327. Women, Pornography, and Sadism ｜ Dr. Del Paulhus
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 49 minutes
Words per Minute
140.22093
Summary
Dr. Dale Paulus from the University of British Columbia is a personality researcher whose work in so-called dark personality traits via a variety of measurement methods has yielded measures of the Dark Triad, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and last but not least, sadism. His work has also validated measures of socially desirable responding, perceived control, free will, and over-claiming. Dr. Paulus is definitely one of the world s most outstanding psychometric personality psychologists. He has been published in over 150 articles in books, and his current citation count exceeds 43,000. In this episode, he walks through his research on the dark triad, and explains how he became interested in it, and how he developed the measuring devices that he uses to measure it. He also explains how his research can be applied to other areas of psychological research, such as the study of narcissism and sadism, as well as to other domains of human behavior, like online misbehaviour, and the dark side of the internet. This episode is sponsored by Leaffilters, the leading anti-clogged gutters company. Leaffilter is a leading eco-friendly cleaning product and cleaning product company in the space. Leaf Filter is a trusted partner in the fight against climate change and climate change, and is the best-selling author of the bestselling book on the topic of climate change. Leaf Filter has been around for over 30 years. Since their founding in the late 1980s, Leaffilter has been recognized as the leading the way in the field of anti-eco-designer cleaning products, and eco-designers. in the past decade, and now they re the leading supplier of cleaning products for the modern era. and the only company to do it in the and their products are the best in the market. are the only ones in the world, and they re also the best at doing it all in the best of their price range. And they re on the cutting-edge of their own in a high-performance cleaning equipment, and are also the only in their own terms. . Leaffiltered, non-trendy, high-grade, ultra-high-grade and ultra-specialized, in-effortless, low-no frills, they re not just good at cleaning their own homes, they re good at it, they are the ones you need to know how to do so.
Transcript
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Hello everyone watching on YouTube and associated or listening on associated podcasts. I'm here today
00:01:37.660
talking to a colleague and a compatriot of mine, Dr. Dale Paulus from the University of British Columbia.
00:01:44.640
He's a personality researcher whose work in so-called dark personality traits via a variety of measurement
00:01:52.360
methods has yielded measures of the dark tetrad. Psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and last but not least,
00:02:02.040
sadism. His work has also validated measures of socially desirable responding, perceived control,
00:02:07.880
free will and determinism, and over-claiming. His work has been published in over 150 articles in books
00:02:13.660
and his current citation count, which is the number of times other scientists have referred to his work
00:02:20.340
and the cardinal marker, I would say, of eminence and influence among scientists exceeds 43,000.
00:02:27.620
So, Dr. Paulus is definitely one of the world's most outstanding psychometric personality psychologists.
00:02:37.840
That is, personality psychologists who specialize in the field of mathematical measurement of behavioral and conceptual traits.
00:02:48.140
Hi, Dale. It's good to see you. I want to let everybody who's watching and listening know
00:02:53.520
Dr. Paulus from the University of British Columbia is a researcher in personality. As his bio indicated,
00:03:01.100
our work in some ways ran in parallel methodologically. I was very interested for years in statistical analysis
00:03:09.120
of linguistic descriptions of personality. I concentrated mostly on trying to further develop the idea of
00:03:19.900
the big five on the statistical front, the five-factor personality model, extroversion, neuroticism,
00:03:25.660
agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. Dr. Paulus took a turn that was very interesting to me, though,
00:03:34.020
as well. He's spent a number of decades studying what came to be known as the dark triad, and later the dark tetrad.
00:03:44.240
Originally, when the corpus of adjectives was generated to extract out a five-dimensional
00:03:51.940
description of personality from language, judgmental adjectives were eliminated from the corpus.
00:04:02.620
The idea was to produce a set of descriptors of normative and non-pathological personality,
00:04:08.940
independent in some sense of morality. And there was some utility in that, I think,
00:04:13.400
because it gave us a picture of normative personality. But the downside was we didn't
00:04:18.920
develop as detailed an understanding as we might have of the dark side of personality. And that seems
00:04:24.140
to be where your work, which is receiving increased public attention, I would say, perhaps in the days
00:04:31.080
of internet misbehavior. That's where your research really came into its own. Is that a reasonable
00:04:36.820
initial summary? Yeah, good summary. So do you want to start by explaining to people, let's walk
00:04:45.500
through your research on the dark triad. How did you become interested in this, and how did you develop
00:04:50.920
the measurement instruments, and what do you measure? Well, like a lot of academics, my research can be
00:04:58.260
traced back to my advisor, who was Richard Christie, the inventor of Machiavellianism as a trait. And he did
00:05:10.400
something very clever. He went into the books of Niccolo Machiavelli, who was an advisor to politicians
00:05:17.320
way back when. And he took the statements, administered them to undergraduate students, and simply asked them,
00:05:28.200
how much do you agree with these statements? Like, you have to get to know important people,
00:05:34.440
and always be prepared for the worst in people. And the amazing thing was the huge variance in the
00:05:45.560
responses. And that's what personality research is all about. We look for and wallow in, relish the fact
00:05:55.420
that people give different answers. And apparently, a lot of people agreed totally with the statements that
00:06:03.580
Machiavelli made in the 1500s. Others were horrified by them. And so that inspired Richard Christie to
00:06:12.620
make a questionnaire. The Mach 4, the most popular version of his questionnaires, was administered to
00:06:23.060
subject pools at his university, Columbia University, and elsewhere. And it wasn't just
00:06:33.560
self-reports and predicted actual behavior. So he could show that people who scored high on the Mach 4
00:06:41.420
manipulated others in a room in a laboratory. So they would try to squeeze money out of other people
00:06:51.700
by tricking them. And all of this could be recorded and published. Hence, Richard Christie is forever
00:07:02.020
associated with Machiavellianism. So I thought that was a fabulous way to do research. I moved on then
00:07:17.600
and took a real job at the University of British Columbia, and met up there with Bob Hare, sort of the
00:07:23.980
emperor of the emperor of research on psychopathy. Another aversive trait. And of course, he has done it all.
00:07:34.480
But what he didn't do was compare it to Machiavellianism. And I've also done some research separately
00:07:42.480
on narcissism, which captured attention of researchers in the 1980s. Because it seems to resonate.
00:07:52.860
Everybody knows narcissists, people who want a lot of attention and think they are superior to
00:08:00.740
everyone else. Everyone can resonate to knowing such people. So we have three personality variables.
00:08:10.620
Then when the student, Kevin Williams, came along, and typically in my career, I go with what the
00:08:18.520
students want to do. We decided to figure out whether there were more. Are there more aversive
00:08:27.600
personalities? So we searched the literature, and we did as much as we could back then, early 2000s,
00:08:35.940
to cover all the literature and see if there were more personalities that were at the level of
00:08:45.580
narcissism, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. We call them the dark triad because
00:08:52.920
they seem to dominate the literature. There are already hundreds of studies on each one of those.
00:09:00.520
The unfortunate results, fortunate in the long run, I suppose, is that the literature has overlapped
00:09:09.100
so much. You could barely tell the difference. If you took all the literature on narcissism, all the
00:09:16.600
literature on Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, you could see the same things coming up.
00:09:24.740
And that was the original problem. We want to parse the dark side of traits,
00:09:31.960
but you can't really do much with the literature because of this phenomenon that we called
00:09:40.540
construct creep. And that is, a researcher doesn't have the ability to research everything at once,
00:09:48.720
so they focus on one variable. But it creeps wider and wider until it overlaps with other variables.
00:09:56.600
And that's a problem because you don't know which one you're actually studying when you put it into
00:10:03.840
a research program. Which one is responsible for the action you're seeing?
00:10:10.740
Right, right. Well, we want to talk about that in some more detail, too, because I'd like to find out
00:10:16.180
a bit more about how you feel. I know that the dark triad has morphed into the dark tetrad to some degree,
00:10:22.760
and I'm also curious as to what you have to say about the overlap between the dark tetrad qualities
00:10:28.820
and personality disorder categories, especially in the histrionic, antisocial, and narcissistic
00:10:36.120
categories. Obviously, that shades into personality pathology. And so, can I define the three traits and
00:10:43.440
have you correct my definitions, if you would? So, the Machiavellians, as you pointed out, Machiavelli
00:10:49.400
was an advisor to princes who was really interested, in some sense, in the outright maintenance of
00:10:57.040
instrumental power. I wouldn't say he was driven by any intrinsic ethic. It was Machiavelli gave
00:11:03.020
advices to princes who wanted to maintain their position by hook or by crook, let's say. So,
00:11:09.800
Machiavellians are willing to use manipulation to obtain their personal ends. And narcissists seem to be
00:11:17.820
driven by a high desire to obtain unearned status from others. The most important thing for them is
00:11:27.320
not status in relationship to competence, let's say, or in relationship to performance, but just
00:11:32.240
in status for its own sake. And then the psychopaths, I spent a lot of time looking at Hare's research
00:11:39.800
and thinking about relationship to the big five. Psychopaths seem to be something approximating
00:11:45.580
parasitical predators. And so, they're very, very low in agreeableness, and that makes them callous
00:11:52.820
and non-empathetic. And then they also seem to be very low in conscientiousness. That seems to
00:11:58.240
accord reasonably well with the two factors of the psychopathy scale. And so, a real psychopath is
00:12:04.240
someone who is willing to take what you have, let's say, and use it, and that might be the
00:12:09.840
predatory aspect, and also to live off the earnings and efforts of others. And that's also an element
00:12:16.340
of criminal behavior. And so, you're looking at the nexus of all three of those, Machiavellianism,
00:12:22.320
narcissism, and psychopathy. And recently, you and other researchers have added, I think this is so
00:12:27.940
interesting, because I think it was a real lack. You added sadism to that, which is positive delight
00:12:35.020
and pleasure taken in the suffering of others. And so, can you expand at all upon the definitions
00:12:42.180
of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy? And we can segue into sadism.
00:12:47.620
Yeah, I agree with all of your definitions. Although, what we did was spend a lot of time trying to find
00:12:54.400
what's different among each of the characters, and what the overlap is. Why is it that the literatures
00:13:03.960
and the measures that were available always overlapped to a dangerous degree in trying to understand
00:13:14.920
what's going on? So, the key thing for psychopaths, in our opinion, is impulsivity and
00:13:24.640
sensation-seeking, which is what gets them into trouble. They may not have worse motives than the
00:13:34.180
others, but they can't help it. That's why they, at the extreme levels, spend their lives in prison.
00:13:42.200
They can't help responding to temptation. Whatever the temptation is, they go for it.
00:13:51.460
And often, they get what they want right away, and they keep on doing it until they get caught,
00:13:59.520
and they don't seem to learn from it. So, that answers just a qualification to the definition
00:14:09.240
of psychopath. Now, what's underlying it, we think, is callousness for all of them. They're overlapping
00:14:16.780
because, at the core, is a failure to have empathy. And if you have a deficit in empathy,
00:14:27.680
it seems inevitable that you're going to exploit other people in one way or another because you're
00:14:33.880
not, you're not getting the feedback that people with empathy get in seeing other people suffer at
00:14:42.220
your hands. And the story of sadism is quite a long story, but if you want me to get into the
00:14:50.600
details, I can do that now. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Please do. Please do.
00:14:53.560
Yeah. I don't know whether I'm more sensitive to these things than other people, but I started
00:15:02.060
seeing sadism in regular people. And not only is it there in everyday people, but people seem
00:15:13.200
to wallow in it when the circumstances allow it. For example, violent sports. One of my favorite
00:15:23.040
sports hockey, it's kind of pathetic watching a hockey game. The cheers are larger for the fights
00:15:30.500
than for the goals. People love to see their fighter pummel the fighter of the other team or pummel
00:15:39.680
anyone. And the cheers that go up in a hockey stadium are incredible. And the cheers only stop
00:15:47.880
when the victim falls to the ice and starts twitching and a hush follows over the crowd, showing the dual
00:15:59.180
nature of positive and negative motivations that human beings have. But the fact that they love seeing
00:16:09.180
the fighting, no matter how much blood and teeth end up on the ice, is disappointing in a way. And we
00:16:21.080
learned a long time ago from the Europeans, they don't have to do that to make hockey a wonderful
00:16:28.740
sport. That was just one. But then watching the undergraduate students at UBC, University of British
00:16:36.720
Columbia. What are they doing for fun? Well, if you'll recall, way, way back, they used to play these
00:16:44.560
archive games. And there were some gentle ones, Pac-Man, Asteroids. I don't know if you remember those.
00:16:54.240
But going down into the arcade, you see that people are gathered around one of the arcade games.
00:17:04.280
And so I wandered over to see it. And it was something called Mortal Kombat, which by today's
00:17:12.240
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...are torn off, and the blood spurts out, and that's why the crowd was there, because it was so
00:19:03.480
much more appealing than the silly little Mario Brothers stuff. And it just struck me as
00:19:13.640
the beginning of my interest in what people do, especially young males, when they have time on
00:19:23.260
their own. So if it's not porn, then it seems like it's violence, and it's somewhat horrifying.
00:19:33.480
But it's gotten worse. I don't know if you've been following the video games that are now
00:19:42.520
available on your home computer. You don't need to go to an arcade and be embarrassed by what you're
00:19:48.800
playing, because you can sit at home and play whatever games you want. And so now, what's it
00:19:57.280
called a grand theft auto? You can kill innocent bystanders, step on their heads, etc. And there
00:20:05.720
are actual torture sites where you can go and torture people. You can torture animals. It's all
00:20:12.640
there. And so people are paying to do this stuff. They pay for violent sports. They pay for violent
00:20:21.320
movies. What's the most popular television program these days? It's called Game of Thrones. And it's the
00:20:28.980
most sadistic kind of television program that you've ever seen. People are paying for this in one way or
00:20:38.420
another. And they're attracted to it. They relay stories with their friends. So this, putting this
00:20:45.660
picture together, suggested to me that some, not all, in fact, the variance again is there, which excites
00:20:54.240
a personality researcher. Some people are highly attracted to this stuff. Other people are horrified.
00:21:02.160
I know that neurophysiologically, anger is a multidimensional emotion. It activates positive
00:21:14.060
emotion systems and negative emotion systems simultaneously. And so you can think about that
00:21:20.040
perhaps as the core element of something like aggression, at least maybe both defensive and
00:21:26.380
predatory aggression. And then you could imagine that people are wired differently as individuals so
00:21:31.980
that for any given person, being angry might be associated with a predominance of approach
00:21:38.940
motivation, right? Positive emotion and a relative decrement of negative emotion. And for other people
00:21:43.700
that would be reversed. Like I'm trying to account for what the positive pleasure is in the observation
00:21:49.660
or participation in the aggression. I mean, you could associate it with, hypothetically, you could
00:21:54.420
associate it actually with predatory behavior, with hunting and with combat. But it also might be a
00:22:01.300
consequence of differential wiring at the neurological level in relationship to the balance between
00:22:06.600
positive and negative emotion experienced by any given person with anger. Because you see this
00:22:13.140
variation in people, you know? I mean, I know some people who are real fighters, let's say on the
00:22:18.180
political front, and some of them really enjoy a good scrap, right? It really seems to get them
00:22:23.220
motivated. And this isn't a criticism of them necessarily. And then other people, and I think I fall more into
00:22:29.900
this cap. I'm not really very interested at all in conflict. It bothers me a lot. Although I don't
00:22:35.940
like delayed conflict. So I'm likely to engage in it, you know, relatively upfront. But so we could go
00:22:42.960
into that. Like, what do you think? What do you think is the fundamental biological and then also ethical
00:22:48.980
difference between people who are taking positive delight in aggression and those who aren't?
00:22:53.900
And, well, I guess we could start with those questions.
00:23:00.000
Yeah, that's the fundamental query, a puzzle in a way. Why would human beings have to have a sadistic
00:23:11.000
side, at least some people? And as you mentioned, predatory very often. So one can speculate that it
00:23:18.900
helps adult animals, carnivores especially, hunt if they not only are willing but enjoy the killing.
00:23:30.900
And that could have been carried over to human beings. Also, a little more instrumental explanation
00:23:39.900
would be that it helps dominance. That is, if you can scare off your competitors, whether they're
00:23:49.780
competitors for mates or for territory, then being sadistic about it.
00:23:57.620
That would be a niche theory in some sense, I guess, is that I know that the worldwide prevalence
00:24:04.040
of psychopathy ranges between one and five percent, hovers around three. And what it seems to indicate,
00:24:10.900
because it's relatively stable, is that although being a psychopath isn't a particularly successful
00:24:17.700
strategy, in that 97 percent of people don't take that route, in a cooperative society, a niche does
00:24:24.940
open up for people who are willing to use manipulation and impulsive behavior and sadism to dominate
00:24:32.240
and use power oppressively to at least, what would you say, carve out for themselves some degree of
00:24:39.120
success. And then now and then some spectacular success, I suppose, which would be the case with
00:24:44.520
people who are extraordinarily successful at being tyrants. And so we have two arguments there in some
00:24:51.800
sense. One is like a neurobiological difference in response to the balance of positive and negative
00:24:57.580
emotion in anger. And the other one is, well, there's a niche that opens up for people who are
00:25:02.080
willing to use power and manipulation and so forth to attain the rewards of social dominance. And
00:25:08.920
psychopaths seem to do that, right? Because they'll manipulate. They often have to move from place to
00:25:13.420
place because people figure them out. But they will use short-term dominant strategies. I think you've
00:25:19.060
related that, too, as well, the dark triad, to short-term mating strategies as well, right? Which is an
00:25:25.320
interest. That's another thing that we could concentrate on, right, on what the dark triad predicts.
00:25:29.680
The dark triad interested me particularly because the literature I read on psychopaths did describe
00:25:36.180
them as impulsive. So they're willing even to sacrifice their own futures to the pleasure of
00:25:40.740
the moment. But there was obviously a subset of psychopaths who delighted in being cruel.
00:25:46.420
And the standard explanation of callousness, say, which is merely lack of empathy, didn't seem to be
00:25:52.420
enough, right? Because it isn't merely that people are lacking empathic and empathy. It's that sometimes
00:25:59.780
there are people who take a positive delight in cruelty. And that there's a new term that's used
00:26:04.900
to describe online mobbing behavior or bullying behavior, troll behavior, which is lulls, right? I just
00:26:13.400
did it for the lulls, which is the plural of lol, laugh out loud. And to do it for the lulls is to go
00:26:21.960
after someone on the net, often anonymously, merely for the purpose of making them miserable and wretched
00:26:28.840
and put them in pain, just so that you can enjoy that. And certainly that's not mere psychopathy,
00:26:36.340
right? That's not mere impulsiveness. There's an additional component that's worth concentrating on.
00:26:41.360
All right. So you covered a lot of ground there. Picking up on the argument for psychopaths being
00:26:50.440
impulsive, just to remind viewers who are not that familiar with evolutionary theory, the simple argument
00:27:00.060
is you got to get mates to maintain your genes in the gene pool. And there are many ways of doing that,
00:27:10.280
right? One is to grab and run with whatever you want using force if necessary. That will sometimes get
00:27:19.360
you mates. More strategic Machiavellians find ways of manipulating others to get their genes into the gene pool.
00:27:30.440
Narcissists seem to attract mates, partly because of their confidence, even if it is overconfidence.
00:27:39.940
Sadists are a little harder to see. Why would being sadistic get you romantic and sexual partners?
00:27:52.360
Well, I think I touched on the only explanation that I could think of, and I think you mentioned it too,
00:28:00.260
and that is, well, you scare off your competitors, and you even scare off your mate into doing what you want
00:28:10.040
by hurting them and in a very public way. So you're deterring reactions from other people,
00:28:19.980
and that may be of benefit in some circumstances. And then you went into the niche theory, or niche,
00:28:29.060
as some people say. Yeah, there's a lot of niches out there for dark personalities.
00:28:35.820
Each one may require very select kinds of traits, but if you want a job as an enforcer,
00:28:43.980
enforcer, and on a hockey team, you better damn well be able to, and willing to, and like to, hurt other people.
00:28:53.620
You know, it also might be, so I know someone quite well, so I talked to him. He was often hired by corporations
00:29:02.180
to fire people, and he's a very disagreeable person, but he's very high in conscientiousness, eh?
00:29:08.100
So, I was talking to him at one point in my lab, because I was struggling with a few students,
00:29:13.980
and who I eventually let go, and I really realized that I probably had kept them in the lab longer
00:29:20.420
than I should have, and that their poor performance was demotivating some of the people in my lab
00:29:26.320
who were very high performers, and, you know, just producing a decrement in the overall quality of our work.
00:29:31.420
And part of the reason I think I failed to take action is because I am a rather agreeable person,
00:29:37.540
and I find firing people, let's say, very distasteful.
00:29:42.880
And so I talked to my associate, my friend, about firing people, and he said,
00:29:52.960
And this is someone I admire and respect, a very competent person, by the way.
00:29:57.600
He said, well, you know, I go into corporations, and I ferret out the people who are kissing up and
00:30:07.040
I ferret out the people who, as I alluded to, take credit when they haven't done anything,
00:30:12.360
and cast aspersions on others when they have done something, and who are clearly not doing
00:30:18.180
And then also, I go after people who, for whom it would be better in some real sense to be
00:30:25.960
And his continual pattern of employment for multiple years, because he was particularly
00:30:31.240
good at this, was he'd go into a corporation that was failing and start to fire people at
00:30:37.280
And then when he got too close to the top, they'd fire him, of course.
00:30:40.700
But, you know, it was really interesting to me because it's also possible that some of
00:30:44.940
these traits, the more psychopathic traits, have a positive utility socially, even speaking
00:30:52.500
morally, when they're combined with other personality traits, right?
00:30:56.980
But that are particularly, like, maybe it's not so bad to be low in agreeableness if you're
00:31:03.200
But maybe it's really bad to be low in agreeableness if you're really high in neuroticism or really
00:31:09.940
And so you can see that that tilt towards less empathy, which might make you capable, for
00:31:16.480
example, of enforcing rules, might be, well, as I said, might be extraordinarily useful, even
00:31:24.160
pro-socially under some circumstances, but very pathological under others.
00:31:28.760
Yeah, there's a movement now, I think, to question the absolute positivity of empathy.
00:31:40.900
I'm not sure if you haven't interviewed him yet, you should, because he points out the
00:31:48.620
overuse of empathy or inappropriate use of empathy, like letting a stranger into your
00:31:55.860
door is a simple example, but having traits that make you react, overreact, say, to blood
00:32:05.380
and guts is going to prevent you from being a surgeon.
00:32:09.140
You've got to be able to get your knife in there and slice people up and, to some extent,
00:32:16.660
ignore them if, well, up to a point if they're complaining.
00:32:23.720
But, yeah, so there are jobs in which too much empathy is going to impede your ability
00:32:36.240
So he goes through a lot of examples like that.
00:32:39.760
I suppose one of the first things that he'd do at boot camp is to try to impose certain kinds
00:32:49.920
of motivations in soldiers that are joining the army and make sure they understand that
00:32:57.140
if you don't kill first, they're going to kill you or they're going to kill your buddies.
00:33:03.560
And that should be the way you think when you're in a war.
00:33:07.720
And if you don't have that ability to reframe your normal, gentle personality, then you're
00:33:17.900
Well, and it's clearly the case that people who are very high in trait empathy, so very
00:33:22.380
high in agreeableness, they are easy to take advantage of.
00:33:25.900
And they also tend to become resentful and bitter.
00:33:29.740
At least that's been my clinical observation because it's very difficult for them to stand
00:33:34.960
And so you need a certain amount of capacity for aggression.
00:33:37.960
And then there's an interesting twist here, too.
00:33:41.560
I read a book a while back called Billion Wicked Thoughts.
00:33:49.480
And one of the things they did was analyze pornography use between men and women and with
00:33:58.020
And they found, which is not surprising, that men preferred visual pornography.
00:34:09.280
And they found the classic literary pornography plot, which was something like, you know, relatively
00:34:19.880
innocent but undervalued and attractive but not so obviously attractive young woman stumbles
00:34:28.060
across this sort of commanding man who has many women at his disposal.
00:34:34.980
And over time, despite his relatively high levels of aggression, he finds himself attracted
00:34:41.460
to this woman and then forms a sexual relationship with her.
00:34:48.080
But one of the things that's so interesting about their analysis was they listed the top five
00:34:54.060
occupations or characters for female sexual literature.
00:35:01.200
And they were pirate, surgeon, billionaire, vampire, and pilot.
00:35:08.900
And so those are all males who I would say are marked by, oh no, not pilot, werewolf.
00:35:17.460
And so I think it reflects to some degree this conundrum that women have.
00:35:22.060
It's because women have to pick a man who has the capacity for aggression, enough of the
00:35:28.500
capacity for aggression to protect himself and others and to move out into the world against
00:35:33.700
a fair bit of opposition, but who's also simultaneously empathic or perhaps conscientious enough to be
00:35:43.020
And you can imagine that's a real knife edge, right?
00:35:45.100
Because you need a bit of a monster in your man, let's say, to keep the real monsters away,
00:35:49.700
but you don't want so much monsters so that a relationship is impossible.
00:35:53.300
And so then you could also imagine that there's overshoot on both sides of that target so that
00:35:59.940
some men become too aggressive but can appear attractive in the short term because they have
00:36:09.240
And so they look easy to get along with and so forth, but they can't put themselves forward
00:36:14.680
And so another explanation for the potential emergence of, say, sadism and psychopathy is
00:36:20.700
that there's this narrow target for, especially for men to hit, doesn't account for female
00:36:25.640
psychopathy, but for men to hit, and it's easy to overshoot in either direction.
00:36:29.980
And there's going to be variability in women's choice as well.
00:36:36.600
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00:37:44.800
My work in connection with clinical psychology, which you're the expert in and I'm not, I try
00:38:03.700
These are people who are managing to get along in everyday society, and they're available in
00:38:09.940
large numbers, so you can take surveys and try to tease apart the various aspects of the
00:38:18.960
But I do not, I'm very reticent to venture to the clinical side.
00:38:25.040
And I think that's been a source of criticism of me from clinical psychologists, that I'm
00:38:35.400
touching on areas that really belong to them and do not belong to me because I'm not a clinician.
00:38:43.460
So when we get into sexual sadism and criminal sadism, which in a sense was all people associated
00:38:55.580
with sadism up until recently, it was the only way that people thought about it.
00:39:02.300
And interesting interplays between sadism and masochism, why would it be to some extent the
00:39:12.120
I can ask these questions in surveys, but I hesitate to try to be an expert and accept what
00:39:23.420
Well, it's not as if the clinicians have been any more careful than the personality theorists
00:39:30.320
in elucidating the actual nature of their diagnostic categories, right?
00:39:35.340
I mean, one of the reasons I'm a clinician and a personality psychologist, I mean, one
00:39:38.620
of the reasons I find your work interesting and compelling is because you do the psychometrics
00:39:44.820
And that's not always obviously the case with clinical diagnostic categories because they're
00:39:50.480
basically holdovers from the psychiatric enterprise and they weren't derived, they weren't
00:39:55.280
extracted out of a primarily statistical model.
00:39:58.500
And so on the downside for the clinical psychologists, it's not obvious at all that we have our nosology,
00:40:07.720
And so, I mean, I'm not saying that in a cynically critical manner because it's actually a very
00:40:15.980
But it seems to me that your work isn't unfairly poaching on the grounds of clinical psychologists
00:40:25.220
because somebody has to do the basic psychometric work.
00:40:28.380
It's like, well, what are the basic categories of, let's say, predatory and parasitical behavior?
00:40:34.100
Now, you can imagine that there's a place where that becomes clinically extreme and has
00:40:37.500
to be dealt with in another manner, but there's absolutely no reason not to look at its subclinical
00:40:43.040
One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you now is because I've been reading a number of
00:40:48.660
I got really interested in this idea that virtualization enables, well, maybe psychopathy, but maybe more
00:40:59.060
You know, because one of the open questions is, if you're dealing with someone who has these
00:41:03.860
personality proclivities that you described, Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and
00:41:10.100
sadistic, they obviously lack a Freudian superego in some sense.
00:41:16.580
They can't regulate their own behavior in a social manner.
00:41:20.060
Left to their own devices, they will exploit and hurt.
00:41:24.120
And so then you might say, well, what keeps people like that in check?
00:41:27.740
And one of the answers to that would be, well, the same thing that keeps the rest of us in
00:41:32.060
check, which is mechanisms built into the neurobiology of our face-to-face contact.
00:41:38.320
Like, we know that if you put people in a car, they'll be ruder to each other, to someone
00:41:45.340
in another car than they would be face-to-face on the street.
00:41:49.820
Like, there's a lot of direct inhibition built into our social interactions that keeps psychopathy
00:41:59.780
But then what you see online is that all of that disappears, hey?
00:42:03.720
And I don't think that there's any real price to be paid for dark tetrad behavior online, especially
00:42:12.500
And that's made me think more recently, especially as our culture tears itself apart as a consequence
00:42:19.180
of the battle between extremes on the political spectrum.
00:42:23.440
It's made me wonder how much of that's actually driven by the virtualized enabling of psychopathy
00:42:29.980
and narcissism, because, you know, it's always a problem.
00:42:34.500
One of the things people might not understand who are watching this is the incredibly high
00:42:42.060
cost that biological organisms bear in relationship to parasitical behavior.
00:42:47.660
So that'd be associated, let's say, with psychopathy.
00:42:49.640
There is good evidence, although I wouldn't say it's canonical, that the reason that sex itself
00:42:55.480
evolved was so that we could stay ahead of the parasites.
00:43:00.500
If you just clone yourself, the parasites can chase your genome down the generations.
00:43:06.320
But if you mix your genes, then the parasites have to adapt rapidly to keep up.
00:43:12.740
And so sex itself was driven by parasitical behavior.
00:43:17.220
And so what that indicates is that the presence of parasites, as well as predators, throughout
00:43:22.280
our entire biological history, has presented a canonical threat to our very civilization.
00:43:27.420
And now, if it's true that virtualization enables the psychopaths and the narcissists,
00:43:33.920
then it seems to me that that produces a cardinal threat once again.
00:43:38.360
And there's been a spate of research more recently using the dark tetrad measures to investigate
00:43:45.340
such things as narcissistic self-promotion on TikTok and Instagram, but also trolling and
00:43:54.600
And so maybe you could tell us a little bit about what's been found on that front.
00:44:01.040
Yeah, well, again, you covered a lot of ground there, but the central point I have to totally
00:44:08.000
And we got into a specific aspect where sadism plays a big role, and that is the trolling
00:44:17.660
You get to say anything you want without repercussions.
00:44:21.120
If you said that to the person's face, you'd be in trouble for various reasons, legal and
00:44:29.400
But we tried to delve into asking these people who engage in trolling online, why do you do
00:44:39.660
And we ended up with the title of our paper, Trolls Just Want to Have Fun, because that
00:44:50.440
So you find a website where people are all happy and enjoying it, I don't know, a gardening
00:45:03.100
And that seems to be a lot of fun for certain individuals.
00:45:07.820
We correlated an interest in doing that with the dark tetrad measures, and sadism stood out
00:45:14.200
as the best predictor of liking to mess with happy people.
00:45:20.440
So having the internet has put us into trouble.
00:45:26.400
Politics is an obvious example, but just being nasty to your fellow humans is now...
00:45:43.080
And these people tend to spend a lot of their time engaged in various similar activities.
00:45:56.480
Well, we know that 1% of the criminals commit 65% of the crimes.
00:46:01.920
And so it's a Pareto distribution like almost every other form of, let's say, creative production.
00:46:08.280
And so it's also the case in all probability that a very large proportion of the pathological
00:46:15.360
online behavior comes from a relatively small proportion of, you know, committed dark tetrad
00:46:22.280
And given that they're not only not inhibited by the normal mechanisms of social discourse,
00:46:29.280
they're also rewarded because they get a tremendous amount of attention.
00:46:33.040
And I would say, I think it's reasonable to also point out that that attention is monetized
00:46:38.580
in some sense and expanded by the internal operations of social media networks themselves.
00:46:43.980
It's certainly not the case that the trolls pay a price for being provocative.
00:46:48.060
In fact, I think there's good reason to think that their attempts are more likely to be multiplied
00:46:55.320
And that could be, depending on the degree to which we virtualize, I mean, that could pose
00:47:00.480
a real signal threat to the integrity of our peaceful political arrangements, let's say.
00:47:11.660
Yeah, it's out of hand and it's hard to track down individual contributors to malevolence online.
00:47:21.460
But one could blame it on media polarization and just the need to attract customers.
00:47:31.560
Turns out that people don't like moderate media sources.
00:47:40.300
They'll turn to a channel where they can feel warm and toasty because the other people on
00:47:47.000
that channel agree with them on everything so they don't get to hear other points of view.
00:47:51.460
And many years ago, perhaps you and I were there at the time of Walter Cronkite, and there
00:47:58.160
were a few corporations online, two or three, that everybody watched, and they were more
00:48:10.020
If those were put online now, nobody would watch.
00:48:13.680
People want to watch the extreme version of their own politics.
00:48:17.960
And that's unfortunate development in technology.
00:48:24.060
Well, there is some, you know, there are some exceptions to that, I would say.
00:48:27.520
I mean, I've had a lot of success, let's say, with long-form dialogue on YouTube and other
00:48:35.760
And, you know, inviting people like you to have discussions that last 90 minutes or so.
00:48:40.380
And that's a pretty comprehensive discussion, and it rewards a long-term attention span.
00:48:46.160
But it's definitely the case that there are selective pressures in relationship to attention
00:48:51.900
to gather as much impulsive attention as possible.
00:48:56.500
And, of course, there's a profit motive behind that often.
00:48:59.500
Because if you can gather people's attention, you can advertise to them.
00:49:05.140
I'm just trying to observe the way the system is working.
00:49:07.980
If you can gather people's attention by whatever means, you can almost instantly monetize that.
00:49:13.480
And so we also have this new technological problem, which is that we have technologies
00:49:19.220
that can really reward impulsive information gathering and simultaneously monetize it.
00:49:26.500
And that means that that's fertile territory for the psychopaths and the narcissists and
00:49:33.600
And I think there actually, I think there's enough of that to actually undermine public trust
00:49:39.640
in general, because it makes, like, my actual life is way less contentious than my online life.
00:49:47.780
You know, they're not even in the same universe in some sense.
00:49:52.200
It's really very difficult to tell now in the modern world how much of that is a mere consequence
00:49:59.140
and a mere appearance of virtualization and how much it actually reflects some fundamental disquiet.
00:50:05.360
I mean, I know they loop, but we have no way of really knowing.
00:50:09.120
And if it is true that virtualization enables psychopathy, then that's a real conundrum.
00:50:16.840
Yeah, and it's scary in a way to think that, in a way, you're getting closer to what people
00:50:30.620
We know that from questionnaire work, that the more anonymous responses, the less desirable
00:50:39.780
But it's, yeah, it does sound very cynical to think that the nasty stuff you see online
00:50:48.020
is really the human condition, which is covered up.
00:50:52.960
Well, I'm more optimistic about that, you know, because of this Pareto distribution phenomena.
00:50:58.220
I think I'm pessimistic because it looks like a very small number of bad actors can cause way
00:51:05.600
more trouble than we would have thought, right?
00:51:08.080
And that's a pessimistic idea, is that, yeah, it's only 3% who are dark tetrad types, or maybe
00:51:14.760
5%, it depends on where you put the cutoffs, let's say.
00:51:18.120
And that means 95% of people are going about their business in a decent manner.
00:51:25.220
But the downside is, yeah, but that 5% can cause a god-awful amount of trouble.
00:51:29.560
I mean, I talked to Andy Ngo about Antifa, you know, and I'll tell you how that came about.
00:51:36.540
I was working with a group of Democrats in the U.S. to help pull the Democrat Party towards the
00:51:46.160
And there was one topic that we used to come to a fair bit of disagreement about, and that was
00:51:54.860
Antifa, and the Democrats I was working with were absolutely convinced of the absolute reality
00:51:59.900
of 4chan and the right-wing conspiratorial groups, but they didn't believe that there
00:52:06.460
And I thought, well, these were smart people, and I thought, well, why the hell do they believe
00:52:10.420
And they said, well, there's always been race riots in the United States, and the degree
00:52:14.280
to which Antifa is organized is blown out of proportion, and they're not really a formal
00:52:20.560
And I thought, well, that's interesting, because some of that's true, but you could
00:52:24.180
say the same thing about the hypothetical right-wing conspiratorial groups.
00:52:29.020
So, but then I talked to Andy Ngo, who's done more to cover Antifa than any other journalist,
00:52:34.480
and I said to him, Andy, how many Antifa cells, let's say, do you think are operating in the
00:52:41.900
And he thought for a while, and he thought, well, maybe 40.
00:52:44.160
And I said, well, how many full-time equivalent employees, so to speak, do you think each
00:52:56.180
And so, if that estimate is vaguely accurate, that's 800 people in the entire United States
00:53:09.580
And that's sort of statistically equivalent to zero.
00:53:15.580
So, you know, that's why the Democrats can say, well, that Antifa doesn't even really
00:53:20.220
But the counter-argument is, yeah, there aren't very many of them, but a small number of people
00:53:26.920
who have these dark tetrad motivations, and I'm not saying that's unique to Antifa, by
00:53:32.520
I'm talking more about the riotous troublemakers who love to dance in the street, you know.
00:53:36.840
So, if it's only one in 400,000 people, that's just an indication of how much trouble someone
00:53:43.860
who has no internal sense of restraint can make manifest if they're free of all external
00:53:52.320
Yeah, I don't have too much to say about that, but I would like to talk a bit about extreme
00:54:00.500
niches that you brought up before and where these people end up if they have the proclivities
00:54:12.200
The proclivity for narcissists would be in the realm of politics because they want attention
00:54:20.920
and they get it, whether it's positive or negative.
00:54:28.160
The Machiavellians, I think, are among the most interesting, though.
00:54:37.980
And although we just saw this fellow Santos who made up his CV to get elected in Long Island,
00:54:46.980
an example of a politician who's both narcissistic, because you have to to be a politician,
00:54:54.840
and a Machiavellian, but Bernie Madoff was the classic.
00:54:59.640
He was the most popular guy in his building on Fifth Avenue.
00:55:19.740
But that's a niche in which Machiavellianism will help you get to the top.
00:55:26.160
You have to manipulate and hide and do it relatively low-key, unlike the narcissist.
00:55:34.920
So, I think we already talked about the psychopath and the sadist,
00:55:41.380
but it does play out in the occupations that one chooses to suit your niche.
00:55:51.280
Yeah, well, you can also see there that that makes the issue of leadership a complicated one, right?
00:55:56.420
Because we know that the big five personality profile of narcissists
00:56:01.660
is something like high extroversion and low agreeableness.
00:56:05.620
And so, you can see there that someone who's low in agreeableness
00:56:10.680
is going to put their viewpoint forward in a pretty aggressive manner,
00:56:14.340
and someone who's extroverted is going to be enthusiastic and captivating.
00:56:20.840
You can understand that there might be situations that cry out for genuine leadership
00:56:25.680
where both being extroverted and being disagreeable would be an advantage.
00:56:29.480
And, you know, that might be a situation where you hope like hell
00:56:32.480
that your extroverted, disagreeable politician is also extremely high in conscientiousness.
00:56:38.040
So that even though they might like attention and even though they might be less empathic,
00:56:42.440
then that their relative lack of empathy would pose a certain risk,
00:56:46.380
that their proclivity to abide by a set of ethical principles would override that.
00:56:53.820
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But then you get people who fake that conscientiousness and fake competence,
00:57:50.240
which is partly what psychopaths do when they entrap women,
00:57:54.080
is to fake that competence and then to look like you're abiding by the rules
00:58:00.320
when you're just being Machiavellian and narcissistic and manipulative.
00:58:04.920
Yeah, that's fascinating to think about different combinations
00:58:14.700
I wrote a paper on Steve Jobs, for example, some time ago.
00:58:23.720
but if you're a full narcissist who believes you have the right idea
00:58:36.120
Right, well, that's a good example of that hyper-successful niche, right?
00:58:41.060
So that's a good, that's a very interesting case
00:58:45.800
where someone is narcissistic and hyper-intelligent and correct,
00:58:51.120
in which case their narcissism and their callousness, in some sense,
00:58:56.120
is absolutely what's needed to bring forth that whole set of ideas.
00:59:26.140
Well, you know, I know people who worked with Jobs,
00:59:32.700
was that he was unerring in his ability to cull.
00:59:38.260
You know, so he had a very high eye for quality,
00:59:43.900
from killing projects he thought were counterproductive.
01:00:13.940
So you have the evidence in some sense at hand,
01:00:44.940
Yeah, I agree totally with everything you just said.
01:01:08.660
characterizes a certain approach to personality.
01:01:46.520
to lump together good traits with other good traits.
01:01:50.920
The so-called halo has its correspondent devil effect.
01:01:56.740
And that is, if you learn something bad about somebody,
01:02:04.180
to think that they have all the other bad traits too.
01:02:26.400
and you can array people on this one dimension.
01:02:42.520
How intercorrelated are the four scales on average?
01:02:52.320
How much of the variance does that factor account for?
01:03:17.040
means, well, why don't you just add them together
01:03:21.740
And that's what the so-called D factor people have done.
01:03:31.340
that you could look at your fellow human beings
01:04:05.600
and you talked a little bit about occupational choice.
01:04:29.820
and positive pleasure taken in the suffering from others
01:04:35.140
You know, even though both of those can be problematic,
01:05:07.560
and this is like a biology of ethics in some sense,
01:06:07.180
and had iterated interactions with one another.
01:06:23.460
the little rat had to invite the big rat to play.
01:06:38.520
And so the little rat had to ask the big rat to play
01:06:55.420
And so I thought it was an unbelievably profound set of studies
01:06:58.880
because it indicated that there was an emergent ethos
01:07:07.300
You know the economic games where you take two people
01:07:13.580
and you can offer some fraction of that to your partner.
01:07:17.320
But if he refuses, neither of you get anything.
01:07:26.960
who need the money are very likely to reject a sharing offer
01:07:51.060
And the problem with the psychopathic perspective
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to the immediate gratification of their desires.
01:08:05.620
And that's just not a very sophisticated strategy, right?
01:08:08.960
Why win once when you could hypothetically win,
01:08:20.380
of what constitutes pathological behavior, right?