Attraction to Chris Watts & Ted Bundy? | Personality of Women Romantically Interested in Killers

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel hello this is dr. grande today's question asks if there's a specific personality profile that we would see in women who are romantically attracted to serial killers and other famous murders so people that have been convicted and are in prison so we see that when this happens these individuals receive a lot of romantic interests they've received love letters and sometimes marriage proposals now I've also heard this question as it relates to specific killers so people have asked why do people write letters to Chris Watts why have they written letters to Scott Peterson or Ted Bundy so I'll try to answer this question to kind of covered these other questions as well as I talk about this kind of phenomenon we see so when we look at this construct in general again we look at some of the more famous killers we see they do receive a lot of letters sometimes marriage proposals this has happened with Scott Peterson who was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife the warden of San Quentin prison received over 30 phone calls within a day of Scott Peterson being incarcerated there we see that Ted Bundy received a number of romantic interest type letters and a lot of women went into the courtroom while he was being tried they watched the trial we see the same thing with Lyle Menendez who committed a double parasite he conspired with his brother Eric to kill their parents we see the same thing with Richard Ramirez The Night Stalker and with Chris Watts who murdered his pregnant wife and his two daughters so with these situations I think a lot of people will become kind of confused because it doesn't really seem to matter who these particular murderers killed but just rather that there was a serious crime so all murder is wrong all murder is bad but you could see how maybe some of these individuals would be attractive based on the idea that maybe they didn't do it or that they've kind of done their time for the crime you could also say maybe some of them had a like if you look at Lyle Menendez it doesn't really make a lot of sense to me but I could understand how somebody might believe well he's done his time he committed a murder but I'll sensibly he was abused and that was the reason he committed the murder so I could see how maybe somebody would think that he was a better choice than say Chris Watts but what happens when you look at people like Chris Watson Scott Peterson they're not ideal in any sense right because they murdered their wives so they were convicted of murdering their wives so why would somebody be interested in an individual like that when of course if somehow they got a prison and those people got together that individual who was romantically interested in the killer would be living with the killer so that doesn't really seem to be an endgame strategy on top of that of course the chances of any of these people being released is pretty unlikely well Ted Bundy was executed for example but even with like Chris Watts and Scott Peterson and Lau Menendez they're likely gonna serve life in prison I don't see really any chance that any of them are gonna be released so again we look at the fact that they killed people rather than who they killed that seems to be what's important for people who are Mantic ly interested and we look at other serious crimes like people who steal a lot of money they don't really seem to get a lot of these letters so it's something about the murderous component and this really brings us over to the idea that psychopathy could be involved so as I talked about this phenomenon I'm really gonna be referring mostly to women who are attracted to men so women who didn't commit a crime who are attracted to men who committed murder now this particular phenomenon actually has a name it's called hybristophilia and there's been a lot of speculation as to what causes it there is even speculation that there is kind of a passive type of hyper stuff Elia and an aggressive type so with the passive type somebody's romantically interested in a murder but not interested in committing any crimes now the aggressive type a woman would be interested in that man I guess getting out of prison or whether he does or not still committing crimes kind of taking whatever his criminal actions were and continuing that behavior right expanding on that so like I mentioned there's a lot of speculation on this and I've seen a number of different theories as to what causes this one theory is that a murderer is interpreted as strong somebody who kills must be strong and that a woman could be attracted to somebody who's strong there's this idea that some women want to change men and bigger the potential change the more rewarding that would be and there's really few types of behavior that we consider worse than murder so to change your murder would be like a great accomplishment and somehow romantically fulfilling like a fantasy of some type there's this idea that a woman would believe that the man is innocent and that she's going to be there to support him and when he's eventually found innocent in reality they'll be together and again kind of a fantasy I seen another theory that the relationship is safe right the man's in prison so the woman doesn't have to have any physical interaction she can always be safe outside the prison and another theory it's pretty popular is it's simply the idea of being near someone who's high-profile in some way so attracting the attention of somebody who has attracted attention even if for a bad reason even if they're notorious as opposed to famous but the reality is with all the speculation is that nobody knows and I think that personality could explain this fairly well although there is no perfect explanation that we have available for this and the idea with personality is there must be some sort of profile so if we look at women who are attracted to these murders there must be a trend that we see in terms of their personality profile and to help answer this question I used an article that really looked at this in depth and a few other articles and I'll put those references in the description for this video so we see with hybristophilia is that the act of murder itself may not be what's attractive but rather there's a theory that's the psychopathy behind that that would be attractive and if we consider some of the people I mentioned before like Chris Watts and Scott Peterson and Ted Bundy for example we see a lot of speculation that they have psychopathic characteristics we see that experts that were engaged with Ted Bundy determined he was psychopathic although of course we don't know that for sure but that's what they reported so we see that maybe it's the psychopathy maybe it's the personality profile linked to those type of murders that's more important than the fact that the person is a murderer although again the high-profile nature I think does maybe attract some people but either way we see that this particular study that I'm looking at that gave a lot of information about this ask really two questions are women particularly attracted to men who have market psychopathic personality traits that's the first question and the second question is what types of women seem to be attracted to men with these traits so to get into the answers to these questions we have to take a look at what these traits are and I've covered this in detail and videos before so I'm just going to give kind of a quick overview of psychopathy here psychopathy can be divided into two factors so two types factor 1 and factor 2 and factor 1 has two components affective and interpersonal and specifically in this study they broke factor 1 down of these two components for the analysis that's why I'm really mentioning that here the affective component has lack of guilt lack of empathy lack of remorse and a shallow affect so somebody's not really deep or sensitive they don't have depth to them the interpersonal facet has glibness superficial charm a grandiose sense of self-worth lying and manipulation now factor 2 I'm just going to keep factor two together and not look at the facets factor 2 really has sensation-seeking impulsivity irresponsibility and criminality so engaging in a lot of criminal behavior factor 2 has a much closer relationship to antisocial personality disorder which is a mental disorder cluster B personality in a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual so as we can see from these characters six neither one seemed particularly appealing at a romantic level or really almost at any level but we see in the prior literature before the study that I'm talking about here today we see there's really mixed results about the attraction to Psychopaths we see studies that show that individuals aren't generally attracted to people who are psychopathic we also see studies that indicate that people who have psychopathic traits themselves are more likely to be attracted to Psychopaths and similar to this we see studies that suggest that maybe individuals with low levels of psychopathic traits are attracted to people who are psychopathic for example we see research that says that some women who are vulnerable trusting loyal cooperative sentimental and dependent have a higher probability of being attracted to Psychopaths and the last popular theory we see in the prior research is that individuals who have low levels of self-esteem are attracted to psychopathic individuals or otherwise to individuals who are highly manipulative and if we look at kind of mental health treatment if I look at my clinical experience I see some support for this theory I've seen instances where people who have low self-esteem do seem to be attracted to people who are highly manipulative so that one could be a possibility but moving back to this study and these two questions our women attracted a psychopath and if so for those that are what type of personality profile will we see with those women so to answer this first question our women attracted to psychopathy generally the answer is no now this requires some explaining because of course there are exceptions but overall psychopathy is not particularly attractive to women now looking at more the specifics here because as I mentioned it's not just that simple we see that when we look at traits in men not only psychopathy but other extreme personality profiles like the personality disorders that would be in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual we see that this study looked at specific characteristics so they looked at factor 1 psychopathy and split it between affective and interpersonal they looked at factor 2 psychopathy but they also looked at skits tipple borderline histrionic narcissistic and dependent so it's gets a tipple we see characteristics like odd thinking magical thinking it's kind of on a continuum with schizophrenia that's one of the theories with borderline we see characteristics like frantic efforts to avoid abandonment anger impulsivity a feeling of emptiness with histrionic we see characteristics like being shallow which is consistent with psychopathy but also being forward and provocative with narcissism we see someone who believes they're special or unique they have a sense of entitlement they require admiration and they tend to be jealous other people now a dependent personality disorder what we see there is someone who relies on somebody else for support to an excessive degree so they looked at all these personality traits again not just the psychopathy and they also looked at the time interest so attraction in a sense is dependent on what somebody anticipates in terms of how long that relationships gonna last so if somebody's attracted to somebody to date them that's different than being attracted to somebody for a short-term relationship or a long-term relationship so they looked at those three levels of anticipated time so even though the participants in the study didn't seem to have a particular affinity toward psychopathy the romantic preferences for factor one psychopathy traits were higher than for most of the other personality disorder features including the factor two psychopathic traits so we see here is that the participants expressed preferences for psychopathic traits as a function of anticipated time so this interest was the highest for the dating relationship and the lowest for the long-term relationship and this really indicates that psychopathic traits may be more attractive to others in the short term now when we look at the other personality disorder features all those other personality sort as I mentioned like histrionic and borderline we see kind of the same stair step pattern meaning the attraction level was higher for dating and then a little bit lower for short and then a little bit lower than that for long term and this stair step pattern was consistent for all of the different personality features now it really stands out here is specifically for factor one then the effect of facets of the lack of guilt empathy remorse and shallow effect that was particularly high for interest in dating much higher than for any of the other personality disorder features that were covered in the study and what we see is even though the other ones were fairly similar on the higher end we have psychopathy in terms of interest dependent personality histrionic and narcissistic personality disorder and the low end schizotypal and borderline meaning these skits a tipple and wor line personality disorder features were the least attractive to the women in the study so this brings me to the second question do we see a particular personality profile associated with women attracted to these murders and what they found here in the study is that women with market personality disorder features including cluster B personality sort of pathologies that would be antisocial borderline narcissistic and histrionic person is these participants were more inclined than other women to endorse a preference for psychopathic males as well as males with other personality sort of features so we're not necessarily just talking about psychopathy here but all extreme personality disorder features so this is pretty interesting because this kind of breaks away from again just psychopathy so women with extreme personality traits are attracted to men with extreme personality traits so that's really a pretty interesting finding so this expands beyond murder this expands beyond against psychopathy and moves into all psychopathology related to personalities so taking a look at the personality disorder pathology specifically it's important to understand when looking at the study they looked at features that were not necessarily included in the DSM because there are still areas of study so they talk about some personality disorders that aren't actually officially personal sores in the DSM again because they're still studied they also looked at personality sorters of course that are in the DSM so they found here is that females with schizotypal antisocial paranoid borderline of Weeden and dependent person is order features as well as passive-aggressive self-defeating and sadistic personality sore features now those three of course aren't official person is orders but these women indicated a preference for market personally sorter features in males but women with schizoid histrionic and obsessive-compulsive personality traits did not express a romantic preference for extreme personalities order features in males so taking a step back and looking all these findings what does all this mean well at first glance it appears that women may not be particularly attracted to psychopathic traits women report a greater interest in men with low as opposed to high psychopathic traits for long term relationships and the same is true for other personality disorder features so in general women aren't attracted to personally sorter features however when a romantic interest is present the personality sort of features in those women tend to be elevated now if we look at some of these specific cases we can see these letters some of them are made public the letters sent to Chris Watts some of those have been made public as part of the way the correction systems work so you can look at some of these letters written to these different killers and you can see in those letters without making a diagnosis but rather just speculating you can see some indications that maybe some personality disorder features are present if you read a lot of those letters these letters that women write to these killers they don't always seem to be kind of within the typical patterns of personality profiles right I mean we see some kind of extreme traits as I mentioned so this explanation really does kind of make sense as I talked about before there's really fairly good evidence available that individuals like Chris Watts Ted Bundy or Scott Peterson would not make ideal romantic partners so at the very least it's a poor decision to try to enter in to any type of romantic relationship with somebody like this but on the other end there could be some mental disorders personality disorder type events occurring there you could see this type of psychopathology there so one of the questions I hear sometimes is should women that have this attraction go and seek treatment from male health counselor well I believe the treatment from mouth counselor is always a good idea but my answer would be yes probably it would be good to talk to a mental health counselor and try to sort through some of the feelings and maybe sometimes it's legitimate and has nothing to do with personality sort of pathology and in that case again I don't know how it would work because the murderer is in prison for life but either way it might not involve psychopathology but again in many cases it probably does that's a good idea sort through those feelings and thoughts and behaviors and maybe work toward goals that are more pro-social and would give a better opportunity of having a productive romantic relationship so in this video I've talked about this idea that women aren't generally attracted to Psychopaths so who would be the ideal mate from a personality perspective specifically looking at this one study well high levels of conscientiousness relatively high levels of agreeableness and low levels of neuroticism characterize a male that a woman would typically be attracted to so it's interesting about that of course is that Psychopaths also have the low level of neuroticism but they typically would not have high levels of conscientiousness and certainly in most instances would not have a high level of agreeableness as low agreeableness is a core feature of psychopathy so either way this is a particularly interesting topic I know whenever I talk about topics like this they're giving a lot of people who agree or disagree with me who have other opinions please put those opinions in the comment section they always generate a really interesting dialogue as always I hope you found this description of what personality profile is associated with being attracted to a murder to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 238,939

Rating: 4.9466295 out of 5

Keywords: Chris Watts, Lyle Menendez, Scott Peterson, Hybristophilia, romantic interest in killers, love letters, marriage proposals, psychopathic, psychopath, sociopathic, sociopath, antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic, borderline, schizoid, schizotypal, histrionic, dependent, paranoid, murder, serial killers, mental health, lack of empathy, manipulative, personality disorder, ted bundy

Id: -LTuvDTAHmQ

Length: 19min 43sec (1183 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/MayaPaya]

Love Dr grande 👌

[u/snakpakkid]

Is it just me but I keep thinking they look alike some what? I’m not attracted to any of these guys.

By the way I love Dr. Grande