43 ms·

Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed?

• EleanorLily 6y ago
  The term dark personalities refer to a set of socially aversive traits (such as spitefulness, greed, sadism, narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) in the subclinical range. And thus, according yo this article, those with dark personality traits are slightly more likely to emerge as leaders and are seen as charismatic but, when it comes to getting the job done, they tend to achieve less and are considered poor team players.
  • mcguire 6y ago
    To which one can ask, what are the consequences of not getting the job done or not being a team player? I don't see much, but I'm a cynic.
    • cutemonster 6y ago
      Consequences. Maybe they get more spare time, if they work less, and can pursue other interests? And they can order light pattern people stay in the office and work late to cover up for them? Also see my siblings reply (sibling to your reply)
  • Justsignedup 6y ago
    It also notes the low life satisfaction and a desire to never change and instead aquire more power over people. They seem to be confident in themselves but unable to self analyze. Looks like putting these people in positions of power is terrible as they will lead to an overall worse performance for your company.
  • cutemonster 6y ago
    > emerge as leaders and are seen as charismatic but, when it comes to getting the job done, they tend to achieve less That's a bit funny -- achieve less, according to who? They might be satisfied with having gotten promoted, and higher salaries, status -- whilst looking at getting the actual work done, as off topic. They've achieved success, from their perspective, but not from the researchers perspective? Why would the researchers opinions matter more
• motohagiography 6y ago
  Succeed at what, making things people want, or operating in a bureaucracy? The latter, absolutely, bureaucracy is the pupal nursery for psychopathy, but when you actually have to help people, these traits don't work well.
  • Privacy846 6y ago
    Notice how these two things are divided based on different criteria: one is about aspiration/stated intent (“making things people want”) while the other just plainly describes a person’s role in a wider context. Sounds like a setup for falling for Fundamental Attribution Error.
• sadmann1 6y ago
  Highly intelligent people are highly adaptable. If the incentives set by the system favor certain traits deemed as dark there will be a non zero percentage of people developing these traits. Especially in highly competitive fields. For example is it a dark trait to work at the minimum required level in a company while spending the time gained to sharpen my skills so I get a 50% salary increase changing jobs instead of a possible 5% increase for performance?
  • bagacrap 6y ago
    this might be a reflection of dark traits if you're blatantly harming your coworkers, say, by doing this. But otherwise I'd say no, it's not evidence of a dark trait to work at the minimum required level. You don't owe a corporate entity more than that.
    • mewpmewp2 6y ago
      I never look to harm other people, but according to this quiz I got quite "dark" results. So it doesn't seem like they are specifically considering harming others as the definition of dark traits. I got most highest result in Narcissism or Entitled Self Importance. This just means that I'm ambitious and it's important for me to succeed and others to see that I am successful. It doesn't mean I'm harming others. Most of my motivations in life are for people to consider me to be intelligent for instance, but I don't see how it specifically harms anyone. I don't want them to consider me intelligent on flawed premises.
• indigochill 6y ago
  It mentions those with "dark traits" tend to be seen as poor team players, but perhaps that's exactly why these types ascend to top leadership positions. Your "team play" ability only matters to the extent that you engage in peer-to-peer relationships, which can be relatively minimal in that position compared to, say, middle management. See, for instance, Steve Jobs. I've never heard him described as a "team player", exactly. In the end, I'd say both types are important. Obviously we need team players, but sometimes you need an auteur or benevolent dictator. Measuring success for these different types should account for their respective strengths.
  • ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    The problem is benevolent dictator too often becomes tyrant.
  • derbOac 6y ago
    In my personal experience, the problem with individuals with narcissistic psychopathic features in management or executive positions is that there's almost always opportunity costs with regard to a different way that could have achieved more with less cost. That is, they are ruthless and destructive, and claim doing so was necessary, but it's only because there was a very very simple alternate approach (often requiring some modicum of social awareness) that could have yielded something even better at a fraction of the financial and personal cost. Their approach is often presented as "harsh but necessary" when it's anything but. Also, they tend to deceptively take credit for progress, in the sense that things that would have occurred regardless, even without them in that position. Often things were already in progress before they attained their position, and often the people who were responsible for that are actually eliminated by them so as to remove threats to them getting credit. This is part of the problem: that they tend to manipulate others and the system for their own gain. In fact, I'm a bit suspicious of attributions of success associated with dark traits, even in a research context, because of this phenomenon. I wouldn't say I think the association isn't there, but I think it's a serious research design problem that isn't completely addressed (e.g., let's say you have a company whose profits are starting to increase with acceleration, and a psychopath who wants to gain from that. if they move up in a leadership position as they see it as profitable personally, are subsequent institutional gains due to them or the pre-existing conditions the psychopath appraised? It will look like the gains occurred after the psychopath entered the position, but in reality, the causal direction goes the other way around -- that the psychopath was attracted to the position because they saw it as something that would reflect well on them). I think there's some kind of bias in play with these sorts of social-personality characteristics, where people tend to have a blind spot to the opportunity costs of this behavior (akin to survivorship bias but different). It probably has an established name, but I don't know what it is.
• mtgx 6y ago
  I guess one could say Murthy Renduchintala "suceeded" in moving up the ladder and becoming filthy rich in the process...of destroying Intel's multi-year node advantage in the CPU market. Does that sound like someone companies should be stepping over one another to hire them, though?
• pizza234 6y ago
  The test itself is very well done - they try to get people to respond precisely, but checking attention, and asking multiple times questions about the same concept. However, the article has a very fundamental flaw: > Unfortunately, most people with extreme levels of dark personality traits don’t want to change who they are. Despite not being particularly happy with their lives The test doesn't deal with "happiness" at all, which is a key component of the argument. If consider as example a person like Steve Jobs, who would fair very high on narcisissm and machiavellism, what would be his happiness? While he could have been as much successful being a nice person (there are examples in history, my favorite being Carmack), what does represent happiness for him, from the perspective of other people, and from his own? Probably, from his own perspective, he's a "happy" person - he craves attention and success, and he satisfies both. I think defining happiness in a more general sense requires a certain "wider" personality, which this type of people doesn't have - ultimately, they're very narrow. Generalizing this example, the argument "Despite not being particularly happy with their lives" doesn't really hold - this type of ferociously and single-mindedly driven people are ultimately succeeding in their own, narrow, purpose.
  • bumby 6y ago
    I've found Daniel Khaneman's definition of happiness being useful here. He divides happiness into two parts: a "experiential" happiness and a "reflecting" happiness. For the sake of the discussion and acknowledging I have zero insight into his personality, someone like Steve Jobs could be low in "experiential" happiness (seemingly endlessly frustrated in the present moment) and high on the "reflecting" happiness ("look at all the great, transformational things I've brought to the world")
    • mcguire 6y ago
      What is his evidence for "reflecting" happiness?
      • bumby 6y ago
        Essentially your memories after the moment has past. I heard Steve Rinella talking about this as it relates to hunting. He spoke about how there's some trips where you're miserable in the moment (cold, bug-bitten) but when it's all over you have fond memories of the experience and consider it worthwhile. If you mean specific to Jobs, I don't have any and was just trying to relate to the OP comment, which is why I couched it with the caveat that I have no insight into his psychology. Maybe he generally was happy during the moment and maybe he was actually miserable when reflecting on his life, I have no idea.
• adnzzzzZ 6y ago
  >Overall, individuals with dark traits engage in more counterproductive work behaviour, such as theft and abusive supervision. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they don’t end up with higher average incomes than their peers with light personalities. >The key factor here seems to be empathy: the capacity to resonate with – and understand the perspective of – the emotional experiences of others. Individuals with light personality traits show a great deal of empathy for others, while those with dark personality traits tend to show very little. In our new research, we found that this seems to be what leads to a more satisfying life. Similarly, being prosocial – acting kindly, cooperatively and with compassion toward others – is also significantly linked with higher wellbeing. Maybe the comparison between "dark traits" and "light personalities" yields this, but its been shown pretty consistently that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect on salary, primarily for women. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41343711?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41343711?seq=1 Also, the framing of this article between essentially low agreeableness and high agreeableness as dark and light is awful. There are advantages and disadvantages to being high or low in this trait, and the framing that being high in it is what's more desirable makes me doubt how seriously whoever wrote this takes their work.
  • alexpetralia 6y ago
    Does high agreeableness necessarily translate into more empathy, or vice versa? I define empathy as "knowing your customer" (whoever it may be). You can be very attuned to this whether you are agreeable or disagreeable, no? (Perhaps this is not a widely accepted definition of empathy, and that definition instead somehow indicates "being nice"? I don't think being nice/agreeable necessarily helps you know who you're speaking with.)
    • 52-6F-62 6y ago
      > You can be very attuned to this whether you are agreeable or disagreeable, no? I would think so as well. In fact, along the way I've learned that sometimes it's the less agreeable ones who are acting in the interest of the customer's situation but there has been a communications breakdown that doesn't necessarily reflect on the character of either party.
    • 6y ago
• hikerclimb 6y ago
  Based on who I have seen as leaders I would say this is true.
• SaberTail 6y ago
  My worry isn't addressed by this study: Some portion of people with dark personality traits start from a privileged position. If someone's parent is the head of a company, or even well-connected, "achiev[ing] less and [being] considered poor team players" are much less of an impediment. If someone can effectively skip or get more slack in passing through the career levels for which dark traits are a disadvantage, they'll likely do quite well once they're at the top.
  • zepto 6y ago
    Exactly. A vague and general population study just tells is that dark traits are on average not helpful, it doesn’t tell us anything about outliers. Someone with dark traits and significantly above average intelligence, or inherited wealth, may be able to avoid the pitfalls that otherwise prevent such people advancing. Even if such people are very rare, e.g. 1 in 10,000, they would have an outsized influence, so we should be as interested in the outliers as the general population.
• skim_milk 6y ago
  The article subtly flips the script at the end so much we might be missing the point if we look too much into the title of the article. The "system" we've collectively developed forces blank slate souls to develop and play out our learned behavior in order to survive, or feel like we're surviving, in the world. But, as the article explains, we do not (typically) inherently hold, are not born with, nor do genetics code for, these "dark" or "light" traits. Therefore the emergence of "dark" or "light" tendencies is really more decided by the family, community, and economic systems. It is not that a "dark" or "light" trait necessarily allows a person more to succeed, but it suggests that some family, community, and economic systems require a person to develop what we would label "dark" or "light" traits from our perspective in order to survive. It appears the point of the article is: when we come across a person with "dark" traits, it is not entirely THEIR fault they have "dark" traits, it is more OUR fault we cannot shape our family, community, and economic systems to produce people with "light" traits.
  • nullsense 6y ago
    We're not blank slates when we're born, and it's well established that it's ~50% genetics and ~50% environment. Edit: furthermore it's compounded by the fact that the environment changes the expression of the genes (Gene × Environment interaction) and the genes influence the environment (gene-environment correlation rGE)
    • inreverse 6y ago
      Interesting, I didn't know that had been shown. Do you know any good resources to learn more about the 50/50 split?
      • nullsense 6y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture
  • cutemonster 6y ago
    > are not born with, nor do genetics code for, these "dark" or "light" traits How did you come to believe this? (You read this somewhere, or it's your own idea, or someone told you, or something else?)
• aminozuur 6y ago
  People who have a desire for power, are often the ones who end up getting it. I hope societies can think of methods that allow calm and reasonable people to be elected.
  • loa_in_ 6y ago
    What pains me the most is that (in my country) you can go to police-profiled school at 15 years old. Who the heck is capable to make this choice at 15? What traits is this going to amplify in a public force?
  • cutemonster 6y ago
    I hope so too, and promoted at the workplace
• wpietri 6y ago
  The question I'd rather ask: Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed in systems set up by people with dark personality traits? Traits only have meaning in an environment, a context. It's not clear how much we can control the traits. But we definitely can control the environment. The modern corporation only goes back to the age of railroads. Many of our governmental systems don't go back much farther. These are things we can change.
  • kjlkjoxcvxch 6y ago
    I think an even better, albeit harder, question would be "how can we set up systems such that even when they're gamed they result in positive outcomes?". Any system with incentives can be gamed. Those that learn to game systems as a means to survival are always going to be adept at manipulating those systems.
    • svachalek 6y ago
      I've always thought the answer to that question (which unfortunately is a very hard one) is the ideal form of government. Figure out what balance between personal and societal "positive outcomes" we can stomach and then set up rules that lead us there. I think some of the oldest and most successful bits of governance are built on this principle, but there's a lot of laws out there that seem to just attempt to dictate a desired outcome without considering how the real world will only nominally comply.
• thanksforthe42 6y ago
  The book Blueprint talks about this. Society can't function with only "dark personalities". When only dark personalities are in the room, everyone loses. When it's a mixture, the dark personalities get more. You can quickly see how this can impact evolution if someone swindles their way to wealth and has multiple wives/partners.
• loughnane 6y ago
  The first and second books of Plato’s republic[0] touches on a similar idea; who gets the better of life: The just or the unjust man? It’s a dialogue between Socrates and a few others (in turn). Really neat read and relevant to the conversation. The article also mentions machiavelli’s The Prince[1], which is a shorter read and more tactical. [0] http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.2.i.html http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.2.i.html [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232-h/1232-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232-h/1232-h.htm
• markus_zhang 6y ago
  There are a lot of those dark traits out there, and we have to segment them. Just from my exp, I see more dark traits on successful people, albeit it doesn't necessarily mean that people with dark traits are more likely to succeed. Can't say if it's universal though. I'd also argue that dark traits linked to social success are more or less born, or heavily influenced by childhood exp (which is essentially "born"), so it's kind of difficult to "pick" it up after reaching adulthood.
  • mewpmewp2 6y ago
    There's different groups of people with dark traits. There are straight up criminals who are going to skew the averages, but most successful people do have dark traits, so to me at least it's obvious that dark traits can make you more successful, you just can't do this whole study from the angle they are doing to understand anything meaningful except to have some "holier than thou" results produced.
• rienbdj 6y ago
  The dream of many a disgruntled intellectual teen is to have a dark personality, yet be so good at the hard skills that people put up with it. The most unproductive form this can take is when dark personality traits are seen as a signal of brilliance... “Well if they’re such an asshole they must be good at their job or they would have been shown the door already”. See also: the idolisation of Rick from Rick and Morty
  • ChainOfFools 6y ago
    This is also the axis, personified by the title character, around which the story arcs are bent in House. House is meant as a modern day reboot of Sherlock Holmes, who was written to a similarly extreme NPD template.
    • cutemonster 6y ago
      What's an NPD template?
  • mewpmewp2 6y ago
    I still secretly have this dream and I am almost 30.
• spanktheuser 6y ago
  Be careful extrapolating to the individual from studies such as these, as the study environments control for context while the real world does not. For example, I worked with an developer who I’d consider low on agreeableness. She functioned extremely well in a seed stage startup as 1 of 2 engineers. She was willing to fight for the right decision no matter what and didn’t care how people felt about that. As the startup scaled, however, her disregard for the feelings of others hampered her effectiveness. Her engineering team became one of the lower performing in the organization. Did her personality help or hinder the organization? Did it contribute or detract from her individual goals and overall happiness? Yes.
• lcall 6y ago
  If one defines success as true happiness that lasts, no. If you want caregivers and to be around people who like you and actually care while you are aging and then old, I would say strongly that it is better to practice treating others the way you would want to be treated, with honesty and kindness. Or if you want to be around that kind of people (I hope everyone would, upon reflection). Or if you believe in God (for which I have many reasons that I find compelling, even "proof" sufficient to my personal satisfaction), or if one wants to play the safe side of Pascal's wager (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager). Money is a poor companion compared to trustworthy, unselfish, kind people who know that you in turn can be trusted. (And my experiences with social security and medicare, as well as everything I have read or studied in years, including the outcomes of communisms, family travel and degrees, language study, etc etc, strongly bear this out--we don't want to rely just on institutions to care for us if we can have people who know us and who care, and whom we have trained by our example over a long time to be caring and have a service-oriented mindset of actual considerate love for others. For example, close and extended family, neighbors, and strangers. There is no real substitute. Stalin, for one example, had "success" in terms of power, prestige, and something like adoration of the masses. But if what I read, as I recall, is correct, he died neglected and miserable in a pool of his own waste, surrounded by false friends who cared only when fear required it. And either way, I think the concept could be obvious. If one just wants pleasure, power, and attention during your years of best health, and to fade & die after you can't maintain it, and thinks life is just the law of the jungle (dominate until you are dominated, rule or ruin?), then maybe you would consider that honesty and kindness don't matter. I strongly recommend honesty and kindness, treating others the way you would want to be treated, and a clear conscience for a truly happy life. Much more could be said. :)
  • lcall 6y ago
    Edit: s/surrounded by/near/ (4th para. re Stalin)
• k__ 6y ago
  I read somewhere that bullies are more successful on average than the rest of the population. So they not only do better than their victims, but everyone.
• 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
  'Success' and 'Happiness' may be conflated, depending on how Success is defined. I think it's interesting to focus on Success, and then consider two types: a) Success for personal benefit, b) success achieving a higher purpose. (Intentionally referencing film characters) Success for personal benefit may be illustrated by Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street. He succeeded in becoming, for a while, the type of wealthy person he imagined as a young man that he wanted to become. Success achieving a higher purpose may be illustrated by Terence Fletcher from Whiplash. He succeeded in turning musicians with talent into accomplished performers. Both personalities could be considered 'dark'. One succeeded by being a charming pathological liar. The other by dismissing any sense of empathy and driving others with severe, manipulative criticism. But in the end, it was type a) that eventually flamed out and type b) that had an enduring impact on his profession. I think the notion of 'how to get the most out of people' actually depends on the people you are trying to get the most out of. Many musicians quit under Terence because the achievement was not worth the suffering along the way. Others were motivated to excellence by his style, and he didn't care that they hated him for it.
• NoOneCaresAtAll 6y ago
  Emotional phrenology is a joke.
• stakkur 6y ago
  'If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil. Socrates taught us: “Know thyself.” Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t. From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb. And correspondingly, from evil to good.' --Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • bonoboTP 6y ago
    While it is true that we all have aspects of each in us and depending on time and place one or the other may be more prominent, there is large variation among people regarding temperament and personality. It's just factually not true and dangerous to believe that everyone is the same in this regard. At the same time, we must never think we are above judgment ourselves. All of us need to count with the possibility of being on the evil end sometimes.
  • nefitty 6y ago
    I don’t believe in free will. It has been a much different experience than shedding my belief in God. When I was young I used to “sense” someone always watching me, to the point of feeling shame in natural situations like bathing. One day the feeling just faded, and it was a palpable change in my perception of life. With the absence of free will, that intuition has been extremely difficult for me to hold onto. It is fleeting, even after hundreds of pages of books reiterating the fact. To approximate the intuition, when I see someone in a morally questionable situation or experiencing sheer bad luck, I try to remember to tell myself “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
• postingpals 6y ago
  Dark traits are helpful once you are actually in the position of power. This article thought dark traits might help get you there, but this is not the case. The economic system rewards leaders who are cut throat and rewards subordinates who are kind, it makes a lot of sense when you frame it that way really. If you are a CEO the system will reward you for paying people less wages so you can beat out competition. If you are a worker the system will reward you for kissing the CEO's ass (by not punishing you).
• incrudible 6y ago
  Personality traits that are not advantageous in some way are unlikely to be maintained over many generations of evolution. Personality traits that are universally advantageous would not be discernible as traits, because they would become universal to everyone. Therefore, all personality traits must also be disadvantageous in some way. So-called "dark trait" behaviors obviously confer advantages at least in the short term. In the long run, we're all dead, but early success compounds, like interest. Some of the luckiest psychopaths will end up at the very top, while some of the unluckiest will end up six feet under. This is difficult to accurately capture in statistics, but the expected gain from "dark triad" traits across the whole population is probably zero.
  • courtf 6y ago
    Great comment! High risk, high reward behavior, almost by definition, doesn't often seem too appealing when looking at the averages. We aren't the only organism that loves to gamble though, and there's a reason for that.
  • mewpmewp2 6y ago
    Some personality traits haven't adapted to modern life as well as others and some have adapted extremely well. For instance most people have too much anxiety since you had to be way more careful throughout history. Now you have so much safety net everywhere so risk taking is a much more valuable trait as most people are biased against taking risks.
  • dmch-1 6y ago
    It is not true that traits that are not advantageous are unlikely to be maintained over many generations. For example, many genetic diseases have survived for many generations. This may happen because, for example, they correlate with some other more positive traits. Or, because of other indirect, external factors.
• proverbialbunny 6y ago
  I would take this article with a grain of salt. It gets a lot wrong and a lot of it is questionable. For example, notice something about the stats it gives throughout the article? It's whole numbers, and with large variations: 10-20 per cent of individuals, 30-50 per cent of people, and so on. That variation and the whole numbers should be a read flag. When performing a study very precise numbers pop up. This isn't a confidence interval they're calculating, it's made up numbers. (The real numbers btw are between 8 and 9% of the US population.) Let's look at the premise: >For 15 years, research into dark personality traits (including narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism) has been rapidly expanding. Straight from the get go it uses fuzzy or vague terminology. Furthermore, it does not attempt to explain its chosen initial terminology. The actual terminology is: - ASPD for something close to the Hollywood psychopathy/sociopathy stereotype, there is no official psychopath in the DSM. - Narcissism is NPD, and NPD is quite different from what people typically call a narcissist looking at themselves in the mirror, so the audience is going to misunderstand without explanation. - Machiavellianism. It explains how countries slowly take over land of other countries. It explains how to maintain power on a national level once you have it, and so on. I admit I don't even know what the machiavellianism stereotype is. Maybe Game of Thrones and people backstabbing each other? That is not Machiavellian. Using vague terminology is a way to get people to believe things without questioning them. It gets the audience to think they know the topic on a deep level, but instead their understanding is reduced. A lot of conspiracy theory websites do this, and even political websites as of late. Sadly, at times, vague terminology can be used as a technique to manipulate people. Fuzzy terminology is a red flag when validating a source. I could keep going and critique this article all the way through, but it would be quite a long post. (eg, they say these characteristics are more common in men, but there are more female narcissists than there are males, which is the largest group.) In short, a healthy dose of skepticism is helpful. The article aims to solidify a stereotype, that makes it easier for actual bad actors to not be identified. Sadly, reality is darker than these stereotypes.
  • munificent 6y ago
    > We immediately know this is a fluff piece because it uses pop psychology terminology, instead of the actual terminology. Using the actual terminology in a popular article is what turns that terminology into pop psychology terminology. You can ask for popular articles to use the current terms, or you can ask for psychology terms to retain their precise clinical meaning, but you can't have both.
• dirtnugget 6y ago
  I can kind of feel this articles point. Due to some life-changing events and a bipolar disorder I have developed quite some of these dark traits. But they do tend to come and go. I am not proud of them but they did help me establish myself professionally on some levels while dragging me down on others.o My soft side would usually be very sorry and forgiving while the darker side would push my ego. I had one episode where the darker side took over. I felt like a king, not respecting others opinions on me. For the first time I had this self-esteem which my soft side was lacking. I did actually double my salary with that dark side but ever since I feel completely lonely.
• spiritplumber 6y ago
  They're certainly more likely to steal your stuff and try to resell it, in my experience. Most importantly, they're likely to see a contract in terms of "What can I get away with" rather than "I gave my word in writing".
• vladmk 6y ago
  There’s a great book that goes over this by Wharton Professor Adam Grant called Give and Take
• fairity 6y ago
  > Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed? I think these studies are all significantly flawed because successful people with dark personality traits learn to cover up their dark traits. As a result, the cohort of people with "dark traits" in these observational studies will inevitably be skewed towards those who are less successful/intelligent/adaptable. Possessing "dark traits" basically means you aren't limited by a moral compass. For any given decision, there's a universe of choices - some choices are moral and others are immoral. "Dark" people can choose from the entire universe of choices, while "light" people can only choose from the moral universe of choices. It should be obvious, then, that people with "dark traits" are more likely to be successful iff they learn to cover up their dark traits. After all, having greater optionality in your actions is likely to lead to a more optimal path towards your goal. From my experience working with people that run high in these "dark traits", it's not necessarily a bad thing as long as you put them in positions where their incentives are aligned with those around them.
  • vorpalhex 6y ago
    If only HN had a gold star type thing, instead you'll have to settle for being included in my notes. > having greater optionality in your actions is likely to lead to a more optimal path towards your goal. One of the frequent issues I hit with other people is that they will "block off" a choice before actually evaluating it. They will, for instance, refuse to bring up that they have another job offer in a salary negotiation because they feel it's "unfair". One case of this was a friend who doesn't want to leave a job where they're being made to work 12+ hour days because "they need me and the company might fail if I leave". It feels they can't even dive into and tease apart these choices and really evaluate them ("Is it fair for me to bring up this other job offer in this negotiation?"), and they also struggle to consider what the other side is capable of (eg negotiating with multiple candidates at the same time). Unfortunately it's not until these people get bitten a few times that they start to develop a stronger sense of being able to navigate these choice problems.
    • grugagag 6y ago
      > "they need me and the company might fail if I leave" Isn't this also some kind of hero mentality that these people enjoy being part of? Eventually they realize it doesn't pay bills but while it does make them feel great and that's the temporary payoff. We all learn from our mistakes. It might also be genuine kinship with their coworkers and this is exactly where the leadership of the said company is extremely smart and evil at the same time: they know how to attract intelligent benevolent nerds to exploit and they know that they'll eventually smarten up and leave but the world is large, There's a sucker born every minute All in all, the revolving door and the high churn rate won't make a big dent for the company.
• dmch-1 6y ago
  How do psychologists measure personality traits to classify people in these kinds of categories (dark/light)?
• mewpmewp2 6y ago
  I think the whole thing is flawed. Why? Because criminals and other people who do overall negative things to society as a whole are obviously going to skew averages of dark personality traits down, decrease their average "success/happiness" score. This means that there might exist productive people with "dark personalities" who might very well be much more productive than "light personalities", but this won't come out since average will be skewed. You can have dark view of humanity/people and use people for your means, but still do great things for society. You could also use other people on an individual level to do great things for society in general. Also you don't have to be happy while doing it, and I would consider being influence on the world to be a definition of success. And arguably you would be able to have more influence if you were willing to use some "dark personality traits". Essentially to understand whether "dark traits" can be more productive and achieve more you would have to exclude from results anyone who is fine with doing activities that generally harm society. Take Bill Gates for example. He obviously has "dark traits", but as he got older he got better at hiding them and now look, what kind of positive influence he has had over the world. And arguably there aren't many people out there that are more successful than him. Same with Elon Musk, yadayadayada.
  • cutemonster 6y ago
    What are some of Gates dark traits that comes to your mind? (What did he do?)
• dmch-1 6y ago
  The idea that people with darker personalities will succeed may also be a perception bias. According to this article we are talking about 20% of people with some degree of "dark traits". Of course a group this large will intersect with the most successful portion of the population. And, successful people with bad traits are likely to stand out in peoples perceptions.
• kevingoslar 6y ago
  The older I get, the more I realize how many problems in the world are caused by the dark personality spectrum. Most men, police officers, priests, white people, catholics, politicians, or Germans are actually nice people who wouldn't harm anybody even if given the chance. A lot of the abuse that was done by these groups, be it towards women, ethnic minorities, children, or police brutality, was most likely done by somebody with strong dark personality traits. Not all crimes, but a surprisingly large amount. Exploring this condition, learning to recognize dark personality traits more reliably, knowing how to mitigate them, and maybe finding ways to help these suffering people is an important evolutionary step for us as a species. One way to see through their games and machinations is by looking at the facts.
  • kickling 6y ago
    Isn't this just circular since we would classify all people doing bad things as people with dark personality traits?
    • kevingoslar 6y ago
      That's not how dark personalities are defined. With enough training one can recognize them. Relevant video: https://youtu.be/GaeJCA4nRPI https://youtu.be/GaeJCA4nRPI
      • mewpmewp2 6y ago
        I got quite high on the dark spectrum there, but I don't do actions that I believe would harm others. So I believe the whole premise is flawed as all criminals are going to skew the average and essentially give "dark traits" a bad rep. I believe "dark traits" will make you more productive and able to reach goals more effectively, so if you have goals that are beneficial for society you would also be more effective in reaching said goals as well. Take Bill Gates for instance. Historically it's easy to tell he has had some very dark traits, and also I think it seems obvious that he has learned to hide them better as he has aged, but look how much benefit for the world his work and everything has been doing. So all in all, it's not dark traits, but dark goals.
• hypertexthero 6y ago
  Depends on your definition of success, but psychopaths do exist. http://hintjens.com/blog:_psychopaths http://hintjens.com/blog:_psychopaths “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” ―Primo Levi
• cutemonster 6y ago
  > dark traits ... leads to limited success in work or politics I definitely wouldn't say so. Instead, such people control most large countries, as presidents or dictators, incl the US until recently
• teaneedz 6y ago
  back in the day, they were just called bad people as we wondered why they were still around.
• lkrubner 6y ago
  There is also the question of which personality does the most good for a company. I'll hope you will all forgive me if I quote myself here. At the end of my book "How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps" I concluded with this thought: ---------------------------------------- If you read much of the business press, you're aware that there are two competing theories about what makes a great business leader. One theory says the leaders should be extremely aggressive psychopaths who crush all their competition. For an example of this theory, you can read almost any biography about Steve Jobs. The second theory says that humble, egoless leaders build the most successful companies, because they do the best job facilitating cooperation and communication. James Collins, in his book Good to Great, makes this case about several leaders, including Darwin E. Smith of the paper company Kimberly-Clark. Nonetheless, we can find examples of both types of leaders succeeding. Steve Jobs was successful. So was Darwin E. Smith. Is there any way to reconcile the conflicting theories? I believe there is: simply assume that the most important quality any business leader can have is the willingness to quickly fire weak players. Therefore ruthless psychopaths damage their businesses with their pathology, but then make up for it by firing people quickly. And humble, egoless leaders help their companies with their healthy attitudes, but then undermine the business by being too slow to fire weak players. Humble, egoless leadership, ready to fire fast — that is a rare combination. I would say that Andy Grove of Intel had that combination of traits. And of course, there is Ray Kroc of McDonald's. Due to some people's aversion to the food sold at McDonald's, the sheer brilliance of Kroc's entrepreneurship often goes unsung. But he was willing to take a risk on complete unknowns, most notably on June Martino, one of the all-time great hires in the history of USA business. At the same time, Kroc was willing to fire anyone who didn’t work out. That combination of willingness to take risks on unknowns and quickly fire any mistakes is something to which all business leaders should aspire. How to spread awareness of what is needed in the leadership of startups? Recently, I exchanged some email with my friend Colin Steele (currently CTO of TypeZero and formerly CTO of RoomKey.com). We discussed another startup that had failed, and he wrote: "It's sad and disheartening. I think few people understand how amazingly difficult it is to start a new business, and run it successfully. Drama, people, and personalities, seem to have an outsized role in how these things crash and burn. There needs to be some codification of best internal practices for creating startups, like Steve Blank's book “4 Steps To The Epiphany,” but for the culture; a co-routine that runs alongside "customer development" – call it "culture development" or something." https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-ebook/dp/B0772FJQ1T/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo...
• permille42 6y ago
  To start, I'll define what I view "dark traits" to mean personally to me. They mean having an internal moral system where it is acceptable to harm others in some ways. The more harm a person is willing to do, the more we generally label those people with the personality traits that we say are "dark". There is some measure of psychology that would indicate that many such people who we label that way have neuro-atypical thought patterns. They may even simply feel differently about things. I personally view freewill / personal decision as the primary factor in harming/not-harming others though. A single person can be all of the following simultaneously: 1. Empathetic ( able to understand what others feel and also feel those emotions themselves ) 2. Willing to harm others ( disregarding how they feel ) 3. Successful. 4. Appear to be neurotypical ( for the most part ) 5. Be "team players" 6. Be narcissistic 7. Be manipulative 8. Be happy The false conclusion made by most is that harming others is incompatible with the other modes of thinking. That is unreasonable as it is relying on "holistic stability of the mind". There is no guarantee that the thought process or emotions of a human being are internally consistent. There is also no guarantee that the observable actions of an individual reveal their internal processes. Since this is a throwaway, I'll take this a step further. I'm okay with actively harming others, either for my own amusement or my own gain. I can understand how those I would harm feel about it, and understand how terrible that feeling is. It doesn't prevent me from causing this feeling in others. I simply choose to do so. I may occasionally become overly fixated on the emotion, but I am capable of dismissing it. I am very successful and command a high salary. I am well liked by my peers. I am commended regularly for my work. I am considered a "team player" and am regularly asked to mentor others ( and do so as well ). Those around me believe and say that they think I am neurotypical even when I have confronted a select few that I am not. I morally believe that taking advantage of others is "wrong", but I still am capable of doing it, and I do. I'm happy about who I am. While I do occasionally ponder the morality of my actions, and feel what you might call "guilt" over them, I choose to actively dismiss these emotions and carry on anyway. I don't think I'm the only person who is this way. In fact, I'd wager that the majority of people are capable of harming others for their own gains, and able to dismiss guilt over it given a bit of effort. I do agree that I am atypical in the amount of harm I could do and easily dismiss it... but I don't think any of these studies are able to easily "detect" me. Put simply: if there exist light/dark people, I'm definitely on the dark side, and it absolutely enables me to succeed in ways those on the light side could not. I will though meter this statement a bit by saying that being on the dark side also can be constraining. There is less mental effort needed to simply choose a solid moral base and stick to it. Most of the atrocities in history have come from highly religious groups with strict principles. Blinding believing in some set of morals is very enabling. So it is inaccurate to say that being dark/light will cause success either way. There is simply too much variance and complexity with the ways a human can approach life.
• loco5niner 6y ago
  Depends on how you define 'succeed'.