The term dark personalities refer to a set of socially aversive traits (such as spitefulness, greed, sadism, narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) in the subclinical range. And thus, according yo this article, those with dark personality traits are slightly more likely to emerge as leaders and are seen as charismatic but, when it comes to getting the job done, they tend to achieve less and are considered poor team players.
Succeed at what, making things people want, or operating in a bureaucracy? The latter, absolutely, bureaucracy is the pupal nursery for psychopathy, but when you actually have to help people, these traits don't work well.
Notice how these two things are divided based on different criteria: one is about aspiration/stated intent (“making things people want”) while the other just plainly describes a person’s role in a wider context. Sounds like a setup for falling for Fundamental Attribution Error.
It mentions those with "dark traits" tend to be seen as poor team players, but perhaps that's exactly why these types ascend to top leadership positions. Your "team play" ability only matters to the extent that you engage in peer-to-peer relationships, which can be relatively minimal in that position compared to, say, middle management. See, for instance, Steve Jobs. I've never heard him described as a "team player", exactly.
In the end, I'd say both types are important. Obviously we need team players, but sometimes you need an auteur or benevolent dictator. Measuring success for these different types should account for their respective strengths.
In my personal experience, the problem with individuals with narcissistic psychopathic features in management or executive positions is that there's almost always opportunity costs with regard to a different way that could have achieved more with less cost. That is, they are ruthless and destructive, and claim doing so was necessary, but it's only because there was a very very simple alternate approach (often requiring some modicum of social awareness) that could have yielded something even better at a fraction of the financial and personal cost. Their approach is often presented as "harsh but necessary" when it's anything but.
Also, they tend to deceptively take credit for progress, in the sense that things that would have occurred regardless, even without them in that position. Often things were already in progress before they attained their position, and often the people who were responsible for that are actually eliminated by them so as to remove threats to them getting credit. This is part of the problem: that they tend to manipulate others and the system for their own gain. In fact, I'm a bit suspicious of attributions of success associated with dark traits, even in a research context, because of this phenomenon. I wouldn't say I think the association isn't there, but I think it's a serious research design problem that isn't completely addressed (e.g., let's say you have a company whose profits are starting to increase with acceleration, and a psychopath who wants to gain from that. if they move up in a leadership position as they see it as profitable personally, are subsequent institutional gains due to them or the pre-existing conditions the psychopath appraised? It will look like the gains occurred after the psychopath entered the position, but in reality, the causal direction goes the other way around -- that the psychopath was attracted to the position because they saw it as something that would reflect well on them).
I think there's some kind of bias in play with these sorts of social-personality characteristics, where people tend to have a blind spot to the opportunity costs of this behavior (akin to survivorship bias but different). It probably has an established name, but I don't know what it is.
With the caveat that I have no ability whatsoever to diagnose psychopathy, I nevertheless found the book Snakes in Suits[1][2] (TLDR notes[3]) to be a fascinating and accessible read on the topic. At some point in each of our careers, particularly for readers of HN, we will likely encounter individuals that exhibit the traits described in the text. As the old maxim goes - 'forewarned is forearmed.'
They are damaging, but nevertheless they are ascending to leadership positions. Look at middle management - it literally selects for people with lower EQ who are insensitive towards needs of people who dont have power. Or those with narcissistic psychopathic features.
Yes, they harm things. But their nice cooperating peers are less likely to "steal" other peoples achievements and progress less.
Plenty of anti-social individuals are masters of subtle manipulation and can min/max along social axis to reach their goals. It's dangerous to assume that individuals with narcissistic psychopathic features will always be "ruthless or destructive" because many (most?) will not.
I'd further go on to say that 'unhappiness' is where there's a divergence of "Who you are", "Who you want to be" & "Where you are". Happy people tend to the ones who're really good at their job and a pleasure to work/spend time with.
I'd have thought the ideal would be you'd have your corporate structure/society, with all the varied positions filled and everybody happy in their roles.
Where it goes wrong is where the overall need doesn't map to the population - e.g. half of the people want to be benevolant dictators
>Your "team play" ability only matters to the extent that you engage in peer-to-peer relationships
It doesn't "only matter" in relationships that are horizontal on the org chart. They're just not the totality of the non-peer relationships. Understanding and communicating boundaries between teaming and exercising authority is key to efficiently moving everyone toward a target.
To torture the sports team metaphor more, the captains on a team are players but also an authority among the players. To the front office, a coach is a member of the gameday team.
I guess one could say Murthy Renduchintala "suceeded" in moving up the ladder and becoming filthy rich in the process...of destroying Intel's multi-year node advantage in the CPU market.
Does that sound like someone companies should be stepping over one another to hire them, though?
The test itself is very well done - they try to get people to respond precisely, but checking attention, and asking multiple times questions about the same concept.
However, the article has a very fundamental flaw:
> Unfortunately, most people with extreme levels of dark personality traits don’t want to change who they are. Despite not being particularly happy with their lives
The test doesn't deal with "happiness" at all, which is a key component of the argument.
If consider as example a person like Steve Jobs, who would fair very high on narcisissm and machiavellism, what would be his happiness?
While he could have been as much successful being a nice person (there are examples in history, my favorite being Carmack), what does represent happiness for him, from the perspective of other people, and from his own?
Probably, from his own perspective, he's a "happy" person - he craves attention and success, and he satisfies both.
I think defining happiness in a more general sense requires a certain "wider" personality, which this type of people doesn't have - ultimately, they're very narrow.
Generalizing this example, the argument "Despite not being particularly happy with their lives" doesn't really hold - this type of ferociously and single-mindedly driven people are ultimately succeeding in their own, narrow, purpose.
I've found Daniel Khaneman's definition of happiness being useful here.
He divides happiness into two parts: a "experiential" happiness and a "reflecting" happiness.
For the sake of the discussion and acknowledging I have zero insight into his personality, someone like Steve Jobs could be low in "experiential" happiness (seemingly endlessly frustrated in the present moment) and high on the "reflecting" happiness ("look at all the great, transformational things I've brought to the world")
Essentially your memories after the moment has past.
I heard Steve Rinella talking about this as it relates to hunting. He spoke about how there's some trips where you're miserable in the moment (cold, bug-bitten) but when it's all over you have fond memories of the experience and consider it worthwhile.
If you mean specific to Jobs, I don't have any and was just trying to relate to the OP comment, which is why I couched it with the caveat that I have no insight into his psychology. Maybe he generally was happy during the moment and maybe he was actually miserable when reflecting on his life, I have no idea.
Maybe, but I don’t know that is a good assumption because that experiential happiness is, by definition, fleeting. That reflecting fulfilling memory lasts longer and I don’t that is maximized under that assumption
Altering a person's chemistry is exactly what a drug does, so I may be missing what you're trying to illuminate here.
"Could" there be a drug that makes people both experientially more happy and more industrious to the point where they have more reflecting happiness? Sure, but there could also be drugs that cure cancer and make us smarter at the same time too, I just don't have any pragmatic reason to believe we'll see one anytime soon because I suspect they work on very different mechanisms
I've been diagnosed as having narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) by several doctors so maybe I can shed some light on this.
NPD is the inability to generate and/or experience internal validation. It is the lack of internal voice saying "good job". NPD is not self-aggrandizement although that is a common coping mechanism used to deal with the underlying disorder. I don't think I'm some sort of minor deity, but I'm also told by my doctors that I'm considerably more introspective than the typical narcissist (the irony of my docs being a source of praise is not lost on me).
Because I do not have an internal source of validation I seek out validation and praise from others to fill the void. Psychiatrists call these sources of validation "narcissistic supply". That supply is a finite resource, eventually I either exhaust or build up a tolerance to the individual / group supplying the validation which causes me to seek out new sources. Some people have compared it to an addict trying to find their fix, a metaphor I find distasteful since it does people suffering from addiction a disservice.
In this way I don't think I can be happy because I cannot remain satisfied. Sometimes I feel good, but I understand that no matter what I do, success I achieve, or people I help it will never be enough. I have a hard time staying still because I know that whatever source of supply I'm currently tapping will eventually run dry. It's a rather restless experience.
Thanks for sharing your experiences of being diagnosed with NPD.
I was wondering what made you get referred to the ‘several doctors’ in the first instance, and what treatments did they recommend to help manage your NPD?
I also use throwaways, but to give unpopular advice. I'd say that youre probably alright, but your state indicates an objective reality which is wasting time on things deemed pointless by your ego or soul, whatever you call it. Whenever we engage in such pointless activities, e.g. chasing money, our egos lose interest that feels as the unexplainable loss of life satisfaction. Activities that are deemed important by our egos are usually considered unimportant by our today's society's. The famous example is meditation: it seems meaningless, but for whatever reason it instantly brings the ego's attention and that feels as an unexplainable satisfaction in achieving something important, even though you can't explain whats being achieved. It's like lighting up an internal candle. Other activities are research of certain usually abstract topics, but also giving to others (not just money, but also time or knowledge). I'd recommend studying the bright side of occultism, and start with a short essay called "light on the path" (and to dodge the wrath of the orthodox HN community, I'm using a throwaway account). That essay has a few important references that will eventually lead you to less known books by Plato, Newton and many others. You'll laugh at the idea that Plato was just a philosopher. By that time you wont have lack of internal self validation.
Most of what I do in life is in order for me to be considered successful by others and I don't trust my own judgment of my success. How do I know if I'm delusional or not without feedback of others?
Taken to an extreme, yes, it’s possible you suffer from narcissism. There are also many other forms of the pattern, a common one is impostor syndrome. Speaking from experience, it can present a lot like narcissism (seeking external validation and even self-aggrandizement as a coping mechanism). But it can also subside when enough external validation is established to enable self-validation. If you need external validation for things that are unfamiliar or unproven, but you’re able to self-validate as your comfort level rises, it’s probably something more like that. If you continue to need external validation after you’ve reached enough comfort and certainty on the thing that bears validation, there may be more going on.
>Overall, individuals with dark traits engage in more counterproductive work behaviour, such as theft and abusive supervision. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they don’t end up with higher average incomes than their peers with light personalities.
>The key factor here seems to be empathy: the capacity to resonate with – and understand the perspective of – the emotional experiences of others. Individuals with light personality traits show a great deal of empathy for others, while those with dark personality traits tend to show very little. In our new research, we found that this seems to be what leads to a more satisfying life. Similarly, being prosocial – acting kindly, cooperatively and with compassion toward others – is also significantly linked with higher wellbeing.
Maybe the comparison between "dark traits" and "light personalities" yields this, but its been shown pretty consistently that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect on salary, primarily for women. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41343711?seq=1
Also, the framing of this article between essentially low agreeableness and high agreeableness as dark and light is awful. There are advantages and disadvantages to being high or low in this trait, and the framing that being high in it is what's more desirable makes me doubt how seriously whoever wrote this takes their work.
Does high agreeableness necessarily translate into more empathy, or vice versa?
I define empathy as "knowing your customer" (whoever it may be). You can be very attuned to this whether you are agreeable or disagreeable, no?
(Perhaps this is not a widely accepted definition of empathy, and that definition instead somehow indicates "being nice"? I don't think being nice/agreeable necessarily helps you know who you're speaking with.)
> You can be very attuned to this whether you are agreeable or disagreeable, no?
I would think so as well. In fact, along the way I've learned that sometimes it's the less agreeable ones who are acting in the interest of the customer's situation but there has been a communications breakdown that doesn't necessarily reflect on the character of either party.
A useful breakdown of each trait to me is this one https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5863998_Between_Fac.... Here agreeableness is divided into compassion and politeness. Compassion corresponds to your idea of what empathy means, and politeness corresponds to being generally nice and cooperative, respecting authority and so on. From these https://ipip.ori.org/newAB5CKey.htm, the primary ones for compassion are Warmth, Sympathy and Understanding, and the primary ones for politeness are Nurturance, Cooperation, Pleasantness.
>Does high agreeableness necessarily translate into more empathy
I think the difference is that the personality trait called "agreeableness" doesn't mean someone is a pushover. But I do agree with you in general, my biggest gripe with pop psych as of late is the way "empathy" is used interchangeably with being nice.
Has a quiet person failed to empathize if there is no change in their outward behavior? I'd say obviously no. So I've been trying to work out why we talk about empathy when we mean being nice.
I think people talk about empathy rather than niceness because it makes it easier to admonish others. If I tell someone that they should be nicer, they likely already understand the situation as one where they could be nicer, and chose not too. Maybe they even chose not to be nice fully aware that it violated established social protocol. I am simply making a demand that they behave to my standards, and well adjusted people know that I am not their father no matter how serious I try to make myself sound. Or I can tell someone they lack empathy, accusing them of failing at a basic part of humanity. Depending on their internal thought process I'm more likely at extracting the behavior I want out of them through this manipulation. It's rudimentary bullying. Make an accusation someone doesn't want to be true, and treat any attempt to refute it as proof the accusation is true.
> I've been trying to work out why we talk about empathy when we mean being nice.
Somewhat many people aren't "good" at feeling empathy, and some brains are 100% incapable -- and maybe they cannot see any difference between empathy and faked niceness.
The words sympathy and empathy are often used interchangeably, but the two terms now have fairly distinct meanings. [...] One popular and recent conception of the distinction is that sympathy represents "a feeling of care and concern for someone, often someone close, accompanied by a wish to see him better off or happier," while empathy represents "a person's ability to recognize and share the emotions of another person, fictional character, or sentient being."
The missing piece here is that 'empathizing with your customer' is an extremely different context than 'having empathy for others'. The former focuses on meeting your own needs through using 'the skill of empathy' to create a bond of kinship and be more likely to execute a sale. The latter focuses on understanding the needs of others, even if — especially if — doing so does not advance your own needs.
I am courteous to those around me on phone support calls and in businesses because I can understand — I can empathize — what they've been through with other people yelling at them, mistreating them, and gaslighting them. I may not be friendly, I may not be effusive, I may not be agreeable — I certainly am not known for being agreeable — but I will do my very best to keep it together, because I've been yelled at before, and I would consider that a grievous harm committed upon another.
I think one time I was grinding my teeth I was so angry that they could hear it on the phone, and my voice was flat, tense, and cold to the bone, and I made specifically sure — even amidst my rage at the harm committed by their employer — to thank them and say goodbye politely. It wasn't a warm goodbye, but it was definitely courtesy, and I don't think they expected it.
The comments up and down this post fail to distinguish these two definitions. In both cases, you're "understanding how the other person feels" — literally, empathizing — but it's how you use that information, and to whose benefit your use serves, that is causing such confusion in the replies.
If someone walks into your store purposefully and doesn't want to make eye contact, empathy suggests that you should let them be and keep an eye on them. This is a great example because they clearly don't want to be hassled by you, and you clearly shouldn't allow yourself to be shoplifted from.
If you use empathy to persuade people to buy things that they'll regret buying once they've left your store, that's generally considered a variation of 'evil' and is the subject of fables and fiction, not the least of which being an absolutely terrifying rated-R book called 'Needful Things' by Stephen King. People will leave some of the angriest Yelp reviews you've ever seen for a business that uses this tactic, not just because they feel taken advantage of themselves, but specifically to protect others from feeling that way. They literally empathize with your future customers and will do their best to warn them away.
So, when someone says "show a little empathy", they're telling you that you've prioritized your needs higher than those they think you're disregarding as irrelevant. They may or may not be right, but that's a very common context for negative comments about your skills at empathy.
It's also common for kindly people to have absolutely no clue what's going on in other people's minds. You'll see them hold the door for someone who's about to drop three bags of groceries — missing the forest for the trees, so to speak, but still genuinely making an effort to care at no benefit to themselves. They'll be confused and sad when you drop your groceries, because they would have helped if they'd realized.
To restate this all in dry terms for nerds like me — The default context for "show more empathy" is a request that you increase the priority of donating your energy and time to social support of others without expectation of reward to yourself. In specific contexts like Sales and Marketing, it means not only "listen more closely to the customer's needs" but also "understand that sometimes the customer's needs may prevent the sale". And you can flip this around, too — if someone says "you have to put up some shields", they're usually telling you that you'...
I always found these kind of studies bullshit: the worse serial killers and pedophiles were sometimes described as "nice" and "charming" people.
I don't think it's accurate to make a clear line between "real sociopathy" and "normal people" based on your behavior. Everyone has personal goals, interests, (whether good or bad) and try to have what he think is the the optimal behavior (wether good or bad).
The real question is what are you real personal goal / interests, not how you behave.
It's only outliers if you think "most" sociopath "should" look like it. The truth is you don't know and I actually think most sociopath looks totally normal.
I couldn’t answer that. There could be deceptive people whose intention is to subvert such studies but I doubt they’d make much of a difference. All I could sat is that the psychopath’s charm is always exerted with some goal in mind.
> but its been shown pretty consistently that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect
Be careful conflating agreeableness with empathy. In Big Five OCEAN, empathy is a sub-facet of agreeableness(A), but not the only one. Other sub-facets of agreeableness are conflict-avoidance, modesty, compliance, and naive trust in others.
Intuitively, it would seem to me those are more important contributor to success. In particular conflict-avoidance is a big contributor to being exploited by others. A person who scores moderately low on the aggregate agreableness(A) score could be both empathetic, but willing to stand up for themselves and make sure they're getting a fair deal.
Supporting this, the research has found that agreeable people do particularly bad in transactional, rather than transformative, leadership roles. When a team is working as a high-trust, high-cohesion unit, agreeableness is an asset. But when interacting and negotiating with third parties at arms length, it can be a major liability.
Sociopaths are great at empathy. Empathy is the ability to observe and understand others emotions without actually connecting. It’s absolutely essential to be a successful dark triad tape.
Sympathy is the “light” counterpart, where you actually emotionally resonate with the other person. Obviously this makes nasty behavior less attractive since you feel the emotional effects too.
And now you know why corporate psychobabble always goes on about user empathy.
However I'd think some sociopaths can be good at logically cognitive intelligence wise understanding how a different person feels.
But being unable to actually feel real empathy, I wonder if they might mistake their logical thinking for being empathy? Which they will instead never know what it is
The American Heritage Dictionary[1][2] and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary [3][4] are two that come to mind, but I'm sure that you can find others.
As usual m-w is much sloppier when it comes to making distinctions between similar words, due to their philosophy that common misuse redefines words[5], but even they make a pretty clear distinction between empathy and sympathy and it's clear that sympathy is the one where one actually emotes with the subject.
Understanding other’s feelings seems to be only part you’re focusing on, but it’s not enough to have empathy. The dictionaries you’ve linked to have each a list of skills and I don’t think each stands on its own. It’s a combinations of those.
I’m sure AI already have, and cenrtainly will have it perfected in the future, an ability to “understand” feelings and emotions if I use the term “understanding” the way you do with sociopaths - the ability to analyze and act on. Certainly it can not be called empathetic.
I totally disagree. I’ve only read one book about the topic of the dark triad, sympathy, and empathy, called Social Intelligence. Basically I’ll simplify the definitions for brevity’s sake. Sympathy is that you feel bad for someone. Empathy is actually putting yourself in their shoes and feeling what they feel and adapting to their needs and understanding them as they are. So, maybe you have the terms backwards, or maybe I do? Have you ever heard the phrase, I don’t need your sympathy? What about, I don’t need your empathy? Empathy may be a less common term than sympathy but it is clearly the superior one in my book.
I'm pretty sure your understanding is the right one. It goes even further if you venture away from science and into psychics powers - "empaths" are the psychic subset that literally feel others' emotions.
Also, narcissistsic sociopaths can have a high capacity for empathy in the sense of knowing what others feel and think while also ruthlessly manipulating, being two-faced based on who is present and the gaslighting others when these obvious differences are brought up (differences like switching the entire tone of voice and mannerisms at the flip of a switch, as if it was new person, just to suck up to or put down people depending on their goals).
Working with such people can be a nightmare because they appear so charming outward to powerful people in decision making positions, while being cruel and sadistic to others, leaving very little for these people to do because the higher ups love the individual and cannot imagine what is hidden from them.
> a nightmare because they appear so charming outward to powerful people in decision making positions, while being cruel and sadistic to others
I wouldn't conflate emotional intelligence - i.e. the ability to modulate behavior based on person specific interactions - with necessarily possessing negative, vindictive, malign or cruel personality traits. That's definitely a stereotype.
It is entirely possible to be charming, without secretly being cruel or vindictive. Yes, it can be more difficult to judge a disarming person's intentions, but that doesn't mean the person is inherently sadistic or ill willed. Perhaps they are just good at making other people feel comfortable.
I didn't imply that every charming person is suspicious for being cruel.
Just that when you are on the receiving end, it can be very frustrating to try and tell others about it. This is in fact one mechanism that keeps victims of sexual or other harassment and bullying silent. And I don't mean small misunderstandings and microagressions. There are people who will literally tell you "you can try telling about this to XY, they will never believe you." being absolutely conscious and intentional about the whole thing. The existence of such people is really hard to believe for many. There are truly evil people out there who know they are evil and probably cannot even help it very much.
They also often try to turn things around and blame you for the things that they do. We call it gaslighting. And in a meta way, they will even preemptively say you are gaslighting them! And it devolves into a "no u" kind of debate and some victims even end up believing it! It can literally make you go crazy!
Search YouTube for narcissist or psychopath, sociopath recordings. There are secret video and audio recordings of what these people will do to their subordinates, eg their children or employees. It is absolutely mind bending and life changing to see how predictable and consistent they are.
Now, this is of course a pathological extreme. But there are milder versions of it too.
The problem is especially bad when they get into a position to police other people's conduct and are supposedly there to serve justice.
The problem is that many well intentioned people cannot imagine that it's the case. This will have to be a big realization that the reasonable factions of the social justice movements will need to make. In the current climate this is just too far out to be a topic of rational discussion. Indeed I assume many people now discount everything I wrote due to mentioning this political angle.
But when you actually think about it, it would be surprising if such people didn't seek out some of these powerful positions to roam free.
I guess you mean Trump (still prez till Jan 20). He's a clown. I don't know if he's actually a cruel person who likes to psychologically torment people around him.
> Also, narcissistsic sociopaths can have a high capacity for empathy in the sense of knowing what others feel and think while also ruthlessly manipulating
I initially thought this wasn't considered empathy, but TIL:
> Empathy is generally divided into two major components: ...
> Affective empathy, also called emotional empathy: the capacity to respond with an appropriate emotion to another's mental states.... sympathy and compassion for others in response to their suffering.... self-centered feelings of discomfort and anxiety in response to another's suffering....
> Cognitive empathy: the capacity to understand another's perspective or mental state....
> Affective and cognitive empathy are also independent from one another; someone who strongly empathizes emotionally is not necessarily good in understanding another's perspective.
However, I think when most people use the term "empathy" they're almost exclusively referring to affective empathy.
I like Wikipedia's translation of the German term for empathy, Einfühlung, as "feeling into," which captures the meaning pretty well for me.
On the other hand, someone on the autism spectrum may be able to emotionally empathize if they find it clear what the other person feels, but may not be able to cognitively intuit complicated webs of unspoken social relations and resulting feelings of many layers of "I expected him/her to know that I think he ...."
Yes exactly, I feel this could actually be further split to 3 mostly disjoint concepts:
1. Can I understand why person X would feel emotion Y in situation Z? People probably vary the most on this one when they themselves would not feel emotion Y in situation Z, because it becomes about how well they can put themselves in the shoes of someone with different values/priors (from a more cerebral perspective). There's also a difference between retroactive explanation and prediction of course, but without extensive knowledge on person X prediction can be very hard in the "gray areas" mentioned.
2. If I know that person X feels emotion Y, do I feel emotion Y myself? Again, most people probably have this for their closest friends/family, but the degree to which one has this for people they casually encounter seems to vary widely. Probably due to both inherent personality trait differences, and varying circumstances over time - for example if you currently have some intense mood for personal reasons it may be harder to feel an opposing mood because of someone else (but easier when it's the same mood maybe?)
My understanding is 1 is cognitive empathy and 2 is affective empathy, but I'm not as sure whether 2 encompasses all of affective empathy, because there is also:
3. Given limited information about the situation, can one still figure out the emotion someone is feeling? This allows empathy #2 to be applied more readily, and in cases where your actions are relevant (coworkers, friends, etc.) to investigate further and possibly apply empathy #1.
I'm not sure whether 3 is itself considered part of empathy, but certainly it is very important in being able to "use" your empathy in daily life, so it functionally is part of empathy. And this is likely the trait most frequently impaired in individuals on the spectrum, as it requires recognizing subtle, often non-verbal, behavioral cues. I'm not super up to date on the literature but I don't believe 1 or 2 above are considered to be impaired in most cases of Autism, and there definitely are articles out there about how it's incorrect to say those on the spectrum have low empathy.
It's hard to rate oneself accurately, but personally I would say I am above average at 1, average at 2, and below average at 3 (solid at little linguistic hints but horrible at picking up on facial expressions, posture, tone of voice, etc.)
I think this is better described as superficial charm than any meaningful understanding of other's goals and feelings. It's easy to be outwardly charming when you have no real intention to follow up on whatever you're promising to others.
>> In our new research, we found that this seems to be what leads to a more satisfying life. Similarly, being prosocial – acting kindly, cooperatively and with compassion toward others – is also significantly linked with higher wellbeing.
> Maybe the comparison between "dark traits" and "light personalities" yields this, but its been shown pretty consistently that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect on salary, primarily for women.
You seem to be comparing apples and oranges: I do not think "higher wellbeing" is the same thing as "higher salary," and whatever correlation there is due to the stress of being poor (and thus is less and less signficant as salary progresses past a minimum threshold).
>Perhaps unsurprisingly, they don’t end up with higher average incomes than their peers with light personalities.
This is the relevant quote. The article explicitly says "light personalities" have no penalty compared to "dark traits". This may be true in their comparison, but overall higher agreeableness is related to lower salary.
>ts been shown pretty consistently that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect on salary, primarily for women
It's not just salary - it's every single negotiation you have in your life. Negotiation is the art of backing down carefully, not all at once, not being a pushover, not going-along-to-get-along. If you're an agreeable person, then you by definition don't push for your way instead of someone else's; and when you're in a financial negotiation, this is basically the worst trait you can possibly have, because your adversary probably does this more often and was specifically hired for being someone that is good at pushing for their way. The company wants to hire you for less money; the car salesperson wants to sell you the car for a higher price; and so forth.
There is no way of fixing this problem "systemically" across the board, because game-theoretically it will rarely be to anyone's advantage to take the first step in this direction.
> that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect on salary,
That seems plausible or even obvious. All things being equal, an empathetic person will value a happy work environment (relatively) more than a high salary. They'll avoid the sabotage-all-others big law firm and go into research (avoiding personal conflicts), become a public defender (empathy), judge, etc.
Research involves lots of personal conflict. You couldn't imagine how cutthroat the fight for funding, positions, paper authorships, citations etc can be. Lots of small minded machinators.
I think the cultural aspect of this study must be taken into consideration.
Speaking as someone who can from a country with a relatively high population (India), we were taught that in a race to the top, its either eat or be eaten, and that machinations are a vital part of success as long as they do not tarnish the way you're perceived.
My worry isn't addressed by this study: Some portion of people with dark personality traits start from a privileged position.
If someone's parent is the head of a company, or even well-connected, "achiev[ing] less and [being] considered poor team players" are much less of an impediment. If someone can effectively skip or get more slack in passing through the career levels for which dark traits are a disadvantage, they'll likely do quite well once they're at the top.
Exactly. A vague and general population study just tells is that dark traits are on average not helpful, it doesn’t tell us anything about outliers.
Someone with dark traits and significantly above average intelligence, or inherited wealth, may be able to avoid the pitfalls that otherwise prevent such people advancing.
Even if such people are very rare, e.g. 1 in 10,000, they would have an outsized influence, so we should be as interested in the outliers as the general population.
The article subtly flips the script at the end so much we might be missing the point if we look too much into the title of the article.
The "system" we've collectively developed forces blank slate souls to develop and play out our learned behavior in order to survive, or feel like we're surviving, in the world. But, as the article explains, we do not (typically) inherently hold, are not born with, nor do genetics code for, these "dark" or "light" traits. Therefore the emergence of "dark" or "light" tendencies is really more decided by the family, community, and economic systems. It is not that a "dark" or "light" trait necessarily allows a person more to succeed, but it suggests that some family, community, and economic systems require a person to develop what we would label "dark" or "light" traits from our perspective in order to survive. It appears the point of the article is: when we come across a person with "dark" traits, it is not entirely THEIR fault they have "dark" traits, it is more OUR fault we cannot shape our family, community, and economic systems to produce people with "light" traits.
We're not blank slates when we're born, and it's well established that it's ~50% genetics and ~50% environment.
Edit: furthermore it's compounded by the fact that the environment changes the expression of the genes (Gene × Environment interaction) and the genes influence the environment (gene-environment correlation rGE)
People who have a desire for power, are often the ones who end up getting it. I hope societies can think of methods that allow calm and reasonable people to be elected.
Highly intelligent people are highly adaptable. If the incentives set by the system favor certain traits deemed as dark there will be a non zero percentage of people developing these traits. Especially in highly competitive fields.
For example is it a dark trait to work at the minimum required level in a company while spending the time gained to sharpen my skills so I get a 50% salary increase changing jobs instead of a possible 5% increase for performance?
this might be a reflection of dark traits if you're blatantly harming your coworkers, say, by doing this. But otherwise I'd say no, it's not evidence of a dark trait to work at the minimum required level. You don't owe a corporate entity more than that.
I never look to harm other people, but according to this quiz I got quite "dark" results. So it doesn't seem like they are specifically considering harming others as the definition of dark traits.
I got most highest result in Narcissism or Entitled Self Importance.
This just means that I'm ambitious and it's important for me to succeed and others to see that I am successful. It doesn't mean I'm harming others. Most of my motivations in life are for people to consider me to be intelligent for instance, but I don't see how it specifically harms anyone. I don't want them to consider me intelligent on flawed premises.
The question I'd rather ask: Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed in systems set up by people with dark personality traits?
Traits only have meaning in an environment, a context. It's not clear how much we can control the traits. But we definitely can control the environment. The modern corporation only goes back to the age of railroads. Many of our governmental systems don't go back much farther. These are things we can change.
I think an even better, albeit harder, question would be "how can we set up systems such that even when they're gamed they result in positive outcomes?".
Any system with incentives can be gamed. Those that learn to game systems as a means to survival are always going to be adept at manipulating those systems.
I've always thought the answer to that question (which unfortunately is a very hard one) is the ideal form of government. Figure out what balance between personal and societal "positive outcomes" we can stomach and then set up rules that lead us there.
I think some of the oldest and most successful bits of governance are built on this principle, but there's a lot of laws out there that seem to just attempt to dictate a desired outcome without considering how the real world will only nominally comply.
There are a lot of those dark traits out there, and we have to segment them. Just from my exp, I see more dark traits on successful people, albeit it doesn't necessarily mean that people with dark traits are more likely to succeed. Can't say if it's universal though.
I'd also argue that dark traits linked to social success are more or less born, or heavily influenced by childhood exp (which is essentially "born"), so it's kind of difficult to "pick" it up after reaching adulthood.
There's different groups of people with dark traits. There are straight up criminals who are going to skew the averages, but most successful people do have dark traits, so to me at least it's obvious that dark traits can make you more successful, you just can't do this whole study from the angle they are doing to understand anything meaningful except to have some "holier than thou" results produced.
The dream of many a disgruntled intellectual teen is to have a dark personality, yet be so good at the hard skills that people put up with it.
The most unproductive form this can take is when dark personality traits are seen as a signal of brilliance... “Well if they’re such an asshole they must be good at their job or they would have been shown the door already”.
See also: the idolisation of Rick from Rick and Morty
This is also the axis, personified by the title character, around which the story arcs are bent in House. House is meant as a modern day reboot of Sherlock Holmes, who was written to a similarly extreme NPD template.
Be careful extrapolating to the individual from studies such as these, as the study environments control for context while the real world does not.
For example, I worked with an developer who I’d consider low on agreeableness. She functioned extremely well in a seed stage startup as 1 of 2 engineers. She was willing to fight for the right decision no matter what and didn’t care how people felt about that.
As the startup scaled, however, her disregard for the feelings of others hampered her effectiveness. Her engineering team became one of the lower performing in the organization.
Did her personality help or hinder the organization? Did it contribute or detract from her individual goals and overall happiness?
If one defines success as true happiness that lasts, no.
If you want caregivers and to be around people who like you and actually care while you are aging and then old, I would say strongly that it is better to practice treating others the way you would want to be treated, with honesty and kindness. Or if you want to be around that kind of people (I hope everyone would, upon reflection). Or if you believe in God (for which I have many reasons that I find compelling, even "proof" sufficient to my personal satisfaction), or if one wants to play the safe side of Pascal's wager (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager).
Money is a poor companion compared to trustworthy, unselfish, kind people who know that you in turn can be trusted. (And my experiences with social security and medicare, as well as everything I have read or studied in years, including the outcomes of communisms, family travel and degrees, language study, etc etc, strongly bear this out--we don't want to rely just on institutions to care for us if we can have people who know us and who care, and whom we have trained by our example over a long time to be caring and have a service-oriented mindset of actual considerate love for others. For example, close and extended family, neighbors, and strangers. There is no real substitute.
Stalin, for one example, had "success" in terms of power, prestige, and something like adoration of the masses. But if what I read, as I recall, is correct, he died neglected and miserable in a pool of his own waste, surrounded by false friends who cared only when fear required it. And either way, I think the concept could be obvious.
If one just wants pleasure, power, and attention during your years of best health, and to fade & die after you can't maintain it, and thinks life is just the law of the jungle (dominate until you are dominated, rule or ruin?), then maybe you would consider that honesty and kindness don't matter. I strongly recommend honesty and kindness, treating others the way you would want to be treated, and a clear conscience for a truly happy life. Much more could be said. :)
I read somewhere that bullies are more successful on average than the rest of the population. So they not only do better than their victims, but everyone.
'Success' and 'Happiness' may be conflated, depending on how Success is defined.
I think it's interesting to focus on Success, and then consider two types: a) Success for personal benefit, b) success achieving a higher purpose.
(Intentionally referencing film characters)
Success for personal benefit may be illustrated by Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street. He succeeded in becoming, for a while, the type of wealthy person he imagined as a young man that he wanted to become.
Success achieving a higher purpose may be illustrated by Terence Fletcher from Whiplash. He succeeded in turning musicians with talent into accomplished performers.
Both personalities could be considered 'dark'. One succeeded by being a charming pathological liar. The other by dismissing any sense of empathy and driving others with severe, manipulative criticism.
But in the end, it was type a) that eventually flamed out and type b) that had an enduring impact on his profession.
I think the notion of 'how to get the most out of people' actually depends on the people you are trying to get the most out of. Many musicians quit under Terence because the achievement was not worth the suffering along the way. Others were motivated to excellence by his style, and he didn't care that they hated him for it.
'If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
Socrates taught us: “Know thyself.” Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t. From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb. And correspondingly, from evil to good.'
While it is true that we all have aspects of each in us and depending on time and place one or the other may be more prominent, there is large variation among people regarding temperament and personality.
It's just factually not true and dangerous to believe that everyone is the same in this regard.
At the same time, we must never think we are above judgment ourselves. All of us need to count with the possibility of being on the evil end sometimes.
I don’t believe in free will. It has been a much different experience than shedding my belief in God. When I was young I used to “sense” someone always watching me, to the point of feeling shame in natural situations like bathing. One day the feeling just faded, and it was a palpable change in my perception of life.
With the absence of free will, that intuition has been extremely difficult for me to hold onto. It is fleeting, even after hundreds of pages of books reiterating the fact. To approximate the intuition, when I see someone in a morally questionable situation or experiencing sheer bad luck, I try to remember to tell myself “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
Dark traits are helpful once you are actually in the position of power. This article thought dark traits might help get you there, but this is not the case. The economic system rewards leaders who are cut throat and rewards subordinates who are kind, it makes a lot of sense when you frame it that way really.
If you are a CEO the system will reward you for paying people less wages so you can beat out competition.
If you are a worker the system will reward you for kissing the CEO's ass (by not punishing you).
Personality traits that are not advantageous in some way are unlikely to be maintained over many generations of evolution.
Personality traits that are universally advantageous would not be discernible as traits, because they would become universal to everyone.
Therefore, all personality traits must also be disadvantageous in some way.
So-called "dark trait" behaviors obviously confer advantages at least in the short term. In the long run, we're all dead, but early success compounds, like interest.
Some of the luckiest psychopaths will end up at the very top, while some of the unluckiest will end up six feet under.
This is difficult to accurately capture in statistics, but the expected gain from "dark triad" traits across the whole population is probably zero.
Great comment! High risk, high reward behavior, almost by definition, doesn't often seem too appealing when looking at the averages. We aren't the only organism that loves to gamble though, and there's a reason for that.
Some personality traits haven't adapted to modern life as well as others and some have adapted extremely well. For instance most people have too much anxiety since you had to be way more careful throughout history. Now you have so much safety net everywhere so risk taking is a much more valuable trait as most people are biased against taking risks.
It is not true that traits that are not advantageous are unlikely to be maintained over many generations. For example, many genetic diseases have survived for many generations. This may happen because, for example, they correlate with some other more positive traits. Or, because of other indirect, external factors.
I would take this article with a grain of salt. It gets a lot wrong and a lot of it is questionable.
For example, notice something about the stats it gives throughout the article? It's whole numbers, and with large variations: 10-20 per cent of individuals, 30-50 per cent of people, and so on. That variation and the whole numbers should be a read flag. When performing a study very precise numbers pop up. This isn't a confidence interval they're calculating, it's made up numbers. (The real numbers btw are between 8 and 9% of the US population.)
Let's look at the premise:
>For 15 years, research into dark personality traits (including narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism) has been rapidly expanding.
Straight from the get go it uses fuzzy or vague terminology. Furthermore, it does not attempt to explain its chosen initial terminology.
The actual terminology is:
- ASPD for something close to the Hollywood psychopathy/sociopathy stereotype, there is no official psychopath in the DSM.
- Narcissism is NPD, and NPD is quite different from what people typically call a narcissist looking at themselves in the mirror, so the audience is going to misunderstand without explanation.
- Machiavellianism. It explains how countries slowly take over land of other countries. It explains how to maintain power on a national level once you have it, and so on. I admit I don't even know what the machiavellianism stereotype is. Maybe Game of Thrones and people backstabbing each other? That is not Machiavellian.
Using vague terminology is a way to get people to believe things without questioning them. It gets the audience to think they know the topic on a deep level, but instead their understanding is reduced. A lot of conspiracy theory websites do this, and even political websites as of late. Sadly, at times, vague terminology can be used as a technique to manipulate people. Fuzzy terminology is a red flag when validating a source.
I could keep going and critique this article all the way through, but it would be quite a long post. (eg, they say these characteristics are more common in men, but there are more female narcissists than there are males, which is the largest group.) In short, a healthy dose of skepticism is helpful. The article aims to solidify a stereotype, that makes it easier for actual bad actors to not be identified. Sadly, reality is darker than these stereotypes.
> We immediately know this is a fluff piece because it uses pop psychology terminology, instead of the actual terminology.
Using the actual terminology in a popular article is what turns that terminology into pop psychology terminology. You can ask for popular articles to use the current terms, or you can ask for psychology terms to retain their precise clinical meaning, but you can't have both.
No, you can have both. It's as simple as the author explaining what they mean. But this also requires the author to actually know what they're talking about, and popsci article authors very often don't.
230 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadI don't see much, but I'm a cynic.
And they can order light pattern people stay in the office and work late to cover up for them?
Also see my siblings reply (sibling to your reply)
They seem to be confident in themselves but unable to self analyze.
Looks like putting these people in positions of power is terrible as they will lead to an overall worse performance for your company.
That's a bit funny -- achieve less, according to who?
They might be satisfied with having gotten promoted, and higher salaries, status -- whilst looking at getting the actual work done, as off topic.
They've achieved success, from their perspective, but not from the researchers perspective?
Why would the researchers opinions matter more
In the end, I'd say both types are important. Obviously we need team players, but sometimes you need an auteur or benevolent dictator. Measuring success for these different types should account for their respective strengths.
Also, they tend to deceptively take credit for progress, in the sense that things that would have occurred regardless, even without them in that position. Often things were already in progress before they attained their position, and often the people who were responsible for that are actually eliminated by them so as to remove threats to them getting credit. This is part of the problem: that they tend to manipulate others and the system for their own gain. In fact, I'm a bit suspicious of attributions of success associated with dark traits, even in a research context, because of this phenomenon. I wouldn't say I think the association isn't there, but I think it's a serious research design problem that isn't completely addressed (e.g., let's say you have a company whose profits are starting to increase with acceleration, and a psychopath who wants to gain from that. if they move up in a leadership position as they see it as profitable personally, are subsequent institutional gains due to them or the pre-existing conditions the psychopath appraised? It will look like the gains occurred after the psychopath entered the position, but in reality, the causal direction goes the other way around -- that the psychopath was attracted to the position because they saw it as something that would reflect well on them).
I think there's some kind of bias in play with these sorts of social-personality characteristics, where people tend to have a blind spot to the opportunity costs of this behavior (akin to survivorship bias but different). It probably has an established name, but I don't know what it is.
[1] http://snakesinsuits.com/index.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_in_Suits
[3] https://thepowermoves.com/snakes-in-suits/
Yes, they harm things. But their nice cooperating peers are less likely to "steal" other peoples achievements and progress less.
I'd further go on to say that 'unhappiness' is where there's a divergence of "Who you are", "Who you want to be" & "Where you are". Happy people tend to the ones who're really good at their job and a pleasure to work/spend time with.
I'd have thought the ideal would be you'd have your corporate structure/society, with all the varied positions filled and everybody happy in their roles.
Where it goes wrong is where the overall need doesn't map to the population - e.g. half of the people want to be benevolant dictators
It doesn't "only matter" in relationships that are horizontal on the org chart. They're just not the totality of the non-peer relationships. Understanding and communicating boundaries between teaming and exercising authority is key to efficiently moving everyone toward a target.
To torture the sports team metaphor more, the captains on a team are players but also an authority among the players. To the front office, a coach is a member of the gameday team.
Does that sound like someone companies should be stepping over one another to hire them, though?
However, the article has a very fundamental flaw:
> Unfortunately, most people with extreme levels of dark personality traits don’t want to change who they are. Despite not being particularly happy with their lives
The test doesn't deal with "happiness" at all, which is a key component of the argument.
If consider as example a person like Steve Jobs, who would fair very high on narcisissm and machiavellism, what would be his happiness?
While he could have been as much successful being a nice person (there are examples in history, my favorite being Carmack), what does represent happiness for him, from the perspective of other people, and from his own?
Probably, from his own perspective, he's a "happy" person - he craves attention and success, and he satisfies both.
I think defining happiness in a more general sense requires a certain "wider" personality, which this type of people doesn't have - ultimately, they're very narrow.
Generalizing this example, the argument "Despite not being particularly happy with their lives" doesn't really hold - this type of ferociously and single-mindedly driven people are ultimately succeeding in their own, narrow, purpose.
He divides happiness into two parts: a "experiential" happiness and a "reflecting" happiness.
For the sake of the discussion and acknowledging I have zero insight into his personality, someone like Steve Jobs could be low in "experiential" happiness (seemingly endlessly frustrated in the present moment) and high on the "reflecting" happiness ("look at all the great, transformational things I've brought to the world")
I heard Steve Rinella talking about this as it relates to hunting. He spoke about how there's some trips where you're miserable in the moment (cold, bug-bitten) but when it's all over you have fond memories of the experience and consider it worthwhile.
If you mean specific to Jobs, I don't have any and was just trying to relate to the OP comment, which is why I couched it with the caveat that I have no insight into his psychology. Maybe he generally was happy during the moment and maybe he was actually miserable when reflecting on his life, I have no idea.
"Could" there be a drug that makes people both experientially more happy and more industrious to the point where they have more reflecting happiness? Sure, but there could also be drugs that cure cancer and make us smarter at the same time too, I just don't have any pragmatic reason to believe we'll see one anytime soon because I suspect they work on very different mechanisms
I've been diagnosed as having narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) by several doctors so maybe I can shed some light on this.
NPD is the inability to generate and/or experience internal validation. It is the lack of internal voice saying "good job". NPD is not self-aggrandizement although that is a common coping mechanism used to deal with the underlying disorder. I don't think I'm some sort of minor deity, but I'm also told by my doctors that I'm considerably more introspective than the typical narcissist (the irony of my docs being a source of praise is not lost on me).
Because I do not have an internal source of validation I seek out validation and praise from others to fill the void. Psychiatrists call these sources of validation "narcissistic supply". That supply is a finite resource, eventually I either exhaust or build up a tolerance to the individual / group supplying the validation which causes me to seek out new sources. Some people have compared it to an addict trying to find their fix, a metaphor I find distasteful since it does people suffering from addiction a disservice.
In this way I don't think I can be happy because I cannot remain satisfied. Sometimes I feel good, but I understand that no matter what I do, success I achieve, or people I help it will never be enough. I have a hard time staying still because I know that whatever source of supply I'm currently tapping will eventually run dry. It's a rather restless experience.
I was wondering what made you get referred to the ‘several doctors’ in the first instance, and what treatments did they recommend to help manage your NPD?
>The key factor here seems to be empathy: the capacity to resonate with – and understand the perspective of – the emotional experiences of others. Individuals with light personality traits show a great deal of empathy for others, while those with dark personality traits tend to show very little. In our new research, we found that this seems to be what leads to a more satisfying life. Similarly, being prosocial – acting kindly, cooperatively and with compassion toward others – is also significantly linked with higher wellbeing.
Maybe the comparison between "dark traits" and "light personalities" yields this, but its been shown pretty consistently that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect on salary, primarily for women. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41343711?seq=1
Also, the framing of this article between essentially low agreeableness and high agreeableness as dark and light is awful. There are advantages and disadvantages to being high or low in this trait, and the framing that being high in it is what's more desirable makes me doubt how seriously whoever wrote this takes their work.
I define empathy as "knowing your customer" (whoever it may be). You can be very attuned to this whether you are agreeable or disagreeable, no?
(Perhaps this is not a widely accepted definition of empathy, and that definition instead somehow indicates "being nice"? I don't think being nice/agreeable necessarily helps you know who you're speaking with.)
I would think so as well. In fact, along the way I've learned that sometimes it's the less agreeable ones who are acting in the interest of the customer's situation but there has been a communications breakdown that doesn't necessarily reflect on the character of either party.
I think the difference is that the personality trait called "agreeableness" doesn't mean someone is a pushover. But I do agree with you in general, my biggest gripe with pop psych as of late is the way "empathy" is used interchangeably with being nice.
Has a quiet person failed to empathize if there is no change in their outward behavior? I'd say obviously no. So I've been trying to work out why we talk about empathy when we mean being nice.
I think people talk about empathy rather than niceness because it makes it easier to admonish others. If I tell someone that they should be nicer, they likely already understand the situation as one where they could be nicer, and chose not too. Maybe they even chose not to be nice fully aware that it violated established social protocol. I am simply making a demand that they behave to my standards, and well adjusted people know that I am not their father no matter how serious I try to make myself sound. Or I can tell someone they lack empathy, accusing them of failing at a basic part of humanity. Depending on their internal thought process I'm more likely at extracting the behavior I want out of them through this manipulation. It's rudimentary bullying. Make an accusation someone doesn't want to be true, and treat any attempt to refute it as proof the accusation is true.
Somewhat many people aren't "good" at feeling empathy, and some brains are 100% incapable -- and maybe they cannot see any difference between empathy and faked niceness.
That is a very odd definition of empathy; it seems to imply that you are trying to sell them something, that you want something from them.
Psychopaths are incapable of empathy, but it would make sense if lack of empathy were advantageous from an evolutionary perspective.
The words sympathy and empathy are often used interchangeably, but the two terms now have fairly distinct meanings. [...] One popular and recent conception of the distinction is that sympathy represents "a feeling of care and concern for someone, often someone close, accompanied by a wish to see him better off or happier," while empathy represents "a person's ability to recognize and share the emotions of another person, fictional character, or sentient being."
I am courteous to those around me on phone support calls and in businesses because I can understand — I can empathize — what they've been through with other people yelling at them, mistreating them, and gaslighting them. I may not be friendly, I may not be effusive, I may not be agreeable — I certainly am not known for being agreeable — but I will do my very best to keep it together, because I've been yelled at before, and I would consider that a grievous harm committed upon another.
I think one time I was grinding my teeth I was so angry that they could hear it on the phone, and my voice was flat, tense, and cold to the bone, and I made specifically sure — even amidst my rage at the harm committed by their employer — to thank them and say goodbye politely. It wasn't a warm goodbye, but it was definitely courtesy, and I don't think they expected it.
The comments up and down this post fail to distinguish these two definitions. In both cases, you're "understanding how the other person feels" — literally, empathizing — but it's how you use that information, and to whose benefit your use serves, that is causing such confusion in the replies.
If someone walks into your store purposefully and doesn't want to make eye contact, empathy suggests that you should let them be and keep an eye on them. This is a great example because they clearly don't want to be hassled by you, and you clearly shouldn't allow yourself to be shoplifted from.
If you use empathy to persuade people to buy things that they'll regret buying once they've left your store, that's generally considered a variation of 'evil' and is the subject of fables and fiction, not the least of which being an absolutely terrifying rated-R book called 'Needful Things' by Stephen King. People will leave some of the angriest Yelp reviews you've ever seen for a business that uses this tactic, not just because they feel taken advantage of themselves, but specifically to protect others from feeling that way. They literally empathize with your future customers and will do their best to warn them away.
So, when someone says "show a little empathy", they're telling you that you've prioritized your needs higher than those they think you're disregarding as irrelevant. They may or may not be right, but that's a very common context for negative comments about your skills at empathy.
It's also common for kindly people to have absolutely no clue what's going on in other people's minds. You'll see them hold the door for someone who's about to drop three bags of groceries — missing the forest for the trees, so to speak, but still genuinely making an effort to care at no benefit to themselves. They'll be confused and sad when you drop your groceries, because they would have helped if they'd realized.
To restate this all in dry terms for nerds like me — The default context for "show more empathy" is a request that you increase the priority of donating your energy and time to social support of others without expectation of reward to yourself. In specific contexts like Sales and Marketing, it means not only "listen more closely to the customer's needs" but also "understand that sometimes the customer's needs may prevent the sale". And you can flip this around, too — if someone says "you have to put up some shields", they're usually telling you that you'...
I don't think it's accurate to make a clear line between "real sociopathy" and "normal people" based on your behavior. Everyone has personal goals, interests, (whether good or bad) and try to have what he think is the the optimal behavior (wether good or bad).
The real question is what are you real personal goal / interests, not how you behave.
That is at first sight. Psychopaths have a surface level charm but spending enough time with them and the illusion shatters.
A real agreable and nice person has that as a baseline, that’s a big facet of their personality.
If they participated in psychology studies, which category would they fall in?
Be careful conflating agreeableness with empathy. In Big Five OCEAN, empathy is a sub-facet of agreeableness(A), but not the only one. Other sub-facets of agreeableness are conflict-avoidance, modesty, compliance, and naive trust in others.
Intuitively, it would seem to me those are more important contributor to success. In particular conflict-avoidance is a big contributor to being exploited by others. A person who scores moderately low on the aggregate agreableness(A) score could be both empathetic, but willing to stand up for themselves and make sure they're getting a fair deal.
Supporting this, the research has found that agreeable people do particularly bad in transactional, rather than transformative, leadership roles. When a team is working as a high-trust, high-cohesion unit, agreeableness is an asset. But when interacting and negotiating with third parties at arms length, it can be a major liability.
Sympathy is the “light” counterpart, where you actually emotionally resonate with the other person. Obviously this makes nasty behavior less attractive since you feel the emotional effects too.
And now you know why corporate psychobabble always goes on about user empathy.
However I'd think some sociopaths can be good at logically cognitive intelligence wise understanding how a different person feels.
But being unable to actually feel real empathy, I wonder if they might mistake their logical thinking for being empathy? Which they will instead never know what it is
As usual m-w is much sloppier when it comes to making distinctions between similar words, due to their philosophy that common misuse redefines words[5], but even they make a pretty clear distinction between empathy and sympathy and it's clear that sympathy is the one where one actually emotes with the subject.
[1] https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=empathy
[2] https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=sympathy
[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/empathy
[4] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sympathy
[5] And they aren't even entirely wrong, as anyone can literally tell you.
Working with such people can be a nightmare because they appear so charming outward to powerful people in decision making positions, while being cruel and sadistic to others, leaving very little for these people to do because the higher ups love the individual and cannot imagine what is hidden from them.
I wouldn't conflate emotional intelligence - i.e. the ability to modulate behavior based on person specific interactions - with necessarily possessing negative, vindictive, malign or cruel personality traits. That's definitely a stereotype.
It is entirely possible to be charming, without secretly being cruel or vindictive. Yes, it can be more difficult to judge a disarming person's intentions, but that doesn't mean the person is inherently sadistic or ill willed. Perhaps they are just good at making other people feel comfortable.
Just that when you are on the receiving end, it can be very frustrating to try and tell others about it. This is in fact one mechanism that keeps victims of sexual or other harassment and bullying silent. And I don't mean small misunderstandings and microagressions. There are people who will literally tell you "you can try telling about this to XY, they will never believe you." being absolutely conscious and intentional about the whole thing. The existence of such people is really hard to believe for many. There are truly evil people out there who know they are evil and probably cannot even help it very much.
They also often try to turn things around and blame you for the things that they do. We call it gaslighting. And in a meta way, they will even preemptively say you are gaslighting them! And it devolves into a "no u" kind of debate and some victims even end up believing it! It can literally make you go crazy!
Search YouTube for narcissist or psychopath, sociopath recordings. There are secret video and audio recordings of what these people will do to their subordinates, eg their children or employees. It is absolutely mind bending and life changing to see how predictable and consistent they are.
Now, this is of course a pathological extreme. But there are milder versions of it too.
And yes, that's a particularly terrible form of manipulation.
The problem is that many well intentioned people cannot imagine that it's the case. This will have to be a big realization that the reasonable factions of the social justice movements will need to make. In the current climate this is just too far out to be a topic of rational discussion. Indeed I assume many people now discount everything I wrote due to mentioning this political angle.
But when you actually think about it, it would be surprising if such people didn't seek out some of these powerful positions to roam free.
> seek out some of these powerful positions to roam free
I initially thought this wasn't considered empathy, but TIL:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy#Classification:
> Empathy is generally divided into two major components: ...
> Affective empathy, also called emotional empathy: the capacity to respond with an appropriate emotion to another's mental states.... sympathy and compassion for others in response to their suffering.... self-centered feelings of discomfort and anxiety in response to another's suffering....
> Cognitive empathy: the capacity to understand another's perspective or mental state....
> Affective and cognitive empathy are also independent from one another; someone who strongly empathizes emotionally is not necessarily good in understanding another's perspective.
However, I think when most people use the term "empathy" they're almost exclusively referring to affective empathy.
I like Wikipedia's translation of the German term for empathy, Einfühlung, as "feeling into," which captures the meaning pretty well for me.
1. Can I understand why person X would feel emotion Y in situation Z? People probably vary the most on this one when they themselves would not feel emotion Y in situation Z, because it becomes about how well they can put themselves in the shoes of someone with different values/priors (from a more cerebral perspective). There's also a difference between retroactive explanation and prediction of course, but without extensive knowledge on person X prediction can be very hard in the "gray areas" mentioned.
2. If I know that person X feels emotion Y, do I feel emotion Y myself? Again, most people probably have this for their closest friends/family, but the degree to which one has this for people they casually encounter seems to vary widely. Probably due to both inherent personality trait differences, and varying circumstances over time - for example if you currently have some intense mood for personal reasons it may be harder to feel an opposing mood because of someone else (but easier when it's the same mood maybe?)
My understanding is 1 is cognitive empathy and 2 is affective empathy, but I'm not as sure whether 2 encompasses all of affective empathy, because there is also:
3. Given limited information about the situation, can one still figure out the emotion someone is feeling? This allows empathy #2 to be applied more readily, and in cases where your actions are relevant (coworkers, friends, etc.) to investigate further and possibly apply empathy #1.
I'm not sure whether 3 is itself considered part of empathy, but certainly it is very important in being able to "use" your empathy in daily life, so it functionally is part of empathy. And this is likely the trait most frequently impaired in individuals on the spectrum, as it requires recognizing subtle, often non-verbal, behavioral cues. I'm not super up to date on the literature but I don't believe 1 or 2 above are considered to be impaired in most cases of Autism, and there definitely are articles out there about how it's incorrect to say those on the spectrum have low empathy.
It's hard to rate oneself accurately, but personally I would say I am above average at 1, average at 2, and below average at 3 (solid at little linguistic hints but horrible at picking up on facial expressions, posture, tone of voice, etc.)
This is what I meant by "emotional intelligence" in the comment below.
> Maybe the comparison between "dark traits" and "light personalities" yields this, but its been shown pretty consistently that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect on salary, primarily for women.
You seem to be comparing apples and oranges: I do not think "higher wellbeing" is the same thing as "higher salary," and whatever correlation there is due to the stress of being poor (and thus is less and less signficant as salary progresses past a minimum threshold).
This is the relevant quote. The article explicitly says "light personalities" have no penalty compared to "dark traits". This may be true in their comparison, but overall higher agreeableness is related to lower salary.
It's not just salary - it's every single negotiation you have in your life. Negotiation is the art of backing down carefully, not all at once, not being a pushover, not going-along-to-get-along. If you're an agreeable person, then you by definition don't push for your way instead of someone else's; and when you're in a financial negotiation, this is basically the worst trait you can possibly have, because your adversary probably does this more often and was specifically hired for being someone that is good at pushing for their way. The company wants to hire you for less money; the car salesperson wants to sell you the car for a higher price; and so forth.
There is no way of fixing this problem "systemically" across the board, because game-theoretically it will rarely be to anyone's advantage to take the first step in this direction.
That seems plausible or even obvious. All things being equal, an empathetic person will value a happy work environment (relatively) more than a high salary. They'll avoid the sabotage-all-others big law firm and go into research (avoiding personal conflicts), become a public defender (empathy), judge, etc.
I think the cultural aspect of this study must be taken into consideration.
Speaking as someone who can from a country with a relatively high population (India), we were taught that in a race to the top, its either eat or be eaten, and that machinations are a vital part of success as long as they do not tarnish the way you're perceived.
If someone's parent is the head of a company, or even well-connected, "achiev[ing] less and [being] considered poor team players" are much less of an impediment. If someone can effectively skip or get more slack in passing through the career levels for which dark traits are a disadvantage, they'll likely do quite well once they're at the top.
Someone with dark traits and significantly above average intelligence, or inherited wealth, may be able to avoid the pitfalls that otherwise prevent such people advancing.
Even if such people are very rare, e.g. 1 in 10,000, they would have an outsized influence, so we should be as interested in the outliers as the general population.
The "system" we've collectively developed forces blank slate souls to develop and play out our learned behavior in order to survive, or feel like we're surviving, in the world. But, as the article explains, we do not (typically) inherently hold, are not born with, nor do genetics code for, these "dark" or "light" traits. Therefore the emergence of "dark" or "light" tendencies is really more decided by the family, community, and economic systems. It is not that a "dark" or "light" trait necessarily allows a person more to succeed, but it suggests that some family, community, and economic systems require a person to develop what we would label "dark" or "light" traits from our perspective in order to survive. It appears the point of the article is: when we come across a person with "dark" traits, it is not entirely THEIR fault they have "dark" traits, it is more OUR fault we cannot shape our family, community, and economic systems to produce people with "light" traits.
Edit: furthermore it's compounded by the fact that the environment changes the expression of the genes (Gene × Environment interaction) and the genes influence the environment (gene-environment correlation rGE)
How did you come to believe this?
(You read this somewhere, or it's your own idea, or someone told you, or something else?)
Who the heck is capable to make this choice at 15? What traits is this going to amplify in a public force?
I got most highest result in Narcissism or Entitled Self Importance. This just means that I'm ambitious and it's important for me to succeed and others to see that I am successful. It doesn't mean I'm harming others. Most of my motivations in life are for people to consider me to be intelligent for instance, but I don't see how it specifically harms anyone. I don't want them to consider me intelligent on flawed premises.
Traits only have meaning in an environment, a context. It's not clear how much we can control the traits. But we definitely can control the environment. The modern corporation only goes back to the age of railroads. Many of our governmental systems don't go back much farther. These are things we can change.
Any system with incentives can be gamed. Those that learn to game systems as a means to survival are always going to be adept at manipulating those systems.
I think some of the oldest and most successful bits of governance are built on this principle, but there's a lot of laws out there that seem to just attempt to dictate a desired outcome without considering how the real world will only nominally comply.
Society can't function with only "dark personalities". When only dark personalities are in the room, everyone loses.
When it's a mixture, the dark personalities get more.
You can quickly see how this can impact evolution if someone swindles their way to wealth and has multiple wives/partners.
It’s a dialogue between Socrates and a few others (in turn). Really neat read and relevant to the conversation.
The article also mentions machiavelli’s The Prince[1], which is a shorter read and more tactical.
[0] http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.2.i.html
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232-h/1232-h.htm
I'd also argue that dark traits linked to social success are more or less born, or heavily influenced by childhood exp (which is essentially "born"), so it's kind of difficult to "pick" it up after reaching adulthood.
The most unproductive form this can take is when dark personality traits are seen as a signal of brilliance... “Well if they’re such an asshole they must be good at their job or they would have been shown the door already”.
See also: the idolisation of Rick from Rick and Morty
For example, I worked with an developer who I’d consider low on agreeableness. She functioned extremely well in a seed stage startup as 1 of 2 engineers. She was willing to fight for the right decision no matter what and didn’t care how people felt about that.
As the startup scaled, however, her disregard for the feelings of others hampered her effectiveness. Her engineering team became one of the lower performing in the organization.
Did her personality help or hinder the organization? Did it contribute or detract from her individual goals and overall happiness?
Yes.
If you want caregivers and to be around people who like you and actually care while you are aging and then old, I would say strongly that it is better to practice treating others the way you would want to be treated, with honesty and kindness. Or if you want to be around that kind of people (I hope everyone would, upon reflection). Or if you believe in God (for which I have many reasons that I find compelling, even "proof" sufficient to my personal satisfaction), or if one wants to play the safe side of Pascal's wager (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager).
Money is a poor companion compared to trustworthy, unselfish, kind people who know that you in turn can be trusted. (And my experiences with social security and medicare, as well as everything I have read or studied in years, including the outcomes of communisms, family travel and degrees, language study, etc etc, strongly bear this out--we don't want to rely just on institutions to care for us if we can have people who know us and who care, and whom we have trained by our example over a long time to be caring and have a service-oriented mindset of actual considerate love for others. For example, close and extended family, neighbors, and strangers. There is no real substitute.
Stalin, for one example, had "success" in terms of power, prestige, and something like adoration of the masses. But if what I read, as I recall, is correct, he died neglected and miserable in a pool of his own waste, surrounded by false friends who cared only when fear required it. And either way, I think the concept could be obvious.
If one just wants pleasure, power, and attention during your years of best health, and to fade & die after you can't maintain it, and thinks life is just the law of the jungle (dominate until you are dominated, rule or ruin?), then maybe you would consider that honesty and kindness don't matter. I strongly recommend honesty and kindness, treating others the way you would want to be treated, and a clear conscience for a truly happy life. Much more could be said. :)
I think it's interesting to focus on Success, and then consider two types: a) Success for personal benefit, b) success achieving a higher purpose.
(Intentionally referencing film characters)
Success for personal benefit may be illustrated by Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street. He succeeded in becoming, for a while, the type of wealthy person he imagined as a young man that he wanted to become.
Success achieving a higher purpose may be illustrated by Terence Fletcher from Whiplash. He succeeded in turning musicians with talent into accomplished performers.
Both personalities could be considered 'dark'. One succeeded by being a charming pathological liar. The other by dismissing any sense of empathy and driving others with severe, manipulative criticism.
But in the end, it was type a) that eventually flamed out and type b) that had an enduring impact on his profession.
I think the notion of 'how to get the most out of people' actually depends on the people you are trying to get the most out of. Many musicians quit under Terence because the achievement was not worth the suffering along the way. Others were motivated to excellence by his style, and he didn't care that they hated him for it.
Socrates taught us: “Know thyself.” Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t. From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb. And correspondingly, from evil to good.'
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It's just factually not true and dangerous to believe that everyone is the same in this regard.
At the same time, we must never think we are above judgment ourselves. All of us need to count with the possibility of being on the evil end sometimes.
With the absence of free will, that intuition has been extremely difficult for me to hold onto. It is fleeting, even after hundreds of pages of books reiterating the fact. To approximate the intuition, when I see someone in a morally questionable situation or experiencing sheer bad luck, I try to remember to tell myself “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
How old were you then? And when that feeling disappeared?
I'm guessing one or both of your parents were religious?
> I don’t believe in free will
When you came to that conclusion, how did that affect how you look at life and maybe any meaning with life? Did it make you sadder or happier?
You believe the universe is deterministic somehow? Or possibly with some randomness
If you are a CEO the system will reward you for paying people less wages so you can beat out competition.
If you are a worker the system will reward you for kissing the CEO's ass (by not punishing you).
Personality traits that are universally advantageous would not be discernible as traits, because they would become universal to everyone.
Therefore, all personality traits must also be disadvantageous in some way.
So-called "dark trait" behaviors obviously confer advantages at least in the short term. In the long run, we're all dead, but early success compounds, like interest.
Some of the luckiest psychopaths will end up at the very top, while some of the unluckiest will end up six feet under.
This is difficult to accurately capture in statistics, but the expected gain from "dark triad" traits across the whole population is probably zero.
For example, notice something about the stats it gives throughout the article? It's whole numbers, and with large variations: 10-20 per cent of individuals, 30-50 per cent of people, and so on. That variation and the whole numbers should be a read flag. When performing a study very precise numbers pop up. This isn't a confidence interval they're calculating, it's made up numbers. (The real numbers btw are between 8 and 9% of the US population.)
Let's look at the premise:
>For 15 years, research into dark personality traits (including narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism) has been rapidly expanding.
Straight from the get go it uses fuzzy or vague terminology. Furthermore, it does not attempt to explain its chosen initial terminology.
The actual terminology is:
- ASPD for something close to the Hollywood psychopathy/sociopathy stereotype, there is no official psychopath in the DSM.
- Narcissism is NPD, and NPD is quite different from what people typically call a narcissist looking at themselves in the mirror, so the audience is going to misunderstand without explanation.
- Machiavellianism. It explains how countries slowly take over land of other countries. It explains how to maintain power on a national level once you have it, and so on. I admit I don't even know what the machiavellianism stereotype is. Maybe Game of Thrones and people backstabbing each other? That is not Machiavellian.
Using vague terminology is a way to get people to believe things without questioning them. It gets the audience to think they know the topic on a deep level, but instead their understanding is reduced. A lot of conspiracy theory websites do this, and even political websites as of late. Sadly, at times, vague terminology can be used as a technique to manipulate people. Fuzzy terminology is a red flag when validating a source.
I could keep going and critique this article all the way through, but it would be quite a long post. (eg, they say these characteristics are more common in men, but there are more female narcissists than there are males, which is the largest group.) In short, a healthy dose of skepticism is helpful. The article aims to solidify a stereotype, that makes it easier for actual bad actors to not be identified. Sadly, reality is darker than these stereotypes.
Using the actual terminology in a popular article is what turns that terminology into pop psychology terminology. You can ask for popular articles to use the current terms, or you can ask for psychology terms to retain their precise clinical meaning, but you can't have both.