https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=DpmSdFknoMk
So do you want to start by explaining to people, let’s walk through your research on the dark triad. How did you become interested in this and how did you develop the measurement instruments and what do you measure? Well, like a lot of academics, my research can be traced back to my advisor, who was Richard Christie, the inventor of Machiavellianism as a trait. And he did something very clever. He went into the books of Niccolò Machiavelli, who was an advisor to politicians way back when, and he took the statements, administered them to undergraduate students and simply asked them, how much do you agree with these statements? Like, you have to get to know important people and always be prepared for the worst in people. And the amazing thing was the huge variance in the responses. And that’s what personality research is all about. We look for and wallow in relish the fact that people give different answers. And apparently a lot of people agreed totally with the statements that Machiavelli made in the 1500s. Others were horrified by them. And so that inspired Richard Christie to make a questionnaire. The Mach 4, the most popular version of his questionnaires was administered to subject pools at his university, Columbia University and elsewhere. And it wasn’t just self-reports, it predicted actual behavior. So he could show that people who scored high on the Mach 4 manipulated others in a room, in a laboratory. So they would try to squeeze money out of other people by tricking them. And all of this could be recorded and published. Hence, Richard Christie is forever associated with Machiavellianism. So I thought that was a fabulous way to do research. I moved on then and took a real job at the University of British Columbia and met up there with Bob Hare, sort of the emperor of research on psychopathy. Another aversive trait. And of course he has done it all, but what he didn’t do was compare it to Machiavellianism. And I’ve also done some research separately on narcissism, which captured attention of researchers in the 1980s. Because it seems to resonate, everybody knows narcissists, people who want a lot of attention and think they are superior to everyone else. Everyone can resonate to knowing such people. So we have three personality variables. Then when the student, Kevin Williams, came along, and typically in my career, I go with what the students wanna do, we decided to figure out whether there were more, are there more aversive personalities. So we searched the literature and we did as much as we could back then, early 2000s, to cover all the literature and see if there were more personalities that were at the level of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. We call them the dark triad because they seem to dominate the literature, there are already hundreds of studies on each one of those. The unfortunate results, fortunate in the long run, I suppose, is that the literatures overlapped so much, you could barely tell the difference. If you took all the literature on narcissism, all the literature on Machiavellianism and psychopathy, you could see the same things coming up. And that was the original problem. We wanna parse the dark side of traits, but you can’t really do much with the literature because of this phenomenon that we called construct creep, and that is a researcher doesn’t have the ability to research everything at once, so they focus on one variable, but it creeps wider and wider until it overlaps with other variables. And that’s a problem because you don’t know which one you’re actually studying when you put it into a research program, which one is responsible for the action you’re seeing. Well, we wanna talk about that in some more detail too, because I’d like to find out a bit more about how you feel. I know that the dark trait is morphed into the dark tetrad to some degree, and I’m also curious as to what you have to say about the overlap between the dark tetrad qualities and personality disorder categories, especially in the histrionic, antisocial, and narcissistic categories, obviously, that shades into personality pathology. And so can I define the three traits and have you correct my definitions if you would? So the Machiavellians, as you pointed out, Machiavelli was an advisor to princes who was really interested in some sense in the outright maintenance of instrumental power. I wouldn’t say he was driven by any intrinsic ethic. It was Machiavelli gave advices to princes who wanted to maintain their position by hook or by crook, let’s say. So Machiavellians are willing to use manipulation to obtain their personal ends. And narcissists seem to be driven by a high desire to obtain unearned status from others. The most important thing for them is not status in relationship to competence, let’s say, or in relationship to performance, but just in status for its own sake. And then the psychopaths, I spent a lot of time looking at Hare’s research and thinking about relationship to the Big Five. Psychopaths seem to be something approximating parasitical predators. And so they’re very, very low in agreeableness and that makes them callous and non-empathetic. And then they also seem to be very low in conscientiousness. That seems to accord reasonably well with the two factors of the psychopathy scale. And so a real psychopath is someone who is willing to take what you have, let’s say, and use it. And that might be the predatory aspect and also to live off the earnings and efforts of others. And that’s also an element of criminal behaviour. And so you’re looking at the nexus of all three of those, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. And recently, you and other researchers have added, I think this is so interesting because I think it was a real lack. You added sadism to that, which is positive delight and pleasure taken in the suffering of others. And so can you expand at all upon the definitions of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy? And we could segue into sadism. Yeah, I agree with all of your definitions. Although what we did was spend a lot of time trying to find what’s different among each of the characters and what the overlap is. Why is it that the literatures and the measures that were available always overlapped to a dangerous degree in trying to understand what’s going on? So the key thing for psychopaths, in our opinion, is impulsivity and sensation seeking, which is what gets them into trouble. They may not have worse motives than the others, but they can’t help it. That’s why they, at the extreme levels, spend their lives in prison. They can’t help responding to temptation. Whatever the temptation is, they go for it. And often they get what they want right away and they keep on doing it until they get caught. And they don’t seem to learn from it. So that answers just a qualification to the definition of psychopath. Now, what’s underlying it, we think, is callousness for all of them. They’re overlapping because, at the core, is a failure to have empathy. And if you have a deficit in empathy, you, it seems inevitable that you’re gonna exploit other people in one way or another because you’re not getting the feedback that people with empathy get in seeing other people suffer at your hands. And the story of sadism is quite a long story, but if you want me to get into the details, I can do that now. Yeah, please do, please do. Yeah, I don’t know whether I’m more sensitive to these things than other people, but I started seeing sadism in regular people. And not only is it there in everyday people, but people seem to wallow in it when the circumstances allow it. For example, violent sports. One of my favorite sports, hockey. It’s kind of pathetic watching a hockey game. The cheers are larger for the fights than for the goals. People love to see their fighter pummel the fighter of the other team or pummel anyone. And the cheers that go up in a hockey stadium are incredible. And the cheers only stop when the victim falls to the ice and starts twitching and a hush falls over the crowd, showing the dual nature of positive and negative motivations that human beings have. But the fact that they love seeing the fighting, no matter how much blood and teeth end up on the ice is disappointing in a way. And we learned a long time ago from the Europeans, they don’t have to do that to make hockey a wonderful sport. That was just one. But then watching the undergraduate students at UBC, University of British Columbia, what are they doing for fun? Well, if you’ll recall way, way back, they used to play these archive games. And there was some gentle ones, Pac-Man, asteroids. I don’t know if you remember those, but going down into the arcade, you see that people are gathered around one of the arcade games. And so I wandered over to see it. And it was something called Mortal Kombat, which by today’s standards isn’t that bad. But the heads are torn off and the blood spurts out. And that’s why the crowd was there because it was so much more appealing than the silly little Mario Brothers stuff. And it just struck me as the beginning of my interest in what people do, especially young males, when they have time on their own. So it’s not porn, then it seems like it’s violence. And it’s somewhat horrifying, but it’s gotten worse. I don’t know if you’ve been following the video games that are now available on your home computer. You don’t need to go to an arcade and be embarrassed by what you’re playing because you can sit at home and play whatever games you want. And so now, what’s it called? A grand theft auto, you can kill innocent bystanders, step on their heads, et cetera. And there are actual torture sites where you can go and torture people. You can torture animals. It’s all there. And so people are paying to do this stuff. They pay for violent sports, they pay for violent movies. What’s the most popular television program these days? It’s called Game of Thrones. And it’s the most sadistic kind of television program that you’ve ever seen. People are paying for this in one way or another, and they’re attracted to it. They relay stories with their friends. So this, putting this picture together, suggested to me that some, not all, in fact, the variants again is there, which excites a personality researcher. Some people are highly attracted to this stuff. Other people are horrified.