https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KZrcKI1k8bY
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, and I mean, 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 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 behaviour? 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 its 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 behaviour. 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 behaviour 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. I don’t think that there’s any real price to be paid for dark, tetrad behaviour 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 virtualised enabling of psychopathy and narcissism. Because 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 behaviour. 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 behaviour. 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 civilisation. And now, if it’s true that virtualisation enables the psychopaths and the narcissists, then it seems to me that that produces a cardinal threat once again. There’s been a spate of research more recently using the dark ketrad measures to investigate such things as narcissistic self-promotion 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 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. Right, well, we know that 1% of the criminals commit 65% of the crimes, and so it’s a Pareto distribution like almost every other form of, let’s say, creative production. And so it’s also the case in all probability that a very large proportion of the pathological online behaviour comes from a relatively small proportion of committed dark tetrad types. And given that they’re not only not inhibited by the normal mechanisms of social discourse, they’re also rewarded because they get a tremendous amount of attention. And I would say I think it’s reasonable to also point out that that attention is monetized in some sense and expanded by the internal operations of social media networks themselves. It’s certainly not the case that the trolls pay a price for being provocative. In fact, I think there’s good reason to think that their attempts are more likely to be multiplied rather than inhibited. And that could be, depending on the degree to which we virtualize, that could pose a real signal threat to the integrity of our peaceful political arrangements, let’s say. Just like physical exercise, daily spiritual exercise is critical to your well-being, especially in a world where attacks on faith and religion are happening all around us every day. There’s no better time for a daily habit of prayer than during this season of Lent The number one Christian prayer app in the US and the number one Catholic app in the world. With Hallow, you can pray every single day leading up to Easter alongside world-famous Catholics and Christians like Jim Caviezel, Father Mike Schmitz, and even Mark Wahlberg. Dive deep into scripture and the second most read Christian book of all time, The Imitation of Christ. You’ll learn how to become a better individual through prayer, fasting, and giving in spite of today’s broken world. Unload the app for free at Hallow.com slash Jordan. Set prayer reminders, invite others to pray with you, and track your progress along the way. Get an exclusive three-month free trial at Hallow.com slash Jordan. That’s Hallow.com slash Jordan. Yeah, it’s out of hand and it’s hard to track down individual contributors to malevolence online, but one could blame it on media polarization and just the need to attract customers. Turns out that people don’t like moderate media sources. They won’t turn to that channel. They’ll turn to a channel where they can feel warm and toasty because the other people on that channel agree with them on everything so they don’t get to hear other points of view. And many years ago, perhaps you and I were there at the time of Walter Cronkite and there were a few there were a few corporations online, two or three, that everybody watched and they were more or less down the middle. If those were put online now, nobody would watch. People want to watch the extreme version of their own politics and that’s unfortunate development in technology. Yeah, well there are some exceptions to that, I would say. I’ve had a lot of success, let’s say, with long-form dialogue on YouTube and other people have done the same thing inviting people like you to have discussions for the last 90 minutes or so and that’s a pretty comprehensive discussion and it rewards a long-term attention span but it’s definitely the case that there are selective pressures in relationship to attention to gather as much impulsive attention as possible and of course there’s a profit motive behind that often because if you can gather people’s attention, you can advertise to them and I’m not saying this cynically. I’m just trying to observe the way the system is working. If you can gather people’s attention by whatever means, you can almost instantly monetize that and so we also have this new technological problem which is that we have technologies that can really reward impulsive information gathering and simultaneously monetize it and that means that that’s fertile territory for the psychopaths and the narcissists and the Machiavellians and the sadists to exploit and I think there’s enough of that to actually undermine public trust in general because it makes… like my actual life is way less contentious than my online life. You know, they’re not even in the same universe in some sense. It’s that sense of polarization. It’s really very difficult to tell now in the modern world how much of that is a mere consequence and a mere appearance of virtualization and how much it actually reflects some fundamental disquiet. I mean, I know they loop but we have no way of really knowing and if it is true that virtualization enables psychopathy then that’s a real conundrum. That’s a real tough nut to crack. Yeah, and it’s scary in a way to think that in a way you’re getting closer to what people are really like in anonymous responses. We know that from questionnaire work that the more anonymous responses the less desirable the answers that you get from people are but it’s… yeah, it does sound very cynical to think that the nasty stuff you see online is really the human condition.