Self-victimhood is a personality type, researchers find
reason.com
reason.com
The findings highlight the importance of understanding, conceptualizing, and empirically testing tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV), and suggest that victimhood is a stable and meaningful personality tendency.
Key graf from Reason article:
The study distinguishes TIV from narcissism. Narcissistic individuals also experience moral superiority and vengeful desires, but these feelings tend to spring from the belief that their authority, capability, or grandiosity is being undermined. TIV, on the other hand, is associated with low self-esteem. And while narcissists do not want to be victimized, high-TIV individuals lash out when their victimhood is questioned.
The thing to think about when you run into someone like this is that, for whatever reason, their victimhood has been the only reliable tool that has enabled them to receive positive attachment from others. It's no wonder they get highly defensive about their victimhood being called into question.
These issues are probably intransigent (narcissism, for example, is one of the most immune-to-therapy personality disorders), but maybe one way around victimhood with a friend or family member is to notice positive things about them that don't have anything to do with their victimhood (which is a tough task with some people).
One or two people fits to this template perfectly. Weak, soft, approachable in the beginning but, becomes silently more dominant and sucking your energy for their survival. If you cannot regenerate fast enough, they throw you to the side to find their new victim. Sad, damaging.
> These issues are probably intransigent...
My guess is TIV is not intransigent if you can attack it from right angle. The profile looks like grounded in good person turned bad for real or so, this looks like a winning strategy. Both foundations can be disassembled. First one needs someone who can cut through to anger to reach to the core of the personality. Second one needs an encounter with a bite-resistant person so, they have to think their strategy.
I'm overly generalizing here, but hope I could communicate the idea behind my rationale.
That sounds a lot like Borderline Personality Disorder. Another tricky one because the disorder itself causes resistance to diagnosis and treatment.
- BPD stems from a real distorted self image and manifests itself to protect one from abandonment or being left behind.
- TIV uses victimhood psychology to appear weak (or it already feels weak) but, can use this allure to slowly and surely feed itself. More importantly, TID lacks the wild or fierce side of BPD and narcissism. The process is slower and less painful until it ends. The pain is felt when the process is almost over, and the victim is ejected when it's completely powerless.
Even writing this brings memories back. On the bright side, experiencing these kinds of people once or twice is a very maturing experience (with an expense of course).
I kind of wonder though, if the way we end up classifying these things is unreasonably influenced by the existing classifications which maybe just sort of coalesced from observations that psychologists have made of their patients. Since they're often things that people won't get treated or don't even think of as disorders. The data must be very biased and flakey.
Yes, I only mentioned people which were consistent with the TIV template in the article.
> I kind of wonder though, if the way we end up classifying these things is unreasonably influenced by the existing classifications which maybe just sort of coalesced from observations that psychologists have made of their patients. Since they're often things that people won't get treated or don't even think of as disorders.
Unfortunately, It's possible. Moreover, some traits are not considered as illnesses until it starts to affect one's life (hoarding, some forms of OCD, etc.).
Another problem is, as noted by some other comments, TIV looks like a siamese twin of narcissism when looked from a specific angle. It might be just narcissism without self esteem, or as I've seen in one person might be completely different trait because it can be devoid of narcissistic traits or traces while being extremely efficient in draining someone without giving itself away until just before the victim proverbially dies.
Since psychology is not an exact science, it'll always be up to debate I think, however this trait is a good candidate to think well on. It's much more common than it seems.
TIV is a more soft, hurt presentation with silent/passive strategies to damage someone. It's more silent, slower and harder to stop if your self esteem is also low. This makes it a double-whammy since the person looks weak, approachable and gentle. Other party is also weak and attached to this approachable person hence, is somewhat powerless.
When everything is over, the victim is damaged much more deeply. Same person's encounter with a narcissistic person is much more harmless since person with low-esteem will be driven away by the dominant, narcissistic person.
I may be biased by the article’s prose (and by the site itself), but I get the sense that this is a diagnostic motivated to associate general expressions of victimhood (including the more visible expressions of trauma and oppression alluded to in the article) with harmful and manipulative expressions of victimhood that are plenty common in NPD (and certainly BPD).
I’m not qualified to draw that conclusion in a meaningfully scientific way, but I’m certainly skeptical that there’s a distinction in this classification that warrants distinction. And I think the harm it could do if adopted is pretty significant.
[1]: From personal experience, I likely wouldn’t have been diagnosed ADHD without being prepared with some creativity.
We're in an era which celebrates weakness and perceived victimhood over strength and perseverance, and rewards quite richly with attention, position, status, financial benefits, etc.
It's therefore not unsurprising there's no shortage of grifters willing to play the act in the pursuit of those incentives, whether actively (narcissists) or subliminally optimizing (TIV?) for the path of least resistance.
We get what we deserve or alternatively we get what we reward.
It actually made me curious what evidence there is, if any, in the domain of psychology showing a meaningful connection between individual personalities and cultural analogs, beyond a cultural phenomenon that is superficially similar simply making for a more hospital environment for the personality type, or vice-versa. In other words, by studying one (personality type or cultural phenomenon) can we draw substantive conclusions about the other in terms of genesis or remediation? We (as humans) love making such equivocations, but absent strong evidence they're mostly just exercises in, e.g., the composition fallacy.
If this paper is correct, this is not something that can be corrected by merely changing culture or simply scolding it away; the behavior traits will manifest themselves quietly as per the experiment shows.
Though they are known to invent entirely new classes of victim into which categories they conveniently happen to fall.
And that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in any divide.
But hey, now we have Apple's $549 AirPod Max to both alleviate the pain and create some more at the same time.
Happy complaining!
The linked article is about a psychology result, not a survey of social factors. Maybe it would be more productive to argue for or against the science than invent yet another battlefield on which to fight the culture war?
You've got to be kidding me. How can anything possibly be concluded from such a uniform set of participants?
If nothing else I would have suggested that they throw a couple of Palestinians in there. See if people who have experienced real victimhood are more likely to perceive it when it doesn't exist.
Reiterating my comment in another sub-thread: It looks like TIV might be maladaptive because it is highly correlated to anxious-attachment styles, which usually results from poor childhood attachment. Someone with a very healthy attachment-style is unlikely to suffer from TIV (according to the paper). That being said, even individually maladaptive personalties can be adaptive for their social contexts, because if a social-hierarchy starts to generate a lot of victimhood that is probably a strong signal to healthy members of that social-hierarchy that the hierarchy they are in is generating too many negative outcomes and needs to be corrected somehow.
In retrospect, dictator game allocation scenarios presented to a pile of undergraduates by way of a screen were probably nonsensical back when I was helping my social science grad student friends implement them as crappy Perl CGI in like 2003. I'm disinclined to expect much better from this one.
Also, as a side note, the amount of negative karma you have suggests that you probably don't understand what belongs on HN in the first place.
This is of course not to suggest right wing extremism is present here, but merely a general lean. A lot of folks mistake being “socially liberal” as sufficient to be “left-leaning” when in reality the fiscal part of the equation is inextricably linked as well.
The big government and regulation one often sees as part of implementing an equitable society is not supported here. You know that as well as I do. This is a community with a lot of hackers and startup minded folks who see regulation / government involvement as an impediment rather than a platform to lift up the disenfranchised.
Disruptors don’t like the forces that squash disruption. Fairly unremarkable.
Yes. Socially liberal and fiscally conservative is textbook libertarian, which is not inherently right-wing, though many libertarians do lean that way.
There are certainly plenty of more progressive voices with broader concern sets about services like AirBnB. It was never being proposed that there are no progressive voices.
They just represent a thinner, less upvoted slice.
I will, however, concede that libertarian does not necessarily mean right-leaning, though they presently seem to hang together.
The comments that bubble up (or get otherwise suppressed with votes) speak otherwise.
But “centrists” in 2020 are far closer to right-leaning because of said Overton window.
If you want to call center in 2020 a true center then sure, the site is drawing from the “whole range” equally. To the extent you acknowledge the impact of global cultural shifts and the deeper meaning of ‘left’ or ‘right’ then I would contend otherwise.
I really don't think so. They speak more loudly to you because you're primed to hear them (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). The opposite side is primed the opposite way and so it makes the opposite generalization.
If you stop to think about what this means, it's pretty staggering. It means that we experience ourselves as being surrounded by enemies or, as I metaphorically sometimes put it, demons: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
This cognitive bias is one of the most powerful forces on the internet, including HN, and if there's one thing I've learned from years of moderation, it's "underestimate it at your peril".
Perhaps it is merely that we disagree on the matter (or where “center” lies, which is interesting in and of itself).
And that’s fine. The political environment of grad school in social sciences, then hard sciences, industry in the more formal sciences and industry in software. Growing up around strong conservatives in rural areas. I’ve seen a decent sampling of perspectives.
I do not fault HN for its (generalized) leanings. It’s just a feature of this specific community and I enjoy it for reasons unique to it. No indictment or whatever.
Might be fun to do a poll though.