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>Overall, individuals with dark traits engage in more counterproductive work behaviour, such as theft and abusive supervision. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they don’

>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.
- adnzzzzZ 6y ago
  A useful breakdown of each trait to me is this one https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5863998_Between_Facets_and_Domains_10_Aspects_of_the_Big_Five https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5863998_Between_Fac.... Here agreeableness is divided into compassion and politeness. Compassion corresponds to your idea of what empathy means, and politeness corresponds to being generally nice and cooperative, respecting authority and so on. From these https://ipip.ori.org/newAB5CKey.htm https://ipip.ori.org/newAB5CKey.htm, the primary ones for compassion are Warmth, Sympathy and Understanding, and the primary ones for politeness are Nurturance, Cooperation, Pleasantness.
- finnthehuman 6y ago
  >Does high agreeableness necessarily translate into more empathy I think the difference is that the personality trait called "agreeableness" doesn't mean someone is a pushover. But I do agree with you in general, my biggest gripe with pop psych as of late is the way "empathy" is used interchangeably with being nice. Has a quiet person failed to empathize if there is no change in their outward behavior? I'd say obviously no. So I've been trying to work out why we talk about empathy when we mean being nice. I think people talk about empathy rather than niceness because it makes it easier to admonish others. If I tell someone that they should be nicer, they likely already understand the situation as one where they could be nicer, and chose not too. Maybe they even chose not to be nice fully aware that it violated established social protocol. I am simply making a demand that they behave to my standards, and well adjusted people know that I am not their father no matter how serious I try to make myself sound. Or I can tell someone they lack empathy, accusing them of failing at a basic part of humanity. Depending on their internal thought process I'm more likely at extracting the behavior I want out of them through this manipulation. It's rudimentary bullying. Make an accusation someone doesn't want to be true, and treat any attempt to refute it as proof the accusation is true.
  - cutemonster 6y ago
    > I've been trying to work out why we talk about empathy when we mean being nice. Somewhat many people aren't "good" at feeling empathy, and some brains are 100% incapable -- and maybe they cannot see any difference between empathy and faked niceness.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- mcguire 6y ago
  "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?" That is a very odd definition of empathy; it seems to imply that you are trying to sell them something, that you want something from them.
  - mewpmewp2 6y ago
    You could think of any interaction in the world as a trade of something. Best if it is a win win for both sides.
    - dfilppi 6y ago
      Best in life is to crush your enemies, see dem driven before you, and to hear da lamentations of da vemen.
      - mewpmewp2 6y ago
        Why would you have enemies?
- incrudible 6y ago
  Empathy is feeling what others feel. In other words, if I hurt you, I not only understand that you are hurt, I would be hurt myself. Psychopaths are incapable of empathy, but it would make sense if lack of empathy were advantageous from an evolutionary perspective.
  - alexpetralia 6y ago
    Isn't this sympathy?
    - incrudible 6y ago
      Quoting Wikipedia: The words sympathy and empathy are often used interchangeably, but the two terms now have fairly distinct meanings. [...] One popular and recent conception of the distinction is that sympathy represents "a feeling of care and concern for someone, often someone close, accompanied by a wish to see him better off or happier," while empathy represents "a person's ability to recognize and share the emotions of another person, fictional character, or sentient being."
- BTCOG 6y ago
  Spotted the sociopathic dark personality.
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  The missing piece here is that 'empathizing with your customer' is an extremely different context than 'having empathy for others'. The former focuses on meeting your own needs through using 'the skill of empathy' to create a bond of kinship and be more likely to execute a sale. The latter focuses on understanding the needs of others, even if — especially if — doing so does not advance your own needs. I am courteous to those around me on phone support calls and in businesses because I can understand — I can empathize — what they've been through with other people yelling at them, mistreating them, and gaslighting them. I may not be friendly, I may not be effusive, I may not be agreeable — I certainly am not known for being agreeable — but I will do my very best to keep it together, because I've been yelled at before, and I would consider that a grievous harm committed upon another. I think one time I was grinding my teeth I was so angry that they could hear it on the phone, and my voice was flat, tense, and cold to the bone, and I made specifically sure — even amidst my rage at the harm committed by their employer — to thank them and say goodbye politely. It wasn't a warm goodbye, but it was definitely courtesy, and I don't think they expected it. The comments up and down this post fail to distinguish these two definitions. In both cases, you're "understanding how the other person feels" — literally, empathizing — but it's how you use that information, and to whose benefit your use serves, that is causing such confusion in the replies. If someone walks into your store purposefully and doesn't want to make eye contact, empathy suggests that you should let them be and keep an eye on them. This is a great example because they clearly don't want to be hassled by you, and you clearly shouldn't allow yourself to be shoplifted from. If you use empathy to persuade people to buy things that they'll regret buying once they've left your store, that's generally considered a variation of 'evil' and is the subject of fables and fiction, not the least of which being an absolutely terrifying rated-R book called 'Needful Things' by Stephen King. People will leave some of the angriest Yelp reviews you've ever seen for a business that uses this tactic, not just because they feel taken advantage of themselves, but specifically to protect others from feeling that way. They literally empathize with your future customers and will do their best to warn them away. So, when someone says "show a little empathy", they're telling you that you've prioritized your needs higher than those they think you're disregarding as irrelevant. They may or may not be right, but that's a very common context for negative comments about your skills at empathy. It's also common for kindly people to have absolutely no clue what's going on in other people's minds. You'll see them hold the door for someone who's about to drop three bags of groceries — missing the forest for the trees, so to speak, but still genuinely making an effort to care at no benefit to themselves. They'll be confused and sad when you drop your groceries, because they would have helped if they'd realized. To restate this all in dry terms for nerds like me — The default context for "show more empathy" is a request that you increase the priority of donating your energy and time to social support of others without expectation of reward to yourself. In specific contexts like Sales and Marketing, it means not only "listen more closely to the customer's needs" but also "understand that sometimes the customer's needs may prevent the sale". And you can flip this around, too — if someone says "you have to put up some shields", they're usually telling you that you're going too far with your concern for social support of others, and need to back it down a notch and worry a bit less and take care of your own self. I hope this will help you and others align your definition and uses and contexts of the word "empathy" more closely with the world's.
mam2 6y ago
I always found these kind of studies bullshit: the worse serial killers and pedophiles were sometimes described as "nice" and "charming" people. I don't think it's accurate to make a clear line between "real sociopathy" and "normal people" based on your behavior. Everyone has personal goals, interests, (whether good or bad) and try to have what he think is the the optimal behavior (wether good or bad). The real question is what are you real personal goal / interests, not how you behave.
- playpause 6y ago
  Extreme outliers aren't useful indicators when trying to understand general trends.
  - mam2 6y ago
    It's only outliers if you think "most" sociopath "should" look like it. The truth is you don't know and I actually think most sociopath looks totally normal.
- tartoran 6y ago
  > I always found these kind of studies bullshit: the worse serial killers and pedophiles were sometimes described as "nice" and "charming" people. That is at first sight. Psychopaths have a surface level charm but spending enough time with them and the illusion shatters. A real agreable and nice person has that as a baseline, that’s a big facet of their personality.
  - lazyjones 6y ago
    > That is at first sight. Psychopaths have a surface level charm If they participated in psychology studies, which category would they fall in?
    - tartoran 6y ago
      I couldn’t answer that. There could be deceptive people whose intention is to subvert such studies but I doubt they’d make much of a difference. All I could sat is that the psychopath’s charm is always exerted with some goal in mind.
dcolkitt 6y ago
> but its been shown pretty consistently that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect Be careful conflating agreeableness with empathy. In Big Five OCEAN, empathy is a sub-facet of agreeableness(A), but not the only one. Other sub-facets of agreeableness are conflict-avoidance, modesty, compliance, and naive trust in others. Intuitively, it would seem to me those are more important contributor to success. In particular conflict-avoidance is a big contributor to being exploited by others. A person who scores moderately low on the aggregate agreableness(A) score could be both empathetic, but willing to stand up for themselves and make sure they're getting a fair deal. Supporting this, the research has found that agreeable people do particularly bad in transactional, rather than transformative, leadership roles. When a team is working as a high-trust, high-cohesion unit, agreeableness is an asset. But when interacting and negotiating with third parties at arms length, it can be a major liability.
- User23 6y ago
  Sociopaths are great at empathy. Empathy is the ability to observe and understand others emotions without actually connecting. It’s absolutely essential to be a successful dark triad tape. Sympathy is the “light” counterpart, where you actually emotionally resonate with the other person. Obviously this makes nasty behavior less attractive since you feel the emotional effects too. And now you know why corporate psychobabble always goes on about user empathy.
  - gnaritas 6y ago
    You've got sympathy and empathy backwards there bub, just FYI.
  - teaneedz 6y ago
    source? seems like a rather twisted definition of empathy.
    - cutemonster 6y ago
      Twisted yes However I'd think some sociopaths can be good at logically cognitive intelligence wise understanding how a different person feels. But being unable to actually feel real empathy, I wonder if they might mistake their logical thinking for being empathy? Which they will instead never know what it is
bonoboTP 6y ago
Also, narcissistsic sociopaths can have a high capacity for empathy in the sense of knowing what others feel and think while also ruthlessly manipulating, being two-faced based on who is present and the gaslighting others when these obvious differences are brought up (differences like switching the entire tone of voice and mannerisms at the flip of a switch, as if it was new person, just to suck up to or put down people depending on their goals). Working with such people can be a nightmare because they appear so charming outward to powerful people in decision making positions, while being cruel and sadistic to others, leaving very little for these people to do because the higher ups love the individual and cannot imagine what is hidden from them.
- mercurialshark 6y ago
  > a nightmare because they appear so charming outward to powerful people in decision making positions, while being cruel and sadistic to others I wouldn't conflate emotional intelligence - i.e. the ability to modulate behavior based on person specific interactions - with necessarily possessing negative, vindictive, malign or cruel personality traits. That's definitely a stereotype. It is entirely possible to be charming, without secretly being cruel or vindictive. Yes, it can be more difficult to judge a disarming person's intentions, but that doesn't mean the person is inherently sadistic or ill willed. Perhaps they are just good at making other people feel comfortable.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    I didn't imply that every charming person is suspicious for being cruel. Just that when you are on the receiving end, it can be very frustrating to try and tell others about it. This is in fact one mechanism that keeps victims of sexual or other harassment and bullying silent. And I don't mean small misunderstandings and microagressions. There are people who will literally tell you "you can try telling about this to XY, they will never believe you." being absolutely conscious and intentional about the whole thing. The existence of such people is really hard to believe for many. There are truly evil people out there who know they are evil and probably cannot even help it very much. They also often try to turn things around and blame you for the things that they do. We call it gaslighting. And in a meta way, they will even preemptively say you are gaslighting them! And it devolves into a "no u" kind of debate and some victims even end up believing it! It can literally make you go crazy! Search YouTube for narcissist or psychopath, sociopath recordings. There are secret video and audio recordings of what these people will do to their subordinates, eg their children or employees. It is absolutely mind bending and life changing to see how predictable and consistent they are. Now, this is of course a pathological extreme. But there are milder versions of it too.
ardy42 6y ago
>> 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. You seem to be comparing apples and oranges: I do not think "higher wellbeing" is the same thing as "higher salary," and whatever correlation there is due to the stress of being poor (and thus is less and less signficant as salary progresses past a minimum threshold).
- adnzzzzZ 6y ago
  >Perhaps unsurprisingly, they don’t end up with higher average incomes than their peers with light personalities. This is the relevant quote. The article explicitly says "light personalities" have no penalty compared to "dark traits". This may be true in their comparison, but overall higher agreeableness is related to lower salary.
core-questions 6y ago
>ts been shown pretty consistently that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect on salary, primarily for women It's not just salary - it's every single negotiation you have in your life. Negotiation is the art of backing down carefully, not all at once, not being a pushover, not going-along-to-get-along. If you're an agreeable person, then you by definition don't push for your way instead of someone else's; and when you're in a financial negotiation, this is basically the worst trait you can possibly have, because your adversary probably does this more often and was specifically hired for being someone that is good at pushing for their way. The company wants to hire you for less money; the car salesperson wants to sell you the car for a higher price; and so forth. There is no way of fixing this problem "systemically" across the board, because game-theoretically it will rarely be to anyone's advantage to take the first step in this direction.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
> that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect on salary, That seems plausible or even obvious. All things being equal, an empathetic person will value a happy work environment (relatively) more than a high salary. They'll avoid the sabotage-all-others big law firm and go into research (avoiding personal conflicts), become a public defender (empathy), judge, etc.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  Research involves lots of personal conflict. You couldn't imagine how cutthroat the fight for funding, positions, paper authorships, citations etc can be. Lots of small minded machinators.
  - PradeetPatel 6y ago
    To some, that's part of the thrill. I think the cultural aspect of this study must be taken into consideration. Speaking as someone who can from a country with a relatively high population (India), we were taught that in a race to the top, its either eat or be eaten, and that machinations are a vital part of success as long as they do not tarnish the way you're perceived.

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.
adnzzzzZ 6y ago
A useful breakdown of each trait to me is this one https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5863998_Between_Facets_and_Domains_10_Aspects_of_the_Big_Five https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5863998_Between_Fac.... Here agreeableness is divided into compassion and politeness. Compassion corresponds to your idea of what empathy means, and politeness corresponds to being generally nice and cooperative, respecting authority and so on. From these https://ipip.ori.org/newAB5CKey.htm https://ipip.ori.org/newAB5CKey.htm, the primary ones for compassion are Warmth, Sympathy and Understanding, and the primary ones for politeness are Nurturance, Cooperation, Pleasantness.
finnthehuman 6y ago
>Does high agreeableness necessarily translate into more empathy I think the difference is that the personality trait called "agreeableness" doesn't mean someone is a pushover. But I do agree with you in general, my biggest gripe with pop psych as of late is the way "empathy" is used interchangeably with being nice. Has a quiet person failed to empathize if there is no change in their outward behavior? I'd say obviously no. So I've been trying to work out why we talk about empathy when we mean being nice. I think people talk about empathy rather than niceness because it makes it easier to admonish others. If I tell someone that they should be nicer, they likely already understand the situation as one where they could be nicer, and chose not too. Maybe they even chose not to be nice fully aware that it violated established social protocol. I am simply making a demand that they behave to my standards, and well adjusted people know that I am not their father no matter how serious I try to make myself sound. Or I can tell someone they lack empathy, accusing them of failing at a basic part of humanity. Depending on their internal thought process I'm more likely at extracting the behavior I want out of them through this manipulation. It's rudimentary bullying. Make an accusation someone doesn't want to be true, and treat any attempt to refute it as proof the accusation is true.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  > I've been trying to work out why we talk about empathy when we mean being nice. Somewhat many people aren't "good" at feeling empathy, and some brains are 100% incapable -- and maybe they cannot see any difference between empathy and faked niceness.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
mcguire 6y ago
"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?" That is a very odd definition of empathy; it seems to imply that you are trying to sell them something, that you want something from them.
- mewpmewp2 6y ago
  You could think of any interaction in the world as a trade of something. Best if it is a win win for both sides.
  - dfilppi 6y ago
    Best in life is to crush your enemies, see dem driven before you, and to hear da lamentations of da vemen.
    - mewpmewp2 6y ago
      Why would you have enemies?
incrudible 6y ago
Empathy is feeling what others feel. In other words, if I hurt you, I not only understand that you are hurt, I would be hurt myself. Psychopaths are incapable of empathy, but it would make sense if lack of empathy were advantageous from an evolutionary perspective.
- alexpetralia 6y ago
  Isn't this sympathy?
  - incrudible 6y ago
    Quoting Wikipedia: The words sympathy and empathy are often used interchangeably, but the two terms now have fairly distinct meanings. [...] One popular and recent conception of the distinction is that sympathy represents "a feeling of care and concern for someone, often someone close, accompanied by a wish to see him better off or happier," while empathy represents "a person's ability to recognize and share the emotions of another person, fictional character, or sentient being."
BTCOG 6y ago
Spotted the sociopathic dark personality.
floatingatoll 6y ago
The missing piece here is that 'empathizing with your customer' is an extremely different context than 'having empathy for others'. The former focuses on meeting your own needs through using 'the skill of empathy' to create a bond of kinship and be more likely to execute a sale. The latter focuses on understanding the needs of others, even if — especially if — doing so does not advance your own needs. I am courteous to those around me on phone support calls and in businesses because I can understand — I can empathize — what they've been through with other people yelling at them, mistreating them, and gaslighting them. I may not be friendly, I may not be effusive, I may not be agreeable — I certainly am not known for being agreeable — but I will do my very best to keep it together, because I've been yelled at before, and I would consider that a grievous harm committed upon another. I think one time I was grinding my teeth I was so angry that they could hear it on the phone, and my voice was flat, tense, and cold to the bone, and I made specifically sure — even amidst my rage at the harm committed by their employer — to thank them and say goodbye politely. It wasn't a warm goodbye, but it was definitely courtesy, and I don't think they expected it. The comments up and down this post fail to distinguish these two definitions. In both cases, you're "understanding how the other person feels" — literally, empathizing — but it's how you use that information, and to whose benefit your use serves, that is causing such confusion in the replies. If someone walks into your store purposefully and doesn't want to make eye contact, empathy suggests that you should let them be and keep an eye on them. This is a great example because they clearly don't want to be hassled by you, and you clearly shouldn't allow yourself to be shoplifted from. If you use empathy to persuade people to buy things that they'll regret buying once they've left your store, that's generally considered a variation of 'evil' and is the subject of fables and fiction, not the least of which being an absolutely terrifying rated-R book called 'Needful Things' by Stephen King. People will leave some of the angriest Yelp reviews you've ever seen for a business that uses this tactic, not just because they feel taken advantage of themselves, but specifically to protect others from feeling that way. They literally empathize with your future customers and will do their best to warn them away. So, when someone says "show a little empathy", they're telling you that you've prioritized your needs higher than those they think you're disregarding as irrelevant. They may or may not be right, but that's a very common context for negative comments about your skills at empathy. It's also common for kindly people to have absolutely no clue what's going on in other people's minds. You'll see them hold the door for someone who's about to drop three bags of groceries — missing the forest for the trees, so to speak, but still genuinely making an effort to care at no benefit to themselves. They'll be confused and sad when you drop your groceries, because they would have helped if they'd realized. To restate this all in dry terms for nerds like me — The default context for "show more empathy" is a request that you increase the priority of donating your energy and time to social support of others without expectation of reward to yourself. In specific contexts like Sales and Marketing, it means not only "listen more closely to the customer's needs" but also "understand that sometimes the customer's needs may prevent the sale". And you can flip this around, too — if someone says "you have to put up some shields", they're usually telling you that you're going too far with your concern for social support of others, and need to back it down a notch and worry a bit less and take care of your own self. I hope this will help you and others align your definition and uses and contexts of the word "empathy" more closely with the world's.

mam2 6y ago

I always found these kind of studies bullshit: the worse serial killers and pedophiles were sometimes described as "nice" and "charming" people. I don't think it's accurate to make a clear line between "real sociopathy" and "normal people" based on your behavior. Everyone has personal goals, interests, (whether good or bad) and try to have what he think is the the optimal behavior (wether good or bad). The real question is what are you real personal goal / interests, not how you behave.

playpause 6y ago
Extreme outliers aren't useful indicators when trying to understand general trends.
- mam2 6y ago
  It's only outliers if you think "most" sociopath "should" look like it. The truth is you don't know and I actually think most sociopath looks totally normal.
tartoran 6y ago
> I always found these kind of studies bullshit: the worse serial killers and pedophiles were sometimes described as "nice" and "charming" people. That is at first sight. Psychopaths have a surface level charm but spending enough time with them and the illusion shatters. A real agreable and nice person has that as a baseline, that’s a big facet of their personality.
- lazyjones 6y ago
  > That is at first sight. Psychopaths have a surface level charm If they participated in psychology studies, which category would they fall in?
  - tartoran 6y ago
    I couldn’t answer that. There could be deceptive people whose intention is to subvert such studies but I doubt they’d make much of a difference. All I could sat is that the psychopath’s charm is always exerted with some goal in mind.

dcolkitt 6y ago

> but its been shown pretty consistently that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect Be careful conflating agreeableness with empathy. In Big Five OCEAN, empathy is a sub-facet of agreeableness(A), but not the only one. Other sub-facets of agreeableness are conflict-avoidance, modesty, compliance, and naive trust in others. Intuitively, it would seem to me those are more important contributor to success. In particular conflict-avoidance is a big contributor to being exploited by others. A person who scores moderately low on the aggregate agreableness(A) score could be both empathetic, but willing to stand up for themselves and make sure they're getting a fair deal. Supporting this, the research has found that agreeable people do particularly bad in transactional, rather than transformative, leadership roles. When a team is working as a high-trust, high-cohesion unit, agreeableness is an asset. But when interacting and negotiating with third parties at arms length, it can be a major liability.

User23 6y ago
Sociopaths are great at empathy. Empathy is the ability to observe and understand others emotions without actually connecting. It’s absolutely essential to be a successful dark triad tape. Sympathy is the “light” counterpart, where you actually emotionally resonate with the other person. Obviously this makes nasty behavior less attractive since you feel the emotional effects too. And now you know why corporate psychobabble always goes on about user empathy.
- gnaritas 6y ago
  You've got sympathy and empathy backwards there bub, just FYI.
- teaneedz 6y ago
  source? seems like a rather twisted definition of empathy.
  - cutemonster 6y ago
    Twisted yes However I'd think some sociopaths can be good at logically cognitive intelligence wise understanding how a different person feels. But being unable to actually feel real empathy, I wonder if they might mistake their logical thinking for being empathy? Which they will instead never know what it is

bonoboTP 6y ago

Also, narcissistsic sociopaths can have a high capacity for empathy in the sense of knowing what others feel and think while also ruthlessly manipulating, being two-faced based on who is present and the gaslighting others when these obvious differences are brought up (differences like switching the entire tone of voice and mannerisms at the flip of a switch, as if it was new person, just to suck up to or put down people depending on their goals). Working with such people can be a nightmare because they appear so charming outward to powerful people in decision making positions, while being cruel and sadistic to others, leaving very little for these people to do because the higher ups love the individual and cannot imagine what is hidden from them.

mercurialshark 6y ago
> a nightmare because they appear so charming outward to powerful people in decision making positions, while being cruel and sadistic to others I wouldn't conflate emotional intelligence - i.e. the ability to modulate behavior based on person specific interactions - with necessarily possessing negative, vindictive, malign or cruel personality traits. That's definitely a stereotype. It is entirely possible to be charming, without secretly being cruel or vindictive. Yes, it can be more difficult to judge a disarming person's intentions, but that doesn't mean the person is inherently sadistic or ill willed. Perhaps they are just good at making other people feel comfortable.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  I didn't imply that every charming person is suspicious for being cruel. Just that when you are on the receiving end, it can be very frustrating to try and tell others about it. This is in fact one mechanism that keeps victims of sexual or other harassment and bullying silent. And I don't mean small misunderstandings and microagressions. There are people who will literally tell you "you can try telling about this to XY, they will never believe you." being absolutely conscious and intentional about the whole thing. The existence of such people is really hard to believe for many. There are truly evil people out there who know they are evil and probably cannot even help it very much. They also often try to turn things around and blame you for the things that they do. We call it gaslighting. And in a meta way, they will even preemptively say you are gaslighting them! And it devolves into a "no u" kind of debate and some victims even end up believing it! It can literally make you go crazy! Search YouTube for narcissist or psychopath, sociopath recordings. There are secret video and audio recordings of what these people will do to their subordinates, eg their children or employees. It is absolutely mind bending and life changing to see how predictable and consistent they are. Now, this is of course a pathological extreme. But there are milder versions of it too.

ardy42 6y ago

>> 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. You seem to be comparing apples and oranges: I do not think "higher wellbeing" is the same thing as "higher salary," and whatever correlation there is due to the stress of being poor (and thus is less and less signficant as salary progresses past a minimum threshold).

adnzzzzZ 6y ago
>Perhaps unsurprisingly, they don’t end up with higher average incomes than their peers with light personalities. This is the relevant quote. The article explicitly says "light personalities" have no penalty compared to "dark traits". This may be true in their comparison, but overall higher agreeableness is related to lower salary.

core-questions 6y ago

>ts been shown pretty consistently that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect on salary, primarily for women It's not just salary - it's every single negotiation you have in your life. Negotiation is the art of backing down carefully, not all at once, not being a pushover, not going-along-to-get-along. If you're an agreeable person, then you by definition don't push for your way instead of someone else's; and when you're in a financial negotiation, this is basically the worst trait you can possibly have, because your adversary probably does this more often and was specifically hired for being someone that is good at pushing for their way. The company wants to hire you for less money; the car salesperson wants to sell you the car for a higher price; and so forth. There is no way of fixing this problem "systemically" across the board, because game-theoretically it will rarely be to anyone's advantage to take the first step in this direction.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago

> that higher agreeableness (more empathy) has a negative effect on salary, That seems plausible or even obvious. All things being equal, an empathetic person will value a happy work environment (relatively) more than a high salary. They'll avoid the sabotage-all-others big law firm and go into research (avoiding personal conflicts), become a public defender (empathy), judge, etc.

bonoboTP 6y ago
Research involves lots of personal conflict. You couldn't imagine how cutthroat the fight for funding, positions, paper authorships, citations etc can be. Lots of small minded machinators.
- PradeetPatel 6y ago
  To some, that's part of the thrill. I think the cultural aspect of this study must be taken into consideration. Speaking as someone who can from a country with a relatively high population (India), we were taught that in a race to the top, its either eat or be eaten, and that machinations are a vital part of success as long as they do not tarnish the way you're perceived.