Women, Porn, and Sadists | Dr. Del Paulhus | EP 327

like my actual life is way less contentious than my online life you know they're not even in the same universe in some sense is that sense of polarization it it's really very difficult to tell now in the modern world how much of that is a mere consequence and a mere appearance of virtualization and how much it actually reflects some fundamental disquiet I mean I know they Loop but we have no way of really knowing and if it is true that virtualization enables psychopathy then that's a that's a real that's a real conundrum that's a real tough nut to crack in a way you're getting closer to what people are really like uh in an anonymous responses we know that from questionnaire work that the more Anonymous response is the the less desirable the answers that you get from people are but it's yeah it does sound very cynical to think that the nasty stuff you see online is really The Human Condition [Music] foreign watching on YouTube and Associated or listening on Associated podcasts um I'm here today talking to a colleague and uh compatriot of mine Dr Dale paulus from the University of British Columbia he's a personality researcher whose work in so-called dark personality traits via a variety of measurement methods has yielded measures of the dark tetrad psychopathy narcissism machiavellianism and last but not least sadism his work has also validated measures of socially desirable responding perceived control Free Will and determinism and over claiming his work has been published in over 150 articles in books and his current citation count which is the number of times other scientists have referred to his work and the Cardinal marker I would say of of eminence and influence among scientists exceeds 43 000. so um Dr paulos is definitely one of the world's most outstanding psychometric personality psychologists that is personality psychologists who specify who specialize in the field of of mathematical measurement of of Behavioral and conceptual traits hi hi Dale it's good to see you um I I want to let everybody who's watching and listening know uh Dr paulus from the University of British Columbia is a researcher and personality as his bio indicated uh our work in some ways ran in parallel methodologically I was very interested for years in statistical analysis of linguistic description descriptions of personality I concentrated mostly on um trying to further develop the idea of the Big Five on the statistical front the five Factor personality model extroversion neuroticism agreeableness conscientiousness and openness um Dr paulus took a turn that was very interesting to me though as well he's spent a number of decades studying what what came to be known as the dark Triad and later the dark tetrad originally when the Corpus of adjectives was generated to extract out a five-dimensional description of personality from language um judgmental adjectives were eliminated from the Corpus the idea was to produce a set of descriptors of normative and non-pathological personality independent some sense of morality and there was some utility in that I think because it gave us a picture of normative personality but the downside was we didn't develop as detailed an understanding as we might have of the dark side of personality and that seems to be where your work which is which is receiving increased public attention I would say perhaps in the in the days of of Internet misbehavior that's where your research really came into its own is that a reasonable initial summary yeah good summary so do you want to start by explaining to people let's walk through your your research on the dark Triad how did you become interested in this and and how did you develop the measurement instruments and what do you measure or like a lot of academics my research can be traced back to my advisor who was Richard Christie the inventor of machiavellianism as a trait and he did something very clever he went into the books of Nicolo Machiavelli who's an advisor to politicians way back when and he took the statements administered them to undergraduate students and simply asked them how much do you agree with these statements like you have to get to know important people always be prepared for the worst in people and the amazing thing was the huge variants in the responses and that's what personality research is all about we look for and wallowin relish the fact that people give different answers and apparently a lot of people agreed totally with the statements that Machiavelli made and the 1500s others were horrified by them and so that inspired Richard Christie to make a questionnaire the Mac 4 the most popular version of this questionnaires was administered to subject pools at his university Columbia University and elsewhere and it wasn't just self-reports it predicted actual Behavior so he could show that people who scored high on the Mach 4 manipulated others in a room in a laboratory so they would try to squeeze money out of other people by tricking them and all of this could be recorded and published hence Richard Christie is forever associated with machiavellianism so I I was I I thought that was a fabulous way to do research I moved on then and took a real job at the University of British Columbia and met up there with bob hair sort of the the Emperor of research on psychopathy another averse of trait and of course he has done it all but what he didn't do was compare it to machiavellianism and I've also done some research separately uh narcissism which captured attention of researchers in the 1980s because it seems to resonate everybody knows narcissists people who want a lot of attention and think they are superior to everyone else everyone can resonate to knowing such people so we have three personality variables then when the student Kevin Williams came along and typically in my career I go with what the students want to do we decided to figure out whether there were more are there more aversive personalities so we searched the literature and we did as much as we could back then early 2000s to cover all the literature and see if there were more personalities that that were at the level of narcissism machiavellianism and psychopathy we called them the dark Triad because they seem to dominate the literature they're already hundreds of studies on each one of those the unfortunate results fortunate in the long run I suppose is that the literature is overlapped so much you could barely tell the difference if you took all the literature on narcissism all the literature and machiavellianism and psychopathy you could see the same things coming up and that was the original problem we want to parse the Dark Side of traits but you can't really do much with the literature because of this phenomenon that we called construct creep and that is a researcher it doesn't have the ability to research everything at once so they focus on one variable but it creeps wider and wider until it overlaps with other variables and that's a problem because you don't know which one you're actually studying when you put it into a research program which one is responsible for the action you're seeing right right well we won't we want to talk about that in some more detail too because I'd like to find out a bit more about how you feel I know that the dark Triad is morphed into the dark tetrad to some degree and I'm also curious as to what you have to say about the overlap between the dark tetrad qualities and and personality disorder categories especially in the uh histrionic anti-social and narcissistic categories obviously that Shades into personality pathology and so can I can I define the the three traits and have you correct my definitions if you would so the machiavellians as you pointed out Machiavelli was a an advisor to princes who was really interested in some sense in the outright maintenance of instrumental power I wouldn't say he was driven by any intrinsic ethic it was Machiavelli gave advices to printers who wanted to maintain their position um by by hook or by crook let's say so Machiavellian are willing to use manipulation to obtain their personal ends and narcissists seem to be driven by a high desire to um to obtain unearned status from others and the most important thing for them is not status in relationship to competence let's say or in relationship to Performance but just in status for its own sake and then the Psychopaths I spent a lot of time looking at hairs research and thinking about relationship to the big five Psychopaths seem to be something approximating parasitical Paris or parasitical predators and so they're very very low in agreeableness and that makes them callous and non-empathetic and then they also seem to be very low in conscientiousness that seems to Accord reasonably well with the two factors of the psychopathy scale and so a real psychopath is someone who is willing to take what you have let's say and use it and that might be the predatory aspect and also to live off the earnings and and efforts of others and that's also an element of criminal behavior and so you're looking at the Nexus of all three of those machiavellianism narcissism and psychopathy and recently you and other researchers have added I think this is so interesting because I think it was a real lack you you you added sadism to that which is positive delight and pleasure taken in the suffering of others so is can you expand it all upon the definitions of machiavellianism narcissism and psychopathy and we could segue into sadism yeah I agree with all of your definitions although what we did was spend a lot of time trying to find what's different among each of the characters and what the overlap is why is it that the literatures and the measures that were available always overlapped to a dangerous degree in trying to understand what's going on so the key thing for psychopaths in our opinion is impulsivity and uh sensation seeking which which is what gets them into trouble they may not have worse motives than the others but they can't help it that's why they at the extreme levels spend their lives in prison they can't help um responding to Temptation whatever the Temptation is they go for it and often they get what they want right away and they keep on doing it until they get caught and they don't seem to learn from it so that answers just a qualification to the definition of psychopath now what's underlying it we think is callousness for all of them they're overlapping because at the core is a a failure to have empathy and if you have a deficit in empathy you it seems inevitable that you're going to exploit other people in one way or another because you're not you're not getting the feedback that people with empathy get in seeing other people suffer at your hands and the story of sadism is a is quite a long story but uh as you want me to get into the details sure yeah yeah please do please do yeah I don't know whether I'm more sensitive to these things than other people but then I started seeing sadism in irregular people and not only is it there and everybody people but people seem to wallow in it when the circumstances will allow it for example violent Sports uh one of my favorite sports hockey it's kind of pathetic watching a hockey game the cheers are larger larger for the fights than for the goals people love to see their fighter Pummel the fighter of the other team or Pummel anyone and the cheers that go up in a hockey Stadium are incredible and the cheers only stop when the victim falls to the ice and starts twitching and a hush follows over the crowd showing the Dual nature of positive and negative motivations that human beings have but the fact that they love seeing the fighting no matter how much blood is and teeth end up on the ice uh is is disappointing in a way and we learned a long time ago from the Europeans they don't have to do that to make happy hakia a wonderful sport that was just one but then watching the undergraduate students at UBC University of British Columbia what are they doing for fun well if you'll recall Way Way Back they used to play these archive games and there was some gentle ones Pac-Man asteroids I don't know if you remember those but uh going down into the arcade you see that people are gathered around one of the arcade games and so I wandered over to see it and it was something called Mortal Kombat which by today's standards isn't that bad but the heads are torn off and the blood spurts out and that's why that crowd was there because it was so much more appealing than the silly little Mario Brothers stuff and it just struck me as the beginning of my interest in what people do especially young males when they have time on their own so it's not porn then it seems like it's violence and it's somewhat horrifying but it's gotten worse I don't know if you've been following the video games that are now available on your home computer you don't need to go to an arcade and be embarrassed by what you're playing because you can sit at home and and play whatever games you want and so now uh what's it called a Grand Theft Auto you can kill innocent bystanders step on their heads Etc and there are actual torture sites where you can go and torture people you can torture animals it's all there and so people are paying to do this stuff they pay for violent Sports they pay for violent movies what's the most popular television program these days it's called Game of Thrones and it's the most sadistic kind of television program that you've ever seen people are paying for this in one way or another and they're attracted to it they relay stories with their friends so this putting this picture together suggested to me that some not all in fact the variance again is there which excites a personality researcher some people are highly attracted to this stuff other people are horrified Black Rifle coffee company is on a mission to build a support 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of caffeine so go to blackriflecoffee.com and use promo code Jordan for 10 off you can also find Black Rifle coffee in grocery and convenience stores near you Black Rifle coffee America's coffee and our preferred blend to enjoy alongside the Jordan B Peterson podcast I know that neurophysiologically anger is a multi-dimensional emotion it activates positive emotion systems and negative emotion systems simultaneously and so you can think about that perhaps as the core element of something like aggression at least maybe both defensive and predatory aggression and then you could imagine that people are wired differently as individuals so that for any given person being angry might be associated with a predominance of of approach motivation right positive emotion and a relative decrement of negative emotion for other people that would be reversed like I'm trying to account for what the positive pleasure is in the observation or participation in the aggression I mean you could associate it with hypothetically you could associate it actually with predatory behavior with hunting and with combat but it also might be a consequence of differential wiring at the neurological level in relationship to the balance between positive and negative emotion experienced by having any given person with anger no because I you see this variation in people you know I mean I know some people who are real fighters let's say on the political front and some of them really enjoy a good scrap right it really seems to get them motivated and this isn't a criticism of them necessarily and then other people and I think I fall more into this cap I'm not really very interested at all in in Conflict it bothers me a lot although I don't like delayed conflict so I'm likely to engage in it you know relatively up front but so we could go into that like what do you think what do you think is the fundamental biological and then also ethical difference between people who are taking positive Delight in aggression and those who aren't and uh and well I guess we could start with those questions yeah that's the fundamental query a puzzle in a way why would human beings have to have a sadistic side at least some people and as you mentioned predatory very often so one can speculate that it helps adult animals carnivores especially hunt if they know not only are willing but enjoy The Killing and that could have been carried over to human beings [Music] also a little more instrumental explanation would be that it helps dominance that is if you can scare off your competitors whether they're uh competitors for maids or for territory than being sadistic about it that would be a niche theory in some sense I guess is that I I know that the worldwide prevalence of psychopathy ranges between one and five percent hovers around three and what it seems to indicate because it's relatively stable is that although being a psychopath isn't a particularly successful strategy in that 97 percent of people don't take that route in a Cooperative Society a niche does open up for people who are willing to use manipulation and impulsive behavior and sadism to dominate and use power oppressively to at least what would you say carve out for themselves some degree of success and then now and then some spectacular success I suppose which would be the case with people who are extraordinarily successful at being tyrants and so so you so we have two arguments there in some sense one is like a neurobiological difference in response to the balance of positive and negative emotion in anger and the other one is well there's a niche that opens up for people who are really willing to use power and manipulation and so forth to attain the rewards of social dominance and Psychopaths seem to do that right because they'll manipulate they often have to move from place to place because people figure them out but they will use short-term dominant strategies I think you've related that too as well the dark Triad to to short-term mating strategies as well right which is an interest that's another thing that we could concentrate on right on what the dark Triad predicts the dark tetrad interested me particularly because the literature I read on Psychopaths did describe them as impulsive so they're willing even to sacrifice their own Futures to the pleasure of the moment but there was obviously a subset of psychopaths who delighted in being cruel and the standard explanation of callousness say which is merely lack of empathy didn't seem to be enough right because it isn't merely that people are lacking empathic empathy it's that sometimes there are people who take a positive Delight in cruelty and that there's a new term that's used to describe online mobbing Behavior or bullying Behavior troll Behavior which is lulls right I just did it for the lulls which is the plural of LOL laugh out loud and to do it for the lulls is to go after someone on the net often anonymously merely for the purpose of making them miserable and wretched and put them in pain just so that you can enjoy that and certainly That's Not Mere psychopathy right that's not mere impulsiveness there's there's an additional component that's worth concentrating on all right so you covered a lot of ground there uh uh picking up on the argument for psychopaths being impulsive uh just to remind viewers who are not that familiar with evolutionary theory the simple argument is you got to get mates to maintain your your genes in in the gene pool and there are many ways of doing that right one is to grab and and run with whatever you want using Force if necessary that will sometimes get you mates more strategic uh machiavellians find ways of manipulating others to uh to get their genes into the gene pool narcissists seem to attract mates partly because of their confidence even if it is over confidence say this is a little harder to see why would being sadistic get you romantic and sexual partners well I think I touched on the only explanation that uh I could think of and I think you mentioned it too and that is well you scare off your competitors and you even scare off your mate into doing what you want by hurting them and in a very public way so you're deterring uh you're deterring reactions from other people and that may be of benefit in some circumstances and then you you went into the the niche Theory or niche as some people say um yeah there's a lot of niches out there for dark personalities each one may require very select kinds of traits but uh if you want a job as an enforcer on a hockey team you better damn well be able to and willing to and like to hurt other people you know it also might be so I I know someone quite well so I talked to him he he was often hired by corporations to fire people and he's a very disagreeable person but he's very high in conscientiousness eh so um I was talking to him at one point in my lab because I was struggling with a few students and who I eventually let go and I I really realized that I probably had kept them in the lab longer than I should have and that their poor performance was demotivating some of the people in my lab who are very high performers and you know just producing a decrement in the overall quality of our work and part of the reason I think I failed to take action is because I am a rather agreeable person and I find firing people that say very distasteful and so I talked to my associate my friend about firing people and he said I enjoy it and I said that really surprised me and there's someone I admire and respect very competent person by the way I said well why is that he said well you know I go into corporations and I ferret out the people who are kissing up and kicking down I ferret out the narcissists I figured out the people who as I alluded to take credit when they haven't done anything and cast aspersions on others when they have done something and who are clearly not doing their job and then also I go after people who for whom it would be better in some real sense to be off doing something else and his continual pattern of employment for multiple years because he was particularly good at this was he'd go into a corporation that was failing and start to fire people at the bottom and then climb the hierarchy and then when he got too close to the top they'd fire him of course but you know it was really interesting to me because it's also possible that some of these traits the more Psychopathic traits have a positive utility socially even speaking morally when they're combined with other personality traits right but that are particularly like maybe it's not so bad to be low in agreeableness if you're high in conscientiousness but maybe it's really bad to be low in agreeableness if you're really high in neuroticism or really low in conscientiousness and so you could see that that that tilt towards less empathy which might make you capable for example of enforcing rules might be um well as I said might be extraordinarily useful even Pro socially under some circumstances but very pathological under on under others yeah there's a movement now I think to question the absolute positivity of empathy this fellow who loon from uh Yale University I'm not sure if if you haven't interviewed them yet you should because he um he points out the overuse of empathy or inappropriate use of empathy like letting a stranger into your door is a simple example but having traits that make you react overreact say to Blood and Guts is going to prevent you from being a surgeon you've got to be able to get your your knife in there and slice people up and to some extent ignore them if uh well up to a point if they're complaining right um yeah so there are jobs in which too much empathy is going to um impede your ability to success so he goes through a lot of examples like that I suppose one of the first things they do at boot camp is to try to impose certain kinds of motivations in soldiers that are joining the Army and make sure they understand that if you don't kill first they're going to kill you or they're going to kill your buddies and that should be the way you think when you're you're in a war and if you don't have that ability to reframe your normal gentle personality then you're in the wrong place right well and it's it's clearly the case that people who are very high in trade empathy so very high in agreeableness they are easy to take advantage of and they also tend to become resentful and bitter at least that's been my clinical observation because it's very difficult for them to stand up for themselves right and so you need a certain amount of capacity for aggression and then there's a there's an interesting twist here too I don't know I read a book a while back called billion Wicked thoughts it's a very very interesting book it was written by Google engineers and one of the things they did was analyze pornography use between men and women and on and and with billions of searches literally and they found which is not surprising that men preferred visual pornography but females preferred um literary pornography and they found the classic literary pornography plot which was something like um you know relatively Innocent but undervalued and attractive but not so obviously attractive young woman stumbles across this sort of commanding man who has many women at his disposal and over time despite his relatively high levels of aggression he finds himself attracted to this woman and then forms a sexual relationship with her it's a Beauty and the Beast plot essentially but one of the things that's so interesting about their analysis was they they listed the top five occupations or characters for female sexual uh literature and they were pirate surgeon billionaire vampire and pilot and so those are all males who I would say are marked by oh no not pilate werewolf werewolf was the fifth one and so I think it reflects to some degree this conundrum that women have is because women have to pick a man who has the capacity for aggression enough of the capacity for aggression to protect himself and others and to move out into the world against a fair bit of opposition but who's also simultaneously empathic or perhaps conscientious enough to to be caring and share and you can imagine that's a real knife edge right because you need a bit of a monster in your man let's say to keep the real monsters away but you don't want so much monster so that a relationship is impossible and so then you could also imagine that there's overshoot on both sides of that Target so that some men become too aggressive but can appear attractive in the short term because they have the confidence associated with that and some men become too agreeable and so they look easy to get along with and so forth but they can't put themselves forward and stand up for themselves and so be another explanation for the potential emergence of say sadism and psychopathy is that there's this narrow Target for especially for men to hit doesn't account for female psychopathy but for men to hit and it's easy to overshoot in either direction and there's going to be variability in women's Choice as well [Music] the current administration's New Year's goals are to tax spend and turn a blind eye to inflation if this is at odds with your goals if you are tired of the government playing games with your savings and your retirement plans then you need to get in touch with the experts at Birch gold today for over 5 000 years goldas withstood inflation geopolitical turmoil and stock market crashes with help from the experts at Birch gold you can own gold and attack sheltered retirement account Birch gold makes it easy to convert an IRA or 401K into an IRA in Precious Metals just text Jordan to 989898 to claim your free info kit on gold and then talk to one of their precious metals Specialists Birch gold will hold your hand through the entire process text Jordan to 989898 and protect yourself with gold today with an A plus rating with the Better Business Bureau thousands of happy customers and countless five-star reviews you can trust Birch gold to help protect your savings text Jordan to 989898 today [Music] yeah one of the issues that underlies my work in connection with Clinical Psychology which you're the expert in and I'm not I try to stick to so-called subclinical levels in other words student bodies or workers these are people who are managing to get along in everyday society and they're available in large numbers so you can take surveys and uh and try to tease apart the various aspects of the dark side but I do not I'm very reticent to venture to the clinical side and I think that's been a source of criticism from of me from clinical psychologists that I'm touching on areas that really belong to them and do not belong to me because I'm not a clinician so when we get into sexual sadism and criminal sadism which in a sense was all people associated with sadism up until recently it was the only way that people thought about it and interesting interplays between sadism and masochism why would it be to some extent the same people who are into both uh I can I can ask these questions and surveys but I hesitate to to try to be an expert and accept what people are saying well it's it's not as if it's not as if the clinicians have been any more careful than the personality theorists in elucidating the actual nature of their diagnostic categories right I mean one of the reasons I'm a clinician and a personality psychologist I mean one of the reasons I find your work interesting and compelling is because you do the psychometrics properly and that's not always obviously the case with clinical diagnostic categories because they're basically holdovers from the psychiatric Enterprise and they weren't derived they weren't extracted out of a primarily statistical model and so on the downside for the clinical psychologist it's not obvious at all that we have our nosology our diagnostic category system straight and so I'm and and I mean I I'm not saying that in a cynically critical manner because it's actually a very difficult thing to do right but it seems to me that your work isn't unfairly um what a poaching on the grounds of clinical psychologists because somebody has to do the basic psychometric work it's like well what are the basic categories of let's say predatory and parasitical Behavior now you can imagine that there's a place where that becomes clinically extreme and has to be dealt with in another manner but there's absolutely no reason not to look at it subclinical manifestations as well one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you now is because I've been reading a number of papers I I got really interested in this idea that virtualization enables well maybe psychopathy but maybe more broadly dark tetrad Behavior you know because one of the open questions is if you're dealing with someone who has these personality proclivities that you described Machiavellian narcissistic Psychopathic and sadistic they obviously lack um a Freudian superego in some sense they can't regulate their own behavior in a social manner left to their own devices they will exploit and hurt and so then you might say well what keeps people like that in check and one of the answers to that would be well the same thing that keeps the rest of us in check which is mechanisms built into the neurobiology of our face-to-face contact like we know that if you put people in a car they'll be Ruder to each other to someone in another car than they would be face to face on the street like there's a lot of direct inhibition built into our social interactions that keeps psychopathy and narcissism under control but then what you see online is that all of that disappears eh and I don't think that there's any real price to be paid for dark tetrad Behavior online especially if it's Anonymous and that's made me think more recently especially as our culture tears itself apart as a consequence of the battle between extremes on the political Spectrum it's made me wonder how much of that's actually driven by the virtualized enabling of psychopathy and narcissism because you know it's always a problem one of the things people might not understand who are watching this is the incredibly high cost that biological organisms bear in relationship to parasitical Behavior so that'd be Associated let's say with psychopathy there is good evidence although I wouldn't say it's canonical that the reason that sex itself evolved was so that we could stay ahead of the parasites if you just clone yourself the parasites can chase your genome down the generations but if you mix your genes then the parasites have to adapt rapidly to keep up you can stay ahead of them and so sex itself was driven by parasitical behavior and so what that indicates is that the presence of parasites as well as Predators throughout our entire biological history has presented a canonical threat to our very civilization and now if it's true that virtualization enables the Psychopaths and the narcissists then it seems to me that that produces a cardinal threat once again and there's been a Spate of research more recently using the dark tetrad measures to investigate such things as narcissistic self-promotion on on Tick Tock and Instagram but also trolling in online bullying and so maybe you could tell us a little bit about what's been found on that front yeah well again you covered a lot of ground there but the central point I have to totally agree on and we got into a specific aspect where sadism plays a big role and that is the trolling online you get to say anything you want without repercussions if you said that to the person's face you'd be in trouble for various reasons legal the physical reasons but we we tried to delve into asking these people who engage in trolling online why do you do it and we ended up with the title of our paper trolls just want to have fun because that seemed to be the most common motivation it's just fun poking at people you find a website where people are all happy and uh enjoying it I don't know a gardening group and you mess with them and that seems to be a lot of fun for certain individuals we correlated an interest in doing that with the dark tetrad measures and sadism stood out as the best predictor of liking to mess with happy people so having the internet as has put us into trouble politics is a an obvious example but just being nasty to your fellow humans is now uh yeah it's a sport it's a hobby it's it's a Pastime and these people tend to spend a lot of their time engaged in various uh in similar activities the right well we know that one percent of the criminals commit 65 percent of the crimes and so it's a prito burrito distribution like almost every other form of let's say creative production and so it's also the case in all probability that a very large proportion of the pathological online Behavior comes from a relatively small proportion of you know committed dark tetrad types and given that they're not only not inhibited by the normal mechanisms of social discourse they're also rewarded because they get a tremendous amount of attention and I would say I think it's reasonable to also point out that that attention is monetized in some sense and expanded by the internal operations of social media networks themselves it's certainly not the case that the trolls pay a price for being provocative in fact I think there's good reason to think that they're their attempts are more likely to be multiplied rather than inhibited and that that could be depending on the degree to which we virtualize I mean that could pose a real a signal threat to our to the Integrity of our peaceful political uh uh Arrangements let's say yeah it's out of hand and it's hard to track down individual contributors to malevolence online but uh one could blame it on media polarization and just the the need to attract customers turns out that people don't like moderate uh media sources they won't turn to that channel they'll turn to a channel where they can feel warm and toasty because the other people on that channel agree with them on everything so that I don't get to hear other points of view and many years ago perhaps you and I were there at the time of Walter Cronkite and there were a few um there were a few corporations online two or three that everybody watched and they we're more or less down the middle if those were put online now nobody would watch people want to watch the extreme version of their own politics and that's unfortunate development and Technology yeah well there is some you know there are some exceptions to that I would say I mean I've had a lot of success let's say with long-form Dialogue on YouTube and other people have done the same thing and you know inviting people like you to have discussions the last 90 minutes or so and that's a pretty comprehensive discussion and it rewards a long-term light uh attention span but it's definitely the case that there are selective pressures in relationship to attention to gather as much impulsive attention as possible and of course there's a profit motive behind that often because if you can gather people's attention you can advertise to them and I'm not saying this cynically I I'm just trying to observe the way the system is working if you can gather people's attention by whatever means you can almost instantly monetize that and so we also have this new technological problem which is that we have technologies that can really reward impulsive information gathering and simultaneously monetize it and that means that that's fertile territory for the Psychopaths and the narcissists and the machiavellians and the sadists to exploit and I think they're actually I think there's enough of that to actually undermine public trust in general because it it makes like my actual life is way less contentious than my online life you know they're not even in the same universe in some sense is that sense of polarization it it's really very difficult to tell now in the modern world how much of that is a mere consequence and a mere appearance of virtualization and how much it actually reflects some fundamental disquiet I mean I know they Loop but we have no way of really knowing and if it is true that virtualization enables psychopathy then that's a that's a real that's a real conundrum that's a real tough nut to crack yeah and it's scary in a way to think that in a way you're getting closer to what people are really like uh in an anonymous responses we know that from questionnaire work that the more Anonymous responses the the less desirable the answers that you get from people are but it's yeah it does sound very cynical to think that the nasty stuff you see online is really The Human Condition well I'm more optimistic about that you know because of this Pareto distribution phenomena I think I'm pessimistic because it looks like a very small number of Bad actors can cause way more trouble than we would have thought right and that's a pessimistic idea is that yeah it's only three percent who are dark tetrad types or maybe five percent it depends where you put the cutoffs let's say and that means 95 percent of people are going about their business in a decent manner but and that's a very positive thing but the downside is yeah but that five percent can cause a god-awful amount of trouble I mean I talked to Andy no um about antifa you know and I'll tell you how that came about I I was working with a group of Democrats in the U.S to to help pull the Democrat Party towards the center and I did that for a number of years and uh there was one topic that we used to come to a fair bit of disagreement about and that was the reality of antifa and the Democrats I was working with were absolutely convinced of the absolute reality of 4chan and the right-wing conspiratorial groups but they didn't believe that there was really any such thing as antifa and I thought well these were smart people and I thought why the hell did they believe that and they said well there's always been race riots in the United States and the degree to which antifa is organized is blown out of proportion and they're not really a formal organization and and so on and so forth and I thought well that's interesting because some of that's true but you could say the same thing about the hypothetical right-wing conspiratorial groups so but then I talked to Andy Noe who's done more to cover antifa than any other journalist and I said to him um Andy how many antifa sells let's say do you think are operating in the United States and he thought farhani thought well maybe 40. I said well how many full-time equivalent employees so to speak do you think each of those cells have and he thought well maybe 20. and so if that estimate is vaguely accurate that's 800 people in the entire United States has a population of 320 million it's really one person in 400 000 right and that's sort of statistically equivalent to zero so you know that's why the Democrats can say well that antifa doesn't even really exist but the counter argument is yeah there aren't very many of them but a small number of people who have these dark tetrad motivations and I'm not saying that's unique to antifa by the way I'm talking more about the riotous troublemakers who love to dance in the street you know um if it's only one in four hundred thousand people that's just an indication of how much trouble someone who has no internal sense of restraint can make manifest if they're free of all external social controls yeah I don't have too much to say about that but I would like to talk a bit about extreme niches that you brought up before and where these people end up if they have the proclivities for one of the dark tetrad the proclivity for narcissists would be in the realm of politics because they want attention and they get it whether it's positive or negative it seems to work for them the machiavellians I think are among the most interesting though stock markets Financial organizations and uh although we just saw this fellow Santos who made up his uh CV to get elected right Long Island uh an example of a politician who's both narcissistic because you have to to be a politician and a Machiavellian but Bernie Madoff was the classic he was the most popular guy in his building on Fifth Avenue big smile on his face all the time happy go lucky and stealing money from thousands of people far more money that he could ever use as a billionaire he wanted more billions but that's a niche in which machiavellianism will help you get to the top you have to manipulate and hide and do it relatively low-key unlike the narcissist so uh I think we already talked about the psychopath and the uh the sadist but it does uh play out in the occupations that one chooses uh to to suit your your niche yeah well you you can also see there that that makes the issue of leadership a complicated one right because we know that the Big Five personality profile of narcissists is something like high extroversion and low agreeableness and so and so you you can see there that someone who's low in agreeableness is going to put their Viewpoint forward in a pretty aggressive Manner and someone who's extroverted is going to be enthusiastic and captivating and so and you need those you can understand that there might be situations that cry out for genuine leadership where both being extroverted and being disagreeable would be an advantage and you know that might be a situation where you hope like hell that your extroverted disagreeable politician is also extremely high in conscientiousness so that even though they might like attention and even though they might be less empathic than that their relative lack of empathy would pose a certain risk that their proclivity to abide by a set of ethical principles would override that but then you get people who fake that conscientiousness and fake competence which is partly what Psychopaths do when they entrap women is to to fake that confidence and then to look like you're abiding by the rules when you're just being Machiavellian and narcissistic and manipulative yeah that's fascinating to think about different combinations and uh of the big five but also of the dark the dark tetrad I wrote a paper on Steve Jobs for example some time ago it helps to be a genius of course but if you're a full narcissist who believes you have the right idea and the entire world is wrong about it everyone disagreed with them and he was right right well that's a good example of that hyper successful Niche right so so that's a good that's a very interesting case because you're going to get the odd situation where someone is narcissistic and Hyper intelligent and correct in which case their their narcissism and their callousness in some sense is absolutely what's needed to bring forth that whole set of ideas well in fact he was fired by his own company after having proved himself to be a genius and changing the world in so many ways his own company said he was too obnoxious so they let him go eventually the company kind of faded out they had to bring him back but right how can how can you be so super successful and fired by your own team uh classic case well you know I knew people who I know people who worked with jobs and one of the things they told me was that he was he was unerring in his ability to Cull you know so he had a very high eye for quality but he he also didn't let empathy stop him from killing projects he thought were counterproductive and that's a tough one right because you can imagine you can't say that if you're running a company and you're attempting to produce something that keeping a faltering project going because you don't want to hurt the feelings of the employees by bringing to a halt is a moral virtue it's not a moral virtue and the reason for that as far as I can tell is that you're just prolonging the agony and awaiting the inevitable death right so you have the evidence in some sense at hand but you're unwilling to draw the appropriate conclusions from it and there is that same necessity for discrimination and and elimination that might also be driving the capacity as you pointed out earlier of a surgeon to go into someone's body and to get rid of the cancer right in independent of the fact that they have to deal with the blood and the gore and the and the pain and the fear and all of that and they can't let that stop them yeah agree totally with with everything you just said I wanted to get back to the psychometrics just for a moment um I know you worked in depth uh on the big five and separated into aspects and broke it down and that's in a way characterizes a certain approach to personality I call the distinction lumpers and splitters and that's to some extent then the pro and con of my Approach trying to tease apart or parse the the dark side is an approach that just made sense to to us given the overlap in literatures that I mentioned earlier but there's also a tendency you mentioned earlier the the evaluative sense to lump together good traits with other good traits the so-called Halal has its correspondent devil effect and that is if you learn something bad about somebody you naturally assume it's hard not to to think that they have all the other bad traits too and so that there's a lot of uh in a way competitors out there working on the dark side who are trying to lump it together and call it the the D Factor the dark Factor so it's collapse them all into one and you can array people on this one dimension that never appealed to me I think uh it's a lot more interesting to break things into their components but how intercorrelated how intercorrelated are the four scales on average and and does it can you extract that can you can you extract out a single Factor how much of the variance does that factor account for um yeah excellent question we started off with correlations between 0.3 and 0.5 with the dark Triad and that is definitely all positive they're never negative correlations but uh to some people that was too high especially 0.5 or above means well why don't you just add them together and call it something else yeah and that's what the the so-called d-factor people have done it just seems such a silly Simplicity to me that you could look at your fellow human beings and call them uh place them at a certain position on this single Darkness when there's so many ways of being dark there might be one way of being a good person but there's many ways of being dark is is the approach that we took well technically what you'd want to show is that your multiple measures interestingly predict different outcomes and differentially and you talked a little bit about occupational choice I mean that rubber hits the road basically by having you demonstrate that your your multiplicity of categories adds predictive power to in some interesting way to the solution of some complex problem I mean it certainly seems to me to be useful at least in principle to distinguish something like sadism and positive pleasure taken in the suffering from others from Mere impulsivity you know even though both of those can be problematic I'd also like to suggest something else to uh to the listeners we might ask ourselves why in some fundamental sense are these behaviors these dark tetrad behaviors properly regarded as pathological and I I think especially given that you could make the case that they have some reproductive benefits at least compared to certain other strategies but I think the issue here you tell me what you think about this it it has to do and this is like a biology of Ethics in some sense it has to do with iterability and so there's this famous study set of studies by Jacques panksep where he analyzed the the play behavior of juvenile male rats and what he showed was that if you put two juvenile rats together and one outweighs the other by ten percent there's about a 90 probability that the bigger rat can pin the smaller rat and so if you just do that once the conclusion you would draw if you were a like a zero-sum biologist and someone interested in dominance is you'd say well the bigger stronger meaner dark tetrad rat can win the competition and therefore has elevated himself in the hierarchy of dominance and is more likely to reproduce successfully but panccept being a bit of a genius knew that rats lived in Social communities and had iterated interactions with one another and so they you don't play with another rat if you're a young rat only once you play with them repeatedly and so pancakes paired them repeatedly and what he showed was the second time you put the rats together the little rat had to invite the big rat to play and mammals have a characteristic strategy for play invitation you can see that in dogs they sort of Bounce and so did kids and so do sheep like it's extremely widespread among mammals um and and so the little rat had to ask the big rat to play and the big rat would dating to play but if you paired them together repeatedly if the big rat didn't let the little rat win at least 30 percent of the time the little rat would stop playing and so I thought it was an unbelievably profound set of studies because it indicated that there was an emergent ethos that was intrinsic to repeated trades you know and you know the economic games where you you take two people and you say look I'm I'm gonna give you a hundred dollars and you can offer some fraction of that to your partner but if he refuses neither of you get anything you play that around the world and people average out at about 50 percent and it's the case that even poor people who need the money are very likely to reject a sharing offer that isn't something approximating 50 percent and you might say well that's preposterous because why not just take the money and leave and the answer is something like yeah but there's an ethos of fair play that emerges out of repeated interactions and your goal isn't to win a single game it's to win a set of iterated games and the problem with the psychopathic perspective and the impulsive perspective is that even the Psychopaths themselves sacrificed their own future as well as other people to the immediate gratification of their desires and that's just not a very sophisticated strategy right why win once when you could hypothetically win you know 50 percent of the time 100 times and so we I think we we can get close to a technical description in this sense of what constitutes pathological Behavior right it's pathological behavior is the proclivity to gain in the short term but lose in the medium to long run yeah I've thought about this in terms of the the winner in animal groups the alpha male so to speak is usually the meanest nastiest of the group and uh in human groups the meanestness doesn't rise to the top you have to have allies so Alliance building is an important component of success in human societies not so much it is apparently in chimpanzees but it's really important you get to the Top If you can link associate and get friends get uh allies to help you in getting to the top well friends friends DeWall in his work has has demonstrated quite clearly that the the stable alpha males like there are alpha males who can make it to the top who are sort of dark tetrat and chimps right they'll use just Brute Force but they tend to meet pretty damn violent ends pretty young whereas the stable Alphas sometimes are smaller males who Allied themselves with powerful females but who are also more reciprocal often in their interactions so more fair Traders let's say than any other individual in the group and so dewal has done this lovely job of relating uh let's say Cooperative leadership to social stability and length of rain and so the psychopathic chimp might do better than the the chimp who is only withdrawing and never interacts at all but the psychopathic chimp who relies on aggression doesn't do nearly as well as the reciprocal chimp who builds a network of allies and so and I I well I really like the Wall's work for that reason you know because it's often the fact that people who presume that our hierarchies are based on PowerPoint to say chimpanzees and say no it's power that sustains dominance it's like no power can provide you with dominance in the short run but it's not it's not an optimized long-term strategy and so it's reasonable to view it in some sense as a form of deviant pathology especially in its more extreme forms because it's a self-defeating game we'll be back in one moment first we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series Exodus so the Hebrews created history as we know it don't get away with anything and so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the Tyrant and violate your conscience without cost you will pay the piper it's going to call you out of that slavery into Freedom even if that pulls you into the desert [Music] something else going on here that is far more Cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine the highest [Music] precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of Freedom against tyranny I want villains to get punished but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price that's such a Christian question yeah this notion of getting people on your side or developing allies course is essential for politicians it's the one with the most voters the one with the most compatriots supporting them money-wise and otherwise who gets to the top we apart from Machiavelli we've also been drawing on Sun Tzu the the famous Art of War writer from China and as in many cases the Chinese got there before the West did but he talked about building alliances and indeed we've tried to invoke that in our measures and it turns out to be a key for manipulation the Machiavellian is well aware and you can see that in some of the items on the max scale of getting people on your side is essential to getting ahead it might might be the key the key element to it not standing up and leading but getting people to um to to be persuaded to your side right so the Machiavellian then in that situation the Machiavellian I would say is mimicking reciprocal sociability right because if you and I form a relationship that's going to be stable over time it's going to be something like let's say a 60 60 exchange you'll contribute half and all contribute half but the reason I represented that is 60 or maybe 75 percent is because if you and I engage in reciprocal honest training the sub the sum total of our activity will exceed the sum of our individual activities right we can do more together than we could do a part and so there's there's all sorts of sense to be made for the establishment of these honest durable and reciprocal relationships but what that also means is that if most people establish those then people who only act as if they're establishing them can capitalize on that just like the narcissists and the Psychopaths with their false confidence can mimic competence and fool well there's good literature evidence for example that the dark tetrad types broadly speaking are particularly good if they're male at fooling young women you know as women get older they're better to they get better at separating out the narcissists from the competent men but initially because the narcissists have this confidence that is a marker of competence even though not an you know an invariable marker they can easily be fooled and so that opens up the landscape of cooperatives to exploitation by a small minority of of predators and parasites so so what else have you found out on the social media front and and and where do you think the interesting research is let's let's where's the interesting research going on in that area and do you have any sense of what sort of constraints need to be put in place in online uh forums to keep the Psychopaths under control like I've come out recently against anonymity because my sense I've read tens of thousands of of online comments my sense is that a radical proportion of anonymous posters have these dark tetrad traits and I know there's a research literature that actually indicates that as well and so I've been attacked for that because people think that you know their right to free speech also involves this right to Anonymous posting and I can understand that argument but the problem is it it opens up it does seem to me to open up the landscape to the predatory parasite types and that's a real problem so have you thought about like what have you seen that you regard as a credible deterrence if any on the on the virtual side to the dominance and and proliferation of of dark tetrad Behavior really no uh Solutions have come to mind uh it's it seems out of control when you go to a website and ask for comments which is really trying to get feedback to whatever is on your site it seems I think somebody calculated it takes about 10 comments before someone says oh yeah [ __ ] you yeah well so you're talking about this this proclivity of of open online discourse to turn into a Kind Of Swarm and characterized by the the presence of well I really do think it heats up the whole political environment because you know you alluded to earlier the fact that there's lots of things people won't say in person pardon me for legal reasons but also partly for physical reasons and both the legal and the physical constraints are removed in the virtualized world and that does seem to produce an unbelievable uh flowering of pathological commentary and then I really do believe that that makes everyone think the world and the people in it are a lot worse than they really are because it magnifies the effect of these this tiny minority especially the sadists you know it's been so interesting to me to watch your concept of dark Triad expand to take into account that positive delight and suffering because I don't think you can really understand like radical Evil by merely making uh making reference to narcissism and and instrumental valianism and even psychopathy you need pleasure and suffering to really add that last you know nail into the coffin so to speak yeah one interesting uh goal we had was to try to find the female sadists on on all of on all four of these components with males score higher and even in sadism we figured there's the Mean Girls phenomenon we all have this sense that women can be nasty in different ways perhaps and so we tried to uh develop items especially with my colleague Aaron Buckles at the University of Winnipeg she's working on this and so is Tracy viencore at Ottawa U they are looking at relational aggression so women may use different ways not physical or less physical and uh gossiping for example uh spreading spreading lies um there are a few others that that exploit the verbal abilities of women and allow them to be nasty to people that they think deserve it and so those people are working actively on trying to get a measure of sadism that would apply to women even more than to men because I wonder if that I wonder if that would involve pleasure in exclusion you know I mean it's it's definitely the case that well if you use time out on a child one of the reasons it works is because it's technically a punishment it produces something akin to pain but the pain is essentially social it's it's involuntary social isolation and so if you exclude someone which is what the mean girl types do right that's their their primary this reputation destruction and exclusion seems to be their particular bailiwick you see that with female anti-social behavior and there is a pain associated with that which is the pain of social rejection and it's not trivial like it's very very hard on people and so you could imagine that positive Delight in observing the fruits of social exclusion might be a canonical characteristic of female sadism yeah that's a good idea to focus on that because we know that male friendships are more based on common interests female friendships are more of a bonding an emotional bonding and therefore the exclusion tactic would be much more devastating for women good idea yeah yeah well it so I I studied the development of male and female anti-social behavior for a long time you know and it's pretty obvious that female anti-social types by and large are less sort of impulsively criminal than males are which is why there aren't very many females in jail but that ability to denigrate and to gossip and to destroy reputation is much more characteristic of the female anti-social types and they can be they can be really really good at it and the frightening thing about that too to some degree is that you know male aggression of the physical sort doesn't scale worth a damn on social media because you can't use physical aggression on social media but the female pattern of anti-social Behavior which is reputation destruction and social exclusion man that scale's like a charm on social media especially because of what you described as the negative halo effect you know and I really noticed this I should be very resistant to that negative halo effect when I pick out my guests for my podcast eh because I have had a lot of guests on my podcast and now and then I talk to people who've been uh mobbed excluded or had their reputation damaged for one reason or another you know and even when I know perfectly well that there's a high probability that they've been lied about and that they've been the target of this kind of malicious gossip there's still a strong proclivity in me that I have to fight to overcome not to assume something like well where there's smoke there's fire you know and you don't have to Sully someone's reputation much before you raise the cost that other people need to Bear to interact with them right I mean we all have in principle thousands of people we could interact with and so we're always looking for a reason in some sense not to interact with people and if a terrible Rumor Has spread about someone well the cost to me to avoiding that person can be very very low but the cost to that person if everyone avoids them is unbelievably High yeah most people care about how a person treats them specifically and they can overlook rumors often because the other person has treated them personally well so that's that's a dynamic that works in the other direction to to cut down on the negative effect of rumors and uh Gossip that sort of thing right assume assuming that you actually have that personal relationship you know one of the things I've also seen as a consequence of virtualization you know if I'm if I'm working with people virtually and so we haven't established that kind of personal relationship if any issue comes up that's negative it seems to have a larger effect than it would if we had established uh you know a long-term more personal face-to-face interaction so as long as things are going smoothly the virtual interaction seems to go well but it's really easy for anything negative to be magnified and I think it's partly because you don't have that buffer that you just described which is maybe something like the evidence of repeated interactions face to face evidence of repeated acts of kindness and so forth so that you have that as a data body to offset the you know the negative event against yeah right on on all of those points I I did want to talk a little bit about your your work on the big five with respect to the challenges to the big five as well as the challenges to my work kind of dovetail in an interesting way and that is although the big five has become the consensus for the broad personality traits so big fibers mostly assume that they've covered it all because they're working at such a high level and people like me who are working from time to time on individual traits that would be farther down the hierarchy of of the personality space now it turns out that you can add at least one other dimension to the big five and that's been contributed by Ashton and Lee to to Canadian researchers who have to some extent eaten away at the popularity of the big five by talking about the big six or the hexacool and what they've added is a dimension called the humility honesty humility which is a great choice I thought but but it turns out that that extra Dimension they added subsumes all of the dark traits that I've been working on oh oh I didn't know that I wanted one to ask you that oh when was that discovered that has been coming to light over the last five years and so so I've certainly turned to favoring the big six instead of the big five and in some of my recent work in terms of we know the personality space is rather amorphous and uh you can rotate dimensions in multiple ways to suit your fancy but this one suits me because it shows where the dark traits fall with right back to a comprehensive personality space they all fall together under this this one dimension honesty humility and so I really appreciated the uh do you think that's because Ashton Lee is it because they included in some sense some of the originally excluded words from their statistical samples of adjectives the ones that are more evaluative because I mean your phrases or sentences are really quite evaluative on the moral Dimension and so they wouldn't have been considered in the initial Big Five Corpus and then honesty humility seems to be kind of in the middle of that right because it's obviously better morally to be honest and humble than to be dishonest and arrogant and so you're sneaking there or stepping into the domain of of ethical categorization but I wanted to ask you actually like if you if you throw your your sentences into a sentence level Big Five like the notion model I think what you just said is that the individual sentences will line up the dark tried or dark tetrad sentences will line up on a dimension that's the opposite side of honesty humility do they break out across other factors as well or like how much dishonesty humility subsume the the dark Triad on the negative side well it's pretty much uh the the whole thing is there under honesty humility they do have a couple of other negative traits in there so there's a slightly broader which suggests maybe we could add a couple of other negative traits to our Pantheon of of aversive personality is that's one direction to look in anyway uh it's interesting what you say about the yeah pulling out the negative traits which cattell did many years ago and tell again and a few others have pursued that and indeed I think that's that's there if one looks hard enough that the work of earlier personality researchers the big seven was available in the 70s and one of those looked like um looked like a dark personality Factor so one that would didn't make an interesting paper to to track that issue interesting you put that together has anybody done a large-scale compilation of the dark tetrad items with the hexical model like on thousands and thousands of people have you done that yet others have done that yeah yeah it's there the uh the German sentences have always been known as good psychometricians and uh they they've shown in a number of large-scale studies that both in German and in English they can work as well in English have uh show that clear pattern oh yeah okay well that's really worthwhile knowing um so what what forms of behavior do you think are most powerfully predicted by the dark tetrad questionnaires like the sorts of things that people might encounter in their day-to-day life if we can bring this to life for people we're focusing on a set of personality personality attributes what are you likely to experience if you encounter someone who is characterized by a plethora of these of these uh characteristics well that's been it's kind of a summary of our goals in my laboratory and that is we want to develop practical measurement instruments one can find a lot of interesting things in Freud's Thanatos and Young's shadow shadow but you're not going to be able to ask people about those in a job interview so what we want are measures that can be applied to Ordinary People whether they're um job selection you want certain kinds of people and sometimes you want a little bit of the dark side sometimes not uh even in these romantic websites where you're pairing up people you want to know a little bit about the potential partners the the dark side is starting to prove useful there um so practical measures that you can present to large groups or diagnose people is is what we've been aiming for and so the psychometrics have been the most important thing getting it right so we we tried in in California on that front this might be something you'd be interested in methodologically so I put together a behavioral predictive battery that was very short cognitive analysis which is basically the Ravens Progressive matrices revised we we made our own matrices but we got a good Central measure of General cognitive ability and then a good fake proof measure of the big five and we we made it fake proof by forcing people to choose between positive descriptors or between negative descriptors we lost a degree of freedom but we made the test robust against social self-presentation I did that with Jacob Hirsch and then so I used those tests to predict entrepreneurial success in thousands of people in Silicon Valley I was working with a man a day oresi who ran an Institute called the founder Institute which was the biggest early stage Tech incubator in the world I think he started 5 000 companies something like that and we can predict entrepreneurial ability pretty well basically with General cognitive ability trait openness and a bit of a positive tilt for age and but this is what was happening in classes say he'd get 50 people together to at a very early stage in the development of their business ideas and now and then he'd get a couple of bad apples in the group and that would just destroy the class and then he was spending all his time attending to the troublemakers so he came back to us and he said look we're doing a pretty good job of finding people who are qualified but we can't keep out the troublemakers and I thought well could we do that psychometrically so this might be something interesting to consider in relationship to the dark Triad and the personality disorders so you know there's there is a central factor in personality disorders if you if you turn the personality disorder items in the DSM into questionnaire items you can extract out a single factor and one of the best predictors of failure to respond to clinical intervention on the personality disorder side is sheer number of personality disorder symptoms so it's kind of just like a severity index you know so what we did was we we turned the DSM personality disorder items into questions and then we administered them to a very large number of people and then we we pulled out a central Factor and then we found the items in the personality disorder questionnaire that best predicted the central tendency and those that predicted it the least and then we forced people to choose between them they both sound bad they both sound like pathological attributes but one is much more clearly a marker of the central proclivity than the other and then we did the same thing with Wink's narcissism scale and so then we were able to identify people who had this narcissistic proclivity and a personality disorder proclivity and we'd screen those people out if they scored more than 95th percentile and that cut the incidence of troublemaking the classes dramatically so the reason I'm bringing this up is because utilizing it'd be very interesting to see and maybe you guys have already done this and so this is also a question on that front is like a lot of the personality disorder symptoms look to me like their manifestations of the more severe end of the dark tetrad traits and it would be lovely to see this psychometric Enterprise enter the domain of psychopathological prediction and maybe the doorway through that is the honesty humility Dimension differentiated out into the you know more anti-social pathologies in the manner that you've done it it sounds like that's an interesting Bridge into the technically clinical world well that's been a dynamic in the development of our understanding of the link between normal and clinical traits I again I don't want to step on the on the toes of clinicians but I understand the movement toward trying to make all clinical disorders uh dimensional and that's been a real clash between the traditional clinicians who feel that you've got schizophrenia or you don't got schizophrenia as opposed to having a dimension that represents a particular disorder and placing people on it and so I understand why people would some clinicians who are have a psychometric proclivity are a little bit offended at me trying to come up with labels that sound like clinical disorders but aren't really because all of the people I study are doing okay and you alluded to this earlier but there's very little uh maladjustment among any of those four dark personalities you you can't get them to correlate very strongly with especially with the general neuroticism or feeling of distress they're not distressed whether they're high or low there's there's there's very little relation there right that's an interesting case of the of the absence of distress being a marker for pathology because that is the problem with being a psychopath in some real sense is you do impulsive things and they hurt you in the long run which is why you end up in prison or with no friends or as a catastrophic failure by the age of 40 but none of that's being marked by psychological distress along the way so you're you're opaque to the to the trouble that your own pathology is causing and that means you're not getting error signals when you should so you're not depressed or anxious but you're also whistling in the dark as you walk towards a cliff so not helpful yeah the very clever a clever study that you outlined there sometimes one gets a sample or an opportunity to to study a certain group and that's that's what carries one's research but if you think about it that's been a difficulty in doing Dark Side research you've got to validate these measures so you've got to have hard criteria especially Behavior you can rely on the judgments of others to some extent but hard visible recordable behavior is really the most persuasive kind of Criterion but think about sadism how are you going to show that in the laboratory that was a real challenge to us but but in a way it was fun developing measures that can be used can get by these very restrictive IRB boards that look through your work and say no you can't do that you can't do this and so so with this notion of bug killing which I I guess I have to attribute that to Dan Jones who came up with the notion of getting people to think that they're crunching bugs and a coffee grinder and again such variants some people loved it we we tried to anthropomorphize the bugs by giving them names so there was a little wee container that had names like Ike and muffin cute little names but they had to take these bugs put them into the cruncher pressed down and hear the what sounded like bug parts flying apart it was actually just coffee beans but again like the Milgram study they thought they were doing it and once some of the subjects I give it got any more that was fun other people were so horrified to think about the whole idea they just ran out of the lab when we described what we wanted them to do lovely to have variants like that when you're studying uh something uh sensitive like sadism we also use voodoo dolls I'm not sure if you're familiar with that research giving subjects uh acutely oh yeah and saying think of the person that you really dislike now we're going to leave you alone for five minutes and you're welcome to take this this set of pins and stick them into the doll to represent the degree to which you hate them and again lots of variants there we come back after five minutes and some of these dolls are full of pins and that tends to correlate with um I think this particular study was actually showing the uh the dark tetrad measures in comparison to questionnaire measures of psychoticism which is in a sense answered the question that you often pose yourself with your listening to a horrible crime described on television and you wonder this is such a horrible crime was the person crazy right or it was a person nasty and that has legal consequences doesn't it crazy you're not guilty you're you're just nasty you can go away for some time for doing nasty stuff and we found actually that both contributed to the extent that you can measure psychoticism with a question questionnaire measures debatable we found that independently the dark tetrad and psychoticism predicted the number of pins that you stuck in this uh this uh sorry little doll that you were given so Dale you've been delving into the dark side of human behavior for a long time and you know you alluded to the fact or the possibility of a certain pessimism that emerged as a consequence of your observation that sometimes Anonymous responses are actually more revealing and Anonymous behavior on the net has produced quite the uptick in pathological Behavior but what what has been what has been the consequence for you personally in focusing so intensely on this dark area of human proclivity and uh and well let's start with that oh yes and then the other thing was how do you distinguish let's say personally and scientifically between the ethical issue with regard to the dark tetrad Behavior and the biological motivations right because your work does skirt that line right so you can think about psychopathy as an Adaptive mating strategy in some sense on the scientific front but then when you think about it ethically and personally it falls into the category of the kind of clearly reprehensible behavior that should get people locked up so hey what has this done to your view of human nature and B how do you thread the needle of scientific evaluation versus moral evaluation well for me it started in in an undergraduate course where I learned about machiavellianism and went to work with Richard Christie so in a sense I was there from the beginning how what the causal Direction was I'm not sure at that point but it did do a lot of other work on on self-enhancement Etc other researchers in my department like to study happy people and I I didn't find them as interesting as the as the dark side and certainly I could give a rationale that we're more concerned with the behavior of the dark side than we are with what happy people can do to us maybe they they could bore us at times but they're not going to be a danger to us so studying the dark side is more important arguably and there is a light Triad now where people have put together some positive traits and kind of followed up on the notion of the dark Tetra a dark Triad and said why don't we look at the positive side and see who who is who gives a desirable motivations for their behavior I studied social desirability for a long time and it never really came together for me because you you develop a social desirability scale well it's partly true and it's partly yeah phony and and that's a terrible confounding because do you want to hire the person who scores high on social desirability or the person who scores low is probably right right right I found that very frustrating work as well I tried to develop scales of self-deception and self-presentation and it was I ran into I think very much the same problem it's it's well first of all it's not obvious that it's an independent Dimension right because it seems to be quite affected by agreeableness but it's also not as you said it's not obvious what the desirable outcome actually is like do you want the person who tries to look make themselves look better than they are during a job interview and the answer is well maybe you do want them because at least they came to the interview and tried and you know you could say well it's fake but on the other hand well putting your best foot forward it isn't just fake it's also a step in the right direction and so separating those out is extraordinarily difficult it's also difficult to separate it out from such things as extroversion and trait optimism and yeah it was a real morass I know you did a lot of work on that for a long time eh I don't know if you've heard of Integrity tests but yeah I raised a real Paradox because Integrity tests in the sense of the opposite rationale to design social desirability tests they ask people who are being hired by big companies uh have you stolen from an employer and a variety of other things that would cause the company a problem if they hired you but they take it at face value with Integrity tests if you leave those answers on a social desirability test then researchers would often toss you out because um no one because you're lying you're lying or hypothetically yeah yeah well I didn't I didn't know that the the Integrity tests seemed to be valid predictors only to the degree that they marked something like conscientiousness I never saw any compelling evidence that they really got farther than a good conscientiousness measure so you know some people have argued that the reason why both of them can work is that social desirability skills are usually used on college students who have a higher cognitive abilities if you're hiring cashiers or someone who's doing um muscle work for your company then it's it's a little more straightforward and to some extent they've got some clever methods like saying how much money do you think the typical employee steals from the employer and it's kind of a projective test right built into it in a way to the extent that someone says oh yeah people steal a lot they're they're uh they're indicting themselves right right right they're indicating what they regard as normative so look we're out of time here um unfortunately uh so thank you is there anything else we're going to turn over to the Daily wire plus platform here I'm going to talk to Dr Dale paulus for another half an hour about the course of the development of his interest in Psychology and in these dark Tetra traits um and I'd like to thank him very much for coming to talk to or for agreeing to talk to me today and for sharing what he knows with everybody who's listening uh the dark tetrad research is extremely interesting um if you're interested in Psychology this concentration on the accurate psychometric evaluation of of it of essentially immoral and counterproductive Behavior viewed from a social perspective is very important part of the psychometric Enterprise and I think it's one of the domains of modern psychology that are reliable and valid and that might bear genuine fruit as they unfold just like the big five has so it's been really good to talk to you for everyone uh watching and listening today thank you very much for your time and attention as always and uh is there anything else you want to bring to the attention of people before we we move over to the other interview no I just appreciate that you really covered all of the important issues uh the full breath thanks for that oh my pleasure and like I said I'm I'm very pleased that we had the opportunity to talk today all right everyone watching and listening thank you very much and thanks again Dr paulos and and uh ciao to everyone hello everyone I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 2,651,315

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: l2og1DJvQ94

Length: 108min 58sec (6538 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 30 2023