner, dark

1:00:54

kettrad rat can win the competition and

1:00:56

therefore has elevated himself in

1:00:58

the hierarchy of dominance and is more

1:01:00

likely

1:01:01

to reproduce successfully. But

1:01:04

PANKSAP being a bit of a

1:01:06

genius knew

1:01:07

that rats lived in social

1:01:09

communities and had iterated interactions

1:01:12

with one another. And so they

1:01:14

you don't play with another rat if you're a

1:01:16

young rat only once. You play with them

1:01:18

repeatedly. And so paying separate paired

1:01:21

them repeatedly. And what he showed

1:01:23

was the second time he put the

1:01:25

rats together, the little rat had to invite the

1:01:27

big rat to play. And mammals have

1:01:30

a characteristic strategy for

1:01:32

play invitation. You can see that in dogs.

1:01:34

They sort of bounce. And so do kids

1:01:36

and so do sheep like it's extremely

1:01:39

widespread among mammals. And and

1:01:42

so the little rat had to ask the big rat to

1:01:44

play and the big rat would deem to play.

1:01:46

But if you paired them together repeatedly,

1:01:48

if that Big rat didn't let

1:01:50

the little rat win at

1:01:53

least thirty percent of the

1:01:55

time. The little rat

1:01:57

would stop And so I thought it was an

1:01:59

unbelievably profound set of studies because it indicated that

1:02:02

there was an emergent

1:02:04

ethos that

1:02:06

was intrinsic to repeated

1:02:08

trades. You know and

1:02:10

you know the economic games where you you

1:02:12

take two people and you say, look,

1:02:14

I'm I'm gonna give you a hundred dollars and

1:02:17

you can offer some fraction of

1:02:19

that to your partner. But if

1:02:21

he refuses neither of you get

1:02:23

anything, You play that around the world and people average

1:02:25

out at about fifty percent. And it's

1:02:27

the case that even poor people

1:02:29

who need the money are very

1:02:32

likely to reject a sharing

1:02:34

offer that isn't something approximating

1:02:36

fifty percent. And you might

1:02:38

say, well, that's preposterous because

1:02:40

why not just take the money and leave?

1:02:42

And the answer is something like, yeah,

1:02:44

but there's an ethos of fair play that

1:02:46

emerges out of repeated interactions, and

1:02:49

your goal isn't to win a single

1:02:51

game. It's to win a set of iterated

1:02:53

games. And the problem

1:02:55

with the psychopathic perspective and the

1:02:57

impulsive perspective is that even the

1:02:59

psychopath themselves sacrificed their

1:03:02

own future

1:03:04

as well as other people to the immediate gratification

1:03:06

of their desires. And that's just not a very

1:03:10

sophisticated strategy. Right? Why win

1:03:12

once when you could hypothetically

1:03:14

win fifty percent of the

1:03:15

time, a

1:03:17

hundred times? And so, I think we can get close to a

1:03:20

technical description in this sense of

1:03:22

what constitutes pathological behavior.

1:03:25

Right? It's pathological behavior is the proclivity to gain in the

1:03:28

short term, but lose in the medium to

1:03:30

long run. Yeah. I've thought

1:03:32

about this in

1:03:34

terms of The

1:03:38

winner in animal groups,

1:03:40

the alpha male, so to

1:03:42

speak, is usually the meanest nastiest

1:03:45

of the group. And in

1:03:48

human groups, the meanest

1:03:50

nastiness doesn't rise to the

1:03:53

top You have to have allies. So

1:03:56

alliance building is an

1:03:58

important component of success in human

1:04:00

societies, not

1:04:02

so much It is

1:04:04

apparently in chimpanzees, but

1:04:07

it's really important. You get to

1:04:09

the top if you can

1:04:12

link associate and get friends, get

1:04:14

allies to help you

1:04:16

in getting to the top.

1:04:20

Well, friends friends to wall in his work

1:04:22

has demonstrated quite clearly that

1:04:26

the the stable alpha

1:04:28

males. Like, there are alpha males who can make

1:04:30

it to the top, who are sort of

1:04:32

dark cat trap chimps. Right? They'll use

1:04:34

just brute force but they tend to

1:04:36

meet pretty damn violent ends

1:04:38

pretty young. Whereas the

1:04:40

stable alphas sometimes are

1:04:42

smaller males who ally themselves with

1:04:44

powerful females, but who are

1:04:46

also more reciprocal often in their

1:04:49

interactions. So more fair traders, let's

1:04:51

say, than any other individual in the

1:04:53

group. And so, duet has done this

1:04:55

lovely job of relating, let's

1:04:58

say, cooperative

1:05:00

leadership to social stability and length of rain.

1:05:02

And so the psychopathic chimp might

1:05:04

do better than the the chimp

1:05:06

who is only withdrawing and

1:05:09

never interacts at all. But

1:05:11

the psychopathic chimp who relies on aggression doesn't

1:05:13

do nearly as well as the reciprocal

1:05:15

chimp who builds a

1:05:17

network of allies. And so

1:05:19

and III well, I I really liked the

1:05:22

world's word for that reason, you know,

1:05:24

because it's often the fact that

1:05:26

people who presume that our

1:05:28

hierarchies are based on PowerPoint

1:05:30

to say chimpanzees and

1:05:31

say, no, it's power that

1:05:33

sustains dominance. It's like,

1:05:35

no, Power can provide you

1:05:37

with dominance in the short run,

1:05:39

but it's not an optimized

1:05:41

long term strategy. And so

1:05:44

it's reasonable to view it in some sense as

1:05:46

a form of deviant

1:05:47

pathology, especially in small extreme forms, because it's

1:05:49

a self defeating game. Yeah.

1:05:52

This notion of getting

1:05:55

people on your side

1:05:57

are developing allies Of course,

1:06:00

is essential for politicians.

1:06:02

It's the one with

1:06:05

the most voters, the one

1:06:07

with the most compatriots supporting them money

1:06:09

wise and otherwise who gets to

1:06:11

the top. We, apart

1:06:14

from Machiavelli, we've also been drawn

1:06:17

buying on Sunsoo,

1:06:20

the famous art of

1:06:22

war writer from China, And

1:06:25

as in many cases, the Chinese got

1:06:27

there before the West

1:06:30

did, but he talked about

1:06:32

building alliances And

1:06:34

indeed,

1:06:35

we tried

1:06:37

to invoke that in our

1:06:40

measures, and it turns out

1:06:42

to be A key

1:06:45

for manipulation, the

1:06:48

Machiavellian is well aware, and

1:06:50

you can see that in some of the items on the

1:06:52

MAX scale, of getting people on your side is

1:06:54

essential to getting ahead.

1:06:56

It might might be the key

1:06:58

the key element to

1:07:00

it. Not standing

1:07:02

up and leading by

1:07:05

getting people

1:07:07

to to to be persuaded

1:07:09

to your side? Right. So the

1:07:12

the Machiavellian then in that

1:07:14

situation, the Machiavellian I would

1:07:16

say is

1:07:18

mimicking reciprocal social ability.

1:07:20

Right? Because if you and I

1:07:22

form a relationship that's gonna be stable

1:07:26

over time, It's going to

1:07:28

be something like, let's say, a sixty percent sixty percent exchange.

1:07:31

You'll contribute half and

1:07:34

all contribute half. But the reason I represented that

1:07:36

is sixty percent or maybe seventy five

1:07:39

percent is because if you and

1:07:41

I engage in reciprocal honest

1:07:44

trading, the sub the sum total of

1:07:46

our activity will exceed the sum of

1:07:48

our individual activities. Right? We can do more

1:07:50

together than we can do a part.

1:07:53

And so there's there's all

1:07:55

sorts of sense to be made for the

1:07:57

establishment of these honest, durable,

1:07:59

and reciprocal relationships. But

1:08:01

What that also means is that if most people

1:08:04

establish those, then people

1:08:06

who only act as if they're

1:08:08

establishing them can capitalize

1:08:10

on that. Just like the narcissists and

1:08:13

the psychopaths with their false

1:08:15

confidence can mimic competence and

1:08:18

fool while there's good literature evidence

1:08:20

for example that the dark

1:08:23

tetrod types broadly speaking are

1:08:25

particularly good if they're male

1:08:27

at fooling young women. You know, as women

1:08:29

get older, they're better to they get better at

1:08:31

separating out the narcissists from the competent men. But initially,

1:08:34

because the narcissists have

1:08:36

this confidence that

1:08:38

is a marker of competence even though not

1:08:39

an, you know, an invariable marker. They can easily be

1:08:43

fooled. And so

1:08:47

That opens up the landscape of co operators

1:08:49

to exploitation by a small

1:08:52

minority of

1:08:55

predators and parasites. So so what else

1:08:57

have you found out on the social media front? And and and where do you think

1:08:59

the interesting research

1:09:03

is, let's let's Where's the interesting research

1:09:05

going on in that area? And do you have any sense

1:09:07

of what sort of constraints

1:09:10

need to be put in

1:09:12

place in

1:09:14

online forums to keep the psychopath under control. Like, I've come out recently

1:09:19

against anonymity because my

1:09:23

sense, I've read tens of thousands of of

1:09:25

online comments. My sense

1:09:27

is that a

1:09:32

radical proportion of anonymous posters have these dark

1:09:34

Tetrahed traits, and I know there's a research literature that actually

1:09:36

indicates that as

1:09:39

well. And so I've

1:09:41

been attacked for that because people think that, you know, their right to

1:09:43

free speech also involves

1:09:48

this right to anonymous posting, and I can

1:09:50

understand that argument. But the problem is it it opens up it does

1:09:52

seem to me to open

1:09:54

up the landscape to the hereditary

1:09:57

parasite types, and that's a real problem. So have you

1:09:59

thought about, like, what

1:10:03

have you seen that you regard

1:10:06

as the credible deterrence, if any, on the on the virtual side to the

1:10:09

dominance and and

1:10:12

proliferation of of

1:10:14

dark tetrad behavior. No,

1:10:21

really no solutions have come

1:10:23

to mind.

1:10:24

It seems out of control

1:10:26

when you go to a website,

1:10:31

and ask for comments, which

1:10:34

is really trying

1:10:36

to get feedback to

1:10:38

whatever is on your

1:10:40

site. It seems I

1:10:42

think somebody calculated, it takes about ten comments

1:10:44

before someone says,

1:10:47

oh, yeah. Fuck you. Yeah.

1:10:51

Well, so you're talking about

1:10:53

this this proclivity of of

1:10:55

open online discards to turn into

1:10:57

a kind of swarm and characterized

1:10:59

by the the presence of, why really do

1:11:01

think it heats up the whole political environment

1:11:04

because, you know, you alluded to earlier the

1:11:06

fact that there's lots of things people won't

1:11:08

say in person,

1:11:10

partly for legal reasons, but also partly for physical reasons. And both the

1:11:12

legal and the

1:11:15

physical constraints are removed in

1:11:19

the virtualized world, and that

1:11:21

does seem to produce

1:11:23

an unbelievable flowering

1:11:26

of pathological commentary. And then I really

1:11:28

do believe that that makes

1:11:30

everyone think the world and

1:11:32

the people in it are a

1:11:34

lot worse than they really are. Because it

1:11:36

magnifies the effect of these this tiny minority, especially

1:11:39

the sadists, you know. It's been so

1:11:41

interesting to me

1:11:43

to watch concept of dark triad expand

1:11:45

to take into account that positive delight and suffering because I

1:11:47

don't think you can

1:11:50

really understand, like, radical

1:11:52

evil by

1:11:54

merely making making reference to narcissism and and instrumental

1:11:57

malchiavellianism and

1:12:00

even psychopathy. You

1:12:02

need pleasure and suffering to

1:12:04

really add that

1:12:05

last, you know, nail into the

1:12:08

coffin so to

1:12:09

speak. Yeah. One interesting goal we

1:12:11

had was to try to

1:12:14

find

1:12:15

the female Mhmm.

1:12:18

On all of on

1:12:21

all four of

1:12:22

these components, we've mailed

1:12:27

score higher and Even in

1:12:29

sadism, we figured, there's the

1:12:31

mean girls phenomenon. We all

1:12:33

have this sense that

1:12:35

women can be nasty, in

1:12:38

different ways, perhaps. And so we tried to develop items,

1:12:41

especially with my

1:12:43

colleague, Aaron Buckles, at

1:12:47

the working on this. And

1:12:50

so is Tracy Vaeinkur at

1:12:52

OttawaU. They

1:12:55

are looking at relational aggression.

1:12:58

So women may use

1:13:02

different ways not physical or

1:13:05

less physical and

1:13:08

gossiping, for example,

1:13:11

spreading spreading lies There are

1:13:14

a few others that exploit

1:13:17

the verbal abilities

1:13:20

of women and

1:13:22

allow them to be

1:13:25

nasty to people that

1:13:27

they think deserve it. And

1:13:30

so those people are working actively on trying

1:13:32

to get a

1:13:35

measure of sadism that

1:13:38

would apply to women even

1:13:40

more than to men because I

1:13:43

wonder

1:13:43

if that I wonder if

1:13:46

that would involve pleasure in

1:13:48

exclusion You know, I mean, it's it's definitely

1:13:50

the case that, well, if you use time out on a child, one of the reasons it

1:13:52

works is because

1:13:55

it's technically a punish It

1:13:57

produces something akin to pain, but the pain is

1:13:59

essentially social it's involuntary social isolation. And

1:14:03

so if you exclude which is what the mean girl

1:14:05

types do. Right? That's their their primary

1:14:10

this reputation destruction and exclusion seems to be their

1:14:12

particular bailiwick. You see that with

1:14:14

female antisocial behavior. And there is

1:14:17

a pain associated with that, which is

1:14:19

the pain of social rejection, and it's not trivial. Like, it's very,

1:14:21

very hard on people. And so you

1:14:23

could imagine that

1:14:27

positive delight in observing the fruits of social exclusion might

1:14:29

be a canonical characteristic

1:14:31

of female sadism.

1:14:34

Yeah, that's a good idea to focus

1:14:36

on that because we know

1:14:38

that male friendships are more

1:14:41

based on common interests female

1:14:44

friendships are more of a bonding,

1:14:46

an emotional bonding, and therefore the

1:14:48

exclusion tactic

1:14:50

would be much more devastating

1:14:53

for

1:14:54

women. Good idea. Yeah.

1:14:57

Yeah. Well, So I studied the development of male

1:14:59

and female anti social behavior for a long time, you know. And it's

1:15:03

pretty obvious that female

1:15:06

antisocial types by and large are less sort of impulsively

1:15:11

criminal than males are,

1:15:13

which is why there aren't very

1:15:16

many females in jail. But that ability to

1:15:18

denigrate and to gossip and to destroy reputation

1:15:22

is much more characteristic of the female

1:15:24

anti social types, and they can be

1:15:26

really, really good at it. And the

1:15:29

frightening thing about that too to some

1:15:31

degree is that, you know, male

1:15:33

aggression of the physical sort

1:15:35

doesn't scale with a dam on

1:15:37

social media because you can't use physical

1:15:39

aggression on social media. But the

1:15:41

female pattern of antisocial behavior, which is reputation destruction and social

1:15:44

in exclusion,

1:15:47

man, that scales like a charm on social media, especially

1:15:49

because of what you described as

1:15:52

the negative halo effect. You

1:15:54

know, and I've really noticed this

1:15:57

I should be very resistant to that negative halo effect

1:15:59

when I pick out my guests

1:16:02

for my podcast day

1:16:04

because I

1:16:06

have had a lot of guests on my

1:16:08

podcast. And now and then, I

1:16:10

talk to people who've been logged

1:16:14

excluded or had their reputation damaged

1:16:16

for one reason or another. You know,

1:16:18

and even when I know perfectly

1:16:21

well, that there's a high probability that

1:16:23

they've been lied about and that they've been the target of this kind of malicious gossip. There's

1:16:27

still a strong proclivity

1:16:30

in me that I have to fight

1:16:33

to overcome not to

1:16:35

assume something like, well,

1:16:37

where there's smoke, there's fire.

1:16:39

You know, and you don't have to sully someone's

1:16:42

reputation much before

1:16:44

you raise the cost that

1:16:47

other people need to bear to interact with

1:16:48

them. Right? I mean, we all

1:16:50

have

1:16:50

in principle

1:16:51

thousands of people we

1:16:53

could interact with.

1:16:54

And so we're always looking for a reason in some

1:16:56

sense not to interact with people.

1:16:58

And if a terrible rumor

1:17:02

has spread about someone, well, The cost to me to that person

1:17:04

can be very very low, but the cost

1:17:06

to that person if everyone avoids them

1:17:08

is unbelievably high.

1:17:11

Yeah. Most people care

1:17:14

about how a person treats them specifically and can overlook

1:17:21

rumors often because the other person

1:17:23

has treated them personally

1:17:27

well. So that's that's

1:17:30

a dynamic that works in

1:17:32

the other direction to cut down

1:17:34

on the negative effect of rumors and

1:17:38

gossip that sort of thing. Right. Assuming assuming

1:17:40

that you actually have that personal relationship,

1:17:42

you know, one of the things

1:17:45

I've also seen as a consequence of

1:17:47

virtualization, you know, if I'm if

1:17:49

I'm working with

1:17:51

people virtually.

1:17:51

And so we haven't established that

1:17:54

kind of personal

1:17:55

relationship. If any issue comes up that's negative, it seems to

1:17:57

have a larger effect than it would

1:17:59

if we had

1:18:03

established a long term more personal face to face interaction.

1:18:05

So as long as things are going

1:18:07

smoothly, the virtual interaction seems

1:18:09

to go well, but it's

1:18:11

really easy for anything negative to be

1:18:13

magnified. And I think it's partly because you

1:18:16

don't have that buffer that you

1:18:18

just described, which is maybe something

1:18:20

like The

1:18:22

evidence of repeated interactions face to

1:18:25

face, evidence of repeated acts of

1:18:27

kindness and so forth so that you

1:18:29

have that as a data body

1:18:31

to offset

1:18:31

the, you know, the negative event

1:18:34

against. Yeah. Right

1:18:37

on on all

1:18:39

of those points. I I did

1:18:42

wanna

1:18:42

talk a little bit about your

1:18:45

your work on

1:18:47

the big five with

1:18:51

respect to the challenges

1:18:53

to the big five, as

1:18:55

well as the challenges to

1:18:58

my work. Kind of dovetail

1:19:00

in an interesting way. And

1:19:02

that is, although the big

1:19:05

five has become the

1:19:07

consensus for the broad personality traits. So

1:19:10

big fibers mostly

1:19:12

assume that they've covered

1:19:15

it all because they're working at such a high level. And people

1:19:17

like me who are

1:19:20

working from time

1:19:22

to time on individual

1:19:24

traits that would

1:19:26

be farther down the

1:19:30

hierarchy of the personality

1:19:32

space Now it turns

1:19:34

out that you can one and that's

1:19:37

been contributed by Astrand

1:19:39

and Lee to to

1:19:43

Canadian researchers, to some extent, eaten

1:19:45

away at the popularity of the

1:19:47

big five, by talking

1:19:50

about the big six or

1:19:52

the hexaco, hectic coal.

1:19:54

And what they've added

1:19:57

is a dimension called

1:19:59

the humility, honesty humility, which there

1:20:01

was a brain choice I

1:20:03

thought. But but it turns

1:20:05

out that that extra dimension

1:20:08

they added subumes all of

1:20:10

the dark traits that I've been working on. 00I didn't know that. We won one task of that.

1:20:13

Oh,

1:20:14

when was that discovered?

1:20:17

That has

1:20:18

been coming to light over the last five years.

1:20:23

And so So I've

1:20:26

certainly turned to favoring the big six instead of the big five in

1:20:28

in some of

1:20:31

my recent work. In

1:20:33

terms of We know the personality space is

1:20:35

rather amorphous and you

1:20:41

can rotate dimensions in multiple ways

1:20:43

to suit your fancy. But this

1:20:46

one suits me because

1:20:49

It shows where the dark traits fall with respect

1:20:51

to a comprehensive personality space. They

1:20:54

all fall together under this

1:20:59

this one dimension honesty humility. And

1:21:02

so I really appreciated

1:21:04

the

1:21:06

Astrand and Lee for No. Do you do you

1:21:09

think that's because Astrand and Lee

1:21:11

isn't because they included

1:21:14

in some sense some of the originally excluded

1:21:16

words from their statistical

1:21:18

samples of adjectives, the ones

1:21:20

that are more evaluative. Because

1:21:23

I mean, your phrases or senses

1:21:25

are really quite evaluative on the moral dimension. And so they

1:21:27

wouldn't have been considered in

1:21:30

the initial big five

1:21:32

corpus And then, honesty, humility seems

1:21:34

to be kind of in the middle of that. Right? Because it's obviously better morally to be honest

1:21:36

and humbled and to

1:21:39

be dishonest and arrogant. And

1:21:41

so you're sneaking there or stepping into the domain of of ethical categorization. But I

1:21:43

wanted to ask you, actually, like,

1:21:46

if you if you throw

1:21:48

your your

1:21:50

sentences into a sentence level

1:21:53

big five like the

1:21:55

notion model, do

1:21:57

the I think what you just said is

1:21:59

that the individual senses will line up the dark tried or dark senses will line up on

1:22:01

a dimension that's the opposite side

1:22:03

of honesty, humility. Do

1:22:07

they break out across other factors as well?

1:22:10

Or like how much

1:22:12

does honesty,

1:22:15

humility the dark triad

1:22:17

on the negative side. Well, it's

1:22:20

pretty much

1:22:23

the whole the whole thing is there under honesty

1:22:25

humility. They do have a

1:22:27

couple of other negative

1:22:31

traits in there So there's a slightly

1:22:34

broader, which suggests maybe we could add a couple

1:22:36

of other negative traits

1:22:39

to our pantheon of

1:22:41

of averse of personality. That's one direction to look in

1:22:43

anyway. Mhmm. It's interesting

1:22:46

what you say about

1:22:48

the yeah,

1:22:51

pulling out the the negative traits which

1:22:53

-- Yeah. -- Kattel Kattel did

1:22:55

many years ago and Kelligan

1:22:57

and a few others

1:22:59

have pursued that. And indeed, I think

1:23:01

that's that's there if one looks hard enough that the work of

1:23:04

earlier personality

1:23:08

researchers The big seven was

1:23:10

available in the seventies. And one of those looked

1:23:12

like looks

1:23:15

like a dark personality factor. So when that

1:23:18

would make an interesting paper to

1:23:20

to track that

1:23:22

issue. Interesting, you put that

1:23:24

together.

1:23:25

Has anybody done a

1:23:28

large

1:23:28

scale compilation of the

1:23:31

dark tetrad items with the

1:23:34

hexagonal model, like, on thousands and

1:23:36

thousands of

1:23:37

people, have

1:23:38

you done that

1:23:39

yet? Others have done that

1:23:41

yet. Yeah,

1:23:42

it's there. The Germans have always been known as good

1:23:47

psychometricians and They've shown

1:23:50

in a number of large scale studies that both in German and in English,

1:23:52

they can work as

1:23:55

well in

1:23:55

English, have show

1:23:59

that clear pattern. Oh, yeah.

1:24:01

Okay. Well, that's really worthwhile

1:24:03

knowing. So what What

1:24:06

forms of behavior do you think are most powerfully predicted by

1:24:09

the dark

1:24:12

tetrad questionnaires?

1:24:15

Like, the the sorts of things that people might encounter in their day

1:24:17

to day life if we can bring this to

1:24:19

life for people. We're

1:24:23

focusing on a set of personality at personality attributes.

1:24:25

What do you likely do experience if

1:24:27

you encounter someone who is

1:24:30

characterized Blair Plathora of these of

1:24:32

these

1:24:33

characteristics? Well,

1:24:35

that's been it's

1:24:37

kind of a summary

1:24:39

of our goals in my

1:24:42

laboratory and that is we want to develop practical measurement instruments.

1:24:48

One can find a

1:24:50

lot of interesting things in Freud's Thanatos and Young's

1:24:56

shadow, but you're not going to be able to

1:24:58

ask people about those in a job interview. So

1:25:00

what we want are measures

1:25:02

that can be applied to

1:25:06

ordinary people, whether they're

1:25:12

job selection you want

1:25:14

that kinds of people and sometimes you want a little bit of the dark side, sometimes

1:25:16

not. Even

1:25:21

in these romantic websites where you're pairing

1:25:23

up people, you wanna know

1:25:25

a little bit about the

1:25:28

potential partners

1:25:31

the dark side is

1:25:33

starting to prove useful

1:25:36

there. So

1:25:40

practical measures that you

1:25:41

can present to large groups

1:25:44

or diagnosed

1:25:48

people is is what

1:25:50

we've been aiming for. And so the psychometrics have been

1:25:52

the most important

1:25:55

thing getting it

1:25:56

right. So

1:25:58

we tried in California on

1:26:00

that front. This might be something

1:26:02

you'd be interested in methodologically. So

1:26:05

I put together a behavioral predictive

1:26:08

battery that was very short

1:26:10

cognitive analysis, which is basically

1:26:13

the Raven's progressive matrices

1:26:15

revised We we we made our own matrices, but we got a good central

1:26:17

measure of general cognitive ability. And then

1:26:19

a good fake proof

1:26:22

measure of the big five. And we we made it fake by

1:26:24

forcing people to choose between

1:26:26

positive descriptors or between negative

1:26:29

descriptors. We lost a

1:26:31

degree of freedom by we made

1:26:33

the test robust against social self presentation. I did that

1:26:35

with Jacob Hirsch. And then so

1:26:38

I used those tests

1:26:40

to predict entrepreneurial success in thousands of

1:26:42

people in Silicon Valley. I was working

1:26:45

with a man a

1:26:47

day of rest who ran an institute

1:26:49

called the founder institute, which was the biggest early stage tech incubator in

1:26:51

the world. I think he started

1:26:54

five thousand companies, something like that.

1:26:56

And We

1:26:58

can predict entrepreneurial ability pretty

1:27:00

well, basically with general cognitive

1:27:03

ability, trade openness, and a bit

1:27:05

of a positive tilt for

1:27:07

age. And but this is what was happening in his

1:27:09

classes. Hey, get fifty people

1:27:12

together to at

1:27:14

a very early stage the development of their business ideas. And

1:27:16

now and then, he'd get a couple

1:27:18

of bad apples in the group, and

1:27:22

that would just just destroy the class, and then he was spending all

1:27:24

his time attending to the troublemakers. So he

1:27:26

came back to us and he said, look,

1:27:29

we're doing a pretty good job of finding people

1:27:31

who qualified, but we can't keep out the troublemakers. And I

1:27:33

thought, well, could we do

1:27:35

that psychometrically? So this might be

1:27:37

something interesting to consider in relationship

1:27:39

to the dark try it in

1:27:42

the personality

1:27:42

disorders. So you know there's there is a central factor in personality disorders

1:27:47

If you turn the personality disorder

1:27:50

items in the DSM into questionnaire items, you can extract

1:27:52

out a single factor and

1:27:54

one of the best predictors of

1:27:57

failure to respond to clinical intervention

1:27:59

on the personality disorder side is sheer number of

1:28:03

personality disorder symptoms. So

1:28:06

it's kind of just like a

1:28:08

severity

1:28:08

index. You know? So what we did was we we

1:28:10

turned the DSM personality disorder items into questions.

1:28:15

And then we administered them to a very large

1:28:17

number of people. And then we pulled

1:28:19

out a central factor. And

1:28:21

then we found the items

1:28:24

in the personality disorder

1:28:26

questionnaire that best predicted the central tendency, and those that predicted

1:28:31

it the least.

1:28:32

And then we force people to choose between

1:28:34

them. They both sound bad. They both sound like pathological attributes.

1:28:39

But one is much more clearly a marker of the

1:28:41

central proclivity than the other. And then

1:28:43

we did the same

1:28:45

thing with Wing's

1:28:48

narcissism scale. And so

1:28:50

then we were able to identify people who had this narcissistic proclivity and

1:28:55

personality disorder proclivity. And we

1:28:58

screened those people out if they scored

1:29:00

more than ninety fifth percentile and that cut

1:29:02

the incidence of trouble making the classes dramatically.

1:29:05

So the reason

1:29:06

I'm bringing this up is because utilizing it'd be it'd be very interesting to see

1:29:08

and

1:29:08

maybe you guys have already done this and so

1:29:10

this is also a question on that front

1:29:15

is like a lot of the personality disorder

1:29:19

symptoms look to

1:29:21

me like they're

1:29:24

manifestations of the more severe end of

1:29:26

the dark catrad traits. And it would be lovely to see this psychometric enterprise

1:29:29

enter the domain

1:29:32

of psychopathological prediction and

1:29:34

maybe the doorway through that

1:29:36

is the honesty humility

1:29:38

dimension differentiated out into the you

1:29:40

know, more antisocial pathology is in the manner that you've done

1:29:42

it. It sounds like that's an interesting bridge into the

1:29:47

technically clinical world. Well,

1:29:48

that's been a dynamic

1:29:50

in the development of our

1:29:53

understanding of the link

1:29:55

between normal and clinical

1:29:58

traits. Again, I don't want to step on the toes of clinicians, but I understand

1:30:04

the movement toward trying to

1:30:06

make all clinical disorders

1:30:09

dimensional. And that's been

1:30:11

a real clash between

1:30:14

the traditional clinicians who feel that you've got schizophrenia or you don't got

1:30:17

schizophrenia as

1:30:20

opposed to having

1:30:22

a dimension that represents a

1:30:25

particular disorder and placing

1:30:27

people on it. And

1:30:29

so I understand why

1:30:31

people would some clinicians who are

1:30:34

on have a

1:30:36

psychometric proclivity are

1:30:38

a little bit offended

1:30:40

at me trying to

1:30:42

come up with labels that sound like clinical disorders

1:30:45

but aren't

1:30:48

really because all of the

1:30:50

people I study are doing okay. And you alluded to this earlier, but there's

1:30:56

very little mail adjustment

1:30:58

among any of those four

1:31:04

dark personalities you can't get

1:31:06

them to correlate very strongly with, especially with the general neuroticism

1:31:08

or

1:31:11

feeling of distress. They're not

1:31:14

distressed. Whether they're

1:31:16

high or

1:31:17

low, there's there's there's very

1:31:19

little relation there. Right?

1:31:22

That's an interesting case of the of the absence of distress being a marker for pathology

1:31:28

because That is the problem

1:31:30

with being a psychopath in some real sense as you do impulsive things and they hurt

1:31:33

you in the

1:31:36

long run. Which is why you end up

1:31:38

in prison or with no friends or as a catastrophic failure by the age of forty. But none of

1:31:40

that's being marked by

1:31:42

psychological distress along the way.

1:31:46

So you're you're opaque to

1:31:48

the to the trouble that your own pathology

1:31:50

is causing, and that means you're not getting

1:31:52

error signals when you should. So you're

1:31:54

not depressed or anxious. But you're also whistling in the

1:31:56

dark as you walk towards

1:31:58

a cliff, so not helpful.

1:32:02

Yeah, a very clever study

1:32:05

that you outlined there.

1:32:07

Sometimes one gets a sample

1:32:09

or an opportunity to

1:32:11

to study a certain and that's what carries one's research. But

1:32:14

if you think about it, that's

1:32:16

been a difficulty in

1:32:19

doing dark side research You've

1:32:21

got to validate these measures, so you've got to

1:32:23

have hard criteria, especially

1:32:28

behavior

1:32:29

you can rely on

1:32:31

the judgments of others to some

1:32:33

extent, but hard

1:32:35

visible recordable behavior is really the

1:32:39

most persuasive kind of criterion, but think about sadism.

1:32:41

How are you gonna show that in

1:32:43

the laboratory? That was

1:32:45

a real challenge to

1:32:48

us, but But in a way

1:32:50

it was fun developing measures that can

1:32:52

be

1:32:53

used, can get by

1:32:55

these very restrictive

1:32:57

IRB boards that look through your work and say, no, you

1:33:00

can't do that,

1:33:02

you can't do this. And

1:33:06

so we came up with

1:33:08

this notion of bug killing,

1:33:10

which I guess I have

1:33:12

to attribute that to Dan

1:33:15

Jones. Who came up with the notion of getting

1:33:17

people to think that they're

1:33:19

crunching bugs

1:33:21

in a

1:33:23

coffee grinder. And again, such variants,

1:33:25

some people loved it.

1:33:28

We we tried to

1:33:30

answer Primoris Fis the bugs names.

1:33:32

So there was a a little

1:33:34

wee container that had names like

1:33:39

Ike and Muffin cute little names, but

1:33:42

they had to take these bugs, put them into the cruncher, press

1:33:45

down and

1:33:48

hear the what sounded like

1:33:50

bug parts flying apart. It was actually just

1:33:56

coffee beans. But again, like the

1:33:58

mill room study, they thought that we're doing it. And when some of

1:34:00

the subjects

1:34:01

say, I didn't give a got

1:34:03

anymore, that was fun.

1:34:06

Other people were so

1:34:08

horrified to think about the whole idea

1:34:10

they just ran out of the

1:34:13

lab when we just scribe what we

1:34:15

wanted them to do. Lovely to have

1:34:17

variants like that when you're

1:34:20

studying something

1:34:24

sensitive like sadism. We also use

1:34:26

voodoo dolls. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that research. Giving subjects

1:34:31

acutely loyal and saying,

1:34:33

think of the person that you really dislike. Now we're

1:34:35

gonna leave you alone

1:34:39

for five minutes. And you're

1:34:41

welcome to take this this

1:34:43

set of pins and stick them into the

1:34:47

doll to represent degree which you hate

1:34:49

them. And again, lots

1:34:51

of variants there. We

1:34:54

come back after five

1:34:56

minutes some of these dolls

1:34:58

are full of pens. And that tends to correlate with,

1:35:00

I think this

1:35:03

particular study was actually showing

1:35:08

the the dark tetrad

1:35:10

measures in comparison

1:35:13

to questionnaire measures

1:35:16

of psychiatrists'ism. Which is, in

1:35:17

a sense, answer the question

1:35:19

that you often pose

1:35:23

yourself when you're listening to a

1:35:25

horrible crime described on

1:35:28

television and you

1:35:30

wonder This is such a horrible crime was the

1:35:32

person crazy, the right word

1:35:34

was the person nasty, and

1:35:37

that has legal consequences, doesn't

1:35:39

it? You're crazy. You're not guilty. You're you're just

1:35:42

nasty. You can go

1:35:44

away

1:35:45

for some time to doing

1:35:47

nasty stuff. both contributed to the

1:35:49

extent that you can measure

1:35:52

psychiatrists'ism with questionary

1:35:55

measures debatable. We found

1:35:59

that independently

1:36:01

the dark tethered

1:36:04

and psychiatrists

1:36:05

predicted the number of pins that you stuck in this

1:36:08

this sorry little

1:36:10

doll that you were

1:36:12

given.

1:36:14

So, Dell, you've been delving into the

1:36:16

dark side of human behavior for a

1:36:19

long time. And, you know,

1:36:21

you alluded to the fact or the

1:36:23

possibility of a certain pessimism that emerged

1:36:25

as a consequence of your

1:36:28

observation that sometimes anonymous

1:36:30

responses are actually more revealing

1:36:33

and anonymous behavior on the net has produced

1:36:35

quite the uptick in pathological behavior. But

1:36:40

what what has been what has

1:36:42

been the consequence for you personally in focusing so intensely

1:36:44

on this dark

1:36:47

area of human

1:36:48

proclivity. And, well,

1:36:51

let's

1:36:51

start with

1:36:56

that. Oh, yes. And then the

1:36:58

other thing was how do

1:37:00

you distinguish, let's

1:37:01

say, personally and

1:37:02

scientifically, between the ethical issue with

1:37:05

regard to the dark kedrad behavior and the biological

1:37:07

motivations. Right? Because your work does skirt that

1:37:11

line. Right? So You can

1:37:13

think about psychopathy as an adaptive mating strategy in some sense on the scientific

1:37:15

front. But then when you think

1:37:18

about it ethically and personally,

1:37:20

it falls

1:37:22

into the category of the kind of clearly reprehensible behavior that should get people locked up. So,

1:37:24

hey, what has this done

1:37:26

to your view of human nature?

1:37:31

And b, how you thread the needle

1:37:34

of scientific evaluation versus moral

1:37:36

evaluation?

1:37:38

Well, for me,

1:37:40

I've started in

1:37:43

an undergraduate course where

1:37:45

I learned about Nikevellianism and

1:37:47

went to work with Richard Christie. So

1:37:50

in a sense I was there from the beginning, how what the

1:37:56

causal direction was, I'm not sure at that

1:37:58

point, but it did do a lot of other work on self enhancement,

1:38:00

etcetera. Other

1:38:03

researchers my departments like to

1:38:06

study happy people. And

1:38:08

I didn't find

1:38:11

them as interest thing as the

1:38:14

as the dark side. And certainly, I could give a rationale that

1:38:16

we're more concerned

1:38:19

with the behavior of the

1:38:22

dark side than we are with what happy

1:38:25

people can do to us.

1:38:27

Maybe they could bore

1:38:29

us at times, but they're not gonna

1:38:31

be a danger to us. So studying

1:38:33

the dark side is

1:38:35

more

1:38:35

important, arguably. Mhmm.

1:38:38

And there is a

1:38:40

light

1:38:40

Triad now where people have put together

1:38:42

some positive traits and kind of followed

1:38:44

up in the notion of the dark

1:38:47

titular a dark triad And

1:38:51

said, why don't we look

1:38:53

at the positive side and

1:38:55

see who is

1:38:57

Who gives desirable motivations for their

1:39:00

behavior? I studied

1:39:02

social desirability for a

1:39:04

long

1:39:07

and it it never really came

1:39:09

together for me because

1:39:11

you you develop a

1:39:14

social desirability scale while it's partly