Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities [pdf]
gwern.net
gwern.net
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/personality-and-its-...
I'm not saying this study is bad. But there are hot topics in all fields that are usually well consumed with a bit of caution and extra awareness.
As an alternative, here's an actual discussion.
https://reason.com/2020/07/07/narcissists-psychopaths-and-ma...
I imagine because otherwise the journals wall out the actual content.
Especially for those who have been real victims in the past, these issues can be very poignant issues and cause us to 'trigger'.
In such circumstances, I think a lot of our 'reason' goes out the window and we react purely emotionally.
This creates the perfect vector for manipulation by self-obsessed people with total lack of self awareness.
In any large group of people, there will be a handful that will say and do anything to get ahead, and if it's just 'really easy to reach out and touch that victimhood button' - they will.
Things are very confounded because A) there is usually a degree of truth in the generalisation (i.e. racism, sexism etc. are very real and common things) and B) there may be elements of truth to a specific ordeal (i.e. someone may have been treated in a poor manner, but not in an egregious way).
For some people, because 'A' (such bad behaviour in general) absolutely exists, then 'B' (the individual situation) 'must be an example of A' and then some ham-fisted, lop-sided action ensues, especially in the realm of the press.
Go ahead and watch the founders of the now infamous 'We Charity' as they were grilled in a Parliamentary setting: with no understanding of what happened, they seem like victims. But if you have an inkling as to what was actually going on, it's clear they were exhibiting some of these Machiavellian tendencies with, constant virtue/victim signalling.
Most of us are hard wired to be emotionally empathetic, that's a 'good thing' - it's just easy for a lot of people (and corporations) to take advantage of.
This phenom also metastasises in social settings: one of the worst possible things we can be perceived as, is 'unsympathetic'. How 'terrible' is the person who doesn't care about that 'poor person who was a victim' of something! The issue with skepticism, and especially how it's perceived by others, is that is interpreted as a 'lack of sympathy' - when in reality - it's usually more or less a 'lack of belief in the factuality of the situation' in which, it's possible the victim may not be deserving of sympathy - which are different things.
Since there's way too much risk in being perceive as unsympathetic, the popular response will usually be lopsided on any 'grey, ambiguous issue'.
Well, it is only about as good as any other animal instinct we possess - when not balanced with norms and intellect they lead to long-term disasters #. It's rather dismaying that a lot of people elevate empathy to the position of supremacy.
# For example empathy could cause one to acquit a cute-looking criminal, or to leap to comfort an ebola victim only to become infected themselves and go on to infect the next emphatic person before dying a horrible death.
And this is to be pedantic about the definition (because it matters to me, as obnoxious as silly as that is), because "empathy" is the shared experience of a feeling -- I scream in pain, you feel my pain, I cry my eyes out, you cry your eyes out. "Sympathy" is acknowledging a feeling. "That's a bummer, I know how you feel."
I would say that there is a small portion of people, let's ballpark 2-3%, which are overwhelming and genuinely empathetic. These people actually care, for the sole reason that they are interested in the well-being of everyone.
Many people are mildly sympathetic. You express your genuine emotions, and they'll give you a heartfelt response and listen for minute or two.
A great number of people have very, very little empathy or sympathy. They will feign interest or whatever response a social situation calls for so as to not appear poorly. Unless they are particularly invested in you, and there's a deep bond. (Hell, sometimes people you think were your closest friends will disappear second you ever ask a small favor or inconvenience).
But from a rational standpoint, over-empathatecism (or moderate empatheticism, for too many people) would lead to constant intense, and often negative, psychological states/ imbalance. So I'm not complaining.
Though I'm not sure why the entire adult world cooperatively plays this game where everyone pretends to care in public about everything, and makes a big show about how "<insert canned positive adjective here>" they are.
When we see starvation and poverty (and we don't attribute it to 'their own behaviour') - we are generally sympathetic.
" I'm not sure why the entire adult world cooperatively plays this game" - again I believe it's because to appear 'unsympathetic' is a very bad thing among most people. It generally doesn't pay to appear stern, cold or callous among most people (though for some it does). Sympathetic positions are usually more popular, which is why you see corporate messaging overwhelmingly on this side.
Sure, but it's obviously brazenly disingenuous. Do you think the companies believe that people buy that. That a company actually cares about XYZ. And that the social media/advertising/marketing campaign staff they pay to come up with this had nothing to do with it.
Why is the idea that a company has zero interest in your personal well-being or anything else about you, outside of how much potential revenue you're worth, so taboo?
There are businesses and products that incorporate some level of social good or net-positive impact, but you can bet if continuing to do so put them in the red that would be quietly ushered out stage left.
But it's a business, not a charity.
Do I think Coca-Cola _really cares_ about (insert recent tragic event or latest social cause)? No. Do you? Does anyone? Do we care that they don't care?
So why does the entire world keep up the charades, and not stay "Stop posting trite corporate marketing, do you think you're fooling anyone?"
Oh, they absolutely do.
100%.
Marketing is all about aspiration, and companies are falling over themselves to be perceived as moral, credible, caring - it makes a huge difference.
In a very poignant example, Nike's switched from endorsing athletes for their prowess ... to their politics. The Kaeperinck sponsorship was a massive win for Nike.
Lulu Lemon is selling the 'ethics' of Yoga (for $200 yoga pants that make your butt look good!).
You noticed that the brand of water Starbucks sold forever was 'Ethos'. That's not an accident.
Terms such as 'ethically sourced', 'locally sourced', 'fair trade', 'eco friendly' etc. all over the place.
The marketing absolutely works, even if on a cognitive level we have some degree of cynicism, the messaging goes right past our logic to associates a brand directly with an emotion, possibly sympathetic, possibly other thins like the love we have for our children etc..
If you look at celebrity brand marketing these days (i.e. how celebs market themselves), it's at least 1/2 social signalling. It's all about their politics, their charities, their causes, this is driven by smart agents, PR managers etc..
People are smart but crowds are stupid.
I wouldn't consider myself cynical but everything about this social-politics and fake-caring shenanigans deeply unsettles me. Like plastic humans.
Then, in the same paragraph:
"Yet in the current historical period, many observers have argued that in the United States and in other Western societies being a victim does not always carry these negative connotations or produce unwanted outcomes. ... (Bawer, 2012; Campbell & Manning, 2018; Sykes, 1992) "
I haven't read the references, but this sounds silly. They're not "connotations" - they're physical ailments caused by trauma. No one with PTSD would want to have it.
BTW, I have PTSD from early childhood violence. And, I would probably score higher than average on the (Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psy-chopathy) questionnaire. But, I blame that on damage to my Amygdala.
There are also borderline cases of victimhood. Do those get rounded to "yes" or "no"? If you've had a difficult experience, you could talk that up into PTSD or brush it off. If being a victim brings social or financial benefits, that will make the difference for some people.
Isn't it rather that signalling PTSD can be a net positive?
It would seem like a really bad conclusion to say people signalling PTSD are psychopath if actually, there are people with PTSD and then psychopaths who signal PTSD - because you're essentially lumping people with real pain into a group with people who are exploiting thier pain.
Historically, some people with PTSD may have been stigmatised, whereas now people are generally more sympathetic.
Also, being a 'victim' doesn't necessarily imply PTSD or any 'ailments' specifically.
Edit: To be more clear I'm not denying that the clinical descriptions of it are lies. Rather my impression is that they do not amount to a diagnosable condition. The variance between the reported cases leave it as a very open ended and even dangerous diagnosis. This is my current impression and I could be wrong.
I know that the study controlled for socioeconomic and demographic variables, but I can think of a couple potential problems. One is that the overall study is composed of several smaller studies, each of which uses what may be a flimsy way of assessing negative traits from surveys and games. The other problem is as follows: take two African American women who make the same amount of income. Generally, they have the same demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. However, if one believes that she must, on the margins, extract more from an oppressive system, and the other believes that she must completely work with the system and take what she can get (regardless of her beliefs about the system), then can the former be classified as a Machiavellian psychopath and the latter be classified as a normative angel? (rhetorical question)
Note: I used the term "the system" to abstract from a lot of variables to keep things brief.
Note 2: Don't get me wrong, I'm not a post-modernist on ethics. Quite the opposite. I'm just skeptical about many psychological studies like the one in the OP. The correlations could be true (or not, or smaller in magnitude), and the research is worth doing, but I see no reason to update my priors yet.
Of course. I certainly don't like working with cheaters. But are you sure that that's what the study is actually measuring? Does it really prove that someone is more likely to be a cheater and a liar in a corporate environment if they exhibit a dubious and simplistic measure of victimization? I think it's dangerous to update my priors and increase my suspicion of people whom I deem to demonstrate above average victimization for their demographic. Guess who that would hurt the most? How arbitrary would my judgment be? Even if we can definitively say that the correlations in the study hold, the error terms, effect magnitude, and the practical difficulty in reproducing the study's controls render its findings impracticable in most contexts.
Thankfully, I haven't met many capital B Bad people/cheaters/pathological liars in my life, at least I don't think so. The worst people I met were very confident (the c in con artist) and didn't seem to have a victim complex.
One of the greatest draws of a guaranteed minimum income is to get the lying slackers out of the job market. Maybe they'll get bored watching Netflix and find something useful to be productive at, maybe not, but they suck to work with and employ, making everyone less productive who has to deal with their crap.
But if it is the entire "system" that is oppressing her, then she is likely to find that these legal prescriptions do not apply in her case. Isn't that quite obvious?
If you're being oppressed by a system, the system oppresses you, no matter how loudly it claims that it has resolutions for anyone who is being oppressed.
The fact that the system does not work for you is what it means to be oppressed in the first place.
> Quite the opposite. I'm just skeptical about many psychological studies like the one in the OP.
There's reason to be skeptical about many things in psychology, but the broad "dark triad" construct is seems to be at least somewhat sensible.
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Gwern has fans precisely because of the content. If the quality began to nosedive, I'm not sure they'd stick around. More to the point, Gwern isn't writing articles in exchange for upvotes on HN.
Anyway, the reason I wrote the comment is because the alternative is to down vote, which achieves nothing. No one really knows why the down votes were made, no lesson is being learnt. Nor a fruitful discussion.
By commenting I hoped that: 1. OP will think about this. 2. More importantly, other people will think about this.