https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ed_dn3XT2qQ
the beginning of my interest in what people do, especially young males, when they have time on their own. So if 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, etc. 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 variance again is there, which excites a personality researcher. Some people are highly attracted to this stuff. Other people are horrified. I know that neurophysiologically, anger is a multi-dimensional emotion. It activates positive emotion systems and negative emotion systems simultaneously. And so you can think about that perhaps as the core element of something like aggression, at least maybe both defensive and predatory aggression. And then you could imagine that people are wired differently as individuals so that for any given person, being angry might be associated with a predominance of approach motivation, positive emotion and a relative decrement of negative emotion. For other people, that would be reversed. I’m trying to account for what the positive pleasure is in the observation or participation in the aggression. I mean, you could associate it with, hypothetically, you could associate it actually with predatory behavior, with hunting and with combat, but it also might be a consequence of differential wiring at the neurological level in relationship to the balance between positive and negative emotion experienced by any given person with anger. Because you see this variation in people, you know. I mean, I know some people who are real fighters, let’s say on the political front, and some of them really enjoy a good scrap, right? It really seems to get them motivated. This isn’t a criticism of them necessarily. And then other people, and I think I fall more into this cap, I’m not really very interested at all in conflict. It bothers me a lot, although I don’t like delayed conflict, so I’m likely to engage in it relatively upfront. But so we could go into that, like what do you think is the fundamental biological and then also ethical difference between people who are taking positive delight in aggression and those who aren’t? And, well, I guess we could start with those questions. Yeah, that’s the fundamental query, a puzzle in a way. Why would human beings have to have a sadistic side, at least some people? And as you mentioned, predatory very often. So one can speculate that it helps adult animals, carnivores, especially hunt, if they not only are willing but enjoy the killing, and that could have been carried over to human beings. Also, a little more instrumental explanation would be that it helps dominance. That is, if you can scare off your competitors, whether they’re competitors for mates or for territory, then being sadistic about it… That would be a niche theory in some sense, I guess, is that I know that the worldwide prevalence of psychopathy ranges between 1 and 5 percent, hovers around 3, and what it seems to indicate, because it’s relatively stable, is that although being a psychopath isn’t a particularly successful strategy, in that 97 percent of people don’t take that route, in a cooperative society, a niche does open up for people who are willing to use manipulation and impulsive behaviour and sadism to dominate and use power oppressively to at least, what would you say, carve out for themselves some degree of success, and then now and then some spectacular success, I suppose, which would be the case with people who are extraordinarily successful at being tyrants. And so we have two arguments there in some sense. One is a neurobiological difference in response to the balance of positive and negative emotion in anger, and the other one is, well, there’s a niche that opens up for people who are willing to use power and manipulation and so forth to attain the rewards of social dominance. And psychopaths seem to do that, right, because they’ll manipulate. They often have to move from place to place because people figure them out, but they will use short-term dominant strategies. I think you’ve related that too, as well, the dark triad, to short-term mating strategies as well, right, which is an interest. That’s another thing that we could concentrate on, right, on what the dark triad predicts. The dark tetrad interested me particularly because the literature I read on psychopaths did describe them as impulsive, so they’re willing even to sacrifice their own futures to the pleasure of the moment. But there was obviously a subset of psychopaths who delighted in being cruel, and the standard explanation of callousness, say, which is merely lack of empathy, didn’t seem to be enough, right, because it isn’t merely that people are lacking empathy, it’s that sometimes there are people who take a positive delight in cruelty, and that there’s a new term that’s used to describe online mobbing behavior or bullying behavior, troll behavior, which is lulz, right? I just did it for the lulz, which is the plural of lol, laugh out loud. And to do it for the lulz is to go after someone on the net, often anonymously, merely for the purpose of making them miserable and wretched and put them in pain just so that you can enjoy that. And certainly that’s not mere psychopathy, right? That’s not mere impulsiveness. There’s an additional component that’s worth concentrating on. All right, so you covered a lot of ground there. Picking up on the argument for psychopaths being impulsive, just to remind viewers who are not that familiar with evolutionary theory, the simple argument is you’ve got to get mates to maintain your genes in the gene pool. And there are many ways of doing that, right? One is to grab and run with whatever you want, using force if necessary. That will sometimes get you mates. More strategic Machiavellians find ways of manipulating others to get their genes into the gene pool. Narcissists seem to attract mates partly because of their confidence, even if it is overconfidence. Say this a little harder to see. Why would being sadistic get you romantic and sexual partners? Well, I think I touched on the only explanation that I could think of, and I think you mentioned it too, and that is, well, you scare off your competitors, and you even scare off your mate into doing what you want by hurting them in a very public way. So you’re deterring reactions from other people, and that may be of benefit in some circumstances. And then you went into the niche theory, or niche, as some people say. Yeah, there’s a lot of niches out there for dark personalities. Each one may require very select kinds of traits, but if you want a job as an enforcer on a hockey team, you better damn well be able to, and willing to, and like to, hurt other people. It also might be…