https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=r7W8yIeJ954
Men preferred visual pornography, but females preferred literary pornography. And they found the classic literary pornography plot, which was something like, you know, relatively innocent but undervalued and attractive but not so obviously attractive young woman stumbles across this sort of commanding man who has many women at his disposal and over time, despite his relatively high levels of aggression, he finds himself attracted to this woman and then forms a sexual relationship with her. It’s a Beauty and the Beast plot essentially, but one of the things that’s so interesting about their analysis was they listed the top five occupations or characters for female sexual literature and they were pirate, surgeon, billionaire, vampire and pilot. And so those are all males who I would say are marked by, oh no, not pilot, werewolf. Werewolf was the fifth one. And so I think it reflects to some degree this conundrum that women have, because women have to pick a man who has the capacity for aggression, enough of the capacity for aggression to protect himself and others and to move out into the world against a fair bit of opposition, but who’s also simultaneously empathic or perhaps conscientious enough to be caring and share. And you can imagine that’s a real knife edge, right? Because you need a bit of a monster in your man, let’s say to keep the real monsters away, but you don’t want so much monsters so that a relationship is impossible. And so then you could also imagine that there’s overshoot on both sides of that target so that some men become too aggressive but can appear attractive in the short term because they have the confidence associated with that and some men become too agreeable and so they look easy to get along with and so forth, but they can’t put themselves forward and stand up for themselves. And so be another explanation for the potential emergence of say sadism and psychopathy is that there’s this narrow target for especially for men to hit, doesn’t account for female psychopathy, but for men to hit and it’s easy to overshoot in either direction. And there’s going to be variability in women’s choice as well. Yeah, one of the issues that underlies my work in connection with clinical psychology, which you’re the expert in and I’m not, I try to stick to so-called subclinical levels. In other words, student bodies or workers. These are people who are managing to get along at everyday society and they’re available in large numbers so you can take surveys and try to tease apart the various aspects of the dark side. But I do not, I’m very reticent to venture to the clinical side and I think that’s been a source of criticism from, of me from clinical psychologists that I’m touching on areas that really belong to them and do not belong to me because I’m not a clinician. So when we get into sexual sadism and criminal sadism, which in a sense was all people associated with sadism up until recently, it was the only way that people thought about it. And interesting interplays between sadism and masochism, why would it be to some extent the same people who are into both? I can ask these questions in surveys but I hesitate to try to be an expert and accept what people are saying. Well it’s not as if the clinicians have been any more careful than the personality theorists in elucidating the actual nature of their diagnostic categories. I mean one of the reasons I’m a clinician and a personality psychologist, I mean one of the reasons I find your work interesting and compelling is because you do the psychometrics properly and that’s not always obviously the case with clinical diagnostic categories because they’re basically holdovers from the psychiatric enterprise and they weren’t derived, they weren’t extracted out of a primarily statistical model. And so on the downside for the clinical psychologist, it’s not obvious at all that we have our nosology, our diagnostic category system straight. And so I’m not saying that in a cynically critical manner because it’s actually a very difficult thing to do right, but it seems to me that your work isn’t unfairly um what poaching on the grounds of clinical psychologists because somebody has to do the basic psychometric work. It’s like well what are the basic categories of let’s say predatory and parasitical behavior? Now you can imagine that there’s a place where that becomes clinically extreme and has to be dealt with in another manner but there’s absolutely no reason not to look at it subclinical manifestations as well. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you now is because I’ve been reading a number of papers. I got really interested in this idea that virtualization enables well maybe psychopathy but maybe more broadly dark tetrad behavior. You know because one of the open questions is if you’re dealing with someone who has these personality proclivities that you described, Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic and sadistic, they obviously lack a Freudian superego in some sense. They can’t regulate their own behavior in a social manner. Left to their own devices they will exploit and hurt and so then you might say well what keeps people like that in check? And one of the answers to that would be well the same thing that keeps the rest of us in check which is mechanisms built into the neurobiology of our face-to-face contact. We know that if you put people in a car they’ll be ruder to each other to someone in another car than they would be face-to-face on the street. There’s a lot of direct inhibition built into our social interactions that keeps psychopathy and narcissism under control but then what you see online is that all of that disappears. And I don’t think that there’s any real price to be paid for dark tetrad behavior online, especially if it’s anonymous and that’s made me think more recently, especially as our culture tears itself apart as a consequence of the battle between extremes on the political spectrum, it’s made me wonder how much of that’s actually driven by the virtualized enabling of psychopathy and narcissism because you know it’s always a problem. One of the things people might not understand who are watching this is the incredibly high cost that biological organisms bear in relationship to parasitical behavior so that’d be associated let’s say with psychopathy. There is good evidence, although I wouldn’t say it’s canonical, that the reason that sex itself evolved was so that we could stay ahead of the parasites. If you just clone yourself, the parasites can chase your genome down the generations but if you mix your genes then the parasites have to adapt rapidly to keep up. You can stay ahead of them and so sex itself was driven by parasitical behavior and so what that indicates is that the presence of parasites as well as predators throughout our entire biological history has presented a canonical threat to our very civilization and now if it’s true that virtualization enables the psychopaths and the narcissists then it seems to me that that produces a cardinal threat once again and there’s been a spate of research more recently using the dark tetrad measures to investigate such things as narcissistic self promotion on on TikTok and Instagram but also trolling and online bullying and so maybe you could tell us a little bit about what’s been found on that front. Yeah well again you covered a lot of ground there but the central point I have to totally agree on and we got into a specific aspect where sadism plays a big role and that is the trolling online. You get to say anything you want without repercussions. If you said that to the person’s face you’d be in trouble for various reasons, legal and physical reasons but we tried to delve into asking these people who engage in trolling online why do you do it and we ended up with the title of our paper trolls just want to have fun because that seemed to be the most common motivation. It’s just fun poking at people. You find a website where people are all happy and enjoying it, I don’t know, a gardening group and you mess with them and that seems to be a lot of fun for certain individuals. We correlated an interest in doing that with the dark tetrad measures and sadism stood out as the best predictor of liking to mess with happy people. So having the internet has put us into trouble. Politics is an obvious example but just being nasty to your fellow humans is now a sport. Yeah it’s a sport, it’s a hobby, it’s a pastime and these people tend to spend a lot of their time engaged in various similar activities.