7 ms·

Examining interactions between narcissistic leaders and anxious followers

111 points by tokai 5y ago

stevespang 5y ago
Hah, put Beto out of Texas into that category . . . .
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
This seems potentially interesting, but I am extremely skeptical that they can build a machine learning model that accurately diagnosis narcissistic or anxious behaviors from 280 character snippets and self-reported measures of narcissism: > To collect our ground truth dataset for the prediction of narcissism, we recruited participants via an article published on the webpage of Psychology Today. At the end of the article, a link to a short survey was provided, in which, after providing consent, participants were asked to complete a scale on narcissism by Konrath et al. (2014), namely “To what extent do you agree with this statement: ‘I am a narcissist? (Note: The word ‘narcissist’ means egotistical, self-focused, and vain)” using a 7-point Likert scale (1 = “Not Very True of Me” to 7 = “Very True of Me”), and to provide their public Twitter username/handle for research purposes. In total, 1,067 participants, located in the United States, completed the survey, indicated their public Twitter username, and provided consent for their social media data to be used for research. In total, 309,417 tweets were obtained from these participants. Psychology research already struggles with reproducibility issues at an alarmingly high rate. I fear that machining learning models are an easy way for researchers to get the answer they want from a dataset by tweaking the model until it produces the answer they want. Their model included variables like average Tweet length and number of upper-case words. Notably, they built the model on one demographic (volunteer Psychology Today readers) but tested it on a demographic using Twitter for entirely different reasons (public-facing leaders of companies on Crunchbase) It’s not hard to imagine a model like this creating a lot of false positives when applied to public-facing leaders of popular startups they found on Crunchbase
- dboreham 5y ago
  Wondering how likely it is that a big-time narcissist will be reading Psychology Today.
  - blululu 5y ago
    There are plenty of highly narcissistic people with tenure and psychology departments are somewhat famous for being permeated with varying forms psychic peculiarities.
    - themitigating 5y ago
      Can you provide proof of that?
      - blululu 5y ago
        Absolutely not. There are plenty of studies indicating that narcissist tend to get ahead in institutional contexts and I see no reason to think academia to be less viciously competitive than anywhere else. As for psych departments harboring a greater share of crazies, this is just a personal observation in an area that falls beyond the normally accepted range of research topics. Ask around, you might hear similar things; you might not.
  - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    They will, looking for confirmation of how special they are.
- GavinMcG 5y ago
  Self-reporting seems to be fairly accurate for narcissism: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0103469 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    They didn’t use the self-reported narcissists for the study, though. They were only used for training the model, which was then used to identify narcissist from a different set of Twitter “leaders” that they chose from Crunchbase: > Using an initial database of organizational leaders and employees, provided by Crunchbase (crunchbase.com), we randomly selected 500 highly active leaders on Twitter, and downloaded their public Twitter profile data. They trained the model on one demographic (readers of a psychology magazine) and then applied it to a different demographic (public faces of startups) and assumed that the model was equally accurate for this entirely different demographic.
- hirundo 5y ago
  > (Note: The word ‘narcissist’ means egotistical, self-focused, and vain)” using a 7-point Likert scale (1 = “Not Very True of Me” to 7 = “Very True of Me”) First, this study is clearly about me, but they don't admit that anywhere. Second, I am not a narcissist, because among all other people, I'm probably the least egotistical (I am but a modest demi-god), self-focused (the things I create are actually gifts to the world), or vain (my beauty is natural and effortless). So obviously I answered the poll with all ones, excluding myself from the training data and rendering this study pointless.
  - austincheney 5y ago
    Anti-narcissism is generally challenging to identify as such suggests a gravity away from the self. A key identifier may be degrees of humility, however that’s defined, such that a person distrusts acknowledgements of success. Another identifier might be an inability to evaluate a group comparative to the self, which is the more rare high functioning side of Dunning-Kruger. Yet another identifier might be objective personality traits that preference balance and measures adversely to the self.
  - ahthat 5y ago
    Exactly. It’s easy to lie, narcissists more than others are likely to flatter themselves. This kind of data is not all that accurate or helpful. It really doesn’t tell you anything.
    - Doxin 5y ago
      Turns out narcissists largely don't see narcissistic traits as a negative thing. Which makes just asking them about these sorts of things more effective than you'd imagine.
skim_milk 5y ago
Makes sense - narcissists have poor barriers, are the most likely to absorb other peoples' emotions and attempt to modify them. People with disordered emotional regulation (including anxiety) tend to attach to people that regulate their emotions for them and are more likely to pair up with narcissists. Not a ground-breaking study, but a really interesting way of gathering data to prove what therapists have been saying for a while but without much data to back themselves up.
- mckirk 5y ago
  Thanks for the insight! I'd never thought about this way, but it makes a lot of sense intuitively. Did you formulate that yourself, or is there some source that might hold similar nuggets of wisdom?
  - skim_milk 5y ago
    Sam Vaknin is one of the leading experts on narcissism, he says this all the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzj7wouSe7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzj7wouSe7A might cover this topic. Also, I wouldn't trust anyone on YouTube on the subject of narcissism other than Sam and the channel BorderlinerNotes if you want to keep studying this, there are heaps of trash on Youtube on this subject.
motohagiography 5y ago
A link describing what NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) really is: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-personality-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20366662 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-... The method of self-reporting seems like a real problem, as nobody is going to be reporting their dangerous pathologies out of a sense of civic mindedness. The crux of this seems to be they wanted to show they could use an ML model to their peers. It's worth looking at it more clinically instead of using it as a proxy for "kicking up," at leaders or charismatic people who may be otherwise pretty average. Elevating disorders to represent symbols of powerful evil and applying them to hate figures is superstitious villager quality reasoning. A useful example of narcisism is a more banal version, where someone manages their personal brand, and becomes actuated by external validation and the approval of others in a way that is pathological. Their neuroticism means they are much less likely to be leaders at all, and plausibly more like actors, lawyers, celebrities, academics, and indeed, politicians and other artifacts of fame and attention, but not because they are leaders. Rather, status occupations are watering holes for narcissists and their cousin pathology, psychopaths. A psychologist friend once quipped, if you want to see the Galapogos Islands of personality disorders in the wild just go to a strip club, which I thought was very insightful because the people there feel the attention and money and status but divorced from social norms. I would wonder in this paper whether they bothered to detect narcisism in the twitter followers, or is this just about leaders, and then, really, why? It's the need for reflected representations of status, and arguably not a leadership trait at all.
123pie123 5y ago
Do narcissistic people typically know they're narcissistic?
- louthy 5y ago
  Simple test: "Have you been staring into a pool of water for a very long time?" If your answer is yes: you're a narcissist If your answer is no: you're probably not a narcissist /s
  - tomjakubowski 5y ago
    The Disciple, by Oscar Wilde When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weeping through the woodland that they might sing to the pool and give it comfort. And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green tresses of their hair and cried to the pool and said, `We do not wonder that you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was he.' `But was Narcissus beautiful?' said the pool. `Who should know that better than you?' answered the Oreads. `Us did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on your banks and look down at you, and in the mirror of your waters he would mirror his own beauty.' And the pool answered, `But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.'
- tokai 5y ago
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3119754/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3119754/
  - SamPatt 5y ago
    "One fascinating aspect of narcissists is their ability to make a very positive first impression. At first sight, narcissists have a reputation for being charming, likeable, extraverted, open to experience, and physically attractive" This reputation then changes the more people know them. I wonder how that's possible for attractiveness though? You'd think people's perceptions of that wouldn't change. Also if narcissists are generally regarded as attractive does that mean they are, and in this one dimension they aren't totally out of touch?
greenail 5y ago
I have hope the real world does not reflect twitter behavior in any way.
ectopod 5y ago
> On the dark side, narcissists commonly display a lack of sympathy, a tendency toward cruelty and foresight, moodiness, and irritability. Is foresight a bad thing?
jerry1979 5y ago
>Since narcissistic leaders portray themselves as [!] favorable than the rest and show a sense of authority, deviance, and success, we propose that anxious followers favor and therefore interact more often with narcissistic leaders than non-narcissistic leaders. [!] Is it common to have grammar errors in publications like this? Wouldn't the author have preferred to say "more favorable"?

111 points by tokai 5y ago

Hah, put Beto out of Texas into that category . . . .

This seems potentially interesting, but I am extremely skeptical that they can build a machine learning model that accurately diagnosis narcissistic or anxious behaviors from 280 character snippets and self-reported measures of narcissism: > To collect our ground truth dataset for the prediction of narcissism, we recruited participants via an article published on the webpage of Psychology Today. At the end of the article, a link to a short survey was provided, in which, after providing consent, participants were asked to complete a scale on narcissism by Konrath et al. (2014), namely “To what extent do you agree with this statement: ‘I am a narcissist? (Note: The word ‘narcissist’ means egotistical, self-focused, and vain)” using a 7-point Likert scale (1 = “Not Very True of Me” to 7 = “Very True of Me”), and to provide their public Twitter username/handle for research purposes. In total, 1,067 participants, located in the United States, completed the survey, indicated their public Twitter username, and provided consent for their social media data to be used for research. In total, 309,417 tweets were obtained from these participants. Psychology research already struggles with reproducibility issues at an alarmingly high rate. I fear that machining learning models are an easy way for researchers to get the answer they want from a dataset by tweaking the model until it produces the answer they want. Their model included variables like average Tweet length and number of upper-case words. Notably, they built the model on one demographic (volunteer Psychology Today readers) but tested it on a demographic using Twitter for entirely different reasons (public-facing leaders of companies on Crunchbase) It’s not hard to imagine a model like this creating a lot of false positives when applied to public-facing leaders of popular startups they found on Crunchbase

dboreham 5y ago
Wondering how likely it is that a big-time narcissist will be reading Psychology Today.
- blululu 5y ago
  There are plenty of highly narcissistic people with tenure and psychology departments are somewhat famous for being permeated with varying forms psychic peculiarities.
  - themitigating 5y ago
    Can you provide proof of that?
    - blululu 5y ago
      Absolutely not. There are plenty of studies indicating that narcissist tend to get ahead in institutional contexts and I see no reason to think academia to be less viciously competitive than anywhere else. As for psych departments harboring a greater share of crazies, this is just a personal observation in an area that falls beyond the normally accepted range of research topics. Ask around, you might hear similar things; you might not.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  They will, looking for confirmation of how special they are.
GavinMcG 5y ago
Self-reporting seems to be fairly accurate for narcissism: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0103469 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  They didn’t use the self-reported narcissists for the study, though. They were only used for training the model, which was then used to identify narcissist from a different set of Twitter “leaders” that they chose from Crunchbase: > Using an initial database of organizational leaders and employees, provided by Crunchbase (crunchbase.com), we randomly selected 500 highly active leaders on Twitter, and downloaded their public Twitter profile data. They trained the model on one demographic (readers of a psychology magazine) and then applied it to a different demographic (public faces of startups) and assumed that the model was equally accurate for this entirely different demographic.
hirundo 5y ago
> (Note: The word ‘narcissist’ means egotistical, self-focused, and vain)” using a 7-point Likert scale (1 = “Not Very True of Me” to 7 = “Very True of Me”) First, this study is clearly about me, but they don't admit that anywhere. Second, I am not a narcissist, because among all other people, I'm probably the least egotistical (I am but a modest demi-god), self-focused (the things I create are actually gifts to the world), or vain (my beauty is natural and effortless). So obviously I answered the poll with all ones, excluding myself from the training data and rendering this study pointless.
- austincheney 5y ago
  Anti-narcissism is generally challenging to identify as such suggests a gravity away from the self. A key identifier may be degrees of humility, however that’s defined, such that a person distrusts acknowledgements of success. Another identifier might be an inability to evaluate a group comparative to the self, which is the more rare high functioning side of Dunning-Kruger. Yet another identifier might be objective personality traits that preference balance and measures adversely to the self.
- ahthat 5y ago
  Exactly. It’s easy to lie, narcissists more than others are likely to flatter themselves. This kind of data is not all that accurate or helpful. It really doesn’t tell you anything.
  - Doxin 5y ago
    Turns out narcissists largely don't see narcissistic traits as a negative thing. Which makes just asking them about these sorts of things more effective than you'd imagine.

skim_milk 5y ago

Makes sense - narcissists have poor barriers, are the most likely to absorb other peoples' emotions and attempt to modify them. People with disordered emotional regulation (including anxiety) tend to attach to people that regulate their emotions for them and are more likely to pair up with narcissists. Not a ground-breaking study, but a really interesting way of gathering data to prove what therapists have been saying for a while but without much data to back themselves up.

mckirk 5y ago
Thanks for the insight! I'd never thought about this way, but it makes a lot of sense intuitively. Did you formulate that yourself, or is there some source that might hold similar nuggets of wisdom?
- skim_milk 5y ago
  Sam Vaknin is one of the leading experts on narcissism, he says this all the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzj7wouSe7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzj7wouSe7A might cover this topic. Also, I wouldn't trust anyone on YouTube on the subject of narcissism other than Sam and the channel BorderlinerNotes if you want to keep studying this, there are heaps of trash on Youtube on this subject.

motohagiography 5y ago

A link describing what NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) really is: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-personality-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20366662 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-... The method of self-reporting seems like a real problem, as nobody is going to be reporting their dangerous pathologies out of a sense of civic mindedness. The crux of this seems to be they wanted to show they could use an ML model to their peers. It's worth looking at it more clinically instead of using it as a proxy for "kicking up," at leaders or charismatic people who may be otherwise pretty average. Elevating disorders to represent symbols of powerful evil and applying them to hate figures is superstitious villager quality reasoning. A useful example of narcisism is a more banal version, where someone manages their personal brand, and becomes actuated by external validation and the approval of others in a way that is pathological. Their neuroticism means they are much less likely to be leaders at all, and plausibly more like actors, lawyers, celebrities, academics, and indeed, politicians and other artifacts of fame and attention, but not because they are leaders. Rather, status occupations are watering holes for narcissists and their cousin pathology, psychopaths. A psychologist friend once quipped, if you want to see the Galapogos Islands of personality disorders in the wild just go to a strip club, which I thought was very insightful because the people there feel the attention and money and status but divorced from social norms. I would wonder in this paper whether they bothered to detect narcisism in the twitter followers, or is this just about leaders, and then, really, why? It's the need for reflected representations of status, and arguably not a leadership trait at all.

123pie123 5y ago

Do narcissistic people typically know they're narcissistic?

louthy 5y ago
Simple test: "Have you been staring into a pool of water for a very long time?" If your answer is yes: you're a narcissist If your answer is no: you're probably not a narcissist /s
- tomjakubowski 5y ago
  The Disciple, by Oscar Wilde When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weeping through the woodland that they might sing to the pool and give it comfort. And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green tresses of their hair and cried to the pool and said, `We do not wonder that you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was he.' `But was Narcissus beautiful?' said the pool. `Who should know that better than you?' answered the Oreads. `Us did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on your banks and look down at you, and in the mirror of your waters he would mirror his own beauty.' And the pool answered, `But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.'
tokai 5y ago
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3119754/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3119754/
- SamPatt 5y ago
  "One fascinating aspect of narcissists is their ability to make a very positive first impression. At first sight, narcissists have a reputation for being charming, likeable, extraverted, open to experience, and physically attractive" This reputation then changes the more people know them. I wonder how that's possible for attractiveness though? You'd think people's perceptions of that wouldn't change. Also if narcissists are generally regarded as attractive does that mean they are, and in this one dimension they aren't totally out of touch?

greenail 5y ago

I have hope the real world does not reflect twitter behavior in any way.

ectopod 5y ago

> On the dark side, narcissists commonly display a lack of sympathy, a tendency toward cruelty and foresight, moodiness, and irritability. Is foresight a bad thing?

jerry1979 5y ago

>Since narcissistic leaders portray themselves as [!] favorable than the rest and show a sense of authority, deviance, and success, we propose that anxious followers favor and therefore interact more often with narcissistic leaders than non-narcissistic leaders. [!] Is it common to have grammar errors in publications like this? Wouldn't the author have preferred to say "more favorable"?