6 ms·

Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities [pdf]

117 points by cscurmudgeon 6y ago

pmiller2 6y ago
Aside: I am upvoting this before I even read it. gwern.net in the URL is all I need to know that it's a quality submission.
- mola 6y ago
  That's nothing to be proud of. You like gwern, legit. But upvoting because of a brand and not because of content is not very helpful for the community.
  - slothtrop 6y ago
    It's implicit in his suggestion that it reflects quality content. Ironically, this is the sort of post that community guidelines suggests not to write. Because it's not helpful for the community.
    - keenmaster 6y ago
      Another issue is that such comments produce negative externalities. What if everyone thought that way and automatically upvoted every gwern post? I'm not sure gwern themselves are confident that their post quality would remain the same. Personally, I'm sure it would decline, and they would put out ever more self-serving content, because why not? Everyone loves it anyway.
      - pmiller2 6y ago
        If everybody made such comments on, say, gwern.net posts, then, the most that would probably happen is that upvotes would lose their signaling value regarding the quality of gwern.net posts. The comments not saying "I upvoted this because gwern.net" would still be an accurate gauge of submission quality, IMO. Based on reading a good bit of their writing, I don't think u/gwern [0] would modify their posting style at all, just to garner HN upvotes. --- [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gwern https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gwern
        keenmaster 6y ago
        I'm not talking about gwern specifically. I'm talking about literally anyone. No one, not even gwern, is a completely rational, stoic being incapable of sliding backwards if constructive criticism is attenuated. There isn't a huge danger of gwern not getting enough constructive criticism. I'm sure they get a firehose of it. But this is a platform, and in this thread we're talking about the marginal effect of comments of a certain kind on the platform and the authors of contributions to the platform in general. Moreover, and for related reasons, we need more good faith scrutiny in this world. Unconditional love of this kind reduces and crowds out scrutiny.
      - slothtrop 6y ago
        They are in large part hyperbolic and meant to reflect enthusiasm for the content. It's silly to imagine a sizable portion of his base upvoting a submission, but not consuming the content, notwithstanding the fact that upvotes don't matter. Likely many users upvote submissions here without comment, in the first place. Gwern has fans precisely because of the content. If the quality began to nosedive, I'm not sure they'd stick around. More to the point, Gwern isn't writing articles in exchange for upvotes on HN.
        mola 6y ago
        People are associative not rational. They like X's posts, then they like X, then they tend to assume X is right because they like him, so they tend to be less critical of X which makes them like X's posts even more. Anyway, the reason I wrote the comment is because the alternative is to down vote, which achieves nothing. No one really knows why the down votes were made, no lesson is being learnt. Nor a fruitful discussion. By commenting I hoped that: 1. OP will think about this. 2. More importantly, other people will think about this.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  It's actually from the University of British Columbia.
DenisM 6y ago
I'm wondering a "by proxy" follow up research is in the works?
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  You mean "Munchausen"? Isn't that a bit of psudoscience? Genuinely asking. I'm under the impression it is not good science. Edit: To be more clear I'm not denying that the clinical descriptions of it are lies. Rather my impression is that they do not amount to a diagnosable condition. The variance between the reported cases leave it as a very open ended and even dangerous diagnosis. This is my current impression and I could be wrong.
keenmaster 6y ago
"We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits—Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy—more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies." I know that the study controlled for socioeconomic and demographic variables, but I can think of a couple potential problems. One is that the overall study is composed of several smaller studies, each of which uses what may be a flimsy way of assessing negative traits from surveys and games. The other problem is as follows: take two African American women who make the same amount of income. Generally, they have the same demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. However, if one believes that she must, on the margins, extract more from an oppressive system, and the other believes that she must completely work with the system and take what she can get (regardless of her beliefs about the system), then can the former be classified as a Machiavellian psychopath and the latter be classified as a normative angel? (rhetorical question) Note: I used the term "the system" to abstract from a lot of variables to keep things brief. Note 2: Don't get me wrong, I'm not a post-modernist on ethics. Quite the opposite. I'm just skeptical about many psychological studies like the one in the OP. The correlations could be true (or not, or smaller in magnitude), and the research is worth doing, but I see no reason to update my priors yet.
- merpnderp 6y ago
  Can she prove it is oppressive, or is it just her opinion? Because if she can prove she's being oppressed, there are a large number of legal prescriptions (in the US) rather than ruining her professional career by being cunning and duplicitous. Nobody likes working with lying cheaters, regardless of their stated goals.
  - keenmaster 6y ago
    "Nobody likes working with lying cheaters, regardless of their stated goals." Of course. I certainly don't like working with cheaters. But are you sure that that's what the study is actually measuring? Does it really prove that someone is more likely to be a cheater and a liar in a corporate environment if they exhibit a dubious and simplistic measure of victimization? I think it's dangerous to update my priors and increase my suspicion of people whom I deem to demonstrate above average victimization for their demographic. Guess who that would hurt the most? How arbitrary would my judgment be? Even if we can definitively say that the correlations in the study hold, the error terms, effect magnitude, and the practical difficulty in reproducing the study's controls render its findings impracticable in most contexts. Thankfully, I haven't met many capital B Bad people/cheaters/pathological liars in my life, at least I don't think so. The worst people I met were very confident (the c in con artist) and didn't seem to have a victim complex.
DubiousPusher 6y ago
For some background and a word of warning regarding "dark triad" studies. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/personality-and-its-problems/201907/don-t-believe-the-hype-shining-light-the-dark-triad https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/personality-and-its-... I'm not saying this study is bad. But there are hot topics in all fields that are usually well consumed with a bit of caution and extra awareness.
jariel 6y ago
At the risk of being overly glib, the pathways for this may seem a little bit obvious: we are actually very empathetic people in general. When we see someone being treated poorly, we react both emotionally (sympathy, empathy) but also intellectually (moral condemnation). Especially for those who have been real victims in the past, these issues can be very poignant issues and cause us to 'trigger'. In such circumstances, I think a lot of our 'reason' goes out the window and we react purely emotionally. This creates the perfect vector for manipulation by self-obsessed people with total lack of self awareness. In any large group of people, there will be a handful that will say and do anything to get ahead, and if it's just 'really easy to reach out and touch that victimhood button' - they will. Things are very confounded because A) there is usually a degree of truth in the generalisation (i.e. racism, sexism etc. are very real and common things) and B) there may be elements of truth to a specific ordeal (i.e. someone may have been treated in a poor manner, but not in an egregious way). For some people, because 'A' (such bad behaviour in general) absolutely exists, then 'B' (the individual situation) 'must be an example of A' and then some ham-fisted, lop-sided action ensues, especially in the realm of the press. Go ahead and watch the founders of the now infamous 'We Charity' as they were grilled in a Parliamentary setting: with no understanding of what happened, they seem like victims. But if you have an inkling as to what was actually going on, it's clear they were exhibiting some of these Machiavellian tendencies with, constant virtue/victim signalling. Most of us are hard wired to be emotionally empathetic, that's a 'good thing' - it's just easy for a lot of people (and corporations) to take advantage of. This phenom also metastasises in social settings: one of the worst possible things we can be perceived as, is 'unsympathetic'. How 'terrible' is the person who doesn't care about that 'poor person who was a victim' of something! The issue with skepticism, and especially how it's perceived by others, is that is interpreted as a 'lack of sympathy' - when in reality - it's usually more or less a 'lack of belief in the factuality of the situation' in which, it's possible the victim may not be deserving of sympathy - which are different things. Since there's way too much risk in being perceive as unsympathetic, the popular response will usually be lopsided on any 'grey, ambiguous issue'.
- DenisM 6y ago
  > Most of us are hard wired to be emotionally empathetic, that's a 'good thing' Well, it is only about as good as any other animal instinct we possess - when not balanced with norms and intellect they lead to long-term disasters #. It's rather dismaying that a lot of people elevate empathy to the position of supremacy. # For example empathy could cause one to acquit a cute-looking criminal, or to leap to comfort an ebola victim only to become infected themselves and go on to infect the next emphatic person before dying a horrible death.
afpx 6y ago
Is this for real? I'm lost at the first paragraph. The authors list out a lot of valid reasons why one would not want to be a victim. Then, in the same paragraph: "Yet in the current historical period, many observers have argued that in the United States and in other Western societies being a victim does not always carry these negative connotations or produce unwanted outcomes. ... (Bawer, 2012; Campbell & Manning, 2018; Sykes, 1992) " I haven't read the references, but this sounds silly. They're not "connotations" - they're physical ailments caused by trauma. No one with PTSD would want to have it. BTW, I have PTSD from early childhood violence. And, I would probably score higher than average on the (Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psy-chopathy) questionnaire. But, I blame that on damage to my Amygdala.
- burfog 6y ago
  The point is that one without PTSD might want to claim to have it. This gets sympathy, disability benefits, etc. There are also borderline cases of victimhood. Do those get rounded to "yes" or "no"? If you've had a difficult experience, you could talk that up into PTSD or brush it off. If being a victim brings social or financial benefits, that will make the difference for some people.
  - afpx 6y ago
    Sure. But, their premise is that PTSD can be net-positive.
    - TimTheTinker 6y ago
      As a diagnosis or as a "lived experience"?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - skinkestek 6y ago
      > But, their premise is that PTSD can be net-positive. Isn't it rather that signalling PTSD can be a net positive?
mellosouls 6y ago
This seems a bit of an odd link. It's a publication copied to and linked from a third party website with no context. As an alternative, here's an actual discussion. https://reason.com/2020/07/07/narcissists-psychopaths-and-manipulators-are-more-likely-to-engage-in-virtuous-victim-signaling-says-study/ https://reason.com/2020/07/07/narcissists-psychopaths-and-ma...
- slothtrop 6y ago
  The link to the paper there is also to a 3rd party -- https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Ok-et-al.-2020.pdf https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Ok-... I imagine because otherwise the journals wall out the actual content.
  - mellosouls 6y ago
    Yeah, I saw that also after I'd posted. The pdf being third party hosted makes more sense to me now.
ptbello 6y ago
I see this behaviour every day. There is even a Neapolitan expression for this: "chiagni e fotti" [1], which could be translated as "cry and screw (others)". [1] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiagni_e_fotti https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiagni_e_fotti

117 points by cscurmudgeon 6y ago

Aside: I am upvoting this before I even read it. gwern.net in the URL is all I need to know that it's a quality submission.

mola 6y ago
That's nothing to be proud of. You like gwern, legit. But upvoting because of a brand and not because of content is not very helpful for the community.
- slothtrop 6y ago
  It's implicit in his suggestion that it reflects quality content. Ironically, this is the sort of post that community guidelines suggests not to write. Because it's not helpful for the community.
  - keenmaster 6y ago
    Another issue is that such comments produce negative externalities. What if everyone thought that way and automatically upvoted every gwern post? I'm not sure gwern themselves are confident that their post quality would remain the same. Personally, I'm sure it would decline, and they would put out ever more self-serving content, because why not? Everyone loves it anyway.
    - pmiller2 6y ago
      If everybody made such comments on, say, gwern.net posts, then, the most that would probably happen is that upvotes would lose their signaling value regarding the quality of gwern.net posts. The comments not saying "I upvoted this because gwern.net" would still be an accurate gauge of submission quality, IMO. Based on reading a good bit of their writing, I don't think u/gwern [0] would modify their posting style at all, just to garner HN upvotes. --- [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gwern https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gwern
      - keenmaster 6y ago
        I'm not talking about gwern specifically. I'm talking about literally anyone. No one, not even gwern, is a completely rational, stoic being incapable of sliding backwards if constructive criticism is attenuated. There isn't a huge danger of gwern not getting enough constructive criticism. I'm sure they get a firehose of it. But this is a platform, and in this thread we're talking about the marginal effect of comments of a certain kind on the platform and the authors of contributions to the platform in general. Moreover, and for related reasons, we need more good faith scrutiny in this world. Unconditional love of this kind reduces and crowds out scrutiny.
    - slothtrop 6y ago
      They are in large part hyperbolic and meant to reflect enthusiasm for the content. It's silly to imagine a sizable portion of his base upvoting a submission, but not consuming the content, notwithstanding the fact that upvotes don't matter. Likely many users upvote submissions here without comment, in the first place. Gwern has fans precisely because of the content. If the quality began to nosedive, I'm not sure they'd stick around. More to the point, Gwern isn't writing articles in exchange for upvotes on HN.
      - mola 6y ago
        People are associative not rational. They like X's posts, then they like X, then they tend to assume X is right because they like him, so they tend to be less critical of X which makes them like X's posts even more. Anyway, the reason I wrote the comment is because the alternative is to down vote, which achieves nothing. No one really knows why the down votes were made, no lesson is being learnt. Nor a fruitful discussion. By commenting I hoped that: 1. OP will think about this. 2. More importantly, other people will think about this.
whatshisface 6y ago
It's actually from the University of British Columbia.

DenisM 6y ago

I'm wondering a "by proxy" follow up research is in the works?

DubiousPusher 6y ago
You mean "Munchausen"? Isn't that a bit of psudoscience? Genuinely asking. I'm under the impression it is not good science. Edit: To be more clear I'm not denying that the clinical descriptions of it are lies. Rather my impression is that they do not amount to a diagnosable condition. The variance between the reported cases leave it as a very open ended and even dangerous diagnosis. This is my current impression and I could be wrong.

keenmaster 6y ago

"We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits—Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy—more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies." I know that the study controlled for socioeconomic and demographic variables, but I can think of a couple potential problems. One is that the overall study is composed of several smaller studies, each of which uses what may be a flimsy way of assessing negative traits from surveys and games. The other problem is as follows: take two African American women who make the same amount of income. Generally, they have the same demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. However, if one believes that she must, on the margins, extract more from an oppressive system, and the other believes that she must completely work with the system and take what she can get (regardless of her beliefs about the system), then can the former be classified as a Machiavellian psychopath and the latter be classified as a normative angel? (rhetorical question) Note: I used the term "the system" to abstract from a lot of variables to keep things brief. Note 2: Don't get me wrong, I'm not a post-modernist on ethics. Quite the opposite. I'm just skeptical about many psychological studies like the one in the OP. The correlations could be true (or not, or smaller in magnitude), and the research is worth doing, but I see no reason to update my priors yet.

merpnderp 6y ago
Can she prove it is oppressive, or is it just her opinion? Because if she can prove she's being oppressed, there are a large number of legal prescriptions (in the US) rather than ruining her professional career by being cunning and duplicitous. Nobody likes working with lying cheaters, regardless of their stated goals.
- keenmaster 6y ago
  "Nobody likes working with lying cheaters, regardless of their stated goals." Of course. I certainly don't like working with cheaters. But are you sure that that's what the study is actually measuring? Does it really prove that someone is more likely to be a cheater and a liar in a corporate environment if they exhibit a dubious and simplistic measure of victimization? I think it's dangerous to update my priors and increase my suspicion of people whom I deem to demonstrate above average victimization for their demographic. Guess who that would hurt the most? How arbitrary would my judgment be? Even if we can definitively say that the correlations in the study hold, the error terms, effect magnitude, and the practical difficulty in reproducing the study's controls render its findings impracticable in most contexts. Thankfully, I haven't met many capital B Bad people/cheaters/pathological liars in my life, at least I don't think so. The worst people I met were very confident (the c in con artist) and didn't seem to have a victim complex.

DubiousPusher 6y ago

For some background and a word of warning regarding "dark triad" studies. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/personality-and-its-problems/201907/don-t-believe-the-hype-shining-light-the-dark-triad https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/personality-and-its-... I'm not saying this study is bad. But there are hot topics in all fields that are usually well consumed with a bit of caution and extra awareness.

jariel 6y ago

At the risk of being overly glib, the pathways for this may seem a little bit obvious: we are actually very empathetic people in general. When we see someone being treated poorly, we react both emotionally (sympathy, empathy) but also intellectually (moral condemnation). Especially for those who have been real victims in the past, these issues can be very poignant issues and cause us to 'trigger'. In such circumstances, I think a lot of our 'reason' goes out the window and we react purely emotionally. This creates the perfect vector for manipulation by self-obsessed people with total lack of self awareness. In any large group of people, there will be a handful that will say and do anything to get ahead, and if it's just 'really easy to reach out and touch that victimhood button' - they will. Things are very confounded because A) there is usually a degree of truth in the generalisation (i.e. racism, sexism etc. are very real and common things) and B) there may be elements of truth to a specific ordeal (i.e. someone may have been treated in a poor manner, but not in an egregious way). For some people, because 'A' (such bad behaviour in general) absolutely exists, then 'B' (the individual situation) 'must be an example of A' and then some ham-fisted, lop-sided action ensues, especially in the realm of the press. Go ahead and watch the founders of the now infamous 'We Charity' as they were grilled in a Parliamentary setting: with no understanding of what happened, they seem like victims. But if you have an inkling as to what was actually going on, it's clear they were exhibiting some of these Machiavellian tendencies with, constant virtue/victim signalling. Most of us are hard wired to be emotionally empathetic, that's a 'good thing' - it's just easy for a lot of people (and corporations) to take advantage of. This phenom also metastasises in social settings: one of the worst possible things we can be perceived as, is 'unsympathetic'. How 'terrible' is the person who doesn't care about that 'poor person who was a victim' of something! The issue with skepticism, and especially how it's perceived by others, is that is interpreted as a 'lack of sympathy' - when in reality - it's usually more or less a 'lack of belief in the factuality of the situation' in which, it's possible the victim may not be deserving of sympathy - which are different things. Since there's way too much risk in being perceive as unsympathetic, the popular response will usually be lopsided on any 'grey, ambiguous issue'.

DenisM 6y ago
> Most of us are hard wired to be emotionally empathetic, that's a 'good thing' Well, it is only about as good as any other animal instinct we possess - when not balanced with norms and intellect they lead to long-term disasters #. It's rather dismaying that a lot of people elevate empathy to the position of supremacy. # For example empathy could cause one to acquit a cute-looking criminal, or to leap to comfort an ebola victim only to become infected themselves and go on to infect the next emphatic person before dying a horrible death.

afpx 6y ago

Is this for real? I'm lost at the first paragraph. The authors list out a lot of valid reasons why one would not want to be a victim. Then, in the same paragraph: "Yet in the current historical period, many observers have argued that in the United States and in other Western societies being a victim does not always carry these negative connotations or produce unwanted outcomes. ... (Bawer, 2012; Campbell & Manning, 2018; Sykes, 1992) " I haven't read the references, but this sounds silly. They're not "connotations" - they're physical ailments caused by trauma. No one with PTSD would want to have it. BTW, I have PTSD from early childhood violence. And, I would probably score higher than average on the (Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psy-chopathy) questionnaire. But, I blame that on damage to my Amygdala.

burfog 6y ago
The point is that one without PTSD might want to claim to have it. This gets sympathy, disability benefits, etc. There are also borderline cases of victimhood. Do those get rounded to "yes" or "no"? If you've had a difficult experience, you could talk that up into PTSD or brush it off. If being a victim brings social or financial benefits, that will make the difference for some people.
- afpx 6y ago
  Sure. But, their premise is that PTSD can be net-positive.
  - TimTheTinker 6y ago
    As a diagnosis or as a "lived experience"?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - skinkestek 6y ago
    > But, their premise is that PTSD can be net-positive. Isn't it rather that signalling PTSD can be a net positive?

mellosouls 6y ago

This seems a bit of an odd link. It's a publication copied to and linked from a third party website with no context. As an alternative, here's an actual discussion. https://reason.com/2020/07/07/narcissists-psychopaths-and-manipulators-are-more-likely-to-engage-in-virtuous-victim-signaling-says-study/ https://reason.com/2020/07/07/narcissists-psychopaths-and-ma...

slothtrop 6y ago
The link to the paper there is also to a 3rd party -- https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Ok-et-al.-2020.pdf https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Ok-... I imagine because otherwise the journals wall out the actual content.
- mellosouls 6y ago
  Yeah, I saw that also after I'd posted. The pdf being third party hosted makes more sense to me now.

ptbello 6y ago

I see this behaviour every day. There is even a Neapolitan expression for this: "chiagni e fotti" [1], which could be translated as "cry and screw (others)". [1] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiagni_e_fotti https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiagni_e_fotti