Women, Porn, and Sadists | Dr. Del Paulhus | EP 327

Like my actual life is way less contentious than my online life. You know, they're not even in the same universe. In some sense, is that sense of polarization. It's really very difficult to tell now in the modern world how much of that is a mere consequence and a mere appearance of virtualization and how much it actually reflects some fundamental disquiet. I mean, I know they loop, but we have no way of really knowing. And if it is true that virtualization enables psychopathy, then that's a real conundrum. That's a real tough nut to crack. In a way, you're getting closer to what people are really like. In anonymous responses, we know that from questionnaire work, that the more anonymous responses are, the less desirable the answers that you get from people are. But it's, yeah, it does sound very cynical to think that the nasty stuff you see online is really the human condition.

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Foreign watching on YouTube and associated or listening on associated podcasts. I'm here today talking to a colleague and compatriot of mine, Dr. Dale Paulus from the University of British Columbia. He's a personality researcher whose work in so-called dark personality traits via a variety of measurement methods has yielded measures of the dark tetrad: psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and last but not least, sadism. His work has also validated measures of socially desirable responding, perceived control, free will and determinism, and over-claiming. His work has been published in over 150 articles in books, and his current citation count, which is the number of times other scientists have referred to his work and the cardinal marker, I would say of eminence and influence among scientists, exceeds 43,000.

So, Dr. Paulus is definitely one of the world's most outstanding psychometric personality psychologists, that is, personality psychologists who specialize in the field of mathematical measurement of behavioral and conceptual traits. Hi, Dale, it's good to see you. I want to let everybody who's watching and listening know Dr. Paulus from the University of British Columbia is a researcher and personality, as his bio indicates. Our work in some ways ran in parallel methodologically. I was very interested for years in statistical analysis of linguistic descriptions of personality. I concentrated mostly on trying to further develop the idea of the Big Five on the statistical front: the five-factor personality model—extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness.

Dr. Paulus took a turn that was very interesting to me, though, as well. He's spent a number of decades studying what came to be known as the dark triad and later the dark tetrad. Originally, when the corpus of adjectives was generated to extract a five-dimensional description of personality from language, judgmental adjectives were eliminated from the corpus. The idea was to produce a set of descriptors of normative, non-pathological personality, independent in some sense of morality. And there was some utility in that, I think, because it gave us a picture of normative personality. But the downside was we didn't develop as detailed an understanding as we might have of the dark side of personality. And that seems to be where your work, which is receiving increased public attention, I would say, perhaps in the days of Internet misbehavior, that's where your research really came into its own. Is that a reasonable initial summary?

Yeah, good summary. So, do you want to start by explaining to people, let’s walk through your research on the dark triad? How did you become interested in this, and how did you develop the measurement instruments? And what do you measure?

Well, like a lot of academics, my research can be traced back to my advisor, who was Richard Christie, the inventor of Machiavellianism as a trait. He did something very clever: he went into the books of Nicolo Machiavelli, who was an advisor to politicians way back when, and he took the statements, administered them to undergraduate students, and simply asked them how much do you agree with these statements. Like, you have to get to know important people, always be prepared for the worst in people. And the amazing thing was the huge variance in the responses, and that's what personality research is all about. We look for and wallow in the fact that people give different answers. Apparently, a lot of people agreed totally with the statements that Machiavelli made in the 1500s; others were horrified by them.

And so that inspired Richard Christie to make a questionnaire, the Mach IV—the most popular version of this questionnaires was administered to subject pools at Columbia University and elsewhere. And it wasn't just self-reports; it predicted actual behavior. So he could show that people who scored high on the Mach IV manipulated others in a room in a laboratory. They would try to squeeze money out of other people by tricking them, and all of this could be recorded and published. Hence, Richard Christie is forever associated with Machiavellianism.

So I thought that was a fabulous way to do research. I moved on then and took a real job at the University of British Columbia and met up there with Bob Hare, sort of the emperor of research on psychopathy, another aversive trait. Of course, he has done it all. But what he didn't do was compare it to Machiavellianism. And I've also done some research separately on narcissism, which captured the attention of researchers in the 1980s because it seems to resonate. Everybody knows narcissists—people who want a lot of attention and think they are superior to everyone else.

Everyone can resonate with knowing such people. So, we have three personality variables. Then, when the student Kevin Williams came along and typically in my career, I go with what the students want to do, we decided to figure out whether there were more aversive personalities. So we searched the literature and did as much as we could back then, early 2000s, to cover all the literature and see if there were more personalities that were at the level of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

We called them the dark triad because they seemed to dominate the literature. There are already hundreds of studies on each one of those. The unfortunate result—fortunate in the long run, I suppose—is that the literature has overlapped so much. You could barely tell the difference. If you took all the literature on narcissism, all the literature on Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, you could see the same things coming up. That was the original problem; we wanted to parse the dark side of traits, but you can't really do much with the literature because of this phenomenon that we called construct creep.

And that is a researcher doesn’t have the ability to research everything at once, so they focus on one variable, but it creeps wider and wider until it overlaps with other variables. And that's a problem because you don't know which one you're actually studying when you put it into a research program, which one is responsible for the action you're seeing.

Right, well, we want to talk about that in some more detail too because I'd like to find out a bit more about how you feel—I know that the dark triad has morphed into the dark tetrad to some degree—and I'm also curious as to what you have to say about the overlap between the dark tetrad qualities and personality disorder categories, especially in the histrionic, antisocial, and narcissistic categories. Obviously, that shades into personality pathology.

Can I define the three traits and have you correct my definitions if you would? So the Machiavellians, as you pointed out, Machiavelli was an advisor to princes who was really interested in some sense in the outright maintenance of instrumental power. I wouldn't say he was driven by any intrinsic ethic. It was Machiavelli who gave advice to princes who wanted to maintain their position, by hook or by crook, let's say. So Machiavellians are willing to use manipulation to obtain their personal ends.

Narcissists seem to be driven by a high desire to obtain unearned status from others. The most important thing for them is not status in relation to competence, let's say, or in relation to performance, but just status for its own sake. And then the psychopaths—I spent a lot of time looking at Hare's research and thinking about the relationship to the Big Five. Psychopaths seem to be something approximating parasitic predators, and so they're very, very low in agreeableness, and that makes them callous and non-empathetic.

And then they also seem to be very low in conscientiousness. That seems to accord reasonably well with the two factors of the psychopathy scale. So a real psychopath is someone who is willing to take what you have, let's say, and use it, and that might be the predatory aspect. And also to live off the earnings and efforts of others, and that's also an element of criminal behavior. So you're looking at the nexus of all three of those: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.

Recently, you and other researchers have added—I think this is so interesting because I think it was a real lack—you added sadism to that, which is positive delight and pleasure taken in the suffering of others. So can you expand at all upon the definitions of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy, and we could segue into sadism?

Yeah, I agree with all of your definitions. Although what we did was spend a lot of time trying to find what's different among each of the characters and what the overlap is. Why is it that the literature and the measures that were available always overlapped to a dangerous degree in trying to understand what's going on? So, the key thing for psychopaths in our opinion is impulsivity and sensation seeking, which is what gets them into trouble. They may not have worse motives than the others, but they can't help it. That's why they, at the extreme levels, spend their lives in prison. They can't help responding to temptation, whatever the temptation is; they go for it and often they get what they want right away. They keep on doing it until they get caught and they don't seem to learn from it.

So that answers just a qualification to the definition of psychopath. Now, what's underlying it? We think is callousness for all of them; they're overlapping because at the core is a failure to have empathy. If you have a deficit in empathy, it seems inevitable that you're going to exploit other people in one way or another because you’re not getting the feedback that people with empathy get in seeing other people suffer at your hands.

The story of sadism is quite a long story, but as you want me to get into the details?

Sure, yeah, please do.

I don't know whether I'm more sensitive to these things than other people, but then I started seeing sadism in irregular people. Not only is it there in everybody, but people seem to wallow in it when the circumstances will allow it. For example, violent sports. One of my favorite sports—hockey—it's kind of pathetic watching a hockey game. The cheers are larger for the fights than for the goals. People love to see their fighter pummel the fighter of the other team, or pummel anyone. The cheers that go up in a hockey stadium are incredible, and the cheers only stop when the victim falls to the ice and starts twitching.

A hush follows over the crowd, showing the dual nature of positive and negative motivations that human beings have. But the fact that they love seeing the fighting, no matter how much blood and teeth end up on the ice, is disappointing in a way. We learned a long time ago from the Europeans they don't have to do that to make happy hockey—a wonderful sport that was just one. But then watching the undergraduate students at UBC, University of British Columbia, what are they doing for fun?

Well, if you'll recall, way back they used to play these arcade games. There were some gentle ones—Pac-Man, asteroids. I don't know if you remember those—but going down into the arcade, you see that people are gathered around one of the arcade games, and so I wandered over to see it. It was something called Mortal Kombat, which by today's standards isn't that bad, but the heads are torn off and the blood spurts out. That’s why that crowd was there, because it was so much more appealing than the silly little Mario Brothers stuff.

It just struck me as the beginning of my interest in what people do, especially young males, when they have time on their own. So it's not porn; then it seems like it's violence, and it's somewhat horrifying. But it's gotten worse. I don't know if you've been following the video games that are now available on your home computer. You don't need to go to an arcade and be embarrassed by what you're playing because you can sit at home and play whatever games you want.

So now, what's it called, Grand Theft Auto? You can kill innocent bystanders, step on their heads, etc. And there are actual torture sites where you can go and torture people; you can torture animals. It's all there, and so people are paying to do this stuff. They pay for violent sports; they pay for violent movies. What's the most popular television program these days? It's called Game of Thrones, and it's the most sadistic kind of television program that you've ever seen. People are paying for this in one way or another, and they're attracted to it. They relay stories with their friends.

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I know that neurophysiologically, anger is a multi-dimensional emotion. It activates positive emotion systems and negative emotion systems simultaneously. You can think about that perhaps as the core element of something like aggression, at least maybe both defensive and predatory aggression. Then you could imagine that people are wired differently as individuals, so that for any given person, being angry might be associated with a predominance of approach motivation—right, positive emotion—and a relative decrement of negative emotion. For other people, that would be reversed.

I'm trying to account for what the positive pleasure is in the observation or participation in the aggression. I mean, you could associate it with, hypothetically, you could associate it actually with predatory behavior, with hunting and with combat. But it also might be a consequence of differential wiring at the neurological level in relationship to the balance between positive and negative emotion experienced by having any given person with anger. No, because you see this variation in people.

You know, I mean, I know some people who are real fighters, let's say, and some of them really enjoy a good scrap, right? It really seems to get them motivated, and this isn't a criticism of them necessarily. And then other people—and I think I fall more into this cap—I'm not really very interested at all in conflict. It bothers me a lot, although I don't like delayed conflict, so I'm likely to engage in it, you know, relatively up front.

But so we could go into that. What do you think is the fundamental biological and then also ethical difference between people who are taking positive delight in aggression and those who aren't? And, well, I guess we could start with those questions.

Yeah, that's the fundamental query, a puzzle in a way. Why would human beings have to have a sadistic side, at least some people—and, as you mentioned, predatory—very often? One can speculate that it helps adult animals, carnivores especially, hunt if they not only are willing but enjoy the killing. That could have been carried over to human beings.

Also, a little more instrumental explanation would be that it helps dominance. That is, if you can scare off your competitors, whether they're competitors for mates or for territory, then being sadistic about it would be a niche theory, in some sense, I guess.

I know that the worldwide prevalence of psychopathy ranges between 1% and 5%, hovers around 3%. What it seems to indicate, because it's relatively stable, is that although being a psychopath isn't a particularly successful strategy in that 97% of people don't take that route in a cooperative society, a niche does open up for people who are willing to use manipulation and impulsive behavior and sadism to dominate and use power oppressively to at least—what would you say?—carve out for themselves some degree of success, and then now and then some spectacular success, I suppose, which would be the case with people who are extraordinarily successful at being tyrants.

So we have two arguments there in some sense: one is like a neurobiological difference in response to the balance of positive and negative emotion in anger; the other one is, well, there's a niche that opens up for people who are really willing to use power and manipulation and so forth to attain the rewards of social dominance, and psychopaths seem to do that. Right? Because they'll manipulate, they often have to move from place to place because people figure them out, but they will use short-term dominant strategies.

I think you've related that too, as well, the dark triad to short-term mating strategies as well, right? Which is another thing that we could concentrate on. Right. On what the dark triad predicts. The dark tetrad interested me particularly because the literature I read on psychopaths did describe them as impulsive. So they're willing even to sacrifice their own futures to the pleasure of the moment. But there was obviously a subset of psychopaths who delighted in being cruel, and the standard explanation of callousness, say, which is merely lack of empathy, didn't seem to be enough, right? Because it isn't merely that people are lacking empathic empathy; it's that sometimes there are people who take a positive delight in cruelty.

And there's a new term that's used to describe online mobbing behavior or bullying behavior, troll behavior, which is "lulls." I just did it for the lulls, which is the plural of LOL—laugh out loud. And to do it for the lulls is to go after someone on the net, often anonymously, merely for the purpose of making them miserable and wretched and putting them in pain just so that you can enjoy that.

And certainly, that's not mere psychopathy, right? That's not mere impulsiveness. There's an additional component that's worth concentrating on.

All right, so you covered a lot of ground there. Picking up on the argument for psychopaths being impulsive, just to remind viewers who are not that familiar with evolutionary theory, the simple argument is you've got to get mates to maintain your genes in the gene pool, and there are many ways of doing that. One is to grab and run with whatever you want using force if necessary; that will sometimes get you mates. More strategic, Machiavellians find ways of manipulating others to get their genes into the gene pool. Narcissists seem to attract mates partly because of their confidence, even if it is overconfidence.

This is a little harder to see. Why would being sadistic—get you romantic and sexual partners? Well, I think I touched on the only explanation that I could think of, and I think you mentioned it too. And that is, well, you scare off your competitors, and you even scare off your mate into doing what you want by hurting them in a very public way. So you're deterring reactions from other people, and that may be of benefit in some circumstances.

Then you went into the niche theory or niche, as some people say. Yeah, there's a lot of niches out there for dark personalities. Each one may require very select kinds of traits, but if you want a job as an enforcer on a hockey team, you better damn well be able to, and willing to, and like to hurt other people.

You know, it also might be. So I know someone quite well. I talked to him. He was often hired by corporations to fire people, and he's a very disagreeable person, but he's very high in conscientiousness. So I was talking to him at one point in my lab because I was struggling with a few students who I eventually let go, and I really realized that I probably had kept them in the lab longer than I should have.

Their poor performance was demotivating some of the people in my lab who are very high performers. And, you know, just producing a decrement in the overall quality of our work. Part of the reason I think I failed to take action is because I am a rather agreeable person, and I find firing people, let's say, very distasteful.

So I talked to my associate, my friend, about firing people, and he said, "I enjoy it." I said, "That really surprised me." And there’s someone I admire and respect. Very competent person, by the way. I said, "Well, why is that?" He said, "Well, you know, I go into corporations and I ferret out the people who are kissing up and kicking down. I ferret out the narcissists. I figured out the people who, as I alluded to, take credit when they haven't done anything, cast aspersions on others when they have done something, and who are clearly not doing their job.

And then also, I go after people who, for whom it would be better in some real sense, to be off doing something else." His continual pattern of employment for multiple years because he was particularly good at this was he'd go into a corporation that was failing and start to fire people at the bottom and then climb the hierarchy, and then when he got too close to the top, they’d fire him, of course.

But, you know, it was really interesting to me because it's also possible that some of these traits—the more psychopathic traits—have a positive utility socially, even speaking morally, when they're combined with other personality traits, right? But that are particularly—like maybe it's not so bad to be low in agreeableness if you're high in conscientiousness, but maybe it's really bad to be low in agreeableness if you're really high in neuroticism or really low in conscientiousness.

You could see that that tilt towards less empathy, which might make you capable, for example, of enforcing rules—might be, well, as I said, might be extraordinarily useful even pro socially under some circumstances, but very pathological under others.

Yeah, there's a movement now, I think, to question the absolute positivity of empathy. This fellow, who, Loon from Yale University, I'm not sure if you haven't interviewed him yet. You should because he points out the overuse of empathy or inappropriate use of empathy—like letting a stranger into your door is a simple example, but having traits that make you react overreact, say, to blood and guts is going to prevent you from being a surgeon.

You've got to be able to get your knife in there and slice people up, and to some extent ignore them if, well, up to a point, if they're complaining, right? So there are jobs in which too much empathy is going to impede your ability to succeed.

So, he goes through a lot of examples like that. I suppose one of the first things they do at boot camp is to try to impose certain kinds of motivations in soldiers that are joining the Army and make sure they understand that if you don't kill first, they're going to kill you, or they're going to kill your buddies, and that should be the way you think when you're in a war.

And if you don't have that ability to reframe your normal gentle personality, then you're in the wrong place, right? Well, and it's clearly the case that people who are very high in trait empathy—so very high in agreeableness—they are easy to take advantage of, and they also tend to become resentful and bitter, at least that's been my clinical observation, because it's very difficult for them to stand up for themselves.

Right? So you need a certain amount of capacity for aggression. And then there's an interesting twist here too. I don't know. I read a book a while back called Billion Wicked Thoughts. It's a very, very interesting book. It was written by Google engineers. One of the things they did was analyze pornography use between men and women. And they found—which is not surprising—that men preferred visual pornography, but females preferred literary pornography.

And they found the classic literary pornography plot which was something like, you know, relatively innocent, but undervalued and attractive but not so obviously attractive young woman stumbles across this commanding man who has many women at his disposal, and over time, despite his relatively high levels of aggression, he finds himself attracted to this woman and then forms a sexual relationship with her.

It's a Beauty and the Beast plot, essentially. But one of the things that's so interesting about their analysis was they listed the top five occupations or characters for female sexual literature, and they were pirate, surgeon, billionaire, vampire, and pilot. And so those are all males who I would say are marked by—not pilate—werewolf was the fifth one.

And so I think it reflects to some degree this conundrum that women have is because women have to pick a man who has the capacity for aggression—enough of the capacity for aggression to protect himself and others and to move out into the world against a fair bit of opposition—but who's also simultaneously empathic or perhaps conscientious enough to be caring and share.

You can imagine that's a real knife edge, right? Because you need a bit of a monster in your man, let's say, to keep the real monsters away, but you don't want so much monster that a relationship is impossible.

And so then you could also imagine that there's overshoot on both sides of that target so that some men become too aggressive but can appear attractive in the short term because they have the confidence associated with that, and some men become too agreeable, and so they look easy to get along with and so forth, but they can't put themselves forward and stand up for themselves.

And so be another explanation for the potential emergence of, say, sadism and psychopathy is that there's this narrow target for especially for men to hit. Doesn't account for female psychopathy, but for men to hit. And it's easy to overshoot in either direction, and there's going to be variability in women's choice as well.

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Yeah, one of the issues that underlies my work in connection with clinical psychology, which you're the expert in and I'm not, I try to stick to so-called subclinical levels. In other words, student bodies or workers, these are people who are managing to get along in everyday society and they're available in large numbers. So, you can take surveys and try to tease apart the various aspects of the dark side, but I do not—the fact is I am very reticent to venture to the clinical side.

I think that's been a source of criticism from me from clinical psychologists that I'm touching on areas that really belong to them and do not belong to me because I'm not a clinician. So, when we get into sexual sadism and criminal sadism, which in a sense was all people associated with sadism up until recently, it was the only way that people thought about it. The interesting interplays between sadism and masochism—why would it be to some extent the same people who are into both? I can ask these questions and surveys, but I hesitate to try to be an expert and accept what people are saying.

Well, it's not as if the clinicians have been any more careful than the personality theorists in elucidating the actual nature of their diagnostic categories. I mean, one of the reasons I'm a clinician and a personality psychologist, one of the reasons I find your work interesting and compelling is because you do the psychometrics properly, and that's not always obviously the case with clinical diagnostic categories because they're basically holdovers from the psychiatric enterprise, and they weren't derived, they weren't extracted out of a primarily statistical model.

So on the downside for the clinical psychologist, it's not obvious at all that we have our nosology, our diagnostic category system, straight. And so I’m not saying that in a cynically critical manner, because it's actually a very difficult thing to do, right? But it seems to me that your work isn't unfairly poaching on the grounds of clinical psychologists because somebody has to do the basic psychometric work. It's like, well, what are the basic categories of, let's say, predatory and parasitical behavior?

Now you can imagine that there's a place where that becomes clinically extreme and has to be dealt with in another manner, but there’s absolutely no reason not to look at it subclinical manifestations as well. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you now is because I've been reading a number of papers. I got really interested in this idea that virtualization enables, well, maybe psychopathy, but maybe more broadly dark tetrad behavior.

One of the open questions is, if you're dealing with someone who has these personality proclivities that you described—Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and sadistic—they obviously lack a Freudian superego in some sense. They can't regulate their own behavior in a social manner. Left to their own devices, they will exploit and hurt. And then you might say, well, what keeps people like that in check?

One of the answers to that would be, well, the same thing that keeps the rest of us in check, which is mechanisms built into the neurobiology of our face-to-face contact. Like we know that if you put people in a car, they'll be ruder to each other—someone in another car—than they would be face to face on the street.

There's a lot of direct inhibition built into our social interactions that keeps psychopathy and narcissism under control. But then what you see online is that all of that disappears. I don't think that there's any real price to be paid for dark tetrad behavior online, especially if it's anonymous. And that's made me think more recently, especially as our culture tears itself apart as a consequence of the battle between extremes on the political spectrum.

It's made me wonder how much of that’s actually driven by the virtualized enabling of psychopathy and narcissism. Because, you know, it's always a problem. One of the things people might not understand who are watching this is the incredibly high cost that biological organisms bear in relationship to parasitical behavior. So, that’d be associated, let's say, with psychopathy.

There is good evidence—although I wouldn't say it's canonical—that the reason that sex itself evolved was so that we could stay ahead of the parasites. If you just clone yourself, the parasites can chase your genome down the generations, but if you mix your genes, then the parasites have to adapt rapidly to keep up. You can stay ahead of them.

And so sex itself was driven by parasitical behavior. What that indicates is that the presence of parasites, as well as predators throughout our entire biological history, has presented a canonical threat to our very civilization. And now, if it's true that virtualization enables the psychopaths and the narcissists, then it seems to me that that produces a cardinal threat once again.

There's been a spate of research more recently using the dark tetrad measures to investigate such things as narcissistic self-promotion on TikTok and Instagram, but also trolling in online bullying. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about what's been found on that front?

Yeah, well, again, you covered a lot of ground there. But the central point I have to totally agree on, and we got into a specific aspect where sadism plays a big role, and that is the trolling online. You get to say anything you want without repercussions. If you said that to the person's face, you'd be in trouble for various reasons—legal, the physical reasons—but we tried to delve into asking these people who engage in trolling online, “Why do you do it?”

We ended up with the title of our paper, "Trolls Just Want to Have Fun" because that seemed to be the most common motivation. It's just fun poking at people. You find a website where people are all happy and enjoying it—I don't know, a gardening group—and you mess with them, and that seems to be a lot of fun for certain individuals. We correlated an interest in doing that with the dark tetrad measures, and sadism stood out as the best predictor of liking to mess with happy people.

So, having the internet has put us into trouble. Politics is an obvious example, but just being nasty to your fellow humans is now a sport; it's a hobby; it's a pastime. And these people tend to spend a lot of their time engaged in various similar activities.

Right, well, we know that 1% of the criminals commit 65% of the crimes, and it's a prito burrito distribution, like almost every other form of, let's say, creative production, and so it's also the case, in all probability, that a very large proportion of the pathological online behavior comes from a relatively small proportion of committed dark tetrad types.

Given that they're not only not inhibited by the normal mechanisms of social discourse, they're also rewarded because they get a tremendous amount of attention, and I would say, I think it's reasonable to also point out that that attention is monetized in some sense and expanded by the internal operations of social media networks themselves.

It's certainly not the case that the trolls pay a price for being provocative. In fact, I think there's good reason to think that their attempts are more likely to be multiplied rather than inhibited, and that could be, depending on the degree to which we virtualize, I mean, that could pose a real signal threat to our peaceful political arrangements, let's say.

Yeah, it's out of hand, and it's hard to track down individual contributors to malevolence online, but one could blame it on media polarization and just the need to attract customers. It turns out that people don't like moderate media sources—they won't turn to that channel; they'll turn to a channel where they can feel warm and toasty because the other people on that channel agree with them on everything.

So, they don't get to hear other points of view. Many years ago, perhaps you and I were there at the time of Walter Cronkite, and there were a few corporations online, two or three, that everybody watched, and they were more or less down the middle. If those were put online now, nobody would watch. People want to watch the extreme version of their own politics, and that's an unfortunate development in technology.

Yeah, well, there are some exceptions to that, I would say. I mean, I've had a lot of success, let's say, with long-form dialogue on YouTube, and other people have done the same thing. You know, inviting people like you to have discussions, the last 90 minutes or so, and that's a pretty comprehensive discussion, and it rewards a long-term attention span.

But it's definitely the case that there are selective pressures in relationship to attention to gather as much impulsive attention as possible. And of course, there’s a profit motive behind that often, because if you can gather people’s attention, you can advertise to them. I'm not saying this cynically; I'm just trying to observe the way the system is working.

If you can gather people's attention by whatever means, you can almost instantly monetize that, and so we also have this new technological problem, which is that we have technologies that can really reward impulsive information gathering and simultaneously monetize it.

And that means that that's fertile territory for the psychopaths and the narcissists and the Machiavellians and the sadists to exploit. And I think there's actually—I think there's enough of that to actually undermine public trust in general because it makes, like, my actual life is way less contentious than my online life. You know, they're not even in the same universe in some sense.

Is that sense of polarization, it's really very difficult to tell now in the modern world how much of that is a mere consequence and a mere appearance of virtualization and how much it actually reflects some fundamental disquiet. I mean, I know they loop but we have no way of really knowing.

And if it is true that virtualization enables psychopathy, then that's a real—I mean, that's a real conundrum; that's a real tough nut to crack, yeah. And it's scary, in a way, to think that. In a way, you're getting closer to what people are really like in anonymous responses.

We know that from questionnaire work that the more anonymous responses are, the less desirable the answers that you get from people are. But it's, yeah, it does sound very cynical to think that the nasty stuff you see online is really the human condition.

Well, I'm more optimistic about that, you know, because of this Pareto distribution phenomena. I think I'm pessimistic because it looks like a very small number of bad actors can cause way more trouble than we would have thought, right?

And that's a pessimistic idea, is that, yeah, it's only 3% who are dark tetrad types—or maybe 5%. It depends where you put the cutoffs, let's say. And that means 95% of people are going about their business in a decent manner, but—and that's a very positive thing.

But the downside is, yeah, but that 5% can cause a god-awful amount of trouble. I mean, I talked to Andy No about Antifa, you know, and I'll tell you how that came about. I was working with a group of Democrats in the U.S. to help pull the Democratic Party towards the center, and I did that for a number of years.

There was one topic that we used to come to a fair bit of disagreement about, and that was the reality of Antifa. The Democrats I was working with were absolutely convinced of the reality of 4chan and the right-wing conspiratorial groups, but they didn't believe that there was really any such thing as Antifa.

I thought, well, these were smart people, and I thought, why the hell did they believe that? And they said, “Well, there have always been race riots in the United States, and the degree to which Antifa is organized is blown out of proportion.” And they're not really a formal organization, and so on and so forth.

I thought, well, that's interesting because some of that's true, but you could say the same thing about the hypothetical right-wing conspiratorial groups. But then I talked to Andy Noe, who's done more to cover Antifa than any other journalist, and I said to him, "Andy, how many Antifa cells, let's say, do you think are operating in the United States?"

He thought far hard and he thought, well, maybe 40. I said, "Well, how many full-time equivalent employees, so to speak, do you think each of those cells have?" And he thought, well, maybe 20. And so if that estimate is vaguely accurate, that's 800 people in the entire United States, have a population of 320 million.

It's really one person in 400,000, right? And that's sort of statistically equivalent to zero. So, you know, that's why the Democrats can say, well, that Antifa doesn't even really exist. But the counter-argument is, yeah, there aren’t very many of them, but a small number of people who have these dark tetrad motivations—and I’m not saying that's unique to Antifa, by the way; I'm talking more about the riotous troublemakers, who love to dance in the street, you know—if it's only one in 400,000 people, that's just an indication of how much trouble someone who has no internal sense of restraint can make manifest if they're free of all external social controls.

Yeah, I don't have too much to say about that, but I would like to talk a bit about extreme niches that you brought up before and where these people end up if they have the proclivities for one of the dark tetrad. The proclivity for narcissists would be in the realm of politics because they want attention, and they get it, whether it's positive or negative.

It seems to work for them. The Machiavellians, I think, are among the most interesting, though: stock markets, financial organizations. Although we just saw this fellow Santos who made up his CV to get elected, right? Long Island, an example of a politician who's both narcissistic—because you have to to be a politician—and a Machiavellian.

But Bernie Madoff was the classic; he was the most popular guy in his building on Fifth Avenue, big smile on his face all the time, happy-go-lucky, and stealing money from thousands of people, far more money that he could ever use as a billionaire. He wanted more billions— but that's a niche in which Machiavellianism will help you get to the top.

You have to manipulate and hide and do it relatively low-key, unlike the narcissist. So, I think we already talked about the psychopath and the sadist, but it does play out in the occupations that one chooses to suit your niche.

Yeah, well, you can also see there that that makes the issue of leadership a complicated one, right? Because we know that the Big Five personality profile of narcissists is something like high extroversion and low agreeableness. And so, you can see there that someone who's low in agreeableness is going to put their viewpoint forward in a pretty aggressive manner, and someone who's extroverted is going to be enthusiastic and captivating.

And so, you need those. You can understand that there might be situations that cry out for genuine leadership where both being extroverted and being disagreeable would be an advantage. And you know, that might be a situation where you hope like hell that your extroverted, disagreeable politician is also extremely high in conscientiousness so that even though they might like attention, and even though they might be less empathic than that, their relative lack of empathy would pose a certain risk, that their proclivity to abide by a set of ethical principles would override that.

But then you get people who fake that conscientiousness and fake competence, which is partly what psychopaths do when they entrap women; it's to fake that confidence and then to look like you're abiding by the rules when you're just being Machiavellian and narcissistic and manipulative.

Yeah, it's fascinating to think about different combinations of the Big Five, but also of the dark tetrad. I wrote a paper on Steve Jobs, for example, some time ago. It helps to be a genius, of course, but if you're a full narcissist who believes you have the right idea and the entire world is wrong about it, everyone disagreed with him, and he was right, right?

Well, that's a good example of that hyper-successful niche, right? So that's a good—that's a very interesting case because you're going to get the odd situation where someone is narcissistic and hyper-intelligent and correct—in which case their narcissism and their callousness, in some sense, is absolutely what's needed to bring forth that whole set of ideas.

Well, in fact, he was fired by his own company after having proved himself to be a genius and changing the world in so many ways. His own company said he was too obnoxious, so they let him go. Eventually, the company kind of faded out; they had to bring him back.

But right, how can you be so super successful and fired by your own team? Classic case!

Well, you know, I knew people who—I know people who worked with Jobs, and one of the things they told me was that he was unerring in his ability to cull. You know, so he had a very high eye for quality, but he also didn't let empathy stop him from killing projects he thought were counterproductive.

And that's a tough one, right? Because you can imagine—you can't say that if you're running a company and you're attempting to produce something that keeping a faltering project going because you don't want to hurt the feelings of the employees by bringing it to a halt is a moral virtue; it's not a moral virtue.

And the reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that you're just prolonging the agony and awaiting the inevitable death, right? So you have the evidence in some sense at hand, but you're unwilling to draw the appropriate conclusions from it, and there is that same necessity for discrimination and elimination that might also be driving the capacity, as you pointed out earlier, of a surgeon to go into someone's body and to get rid of the cancer, right?

Independent of the fact that they have to deal with the blood and the gore and the pain and the fear and all of that, and they can't let that stop them.

Yeah, I agree totally with everything you just said. I wanted to get back to the psychometrics just for a moment. I know you worked in depth on the Big Five and separated it into aspects and broke it down, and that's—in a way—characterizes a certain approach to personality.

I call the distinction "lumpers and splitters." That's to some extent then the pro and con of my approach: trying to tease apart or parse the dark side is an approach that just made sense to us given the overlap in literatures that I mentioned earlier. But there's also a tendency—you mentioned earlier, the evaluative sense to lump together good traits with other good traits—the so-called halo effect has its correspondent devil effect.

And that is if you learn something bad about somebody, you naturally assume—it's hard not to—to think that they have all the other bad traits too. And so that there's a lot of, in a way, competitors out there working on the dark side who are trying to lump it together and call it the D Factor, the dark factor.

So it's collapsing them all into one, and you can array people on this one dimension. That never appealed to me. I think it's a lot more interesting to break things into their components, but how intercorrelated—how intercorrelated are the four scales on average? And does it—can you extract that? Can you extract out a single factor? How much of the variance does that factor account for?

Yeah, excellent question. We started off with correlations between 0.3 and 0.5 with the dark triad, and that is definitely all positive—they're never negative correlations. But to some people that was too high, especially 0.5 or above means, well, why don't you just add them together and call it something else?

And that's what the so-called D-factor people have done. It just seems such a silly simplicity to me that you could look at your fellow human beings and call them and place them at a certain position on this single darkness when there's so many ways of being dark. There might be one way of being a good person, but there's many ways of being dark is the approach that we took.

Well, technically what you'd want to show is that your multiple measures, interestingly, predict different outcomes and differentially. And you talked a little bit about occupational choice. I mean, that rubber hits the road basically by having you demonstrate that your multiplicity of categories adds predictive power in some interesting way to the solution of some complex problem.

I mean, it certainly seems to me to be useful, at least in principle, to distinguish something like sadism and positive pleasure taken in the suffering from others from mere impulsivity. You know, even though both of those can be problematic.

I'd also like to suggest something else to the listeners. We might ask ourselves why, in some fundamental sense, are these behaviors—these dark tetrad behaviors—properly regarded as pathological?

I think especially given that you could make the case that they have some reproductive benefits at least compared to certain other strategies, but I think the issue here—you tell me what you think about this—it has to do—and this is like a biology of ethics in some sense—it has to do with iterability.

And so there’s this famous study, set of studies, by Jacques Panksepp where he analyzed the play behavior of juvenile male rats. What he showed was that if you put two juvenile rats together and one outweighs the other by ten percent, there's about a 90% probability that the bigger rat can pin the smaller rat.

And so, if you just do that once, the conclusion you would draw if you were a like a zero-sum biologist and someone interested in dominance is you'd say, well, the bigger, stronger, meaner dark tetrad rat can win the competition and therefore has elevated himself in the hierarchy of dominance and is more likely to reproduce successfully. But Panksepp, being a bit of a genius, knew that rats lived in social communities and had iterated interactions with one another, and so you don't play with another rat if you're a young rat only once; you play with them repeatedly.

And so Panksepp paired them repeatedly, and what he showed was the second time you put the rats together, the little rat had to invite the big rat to play. The big rat would deign to play. But if you paired them together repeatedly, if the big rat didn't let the little rat win at least 30% of the time, the little rat would stop playing.

And so I thought it was an unbelievably profound set of studies because it indicated that there was an emergent ethos that was intrinsic to repeated trades. You know the economic games where you take two people and you say, look, I'm going to give you a hundred dollars and you can offer some fraction of that to your partner. But if he refuses, neither of you get anything. You play that around the world, and people average out at about 50%.

And it's the case that even poor people who need the money are very likely to reject a sharing offer that isn't something approximating 50%. You might say, well, that's preposterous because why not just take the money and leave?

And the answer is something like, yeah, but there's an ethos of fair play that emerges out of repeated interactions. And your goal isn't to win a single game; it's to win a set of iterated games. And the problem with the psychopathic perspective and the impulsive perspective is that even the psychopaths themselves sacrificed their own future as well as other people to the immediate gratification of their desires.

And that's just not a very sophisticated strategy, right? Why win once when you could hypothetically win, you know, 50% of the time, 100 times?

And so I think we can get close to a technical description in this sense of what constitutes pathological behavior, right? Pathological behavior is the proclivity to gain in the short term but lose in the medium to long run.

Yeah, I've thought about this in terms of the winner in animal groups, the alpha male so to speak, is usually the meanest nastiest of the group. In human groups, the meanestness doesn't rise to the top; you have to have allies, so alliance building is an important component of success in human societies— not so much it is apparently in chimpanzees, but it's really important. You get to the top if you can link, associate, and get friends, get allies to help you in getting to the top.

Well, Friends DeWall in his work has demonstrated quite clearly that the stable alpha males—like there are alpha males who can make it to the top who are sort of dark tetrad in chimps, right? They'll use just brute force, but they tend to meet pretty damn violent ends pretty young.

Whereas the stable alphas sometimes are smaller males who allied themselves with powerful females, but who are also more reciprocal often in their interactions, so more fair traders, let's say, than any other individual in the group. And so DeWall has done this lovely job of relating cooperative leadership to social stability and length of reign, and so the psychopathic chimp might do better than the chimp who is only withdrawing and never interacts at all, but the psychopathic chimp who relies on aggression doesn't do nearly as well as the reciprocal chimp who builds a network of allies.

And well, I really like DeWall’s work for that reason, you know, because it's often the fact that people who presume that our hierarchies are based on PowerPoint, to say chimpanzees, and say, "No, it's power that sustains dominance." It's like, "No, power can provide you with dominance in the short run, but it's not an optimized long-term strategy."

And so, it's reasonable to view it in some sense as a form of deviant pathology, especially in its more extreme forms, because it's a self-defeating game.

We'll be back in one moment. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series, Exodus.

So the Hebrews created history as we know it. Don't get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper.

It's going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert.

[Music]

Something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine: the highest precisely is that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny.

I want villains to get punished, but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That's such a Christian question.

Yeah, this notion of getting people on your side or developing allies, of course, is essential for politicians. It's the one with the most voters, the one with the most compatriots supporting them—money-wise and otherwise—who gets to the top.

We, apart from Machiavelli, we've also been drawing on Sun Tzu, the famous Art of War writer from China. As in many cases, the Chinese got there before the West did. But he talked about building alliances, and indeed we've tried to invoke that in our measures.

It turns out to be a key for manipulation. The Machiavellian is well aware, and you can see that in some of the items on the Mach scale of getting people on your side is essential to getting ahead. It might be the key element to it—not standing up and leading, but getting people to be persuaded to your side.

Right, so the Machiavellian then in that situation is mimicking reciprocal sociability, right? Because if you and I form a relationship that's going to be stable over time, it's going to be something like, let's say, a 60-60 exchange. You'll contribute half and I'll contribute half, but the reason I represented that as 60% or maybe 75% is because if you and I engage in reciprocal honest trading, the sum total of our activity will exceed the sum of our individual activities, right?

We can do more together than we could do apart. So there's all sorts of sense to be made for the establishment of these honest, durable, and reciprocal relationships. But what that also means is that if most people establish those, then people who only act as if they're establishing them can capitalize on that, just like the narcissists and the psychopaths with their false confidence can mimic competence and fool.

Well, there's good literature evidence, for example, that the dark tetrad types, broadly speaking, are particularly good—if they're male—at fooling young women. You know, as women get older, they get better at separating out the narcissists from the competent men.

But initially, because the narcissists have this confidence that is a marker of competence, even though not an invariable marker, they can easily be fooled. And so that opens up the landscape of cooperatives to exploitation by a small minority of predators and parasites.

So what else have you found out on the social media front and where do you think the interesting research is? Where's the interesting research going on in that area? Do you have any sense of what sort of constraints need to be put in place in online forums to keep the psychopaths under control?

Like I've come out recently against anonymity because my sense—I've read tens of thousands of online comments. My sense is that a radical proportion of anonymous posters have these dark tetrad traits, and I know there's a research literature that actually indicates that as well.

And so I've been attacked for that because people think that their right to free speech also involves this right to anonymous posting. I can understand that argument, but the problem is it does seem to me to open up the landscape to the predatory, parasite types, and that's a real problem. Have you thought about, like, what have you seen that you regard as a credible deterrent, if any, on the virtual side to the dominance and proliferation of dark tetrad behavior?

Really no solutions have come to mind. It seems out of control when you go to a website and ask for comments—which is really trying to get feedback to whatever is on your site. It seems, I think somebody calculated, it takes about 10 comments before someone says, "Oh, yeah, f*** you."

Yeah, well, so you're talking about this proclivity of open online discourse to turn into a kind of swarm, characterized by the presence of—well, I really do think it heats up the whole political environment because, you know, you alluded to earlier the fact that there's lots of things people won't say in person, partly for legal reasons but also partly for physical reasons.

And both the legal and the physical constraints are removed in the virtualized world. That does seem to produce an unbelievable flowering of pathological commentary, and I really do believe that that makes everyone think the world and the people in it are a lot worse than they really are, because it magnifies the effect of this tiny minority, especially the sadists.

You know, it's been so interesting to me to watch your concept of dark triad expand to take into account that positive delight in suffering because I don't think you can really understand radical evil by merely making reference to narcissism and instrumental valianism and even psychopathy. You need pleasure and suffering to really add that last, you know, nail into the coffin, so to speak.

Yeah, one interesting goal we had was to try to find the female sadists on all four of these components. With males score higher, even in sadism, we figured there's the mean girls phenomenon. We all have this sense that women can be nasty in different ways, perhaps, and so we tried to develop items, especially with my colleague Aaron Buckles at the University of Winnipeg.

She's working on this, and so is Tracy Viencore at Ottawa U. They are looking at relational aggression, so women may use different ways—not physical or less physical—and gossiping, for example, spreading lies. There are a few others that exploit the verbal abilities of women and allow them to be nasty to people that they think deserve it.

So those people are working actively on trying to get a measure of sadism that would apply to women even more than to men because... I wonder if that would involve pleasure in exclusion, you know? I mean, it's definitely the case that—well, if you use time-out on a child, one of the reasons it works is because it's technically a punishment. It produces something akin to pain, but the pain is essentially social.

It's involuntary social isolation. And so, if you exclude someone—which is what the mean girl types do, right? That’s their primary—this reputation destruction and exclusion seems to be their particular bailiwick. You see that with female antisocial behavior, and they can be really, really good at it.

And the frightening thing about that too, to some degree, is that, you know, male aggression of the physical sort doesn't scale worth a damn on social media because you can't use physical aggression on social media. But the female pattern of antisocial behavior, which is reputation destruction and social exclusion, man, that scales like a charm on social media, especially because of what you described as the negative halo effect.

You know, and I really noticed this—I should be very resistant to that negative halo effect when I pick out my guests for my podcast, eh? Because I have had a lot of guests on my podcast, and now and then I talk to people who've been mobbed, excluded, or had their reputation damaged for one reason or another.

You know, and even when I know perfectly well that there's a high probability that they've been lied about and that they've been the target of this kind of malicious gossip, there's still a strong proclivity in me that I have to fight to overcome not to assume something like well where there's smoke, there's fire. You know?

And you don't have to sully someone's reputation much before you raise the cost that other people need to bear to interact with them. Right? I mean, we all have in principle thousands of people we could interact with, and so we're always looking for a reason, in some sense, not to interact with people.

And if a terrible rumor has spread about someone, well, the cost to me to avoiding that person can be very, very low, but the cost to that person if everyone avoids them is unbelievably high.

Most people care about how a person treats them specifically, and they can overlook rumors often because the other person has treated them personally well. So that's a dynamic that works in the other direction to cut down on the negative effect of rumors and gossip, that sort of thing, right?

Assuming that you actually have that personal relationship, you know, one of the things I've also seen as a consequence of virtualization, you know if I'm if I'm working with people virtually and so we haven't established that kind of personal relationship, if any issue comes up that's negative it seems to have a larger effect than it would if we had established, you know, a long-term more personal face-to-face interaction.

So as long as things are going smoothly, the virtual interaction seems to go well, but it's really easy for anything negative to be magnified. And I think it's partly because you don't have that buffer that you just described, which is maybe something like the evidence of repeated interactions, face-to-face evidence of repeated acts of kindness and so forth, so that you have that as a data body to offset the, you know, the negative event against.

Right on all of those points. I did want to talk a little bit about your work on the Big Five with respect to the challenges to the Big Five as well as the challenges to my work. Kind of dovetail in an interesting way, and that is: although the Big Five has become the consensus for the broad personality traits, so Big Fiveers mostly assume that they've covered it all because they're working at such a high level, and people like me, who are working from time to time on individual traits, that would be farther down the hierarchy of the personality space.

Now, it turns out that you can add at least one other dimension to the Big Five, and that's been contributed by Ashton and Lee, two Canadian researchers who have to some extent eaten away at the popularity of the Big Five by talking about the Big Six, or the hexaco. And what they've added is a dimension called honesty-humility, which is a great choice I thought.

But it turns out that that extra dimension they added subsumes all of the dark traits that I've been working on. Oh, I didn't know that! I wanted to ask you that. Oh, when was that discovered?

That has been coming to light over the last five years. It turns out that extra dimension they added subsumes all of the dark traits that I've been working on.

Oh, yeah?

So, I've certainly turned to favoring the Big Six instead of the Big Five in some of my recent work in terms of... We know the personality space is rather amorphous, and you can rotate dimensions in multiple ways to suit your fancy, but this one suits me because it shows where the dark traits fall right back to a comprehensive personality space.

They all fall together under this one dimension, honesty-humility, and so I really appreciated the... Do you think that's because Ashton and Lee—Is it because they included in some sense some of the originally excluded words from their statistical samples of adjectives, the ones that are more evaluative?

Because, I mean, your phrases or sentences are really quite evaluative on the moral dimension. And so they wouldn't have been considered in the initial Big Five corpus, and then honesty-humility seems to be kind of in the middle of that, right?

Because it's obviously better morally to be honest and humble than to be dishonest and arrogant. And so you're sneaking there, or stepping into the domain of ethical categorization.

But I wanted to ask you actually, if you throw your sentences into a sentence-level Big Five, like the notion model—I think what you just said was that the individual sentences will line up—the dark triad or dark tetrad sentences will line up on a dimension that's the opposite side of honesty-humility. Do they break out across other factors as well? Or like how much does dishonesty-humility subsume the dark triad on the negative side?

Well, it's pretty much the whole thing is there under honesty-humility. They do have a couple of other negative traits in there so there's a slightly broader aspect, which suggests maybe we could add a couple of other negative traits to our pantheon of aversive personality. That's one direction to look in anyway.

It's interesting what you say about the pulling out the negative traits, which Cattell did many years ago, and a few others have pursued that. And indeed, I think that's there if one looks hard enough at the work of earlier personality researchers. The Big Seven was available in the 70s, and one of those looked like a dark personality factor.

So one that would make an interesting paper to track that issue. Interesting you put that together. Has anybody done a large-scale compilation of the dark tetrad items with the hexaco model, like on thousands and thousands of people? Have you done that yet?

Others have done that, yeah. Yeah, it's there. The German sentences have always been known as good psychometricians, and they've shown in a number of large-scale studies that both in German and in English, they can work as well in English and they’ve shown that clear pattern.

Oh, yeah? Okay, well, that's really worthwhile knowing.

So what forms of behavior do you think are most powerfully predicted by the dark tetrad questionnaires? Like the sorts of things that people might encounter in their day-to-day life if we can bring this to life for people focusing on a set of personality attributes?

What are you likely to experience if you encounter someone who is characterized by a plethora of these characteristics?

Well, that's been a summary of our goals in my laboratory, and that is we want to develop practical measurement instruments. One can find a lot of interesting things in Freud's Thanatos and Jung's shadow, but you're not going to be able to ask people about those in a job interview.

So what we want are measures that can be applied to ordinary people, whether they're, um, job selection—you want certain kinds of people, and sometimes you want a little bit of the dark side, sometimes not. Even in these romantic websites where you're pairing up people, you want to know a little bit about the potential partners.

The dark side is starting to prove useful there. So practical measures that you can present to large groups or diagnose people is what we've been aiming for. And so the psychometrics have been the most important thing: getting it right.

So we tried in California on that front. This might be something you'd be interested in methodologically. So I put together a behavioral predictive battery that was very short: cognitive analysis, which is basically the Ravens progressive matrices revised. We made our own matrices, but we got a good central measure of general cognitive ability.

And then a good fake proof measure of the Big Five. We made it fake proof by forcing people to choose between positive descriptors or between negative descriptors. We lost a degree of freedom, but we made the test robust against social self-presentation.

I did that with Jacob Hirsch, and then so I used those tests to predict entrepreneurial success in thousands of people in Silicon Valley. I was working with a man, Ade Oresi, who ran an institute called the Founder Institute, which was the biggest early-stage tech incubator in the world. I think he started 5,000 companies, something like that.

And we can predict entrepreneurial ability pretty well, basically with general cognitive ability, trait openness, and a bit of a positive tilt for age. But this is what was happening in classes: say he'd get 50 people together at a very early stage in the development of their business ideas—a great idea—and now and then he’d get a couple of bad apples in the group, and that would just destroy the class.

Then he was spending all his time attending to the troublemakers. So he came back to us and he said, "Look, we're doing a pretty good job of finding people who are qualified, but we can't keep out the troublemakers."

I thought, well, could we do that psychometrically? So, this might be something interesting to consider in relationship to the dark triad and the personality disorder side. So, there is a central factor in personality disorders.

If you turn the personality disorder items in the DSM into questionnaire items, you can extract out a single factor. One of the best predictors of failure to respond to clinical intervention on the personality disorder side is sheer number of personality disorder symptoms, so it's kind of just like a severity index, you know?

So, it's like, if you think about it, that's been a difficulty in doing dark-side research. You've got to validate these measures, so you've got to have hard criteria, especially behavior. You can rely on the judgments of others to some extent, but hard, visible, recordable behavior is really the most persuasive kind of criterion.

But think about sadism; how are you going to show that in the laboratory? That was a real challenge to us. But in a way, it was fun developing measures that can get by these very restrictive IRB boards that look through your work and say, "No, you can't do that! You can't do this!" And so, with this notion of bug killing, which I guess I have to attribute that to Dan Jones, who came up with the notion of getting people to think that they're crunching bugs in a coffee grinder.

Again, such variants—some people loved it. We tried to anthropomorphize the bugs by giving them names. So there was a little container that had names like Ike and Muffin—cute little names—but they had to take these bugs, put them into the cruncher, press down, and hear what sounded like bug parts flying apart. It was actually just coffee beans.

But again, like the Milgram study, they thought they were doing it. Once some of the subjects... I give it—got any more—that was fun. Other people were so horrified to think about the whole idea, they just ran out of the lab when we described what we wanted them to do.

Lovely to have variants like that when you're studying something sensitive like sadism. We also use voodoo dolls. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that research: giving subjects acutely—oh yeah—and saying think of the person that you really dislike. Now we're going to leave you alone for five minutes, and you're welcome to take this set of pins and stick them into the doll to represent the degree to which you hate them.

And again, lots of variants there. We come back after five minutes, and some of these dolls are full of pins, and that tends to correlate with... I think this particular study was actually showing the dark tetrad measures in comparison to questionnaire measures of psychoticism, which is in a sense answered the question that you often pose yourself with.

You're listening to a horrible crime described on television, and you wonder, "Is this such a horrible crime? Was the person crazy? Right? Or was the person nasty?" That has legal consequences, doesn't it? Crazy, you're not guilty. You're just nasty. You can go away for some time for doing nasty stuff.

We found actually that both contributed to the extent that you can measure psychoticism with questionnaire measures—debatable. We found that independently, the dark tetrad and psychoticism predicted the number of pins that you stuck in this sorry little doll that you were given.

So, Dale, you've been delving into the dark side of human behavior for a long time. You alluded to the fact or the possibility of a certain pessimism that emerged as a consequence of your observation that sometimes anonymous responses are actually more revealing.

And anonymous behavior on the net has produced quite the uptick in pathological behavior. But what has been the consequence for you personally in focusing so intensely on this dark area of human proclivity?

And, well, let's start with that.

Oh, yes, and then the other thing was: how do you distinguish, let's say personally and scientifically, between the ethical issue with regard to the dark tetrad behavior and the biological motivations? Right? Because your work does skirt that line, right?

So you can think about psychopathy as an adaptive mating strategy in some sense on the scientific front, but then when you think about it ethically and personally, it falls into the category of the kind of clearly reprehensible behavior that should get people locked up.

So, A, what has this done to your view of human nature? And B, how do you thread the needle of scientific evaluation versus moral evaluation?

Well, for me, it started in an undergraduate course where I learned about Machiavellianism and went to work with Richard Christie. So, in a sense, I was there from the beginning. What the causal direction was, I'm not sure at that point, but it did do a lot of other work on self-enhancement, etc. Other researchers in my department like to study happy people, and I didn't find them as interesting as the dark side.

And certainly I could give a rationale that we're more concerned with the behavior of the dark side than we are with what happy people can do to us. Maybe they could bore us at times, but they're not going to be a danger to us. So studying the dark side is more important, arguably.

And there is a light triad now where people have put together some positive traits and kind of followed up on the notion of the dark tetrad and said, "Why don't we look at the positive side and see who gives desirable motivations for their behavior?" I studied social desirability for a long time, and it never really came together for me because you develop a social desirability scale.

Well, it's partly true and it's partly phony, and that's a terrible confounding because do you want to hire the person who scores high on social desirability or the person who scores low?

Probably, right?

Right? I found that very frustrating work as well. I tried to develop scales of self-deception and self-presentation, and I ran into, I think, very much the same problem. It's not obvious that it's an independent dimension, right? Because it seems to be quite affected by agreeableness.

But it's also not, as you said, it's not obvious what the desirable outcome actually is. Like, do you want the person who tries to make themselves look better than they are during a job interview? And the answer is, well, maybe you do want them because at least they came to the interview and tried.

And, you know, you could say, well, it's fake, but on the other hand, well, putting your best foot forward isn't just fake; it's also a step in the right direction. And so separating those out is extraordinarily difficult.

It's also difficult to separate it out from such things as extroversion and trait optimism. And yeah, it was a real morass. I know you did a lot of work on that for a long time, eh?

I don't know if you've heard of integrity tests, but yeah, it raised a real paradox because integrity tests are in the sense of the opposite rationale to design social desirability tests. They ask people who are being hired by big companies: "Have you stolen from an employer?" And a variety of other