In this episode, Dr. Keith Campbell, a social psychologist at the University of Georgia, talks about narcissism and how it affects the social world. Dr. Campbell's research focuses on narcissism as a personality trait and how to recognize it in others. He discusses how narcissism affects leadership, status, and self-esteem, and the broader social world, as well as the role that narcissism plays in the development of social networks and the social behavior of people, and their own individual being. This episode is the first in a new series that Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created that could be a lifeline for those struggling with depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, he offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and a roadmap towards healing. He provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Dr. P.B. Peterson is a world-renowned expert in the field of mental health, and is dedicated to providing the best care, support, and resources to help you get the help you need and the support you need to get the care you need in order to feel better and live the life you deserve and the care and recovery you need. . Today's guest is Dr.Keith Campbell Campbell Campbell, who is a professor of psychology at the UGA, and author of more than 200 scientific papers, including The Big Five, The New Science of Narcissism, The Big 5, and many other books, and an author of over 60 PhD theses and over 70 articles, including a dozen books, including "The Big Five." and a dozen other books on the Big Five. He is the author of hundreds of articles, and hundreds of research papers, and he is a regular contributor to the Journal of Personality Psychology and Psychology, The Journal of the Psychology of Personality and Social Psychology. and the New Science. , and is a frequent contributor to many other journals, including the New Scientist, The Bulletin of the Social Psychology and The Bulletin, The Psychology of Narcism, and The Psychology Journal, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, and other publications.
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00:00:57.420Hello, everybody. So, I had the privilege today of speaking with Dr. Keith Campbell, who is professor of psychology at the University of Georgia.
00:01:16.980Keith is a social psychologist, so he's interested in the relationship between the social networks and the social behavior of people and their own individual being.
00:01:28.680He works at the nexus of social psychology, personality psychology, which is more centered on the individual person, and psychopathology, which is the study of pathological, abnormal, or otherwise counterproductive and painful behavior.
00:01:42.920His research focuses more specifically even on narcissism, and narcissism is part of a broader cluster of personality pathologies that are counterproductive with regards to someone's success over long spans of time and in social circumstances.
00:02:08.160So, if you're self-centered, and you're narcissistic, and it's all about you, the problem with that is that that's a good pathway to misery for you over any reasonable amount of time, although you may have some small punctuated victories.
00:02:21.680And it's also extremely hard on the stability of your social relationships, because the only people who want to be around a manipulative narcissist for any length of time are, you know, disenchanted and demoralized masochists.
00:02:35.860And that's not the basis for a productive and meaningful relationship.
00:02:41.600And so, that narrow self-centeredness that's also hedonistic, whim-focused, requires immediate gratification of needs and wants.
00:02:51.580It's a very counterproductive way of conducting yourself over any reasonable span of time.
00:02:57.460And, well, I was interested in talking to Dr. Campbell, partly because I've talked to some of his compatriots who've been working on narcissism, but I'm also interested in the issue more broadly, because I think that we've seen something of an epidemic of dark personality trait narcissism because of the explosion of social media, which enables anonymity.
00:03:22.520So, it enables people to get away with things that grab attention in the short run, but that are socially counterproductive and counterproductive in relationship to the future.
00:03:33.340And so, I wanted to talk to Dr. Campbell about narcissism, about his work on narcissism, about how it's conceptualized, about how it's best understood, about how you could detect it, about its relationship, let's say, with leadership and status and self-esteem and broader personality.
00:04:10.600And several books, including The New Science of Narcissism and Professor Ocean from the Big Five, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism.
00:04:23.120Ocean, a small tale of personalities, Big Five.
00:04:26.560In any case, that's what the discussion with Dr. Campbell focuses on.
00:04:32.460Well, Dr. Campbell, we might as well start by allowing you to introduce yourself to everybody and tell people what you do, what your specialty is, where you're working, all of that, just to give them a general, well, a general introduction.
00:04:49.020I'm a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia here in Athens, Georgia.
00:04:54.820My training and background are in social personality psychology.
00:04:59.420So, my expertise is primarily on the self, the nature of self and self-enhancement.
00:05:06.180And in terms of personality, most of my work has been on the trait of narcissism, which is sort of the individual difference having to do with self-enhancement.
00:05:14.140Maybe tell people, so when I worked in Boston, I was in the personality and psychopathology research group, but that's slightly different.
00:05:25.100So, that was the overlap between personality psychology and clinical psychology.
00:05:29.540You're working at the nexus between personality psychology and social psychology.
00:05:34.420Those are rather academic distinctions.
00:05:36.740So, maybe one of the things you could do is let everybody know what it means fundamentally to work in the field of personality and in the field of social and how those are the same and how they're distinct.
00:05:50.040So, with something like, from a social psychological perspective, when I'm interested in a topic like the self, I'm focused on things like self-regulation, how people enhance themselves publicly, status-seeking relationships, a lot of the social processes.
00:06:09.820When I'm thinking about personality, I tend to think more about individual differences, how some people are more extroverted, more have different structures on the big five than other people.
00:06:22.380So, those are more like personality traits.
00:06:25.600And then that integrates with psychopathology, where I usually work with my friend Josh Miller, who's a clinician, and we try to integrate a lot of these social personality findings into the personality psychopathology literature.
00:06:38.240To see how normal personality manifests as clinical personality or clinical personality disorders.
00:06:45.800Generally, I think, you know, the study of normal personality is pretty useful for understanding disordered personality as well.
00:06:52.740I don't think you cross a magic threshold and become a different person with a disorder.
00:06:58.600Yeah, so, for everybody watching and listening, you can think, well, there are different ways of analyzing people.
00:07:04.520And so, you can analyze people, say, biologically, you can concentrate on the micro-mechanisms of physiological function.
00:07:12.960So, you can look at the parts of someone, and then you can look at the person as a whole, but as an individual.
00:07:18.460And that's really what the personality psychologists do.
00:07:21.360The unit of analysis would be the individual as a whole.
00:07:24.680And as you pointed out, Dr. Campbell, personality psychologists have done a pretty good job of differentiating the personality into its basic categories, its basic traits.
00:07:37.060The big five theorists have probably done the best job of that with extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience.
00:07:45.040If you're a social psychologist, you start to veer, I suppose, to some degree into the territory of sociology, and you look at the human being as a social organism, like how it is that we interact with others because we're highly social creatures.
00:07:58.360And what it means for our behaviors, our thoughts, our emotions, and our perceptions, that we exist in a social milieu.
00:08:10.400And so, you're working at the intersection between personality and social.
00:08:15.100Now, you also pointed out that in the domain of both personality and social, there are questions about, let's say, normal versus abnormal behavior, or healthy versus unhealthy behavior, depending on how you conceptualize it.
00:08:31.880And that starts to delve into the realm of psychopathology.
00:08:36.400And psychopathology might be described, at least in part, at the personality level.
00:08:41.420So, you could say that someone who has a psychopathological personality is working at cross purposes to themselves, so they're anxious often and hopeless, too much negative emotion, not enough positive emotion, so that they themselves would complain about it.
00:08:59.320But you could also think about psychopathology from the social perspective, because there are people, like the narcissists that you referred to,
00:09:07.640who, at least in the short term, who, at least in the short term, might be perfectly happy from an emotional perspective.
00:09:18.660But everybody else regards them as a veritable plague.
00:09:22.160And so, okay, so we've sketched out the territory.
00:09:25.620I don't know if you have anything to add to that from a definitional perspective.
00:09:29.320No, I think you've hit the nail on the head.
00:09:31.580I think what's really interesting is a lot of things when you focus on the individual, like self-enhancement or showing off or taking credit for things, those things that seem beneficial when you start integrating into a relationship can backfire on you.
00:09:46.440So, if I'm attention-seeking, it might be great as an individual, but if I'm working on a team and I'm attention-seeking, my team members will hate me and my team performance will fall apart.
00:09:55.900So, when we move into that social world, a lot of the rules change.
00:10:19.460You know, there's a lot of ways I can have issues that hurt other people and not necessarily myself.
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00:13:00.780Right, well, you're touching there on something approximating an objective definition of health or its opposite, you know, psychopathology.
00:13:16.400Because what you're implying, and I'm going to flesh it out a little bit, so it's easy to assume that our notions of psychopathology, say, psychological disorder or ill health, are only cultural constructs.
00:13:33.560But you've touched on something, I think, that disproves that quite radically.
00:13:37.760And so let me walk through that a bit and tell me what you think about it.
00:13:41.020So I could perform, I could look at the world or I could think about the world in a manner that optimizes my emotional functioning for the moment.
00:13:51.380And that would be satisfying and rewarding for me in the moment.
00:13:56.620But it could be that I'm regulating my emotions in the present at the cost of my emotional regulation in the future.
00:14:05.040And so for me to be a functional person, because I extend across time, I have to act in the moment in a way that doesn't compromise my actions, my existence across time.
00:14:17.060So you could think about it as, that would be the constraints of an iterating game.
00:14:21.620I have to be able to play a game with myself that can last across the months and years of my life.
00:14:27.760So that sets up a pretty serious set of constraints around the manner in which I have to conduct myself.
00:14:36.900There are ways that I could regulate my emotions that are going to manifest themselves at the expense of my wife or my children, my other family members or the broader community.
00:14:47.860And so for me to be functional in the higher sense as a social creature, I have to, I can't regulate my emotions at the expense of other people.
00:14:57.300That also sets up something like an objective criteria, at least a transpersonal criteria for how we conceptualize normal or healthy personality and abnormal or unhealthy personality.
00:15:09.860It's not merely a matter of subjective judgment.
00:15:12.260It's a matter of not being the sort of person that no one else wants to be around and being miserable and counter.
00:15:24.640You started to talk a little bit about status.
00:15:28.280Okay, so this is where it's very important for psychologists to be careful with their words because we tend to talk a lot about dominance and status and not enough about reputation and responsibility.
00:15:42.000And so, let me outline something and you tell me what you think about it.
00:15:45.300So, it's very important for people to be well situated in a social hierarchy.
00:16:22.940So, even with little kids, if you're a four-year-old and you've learned to regulate your emotions so you're not pathologically self-centered and you can take turns, you can share and you can play other children's games when it's their turn.
00:16:39.280And if you're very good at making friends and you're fun to be around, your reputation is going to grow and that's going to situate you well in the social community.
00:16:47.080When you're an adult, the same thing applies, although adults are also more focused, let's say, on competence rather than mere ability to play, even though that's important.
00:16:57.080And so, you can enhance your reputation by being competent and by being a fair player and that situates you well socially.
00:17:05.740You can also manipulate that by using power and dominance and false claims of competence and status.
00:17:13.460And so, the reputation game can degenerate into a power game, but that doesn't mean that the reputation game is a power game.
00:17:22.960And so, well, that's at least one way of looking at it.
00:17:26.460So, I'm kind of curious about, you know, if you feel that that's a good definitional ground for our conversation to continue if you've got things to say about it.
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00:18:56.160I mean, there's a lot to unpack there.
00:18:57.860First off is the challenge we have as people is we don't know if we're going to live 50 minutes or 50 years.
00:19:04.680So do you regulate for just having a good time today, or do you try to do the long-term game?
00:19:10.000And most of us are trying to play for the long-term.
00:19:12.420If you regulate your emotions for the short-term, for example, I get mad at somebody, so I scream at them or bully them, or I want attention, so I go claim attention or something.
00:19:24.800If I do that, it's going to feel good for me in the short-term, but in the long-term, I'm going to ruin my relationship.
00:19:30.760So it's going to have a long-term cost.
00:19:33.320And we have the way I think we're kind of wired, at least in social psychology, is we regulate emotion before we regulate other things.
00:19:40.940So if I feel bad, the tendency is, like, I want to make that bad feeling go away.
00:19:55.820The second thing I think you're pointing out, the difference in reputation and status or dominance, I think is really important.
00:20:02.220Because you can gain a reputation by being sort of a kind of a showy, big deal, kind of the narcissistic model, you know, the celebrity model.
00:20:14.800Or you can just be a good person over a long period of time.
00:20:18.240And in the leadership world, this is sort of like dominance versus prestige.
00:20:23.700You know, people either admire you and they want to make you a leader or you kind of dominate people.
00:20:28.860So I think in the status world, there's sort of two paths to status.
00:20:32.520One is you be a good person and people lift you up.
00:20:35.880And the other path is you kind of fight your way with sharp elbows to the top and make sure people think you're a big deal, control the media, you know, control the message and all that.
00:20:44.580So I think there's a lot of conflict in this human experience about this.
00:20:50.820Yeah, well, so I interviewed Franz DeWall before he passed away in a rather untimely and a certainly unfortunate manner.
00:21:00.180And I was really struck by his work on chimpanzees in relationship to the kinds of things that we're discussing.
00:21:06.260Because the classic view among, even among evolutionary biologists, I would say of the somewhat less sophisticated sort, and also of psychologists, is that the hierarchies that we live in, the social structures, hierarchies because there's limited access to resources and people sort themselves out so that some people get preferential access.
00:21:29.960And a functional hierarchy is one where the more able people get preferential access because that's good for everyone else.
00:21:35.260Anyways, the classic view is being that the more dominant, say, the more socially successful, especially male, tends to be more dominant.
00:21:47.420But DeWall showed that even among chimpanzees, the dominance route was, you might say, a suboptimal solution.
00:21:56.080It seemed better than being a subordinate, let's say.
00:22:00.360So if you had to pick between being weak and useless and strong and mean and dominant from an evolutionary perspective and maybe even from a personal perspective, it would be better to take the dominance route.
00:22:12.440But if you could serve a more sophisticated role, then, and DeWall pointed out that for his alpha chimps, the ones that were stable, that was the role, often a role of peacemaker and of reliable friend.
00:22:29.360That the alphas that DeWall studied, even among chimpanzees, were much, their troops were more functional and their rule was more stable and less violent if they didn't use dominance.
00:22:42.420And this is a finding of unbelievable importance, right?
00:22:47.060Because it's really crucial that we understand these two pathways to both reproductive and personal success.
00:22:55.040And the dominance route is simpler and it's more attractive at a surface level.
00:23:02.260And that's also partly why the narcissists and the psychopaths have a niche, right?
00:23:07.360And so I would like to delve into that.
00:23:09.740So a narcissist, as far as I'm concerned, and you tell me, tell me what you think about this.
00:23:14.900So a narcissist fundamentally is someone who manipulates to achieve unearned reputational status.
00:23:24.500Now, so does that, so I know that needs to be fleshed out, but that seems to me to be something like at the core of it.
00:23:31.220Perhaps the reason that works is because once you establish a social hierarchy that's functional, the higher you are in the hierarchy, the more resources accrue to you.
00:23:42.920And for men in particular, that also involves reproductive success because the best predictor of mate access for men is relative position in a hierarchy.
00:24:26.940I've got, I'm going to take this in pieces.
00:24:31.100First, I do think that idea of unearned status is really important with narcissism.
00:24:35.720But there's also the case of people, and I'm thinking of Bill Clinton in particular after he was president, but I'm sure it applies to President Trump not picking parties here, where you have somebody that really is successful, really is competent, and still has the need for attention, still has the need to be admired, even though they have all those things.
00:24:55.240So it's not necessarily only unearned.
00:24:58.440It's like, hey, I just want attention, whereas other people are like, you know, I go out there, I do my best, I just want to go home with my family.
00:25:06.060So I think it can be, people enjoy the earned attention too, to some extent, but it always gets to the point where you want more than you deserve.
00:25:15.640There's an inflation component with narcissism.
00:25:18.500So I do think that, but I do think there are people who are very competent and narcissistic.
00:25:23.520Yeah, okay, that's a good distinction.
00:25:25.660So I want to go back to your alpha question, because it's so interesting.
00:25:29.460I was, where it hit me, I was in South Africa looking at a group of gazelle of some sort with the guide, and I was watching the alpha running around mate guarding.
00:25:42.820And I said to my guide, I'm like, what's going on here?
00:25:47.140He has to spend his life mate guarding to make sure the other guys don't come in.
00:25:51.940I said, how long does he last in this role of an alpha?
00:25:54.520He goes, well, about a season, and then he'll die because your cortisol's up.
00:26:00.240And in the human condition, what we have are reverse hierarchies.
00:26:03.720I mean, this is Freud and totem and taboo.
00:26:06.140This is essentially the tension in the human system.
00:26:09.720So if you're an alpha and you're like, I'm not working with the younger guys, the younger guys are going to band together and take you out, and you're going to have an unstable system in the short-term reign or short-term rule.
00:26:21.500But if, as you say, and like Franz de Waal said, is if you align the alpha with a group of, you know, become a peacemaker, work with the younger guys, you're going to be stable and have a more stable society.
00:26:49.480Yeah, well, you see that with gang members.
00:26:52.260I mean, we know something about the psychology of gang members, and it's clearly the case that in gang members or among gang members, the more narcissistic, aggressive, manipulative, psychopathic types who are certainly prone to turn to violence can rise, but their lifespan tends to be extremely short.
00:27:11.180And then they also adopt an attitude towards the world, which is associated with a truncated temporal view, which is, I'm going to get every goddamn thing I can get my hands on right now.
00:27:23.080And, you know, you can understand the attractiveness of that if the alternative is, I never get anything I want, and I also die quickly.
00:27:32.700But it's not a very good solution when you could be successful and productive, and that could span decades and also be of service to other people.
00:27:41.380You know, we should point out, too, that this discussion that we're having, it strikes to the core of cultural critique as well, because one of the things that we see happening continually, I mean, throughout human history,
00:27:55.860but I guess it's been amplified intellectually more since the time of Marx, is this insistence that male sociological structures are oppressive patriarchies.
00:28:08.280And, you know, we need to take that apart, because we could say at a more sophisticated level that if the male hierarchy deteriorates in the direction of narcissistic power, then it becomes an oppressive patriarchy.
00:28:23.800But if it's bounded by the necessity of productive, iterable interactions of the sort that define, let's say, de Waal's peacemaking chimps, then there's nothing about the patriarchy that's oppressive at all.
00:28:38.220All that means, if it's oppressive, that means that it's not structured optimally, either for the people who are in the positions of authority and responsibility or for anybody else.
00:28:48.880But the crucial issue here is that it's certainly possible to structure hierarchies of responsibility so that they're not narcissistic and dominance-based.
00:29:19.400It just takes some time for it to happen.
00:29:21.720So it's not a stable system, and it can become toxic.
00:29:25.760But a healthy, well-adjusted group of guys, I mean, guys get together, and they try to align towards a goal.
00:29:32.280So if I took a bunch of guys and said, let's go fight that monster over there, we'd all get together and fight the monster and have a great time.
00:29:39.060So guys can work together if they're not doing a bunch of ego stuff, if they're focused on goals.
00:29:46.980Well, and it's also the case that men who aren't immature, and we'll go back to the immaturity issue,
00:29:53.020and who are goal-focused tend to organize themselves in relationship to perceived competence while pursuing that goal.
00:30:03.060And I think, you know, one of the things that's puzzled me, for example, is a trope, let's say, that's very common in American movies.
00:30:11.100Because it kind of runs contrary to the apparent presuppositions of something like evolutionary biology.
00:30:17.760So you can imagine a football movie, football team movie, and you can imagine a subplot being a quarterback who overcomes the odds and, you know, wins the championship game
00:30:29.220and is paraded out of the stadium on the shoulders of his teammates.
00:30:34.060So they're all celebrating him, right?
00:30:36.020They're pushing him up to the highest position.
00:30:38.780One of the consequences of that is that he becomes much more radically attractive to the cheerleaders, let's say.
00:30:45.440And then you might ask, well, what the hell's up with those males who are putting this guy up on their shoulders?
00:30:51.000Because they seem to be taking a reproductive hit with their celebration of his ability.
00:30:55.560But I suspect that the corollary to that is something like, well, if you're a man and you associate with the group that's run by a very productive winner, let's say,
01:40:07.840It's much more immediate action, which is why when we were talking about conscientiousness as being a buffer to this, I mean, that's why it's important.
01:40:16.520And as I usually tell my students, hedonism is a terrible way to be happy.
01:40:23.460If you do what makes you happy in the moment all the time, you're guaranteed to be depressed and ruin your life.
01:40:29.680I mean, so, yes, by self-centered, it's much more whim-centered.
01:40:34.820It might be that the cardinal elements of narcissism are disagreeableness, let's say, extroversion, low conscientiousness when it gets really pathological.
01:40:45.360But that short-term pleasure orientation is a crucial element of it, I think, right?
01:40:53.460And that would be the hedonistic element.
01:40:55.860And I don't think you get really, you certainly don't get the malignant narcissistic or the criminal narcissistic type without including that hedonism.
01:41:03.460And that would be something like short-term mating strategy, live-for-the-day hedonism that's part and parcel of that.
01:41:11.700And I do think that that's really equivalent to something like lack of cortical maturation, right?
01:41:17.480Because it's the default condition of the typical two-year-old.
01:41:20.100But now there's another element of this that's cool, too.
01:41:22.780So, you know, in the linguistic analysis that established the big five, there are all sorts of trait descriptors of negative emotion that loaded powerfully on neuroticism, right?
01:41:35.440One of those, this is so cool, is self-consciousness, which is actually a facet in the neo-system.
01:41:42.880And this is something that's also extremely worth thinking about relationship to selfishness.
01:41:47.560Because you might think, well, I'm concerned with myself and that's going to make me happy.
01:41:52.420It's like, no, self-consciousness is indistinguishable from negative emotion.
01:41:59.260Because what it implies is that it isn't that there's a causal connection between being obsessed with yourself and being miserable.
01:42:07.000It's that they're actually the same thing by different names.
01:42:11.280So, you know, one of the ways I used to treat my socially anxious clients, so maybe they were worried about going to a party.
01:42:17.860And one approach to that would be to teach them relaxation exercises and to teach them, to encourage them not to focus on their own experience.
01:42:27.340But when you tell someone not to think about something, they tend to think about it more, right?
01:42:44.580Well, it worked like a charm, you know, because, well, first of all, as soon as they, most of these people who were socially anxious had some social skill.
01:42:55.460Some of them were very badly socialized and they were anxious because they just didn't know how to behave in a social environment.
01:43:00.120But some of them had social skills that they'd shut off because of their anxiety.
01:43:04.480And then if they focused on being hospitable, let's say, then, well, they weren't thinking about themselves.
01:43:11.660And then they were effective and their anxiety went away and they started to flow into a natural conversation.
01:43:17.860So, you know, another thing worth pointing out, say, on the hedonism front is that not only is short-term gratification of your whims a bad strategy, even to gratify them, but because it's associated with self-consciousness, because it's associated with what you want right now, it's also a direct pathway to high levels of negative emotion.
01:44:56.600And, you know, your point is exactly right.
01:44:58.940It's like what we call self-esteem, which is really regulation of negative emotion to a large degree, is actually obtained by establishing long-term functional reciprocal relationships.
01:46:44.660Well, look, that's a really good place to end and also a good time to end.
01:46:47.880So for everybody watching and listening, I'm going to delve more into Dr. Campbell's autobiographical background because we didn't flesh that out as much as I would have liked to on this side.
01:46:57.740So if you want to join us on the Daily Wire side for the additional, for the extra half an hour of our conversation, like, please do join us there.
01:47:06.860I'd like to, well, I would like to find out, for example, what it was that impelled Dr. Campbell to start studying narcissism to begin with and also how that's associated with self-enhancement.
01:47:19.020We didn't talk a lot about entitlement, which I would have liked to have covered because that's not something that people understand really deeply.
01:47:26.000And entitlement is a very dangerous attitude and one that's not going to work out very well for the entitled person, let's say.
01:47:33.880So anyways, all of you who are watching and listening, you could join us on the Daily Wire side.
01:47:38.080And Dr. Campbell, thank you very much for talking to us today about narcissism.