Female Attraction to Psychopaths? | Did Jordan Peterson Misinterpret "A Billion Wicked Thoughts?"

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 moses dr. grande today's question asks why are some women attracted to psychopaths I've heard this worded many different ways including why are some women attracted to bad boys that I've talked about this before in a collaboration video I did some time ago but really here I'm gonna be looking specifically at the psychopathy component and more specifically really kind of honing in on the subclinical psychopathy a lot of the time we think about subclinical psychopathy we think about the dark triad this would be psychopathy narcissism and Machiavellianism now machiavellianism by definition is subclinical but of course psychopathy and narcissism both have pathological levels to them so they have subclinical and then they have levels that would in theory require treatment we call that pathological as I mentioned so before I take a look at the sub clinical components in more detail on a cover primary and secondary psychopathy because the characteristics are all the same it's just a matter of how strong those characteristics are where they are on the continuum so when we talk about psychopathy here I'm really talking about primary and not as much about secondary psychopathy so primary psychopathy is also called factor 1 psychopathy and we see characteristics here like being callous unemotional manipulative being a pathological liar we're having a tendency to live we're looking at subclinical fearless dominus and lacking and remorse empathy and guilt in terms of personality traits we see low neuroticism is associated with primary psychopathy so somebody's calm under pressure now it's secondary psychopathy this is referred to as factor 2 psychopathy and here we see characteristics like being impulsive irresponsible being high in neuroticism being emotionally reactive we also see criminal behavior associated with secondary psychopathy and sensation-seeking so this isn't somebody gets bored easily and they're kind of always looking for excitement now secondary psychopathy has a relationship with antisocial personality disorder so at an extreme level it could be pathological in the sense of antisocial personality which of course is a cluster B personality sorter in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual now much of the time when we see psychopathy we would expect to see that somebody's more in the factor one category or more in the factor two but they're not perfectly distinct there's a lot of overlap for example with primary psychopathy it's not unusual to see sensation-seeking which of course is associated more with secondary psychopathy so as we look at the sub clinical psychopathy if we look at these traits to the point where they're not getting in the way of life we see that a lot of these traits could be advantageous in particular low neuroticism being calm under pressure would have a lot of advantages so I'm going to get into all the reasons why women might be attracted to a man as subclinical psychopathic characteristics but I first want to start by looking at a book that kind of speaks to this topic and also a jordan peterson video that speaks to this topic that was really on the same book this is interesting because i've seen at least one video that jordan Peterson has done on a book called a billion wicked thoughts and he made kind of a technical error in terms of describing what the book said it's not a big deal Jordan Pearson produces a lot of content so there's always going to be little technical mistakes but there was a mistake here I don't think it's particularly important but I just wanted to point it out and just kind of give my take on how he presented it but also how it's actually presented in the book and how this could tie to subclinical psychopathy and attraction so we see in the book that two scientists analyzed almost a billion internet searches to explore what type of sexual images or information that men and women tend to search for really to understand better what men and women desire now Peterson indicated that the Google engineers who wrote the book listed the five most male entities used in female pornography and according to Peterson they were vampire-werewolf billionaire surgeon and pirate now the book actually lists the most 10 common professions of the hero listed specifically in fifteen thousand Harlequin romance novels that's what the books really talking about here in this section and the most common our doctor it's not clear what type of doctor MD like medical doctor or PhD doctor philosophy bit away doctor we see cowboy boss Prince Rancher Knight surgeon King bodyguard and sheriff so those were the actual ten categories so you can see there's really not much overlap with what Petersen said really surgeon is the only one that I can see that clearly overlaps and you could argue that a rancher or prince or a king could be a billionaire so you could give him that one but we still end up with vampire werewolf and pirate so where did sort of Peterson get these from well pirate I have no idea it might be somewhere in the book and I missed it that's possible obviously I talked about the billionaire that could be the rancher king or Prince and the surgeon he did get in terms of vampire and werewolf there is a reference to these characters in the book in a different area of the book and it talks about how over the past decade vampires and werewolves and other kind of supernatural entities have replaced mortal men as the most popular romance heroes so my guess is that Peterson of course read the whole book and it just kind of synthesized it and made this small error but either way this tells us a lot of interesting information about what some women are attracted to if we look at the ten professions listed in the book are they associated with subclinical psychopathy well the answer is that many of them are so kind of breaking it down the first category was doctor this one's kind of a maybe in terms of subclinical psychopathy again it depends if it's an MD or PhD we're talking about now cowboy a cowboy would certainly have fear dominus and low neuroticism a boss this way depends on the type of boss so this one's not clear a prince could be manipulative a rancher could have fearless dominance low neuroticism a night could have fearless dominance and low neuroticism a surgeon of course could have fearless dominance bone eroticism and callous unemotional traits a king a king would be similar to a prince with the manipulation we could also have fearless dominance and motar honest ism a bodyguard could have fearless dominance be callous unemotional and of course have the low neuroticism piece and we could see the same thing with the sheriff so when we look at these 10 occupations these 10 character types we do see that there's a lot of subclinical psychopathy represented now looking with Jordan Peterson said in terms of the way he kind of interpreted the book he emphasized the vampire-werewolf in pirate well if we look at vampire and pirate we see fearless dominus manipulation pathological lying low neuroticism lack of empathy and lack of guilt werewolf I think is pretty much the same but I'm not sure werewolves are really into pathological lying or manipulation they're not real so it's just based on what I've seen in literature or in movies but they seem a little more straightforward werewolves are strong kind of powerful creatures that don't really have to sneak around to get the job done so I think you could leave off lying and manipulation for the werewolf so either way with this part the book and Jordan Peterson all this we see that the hero can be impolite and domineering with everybody as long as the hero is attentive and sensitive to the love interest I'll talk about this more in a moment when I go through kind of the reasons why some women are attracted to subclinical Psychopaths so now getting to the reasons why some women are attracted to people who have subclinical psychopathy this is not all women again just some women well there are a few different reasons here I think the first is that someone who's psychopathic even the subclinical level can kind of come across as hard-to-get there's this idea that they may not view a woman as an equal and therefore this could create a desire for a woman to prove her value normally we expect an oscillation and approach and avoidance so when somebody's romantically interested in somebody else if that feeling is reciprocated you'll see one person approach and the other person approach and then one will start to avoid a little so have kind of a balance but it stays within a fairly narrow range and again oscillates back and forth if somebody is always avoiding like potentially a subclinical psychopath or a regular psychopath could do that could intensify the feelings for a woman and make her approach more so the hard-to-get piece incidentally the hard-to-get pace really works in both directions it works in terms of women being attracted to men and men being attracted to women now another component here could be superficial charm we see this is associated with not only psychopathy but narcissism so somebody who has psychopathy especially in the beginning can seem really charming and caring but of course there's no depth or sensitivity behind that so after a few days or weeks of exposure most women would realize that is in fact superficial but that can still kind of get things started they can kind of light the fire and move things along the next feature here of subclinical psychopathy that may be attractive would be the manipulation component now that doesn't mean that a woman will look at somebody who's manipulative and think that person is good what I'm saying here is that a psychopath can appear more attractive by manipulating a woman so they might take deliberate steps to appear more attractive to do things that they think the woman would want to see next category here would be somebody who's exciting is sometimes attractive now I mentioned before that sensation seeking somebody who would look for excitement this isn't part of primary psychopathy factor one psychopathy but rather secondary psychopathy factor two psychopathy but again there is some overlap and therefore we could see sensation-seeking with primary psychopathy now we do see that people who have primary psychopathy have more violent sexual and aggressive dreams and of course sometimes just plain sensation-seeking so this could be something that a woman is attracted to just the exciting persona that a psychopath may have somebody was always looking for an adventure and the last part I'll cover here in terms of this list is the fantasy and this kind of connects back to what I talked about before with that book and Jordan Peterson what he was talking about in terms of that book we see that there's this fantasy of taming the man but this taming would only be necessary if a man was wild so maybe there's this idea that psychopaths are more wild I think what happens here too is that some women want a man that will love them so much that they'll change even something that's hard to change like personality and I think there's this idea that women want a man who has a sensitive side even if he has kind of a hard and nearly impenetrable exterior so tough on the outside and kind of soft on the inside so with all this in mind what's the truth about psychopathy well the truth is that the more psychopathy characteristics that somebody has the more severe they are kind of a stronger they are the lower the probability there's going to be a sensitive side so this man this ideal romantic partner at least statistically speaking is actually fairly elusive so I know whenever I talk about psychopathy and romance and these different topics there'll be a variety of opinions if you agree or disagree with me or have other opinions please put those in the comment section they always add to an interesting dialogue as always I hope you found this description of why some women like Psychopaths to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 119,433

Keywords: attraction to psychopaths, sociopath, bad boys, subclinical psychopathy, dark triad, psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, Jordan Peterson, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, female romantic attraction, grandiosity, pathological lying, manipulation, a superficial charm, callous, unemotional, low neuroticism, lack of empathy, sensation seeking, impulsivity, irresponsibility, criminal versatility, grandiose narcissism, vulnerable narcissism

Id: e6LID8QsHFo

Length: 13min 2sec (782 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2019