8 ms·

The Dark Core of Personality

112 points by imartin2k 8y ago

mikert5671 8y ago
This is obvious, most personality traits are normally distributed and biologically driven
- dang 8y ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - jl2718 8y ago
    Just want to call myself out on this one. Thanks for the reminder to be better.
  - interfixus 8y ago
    Respectfully disagree. 'normally distributed and biologically driven' is a distinct and non-shallow point of view, as far as I can see not really put forward in any other comment. Also, 'obvious' is not necessarily as dismissal.
vinceguidry 8y ago
I don't really want to call this pseudoscience, but what it's missing is the connection to psychiatry and neuroscience and to me falls into the nasty tendency of bucket thinking. Just because traits are observable and nameable doesn't mean they're actually valid. You're just handing amateurs dumb "diagnostic" tools that are just going to harm interpersonal relationships rather than make them better. If I observe you as having narcissistic traits, and you observe yourself as having narcissistic traits, and you form an identity around being a narcissist, nothing meaningful has been done. You still have no useful tools with which to make your life better. The psychological world needs a lot less of this, because handing people convenient identities without a corresponding plan of action for improving yourself that actually works, is contributing to rather than alleviating the problem. I don't think half of the people who think they're on the autism spectrum are anywhere close to it. I don't think half of the people described as narcissistic or psychopathic deserve the term. I do think that most people have emotional difficulties, and quantifying and providing resources for improving emotional health and depth should be the primary focus of psychology at the moment. I like the focus on loneliness, I hate the focus on disorders.
- derefr 8y ago
  > The psychological world needs a lot less of this, because handing people convenient identities without a corresponding plan of action for improving yourself that actually works, is contributing to rather than alleviating the problem. Why? Psychology is not medicine. Psychology is the study of the mind. (Maybe you're thinking of psychiatry?) We—psychologists—study the mind because we want to know how it works. It's basic research, like physicists studying particle collisions, or astronomers studying the cosmic microwave background. We're doing it in order to understand. We're approaching the same problems neurologists work on (how does the brain do this? why does the brain do that?), but from a different abstraction layer, using more of a social-sciences toolset. This research, in particular, is interesting because it unifies several previous, more limited hypotheses about how and why the human brain ends up in a particular persistent state. It provides a rubric that allows researchers (not doctors; not laymen) to craft tools that find this state, and to make predictions based off of the presence of this state. Researchers in possession of those tools can then use them to do other things. Like, say, medicine. But the basic research comes first.
  - 0x8BADF00D 8y ago
    > We're approaching the same problems neurologists work on (how does the brain do this? why does the brain do that?), but from a different abstraction layer, using more of a social-sciences toolset. You’re approaching the same problems that neuroscientists are tackling, but using a “social sciences” toolset? What does that even mean? That sounds like an outright rejection of the scientific method.
    - Sharlin 8y ago
      First, the scientific method is not relevant or useful in all worthwhile fields of inquiry. Second, the scientific method can definitely be applied in psychology.
      - yuhe00 8y ago
        I don't know a lot about psychology. The only things I've read are pop-psych articles like this about "traits", "D-factors" and "personality types", which you got to admit do sound a bit much like pseudo-science, or at least not telling the full story. It's useful, for sure, but I'd like to know more about the formal methods employed in modern psychology today. I imagine statistics, surveys and telemetry perhaps being key, but like all methods based in data - You have to be very careful; testing methodology and interpretation biases can heavily influence the results. I think psychology could bring valuable insight into the future of AI as well. It's a shame that most psychologists involved in tech are in HR/communications or at best tasked with keeping people addicted to whatever social platform they are building.
User23 8y ago
It’s more or less pointless to worry about physical or neurological mechanisms in this context. Psychology isn’t really a science, but done rigorously it is a legitimate phenomenology. For practical purposes it doesn’t matter what causes g or d to have the value that it does, only that various correlated behavior patterns are observable. For example the NFL and US military both successfully use tests of g to select more capable recruits. Unfortunately I don’t believe any test of d will be useful, except maybe in very low g high d individuals. This is because there is usually no incentive to score low on a g test, but there is on a d test.
- denzil_correa 8y ago
  > Psychology isn’t really a science Why not?
  - brohee 8y ago
    Reproducibility crisis.
rossdavidh 8y ago
So, as I understand it, they're saying that someone who is (for example) a psychopath, is a lot more likely (than most people) to be narcissistic, someone who is sadistic is a lot more likely to be self-interested, and so on. This is perhaps a good thing to go out and check, but mostly this does not seem surprising to me; it would have been news if it turned out not to work like that.
- denzil_correa 8y ago
  > but mostly this does not seem surprising to me I know what you're tying to say but I'd just like to put it out there that conclusions from scientific studies do not have to be surprising. Scientific exploration is to find out the truth - sometimes it is "common sense" and sometimes it is surprising.
  - rossdavidh 8y ago
    Absolutely. And the underlying paper is entirely justified. The Scientific American article about the paper, is I believe trying to turn this into big news. But I agree with your point.
jl2718 8y ago
#9 is really interesting, and apparently the most correlated with all forms of malevolence. Are we just kidding ourselves when we do things like take political action, or even punish criminals? Is it really just feeding our need for hate and malevolence? Is hatred necessary? If it’s all based on self-justification, how do we know when it is appropriate? I think this is the metaphor with lady justice. She is blind but very exact. She does not interpret, she executes. She has no empathy nor malevolence. Because we know that those are the seeds of our delusion.
beautifulfreak 8y ago
This reminds me of the Parallax View, the 1974 Warren Beatty movie, in which the evil Parallax Corporation recruited psychopaths it identified with a standardized test, then put them to work doing evil things. The story proposed that those tests were hard to fool, because the questions were intricately cross referenced (so Beatty didn't even try, he just had a real psychopath fill in the answers) and that the traits sought by Parallax were not ordinary, but were complex and rare. Contrast that with tests to identify the D-Factor. They'd be easy to fool, if one knows they're looking for self exaltation. And D-Factor traits are not complex or rare, they're present in everyone to a degree. I just don't see why the notion of a D-Factor would surprise anyone, or why this study is regarded as "big news."
aasasd 8y ago
Noob here, and only read the article. It sounds strange since afaik some of the mentioned manifestations are full-blown disorders in the physiology, or at least work like that―namely psychopathy. Now, there would be no surprise if the conclusion was "you need to have less empathy if you gonna be evil," but apparently the scores don't depend on any single one of the manifestations. Also weird for a research paper like this one to have its own site that looks like a startup landing page.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- foozed 8y ago
  Not sure what you mean by "research paper", but scientifamerican is "just" a magazine. """Scientific American, the longest continuously published magazine in the U.S., has been bringing its readers unique insights about developments in science and technology f or more than 170 years.""" - from the about page https://www.scientificamerican.com/page/about-scientific-american/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/page/about-scientific-ame...
  - aasasd 8y ago
    There's a separate site linked in the article: http://www.darkfactor.org/ http://www.darkfactor.org/
    - foozed 8y ago
      ah ok, wow you're right that does look like a startup landing page. Instantly makes me lose trust in it tbh
splitdisk 8y ago
I've tackled this issue from a bunch of different angles, and have never come to any comfortable conclusion. But one can assume that, there is a semi-random distribution of these traits based on genes and inheritance. So these people are going to keep cropping up, and maybe even more of them. Given that there's no way to stop people with certain personality traits from being born, what to do with them? Unless we're making exceptions, these people also have human rights as well.
- ianai 8y ago
  Once you know someone will hurt you to get ahead - avoid them and avoid being the throat they need to step on. Sometimes you can’t help it. The best you can do then is not leave openings and have some solid backup plans.
mooneater 8y ago
I really want to know, to what extent the D score can change, and what factors can change it.
dre85 8y ago
Coming to a Facebook quiz near you! Discover your D-factor! Are you darker than your (also discoverable) celebrity alter - ego?
8bitsrule 8y ago
People have been reflecting on their own natures, and the natures of others, for thousands of years. Some of those reflections grew into systematic traditions leading to real understanding. Apart from their scientific-ness, finding one of these traditions can be helpful in sorting out self. E.g. in Jung's psychology, we all have a shadow ('dark core'). But beyond that is a greater Self. E.g. in Buddhism, we learn that desire is a primary cause of suffering ... But we can grow, through self-mastery, beyond our suffering. And share. There are more examples. Yes, these old systems pre-date science, but several are firmly grounded in centuries (or more) of shared human experience. Finding one of these traditions that 'talks to you' (while avoiding schemes) can be very helpful - in a pragmatic sense. All are part of what Huxley called the 'Perennial Philosophy'.
mindgam3 8y ago
The general idea of a Dark Score is not a bad concept; you can think of psychopathy as a spectrum from "a bit of an asshole" to "serial killer". But as someone who takes psychology seriously, and who grew up in a family environment rife with psychopathic behavior, I have some problems with this article. First, echoing dboreham's comment below, the problem with a self-reported Dark Score is that no real psychopath is going to rate themselves accurately. You just don't get very far on the spectrum if you have the ability to truly introspect and self-reflect. In my experience dealing with psychopathic individuals (I'm talking behavior leading to lawsuits, major crimes, and death), I can trace this lack of self-awareness to severe childhood trauma/abuse causing a sort of split or divided self. The true psychopath is a stranger to themselves. Second, I think that creating a simple online self-report quiz trivializes some very real and very dangerous aspects of personality. I think it does a disservice to the field of serious forensic psychology. It is possible to study the type of minds of that cause tremendous suffering for others in a rigorous scientific way. But fun online quizzes aren't the way.

112 points by imartin2k 8y ago

mikert5671 8y ago

This is obvious, most personality traits are normally distributed and biologically driven

dang 8y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jl2718 8y ago
  Just want to call myself out on this one. Thanks for the reminder to be better.
- interfixus 8y ago
  Respectfully disagree. 'normally distributed and biologically driven' is a distinct and non-shallow point of view, as far as I can see not really put forward in any other comment. Also, 'obvious' is not necessarily as dismissal.

vinceguidry 8y ago

I don't really want to call this pseudoscience, but what it's missing is the connection to psychiatry and neuroscience and to me falls into the nasty tendency of bucket thinking. Just because traits are observable and nameable doesn't mean they're actually valid. You're just handing amateurs dumb "diagnostic" tools that are just going to harm interpersonal relationships rather than make them better. If I observe you as having narcissistic traits, and you observe yourself as having narcissistic traits, and you form an identity around being a narcissist, nothing meaningful has been done. You still have no useful tools with which to make your life better. The psychological world needs a lot less of this, because handing people convenient identities without a corresponding plan of action for improving yourself that actually works, is contributing to rather than alleviating the problem. I don't think half of the people who think they're on the autism spectrum are anywhere close to it. I don't think half of the people described as narcissistic or psychopathic deserve the term. I do think that most people have emotional difficulties, and quantifying and providing resources for improving emotional health and depth should be the primary focus of psychology at the moment. I like the focus on loneliness, I hate the focus on disorders.

derefr 8y ago
> The psychological world needs a lot less of this, because handing people convenient identities without a corresponding plan of action for improving yourself that actually works, is contributing to rather than alleviating the problem. Why? Psychology is not medicine. Psychology is the study of the mind. (Maybe you're thinking of psychiatry?) We—psychologists—study the mind because we want to know how it works. It's basic research, like physicists studying particle collisions, or astronomers studying the cosmic microwave background. We're doing it in order to understand. We're approaching the same problems neurologists work on (how does the brain do this? why does the brain do that?), but from a different abstraction layer, using more of a social-sciences toolset. This research, in particular, is interesting because it unifies several previous, more limited hypotheses about how and why the human brain ends up in a particular persistent state. It provides a rubric that allows researchers (not doctors; not laymen) to craft tools that find this state, and to make predictions based off of the presence of this state. Researchers in possession of those tools can then use them to do other things. Like, say, medicine. But the basic research comes first.
- 0x8BADF00D 8y ago
  > We're approaching the same problems neurologists work on (how does the brain do this? why does the brain do that?), but from a different abstraction layer, using more of a social-sciences toolset. You’re approaching the same problems that neuroscientists are tackling, but using a “social sciences” toolset? What does that even mean? That sounds like an outright rejection of the scientific method.
  - Sharlin 8y ago
    First, the scientific method is not relevant or useful in all worthwhile fields of inquiry. Second, the scientific method can definitely be applied in psychology.
    - yuhe00 8y ago
      I don't know a lot about psychology. The only things I've read are pop-psych articles like this about "traits", "D-factors" and "personality types", which you got to admit do sound a bit much like pseudo-science, or at least not telling the full story. It's useful, for sure, but I'd like to know more about the formal methods employed in modern psychology today. I imagine statistics, surveys and telemetry perhaps being key, but like all methods based in data - You have to be very careful; testing methodology and interpretation biases can heavily influence the results. I think psychology could bring valuable insight into the future of AI as well. It's a shame that most psychologists involved in tech are in HR/communications or at best tasked with keeping people addicted to whatever social platform they are building.

User23 8y ago

It’s more or less pointless to worry about physical or neurological mechanisms in this context. Psychology isn’t really a science, but done rigorously it is a legitimate phenomenology. For practical purposes it doesn’t matter what causes g or d to have the value that it does, only that various correlated behavior patterns are observable. For example the NFL and US military both successfully use tests of g to select more capable recruits. Unfortunately I don’t believe any test of d will be useful, except maybe in very low g high d individuals. This is because there is usually no incentive to score low on a g test, but there is on a d test.

denzil_correa 8y ago
> Psychology isn’t really a science Why not?
- brohee 8y ago
  Reproducibility crisis.

rossdavidh 8y ago

So, as I understand it, they're saying that someone who is (for example) a psychopath, is a lot more likely (than most people) to be narcissistic, someone who is sadistic is a lot more likely to be self-interested, and so on. This is perhaps a good thing to go out and check, but mostly this does not seem surprising to me; it would have been news if it turned out not to work like that.

denzil_correa 8y ago
> but mostly this does not seem surprising to me I know what you're tying to say but I'd just like to put it out there that conclusions from scientific studies do not have to be surprising. Scientific exploration is to find out the truth - sometimes it is "common sense" and sometimes it is surprising.
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  Absolutely. And the underlying paper is entirely justified. The Scientific American article about the paper, is I believe trying to turn this into big news. But I agree with your point.

jl2718 8y ago

#9 is really interesting, and apparently the most correlated with all forms of malevolence. Are we just kidding ourselves when we do things like take political action, or even punish criminals? Is it really just feeding our need for hate and malevolence? Is hatred necessary? If it’s all based on self-justification, how do we know when it is appropriate? I think this is the metaphor with lady justice. She is blind but very exact. She does not interpret, she executes. She has no empathy nor malevolence. Because we know that those are the seeds of our delusion.

beautifulfreak 8y ago

This reminds me of the Parallax View, the 1974 Warren Beatty movie, in which the evil Parallax Corporation recruited psychopaths it identified with a standardized test, then put them to work doing evil things. The story proposed that those tests were hard to fool, because the questions were intricately cross referenced (so Beatty didn't even try, he just had a real psychopath fill in the answers) and that the traits sought by Parallax were not ordinary, but were complex and rare. Contrast that with tests to identify the D-Factor. They'd be easy to fool, if one knows they're looking for self exaltation. And D-Factor traits are not complex or rare, they're present in everyone to a degree. I just don't see why the notion of a D-Factor would surprise anyone, or why this study is regarded as "big news."

aasasd 8y ago

Noob here, and only read the article. It sounds strange since afaik some of the mentioned manifestations are full-blown disorders in the physiology, or at least work like that―namely psychopathy. Now, there would be no surprise if the conclusion was "you need to have less empathy if you gonna be evil," but apparently the scores don't depend on any single one of the manifestations. Also weird for a research paper like this one to have its own site that looks like a startup landing page.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
foozed 8y ago
Not sure what you mean by "research paper", but scientifamerican is "just" a magazine. """Scientific American, the longest continuously published magazine in the U.S., has been bringing its readers unique insights about developments in science and technology f or more than 170 years.""" - from the about page https://www.scientificamerican.com/page/about-scientific-american/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/page/about-scientific-ame...
- aasasd 8y ago
  There's a separate site linked in the article: http://www.darkfactor.org/ http://www.darkfactor.org/
  - foozed 8y ago
    ah ok, wow you're right that does look like a startup landing page. Instantly makes me lose trust in it tbh

splitdisk 8y ago

I've tackled this issue from a bunch of different angles, and have never come to any comfortable conclusion. But one can assume that, there is a semi-random distribution of these traits based on genes and inheritance. So these people are going to keep cropping up, and maybe even more of them. Given that there's no way to stop people with certain personality traits from being born, what to do with them? Unless we're making exceptions, these people also have human rights as well.

ianai 8y ago
Once you know someone will hurt you to get ahead - avoid them and avoid being the throat they need to step on. Sometimes you can’t help it. The best you can do then is not leave openings and have some solid backup plans.

mooneater 8y ago

I really want to know, to what extent the D score can change, and what factors can change it.

dre85 8y ago

Coming to a Facebook quiz near you! Discover your D-factor! Are you darker than your (also discoverable) celebrity alter - ego?

8bitsrule 8y ago

People have been reflecting on their own natures, and the natures of others, for thousands of years. Some of those reflections grew into systematic traditions leading to real understanding. Apart from their scientific-ness, finding one of these traditions can be helpful in sorting out self. E.g. in Jung's psychology, we all have a shadow ('dark core'). But beyond that is a greater Self. E.g. in Buddhism, we learn that desire is a primary cause of suffering ... But we can grow, through self-mastery, beyond our suffering. And share. There are more examples. Yes, these old systems pre-date science, but several are firmly grounded in centuries (or more) of shared human experience. Finding one of these traditions that 'talks to you' (while avoiding schemes) can be very helpful - in a pragmatic sense. All are part of what Huxley called the 'Perennial Philosophy'.

mindgam3 8y ago

The general idea of a Dark Score is not a bad concept; you can think of psychopathy as a spectrum from "a bit of an asshole" to "serial killer". But as someone who takes psychology seriously, and who grew up in a family environment rife with psychopathic behavior, I have some problems with this article. First, echoing dboreham's comment below, the problem with a self-reported Dark Score is that no real psychopath is going to rate themselves accurately. You just don't get very far on the spectrum if you have the ability to truly introspect and self-reflect. In my experience dealing with psychopathic individuals (I'm talking behavior leading to lawsuits, major crimes, and death), I can trace this lack of self-awareness to severe childhood trauma/abuse causing a sort of split or divided self. The true psychopath is a stranger to themselves. Second, I think that creating a simple online self-report quiz trivializes some very real and very dangerous aspects of personality. I think it does a disservice to the field of serious forensic psychology. It is possible to study the type of minds of that cause tremendous suffering for others in a rigorous scientific way. But fun online quizzes aren't the way.