The Guardian Does Not Know Anything About Psychopathy

Sigh… here we are again, for our voluntary torture session. Let’s get on with it.

In her consulting work, Ten Brinke was brought in by a financial advisory company to help assess which hedge fund managers it should trust with its money. “I was particularly looking for signs that they might be lying, which certainly the company would want to know before handing over millions of dollars.

Oh, let me help you with that. They are a financial advisory company, and you are looking at hedge fund managers. They’re lying. That wasn’t hard. Seriously, what did they pay you for? They wanted, what? Honest hedge fund managers. Ooo wait, I found one for you. Here is his picture:

If you don’t know, that is, The Rake. It is a creature from a creepy pasta, in other words, fictional, just like the honest hedge fund managers she was sent to find.

But we were also looking at the personality traits of these individuals.”

Why though? I can tell a money guy the minute I meet them. They have an air about them that says, money bro. They aren’t hard to find. You hire one, you know most of them. You don’t need someone to come in and look at their personalities. It sounds like this company just liked burning money while looking “responsible”. It also sounds like a joke.

Several stuck out. At one investor conference, Ten Brinke watched in fascination as one CEO demeaned colleagues and potential clients – which can be a sign of a dark personality.

Sigh… this need to label everyone. Let me help you, yet again. That’s called assholiest amungus. They are, unfortunately common, and not at all something to be labeled past their scientific name that I made us. She should know a thing or two about that practice.

“Everything had to revolve around him, all attention on him, no one else could get any praise.” He would constantly interrupt people. “What was so interesting is that the audience was actually really into that. His behaviour seemed to validate perceptions of what kind of personality would succeed in this role, even though our research suggests that these traits actually lead to decreased returns.”

Sooo assholiest amungus with the subcategory of d*ckbag. There, not hard. You don’t have to make things more complicated than they already are. Also, if this dude was such a problem, then the company should have handled that a long time ago. They didn’t, so that means they really didn’t see anything wrong with his behavior up until then.

It’s the same reason we think extreme confidence makes for good leaders – again, our willingness to conflate confidence with competence. A “strongman” type tends to think of themselves as a great leader, and they tell the rest of us that they are.

Buuut… you didn’t describe someone that has extreme confidence. You just described someone with the opposite of that. Is that what you think “extreme confidence” looks like? I already said you should have found a different job, but man, you really should have found a different job. That’s… just poor analysis skills right there. Really poor.

“We tend to believe them because we have a truth bias. Research suggests that we tend to just believe the things we are told, unless we’re given some very specific reason to be suspicious.”

Why is this so all over the place? Where is the cohesive article? Is this the interviewer, the interviewee, or the editor? Someone super sucks at their role here, and I am suspecting it might be all three. How did you go from the guy that was so weak in his own ego and he had to have everyone validate him every five seconds and felt the need to dress everyone down, then speak about how high confidence and the “strongman” effect makes people assume that those like that are more competent than they really are, and now we’re talking about what…? Exactly? Who are you referring to? What story is this article even trying to tell?

This is just bad writing. Good lord.

There is also what Ten Brinke describes as a “dark spiral”. At times of uncertainty and conflict, “we look for a ‘strong’ leader. Then, in position, they can create more chaos, more instability, which actually makes us more likely to vote, again, for someone with these traits. We can end up going round and round.”

LOL! Woman, just say you don’t like strong men. That’s all that statement was right there. Sorry to tell you, we do need strong men and we do not need weak ones. There is a saying.

Strong men make good times.

Good times make weak men.

Weak men make bad times.

This is a saying for a reason, and you are the type of person that makes for bad times. For those of us that like good times, men, “You should be a monster, an absolute monster, and then you should learn how to control it.” That’s how we get there.

In the next paragraph the reporter tries to get her to weigh in on Donald Trump and then other, unnamed politicians, and I am skipping it for a couple of reasons.

1. She has no idea about the man, or any other world leader, celebrity, or anyone else that she has not examined.

2. I do not allow politics on my writing. This goes for everyone. I see political anything, and it will be deleted. I have no time for that, and I am not interested in hearing anyone’s opinion about any of it. Keep it to yourself, or take it somewhere else. Those are your only options.

Recognising dark personalities can help us make more informed choices in many areas of life, says Ten Brinke.

You know what’s amazing? So far, she has said basically nothing on the subject. Her “examples”? A hedge fund manager that isn’t emotionally well regulated, and her opinions on people that she has never met. She talked about confidence, but not what that looks like, or why it’s a problem. She hasn’t just given a list of things that are troublesome, she has conflated everything into this notion of “dark territory” or whatever she called it, and basically is blah blah blahing away about nothing. What, exactly, are you supposed to recognize in your daily life? Where are her examples?

She won’t give them to you, because this is an ad for her book. A bad ad at that, as even if I was totally her target audience and believed her nonsense, she hasn’t told me anything that would make me think, sure, take my money. This interview is not going well for her endgame.

“It can be either a ‘detect and avoid’ or a ‘detect and manage’ type of situation, depending on the circumstances.” Research has found that job adverts that look for people who are “results-oriented” or who “think outside the box” attract more narcissists than adverts whose language highlights a desire for team players.

What research… precisely?

There is a link in the article, and it sends you to an abstract. The abstract literally starts with:

Prior research indicates that narcissistic executives engage in earnings management and other negative organizational behaviors, and many studies ponder why firms hire such individuals, especially into corporate accounting positions.

What the abstract fails to do, is point you to any of this “prior research”. Well done everyone…

The same could be said for dating profiles. How can someone avoid attracting a dark personality, or identify one from their profile? “They might use euphemisms to put a positive spin on some of these traits,” says Ten Brinke. “‘Thrill-seeking’ might indicate some impulsivity.” Power can be attractive, but “you might want to be discerning about whether that is achieved by earning people’s respect or by putting people in a fearful, submissive position”.

Who is putting “thrill seeking” in their dating profile? Also, “thrill seeking” is not “power”. How did one thing become the other, in the next sentence. Did she mean to say, if they are in a high position in a company, or a politician, that might be something to think about, as that kind of work might attract a certain kind of person? Otherwise, what “power” is she referring to? If that is what she meant, she should have said as much, but she didn’t. She just says things without context, or the context was cut out by the editor. I have no idea who is responsible for this mess, but they should be fired.

It’s important to remember that someone’s personality is a pattern, she says – “first impressions will only get you so far” – but there are broad behaviours to watch out for. “If someone interrupts often, but gets really angry if they are interrupted; if they ignore and push personal and professional boundaries.”

Why would anyone need this long ass article to tell them what should be common knowledge? Nothing about that person says anything about them being psychopathic. At all. None of those things are psychopathic in nature. This woman either has no idea what she is trying to convey, or she knows what she is trying to convey is so convoluted that it makes no sense, but she’s running with it anyway. I think that might be what she is doing. If I wanted to know for sure, I could pay her money and find out that not only can she not speak about her work coherently, but she also cannot write about it coherently, because nothing she has supposedly done for her work is coherent or remotely factual.

They can be charismatic, and charming. In romantic relationships, “love bombing” at the start is often a feature.

Firstly, “love bombing” is a trait of narcissistic personality disorder. Psychopaths do not do this. Secondly, it is called “Overvaluation”. As a person, with all the letters after your name, you should not be using internet slang. What’s next? Narcopath?

“I think that’s a good case for taking things relatively slowly. You need time and context to get a real sense of someone.”

If it seems too good to be true, it is. There. That wasn’t hard, was it? Just state the age old saying, and move on. You are not distributing new information from on high. This is a well known feature of relationships, and has been, forever.

People with dark personalities can be skilled at deception, but we tend to be quite bad at detecting this, says Ten Brinke.

Oh please. Everyone is skilled with deception. Honestly… this woman. Most of the people lying to you are neurotypical. That’s just the way it is.

Contrary to many people’s beliefs, you can’t reliably detect a lie by reading body language. “I think we really want it to work,” she says. “But we consistently find that those cues are pretty weak.”

True. Body language is pretty garbage. Nothing new there. Maybe people have yet to know this, but it’s true. You know why it’s garbage? Because no one has actually been able to find anything remotely past chance, 50/50 guesswork basically, that demonstrates deception is something that can be read in body language.

Instead, you need to pay attention to verbal cues, such as inconsistencies, but this is tiring and probably not something you want to be running in the background in every interaction. “But in some situations where I’m like, OK, this is a person who has a personality that is likely to manipulate, I might pay more attention to the words they’re saying. Ask good questions, ask follow-up questions.”

Could you just do that anyway without this lady blowing smoke up your behinds that the people lying to you are “dark personalities”? It will save you a lot of headaches. Just look for where people can’t keep their story straight, and don’t listen with your emotions, listen with your logic.

Those who lean towards narcissism can display “classic things such as showing off and talking about themselves a lot. They are always the expert on every topic of conversation.” Someone with psychopathic traits may be impulsive.

Lots of people are impulsive, and let me tell you, everyone wants to talk about themselves. I don’t want to talk about myself, pretty much ever, because I am an exceptionally private person. This means that everyone sees that as an opening to be heard, and they will talk endlessly about everything in their lives until I think I am going to know more about them than their kids or spouse. Maybe the showoff thing is a tell, because most of the time people are downloading their problems onto me, but the rest of it is generic nothingness.

“We also see emotional differences in the sense that they might be weirdly calm, showing no emotion.” Or their emotions might flare up but be short-lived, particularly in the case of anger.

You are never going to see a psychopath angry. Anger doesn’t last long enough for us to show, or direct any of our behavior. It is so quick it will pass, and you will never have a clue. Also, to piss off a psychopath, you have to be really pushing some buttons hard. So, quit that.

We can all experience moments of schadenfreude at others’ misfortune, but if someone routinely puts others down or seems to take pleasure in someone else’s failure or pain, “those can be important red flags.

I know you’re not talking about psychopathy here, because we don’t care about that nonsense. That would require us to care about other people. We don’t. If they succeed, it has nothing to do with us. If they fail, it has nothing to do with us. We will have the attitude of, whatever, to either event, and be perplexed as to why anyone shared that information with us. It’s irrelevant. Also, again, sadism and psychopathy do not go together.

You start to gain evidence for a lack of compassion or empathy for others.” Does Ten Brinke deploy this in her day-to-day life? It’s more that she clocks behaviour and files it away, she says.

No you don’t. You would have to be better at this than you are, and since you are so bad at it, whatever you are “clocking” is probably background noise, or you successfully finding one of the great assholiest amungus and slapping a label on him or her, thinking that you really did something.

You didn’t.

It’s unrealistic, she adds, to avoid everyone with dark personality traits. Instead, for those with lower levels of psychopathy and other negative traits, you can usually manage them.

Condescending much?

“We’re not changing someone’s personality, but we can approach our interactions with a harm-reduction mindset. One is having clear boundaries.” Having rules – and writing them down or saying them out loud – makes it harder for the person to break or test them, whether this is in a family or work setting.

You should just… you know… have boundaries with everyone. It’s good practice to not be a doormat. You do you, and all, but for everyone else, have boundaries, and stop being a people pleaser.

One study asked people showing various levels of psychopathy to distribute money between themselves and another person; those who were given no rules or instruction were more likely to keep the money. “Understand their motivations, and understand that it’s probably not the same as yours.”

Citation please.

Nope? Not going to give one, are you. Because that would allow the study, and its cohort, to be looked over and it likely doesn’t stand up to muster. Psychopaths are excellent at tit for tat. In other words:

Treat me well and I will treat you better.

Treat me poorly and I will treat you worse.

If there is a benefit for me to give the money, such as then I get more money, I will give it. But why would anyone just give the other person the money? Split it, maybe, but what would the point be to just hand it over?4

Rewards can be key. “I think we often forget about the power of rewarding people. Especially with these personalities, we think, ‘Oh, they’re a bad person – you should never reward them.’

I love how, again, she does not identify who she is speaking about. Also, that she has just decided that whoever it is, they are a “bad person”. Again, condescending much?

But if they do something good – if you see them acting fairly, kindly, being honest – provide some reward that they care about. We know that people, especially with psychopathic personalities, are very reward-motivated. Punishment really doesn’t hit them very hard. So you can help to shape their behaviour by rewarding when they do something good.”

Ohhhh, so you were talking about psychopaths. Well, rewards do work, if you’re someone that we would take that kind of behavior from. However, I am very suspicious of people that want to give me things. I do not have the ability to trust chemically, so if you try this move with me, and you aren’t in my inner circle, I am going to assume that you’re up to something. So, try that, and find out that it isn’t likely to pay you dividends as you might think.

In a work setting, if you are the manager of a dark personality, this reward may be a pay rise or a new title. But she would not recommend giving anyone displaying these traits a management position. “We know that people with these traits tend to bully their subordinates.”

This woman…

Psychopaths don’t bully people. We don’t care about them at all. We don’t want to deal with them, we don’t want to hang out with them, we don’t care if they do well, if their dog died, they had a car accident. We do not care. Sigh… you should not have a career where you are discussing something that you do not understand the first thing about.

When broaching a tricky conversation, finding something in common, however small, can get it off to a better start. “It can decrease the likelihood that they’ll respond aggressively whenever you give them some negative feedback.

Psychopaths are not violent or aggressive. Where are you getting this BS” from? Oh, right, your imagination. Well, going us back down here on earth. I am sure there are people that miss you. Negative feedback is one of two things to a psychopath.

1. A tool. It tells us what to change in order to get to where we want to go. We fail fast because we are not worried about doing so. We fail so we can move on to what works.

2. Not our problem. If we do not see anything of value in the feedback we ignore it, and the person giving it. Not our problem.

She would know this, if she had ever met an actual psychopath. Whoever these people are, they sound annoying, but they also sound very neurotypical to me, as all of these responses are quite emotional that she is trying to attribute to us.

This is particularly true for people with narcissistic traits, who tend to be very sensitive to any criticism, rejection or failure.

Stop.

Seriously. Stop. You can’t keep mixing these two things together. It is conflation, it is confusing for people, it is factually incorrect, and it is disinformation. It is also wildly unprofessional. If you want to discuss psychopathy, first please do learn about it before you come back to do so, but just discuss psychopathy. If you want to discuss narcissism, also learn about it, because I suspect that your academic endeavors on the subject are as mired in nonsense with this subject as they are with psychopathy, then do so. Stop using them in the same paragraph as though they are interchangeable. They aren’t, and they aren’t similar, either.

If negotiating, it can be useful to do it in writing, such as over email or text – in person, you’re more likely to be dazzled by the charm and confidence of a dark personality.

Oh the eye roll. Psychopaths want everything done through email as well, because that means you stay away from us, and we don’t have to deal with you. Also, because I have found that neurotypicals have a bad habit of saying one thing, then doing another, in order to get other people to do their jobs for them, I want everything in writing, and I can promise you, whatever it is, and whenever you said it, I can have it still. I keep everything.

It can be useful to frame requests in the form of a question, rather than a statement, says Ten Brinke. “For example, ‘What do you think of picking the kids up from school on Wednesday?’ instead of, ‘You need to pick the kids up.’ It’s just a little thing, but it can help to avoid shutting down the conversation before it even starts.”

What? Weren’t you talking about the workplace two seconds ago? Where did kids come from? Also, no, with a psychopath just say what you want done. This nonsensical emotional manipulation, and that is exactly what that BS is, does not work on us. When you say, “What do you think about X?” What you really mean is, I want X, but I also want you to think it was your idea so I don’t look like a selfish person. That does not fly with me. If you want something, ask. If not, my response is going to be:

“ I think you’re doing it Wednesday, and every other day until you can ask me like a grownup for what you want. You aren’t fifteen, stop trying to manipulate like a teenager. It will get you nowhere.”

Of course, if you are having to carefully manage these kinds of interactions with a partner, you may question if it’s a relationship you want to be in. Ten Brinke points out that the moment of leaving a potentially abusive relationship with someone with dark personality traits can be incredibly dangerous and you should seek support from specialist agencies.

If you think that was “careful management” you really don’t hear yourself, do you? I have no idea who that would work on, but it isn’t me. Also, psychopaths aren’t abusive. If you leave, whatever, go. We don’t care. With someone that actually is abusive, I have no idea how to handle that situation, so yes, involve professionals if you need to. However, if a psychopath came home and you moved out, all right, bye.

When I took the assessment Ten Brinke includes in her book, aimed at detecting low levels of dark traits, I was alarmed to find I scored higher than I’d like.

1. Don’t worry about it. That’s like scoring poorly on a Buzzfeed quiz. It means nothing. You still aren’t the sorting hat from Harry Potter, right? Her test reflects the quality of her work, and the quality of her work that she is showing in the article is trash, so it has no bearing on anything.

2. What a pathetic attempt to sell her book. The only reason that this is included is so people want to know how they stack up on the test as well, and will buy the book. That’s just transparently poor advertising.

If someone is worried they’re a psychopath, what should they do? That worry is a good sign, she says. The usual problem for people with psychopathy is that “it can be quite difficult to motivate them to want to change”.

If you are worried that you are a psychopath, you aren’t a psychopath. There. Fixed it for you. Good lord.

We can all turn our dark personality traits down, she says. Ten Brinke points to a study where people took “agreeableness challenges” over four months, such as showing gratitude to someone they interacted with during the day.

People need to stop being so agreeable. It has caused a lot of problems in the world.

“People who actively worked on these skills, to consider other people’s perspectives and to show compassion, reported lower dark traits at the end of that four-month period.”

Says the woman that labels psychopaths as “bad people” simply for the fact of existence. Your cognitive empathy is nonexistent, so you should not be telling others how to improve theirs. You have no idea.

It was self-reported, she says, “so I don’t know if people around them also felt the same way about these behavioural improvements, but research shows that our personalities are not chiselled in stone. They can shift.”

I don’t know if it works, but it works. Okay… right.

It may be wise to look at ourselves – the world does not need more people with psychopathic and narcissistic traits.

The world has the number of psychopaths that it is meant to as our population percentage has not changed over the thousands of years we have existed. If you want less people with NPD then teach parents how to not f*ck up their kids, as it comes from how they are raised. There may be some genetic components there, but most of it comes from how they are treated in childhood. So, you know… cut that nonsense out.

“I do think that recognising that we can all become a little bit less manipulative, a little bit more caring, and that all of these things will add up across people and across time, is a hopeful message.”

Holy lord woman, neurotypicals manipulate each other in every single interaction that they have. All interaction is to get your wants and needs met. Nothing more, nothing less. That is manipulation. You aren’t going to suddenly be less of that, you are going to be more as there is less and less human connection. The need for human connection isn’t going anywhere, but the access to it is fading significantly. That drives wild social behavior to get attention, and no, that isn’t from psychopaths. That is neurotypicals realizing on a subconscious level that they aren’t built for that kind of separation. Psychopaths, on the other hand, are.

The article is finally over, and I get to go eat food, so that is what I am going to do.