
The Dark Core of Personality - imartin2k
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-dark-core-of-personality/
======
vinceguidry
I don't really want to call this pseudoscience, but what it's missing is the
connection to psychiatry and neuroscience and to me falls into the nasty
tendency of bucket thinking. Just because traits are observable and nameable
doesn't mean they're actually valid. You're just handing amateurs dumb
"diagnostic" tools that are just going to harm interpersonal relationships
rather than make them better.

If I observe you as having narcissistic traits, and you observe yourself as
having narcissistic traits, and you form an identity around being a
narcissist, nothing meaningful has been done. You still have no useful tools
with which to make your life better.

The psychological world needs a lot less of this, because handing people
convenient identities without a corresponding plan of action for improving
yourself that actually _works_ , is contributing to rather than alleviating
the problem.

I don't think half of the people who think they're on the autism spectrum are
anywhere close to it. I don't think half of the people described as
narcissistic or psychopathic deserve the term. I do think that most people
have emotional difficulties, and quantifying and providing resources for
improving emotional health and depth should be the primary focus of psychology
at the moment.

I like the focus on loneliness, I hate the focus on disorders.

~~~
derefr
> The psychological world needs a lot less of this, because handing people
> convenient identities without a corresponding plan of action for improving
> yourself that actually works, is contributing to rather than alleviating the
> problem.

Why? Psychology is not medicine. Psychology is the study of the mind. (Maybe
you're thinking of psychiatry?)

We—psychologists—study the mind because we want to know how it works. It's
basic research, like physicists studying particle collisions, or astronomers
studying the cosmic microwave background. We're doing it in order to
understand. We're approaching the same problems neurologists work on (how does
the brain do this? why does the brain do that?), but from a different
abstraction layer, using more of a social-sciences toolset.

This research, in particular, is interesting because it unifies several
previous, more limited hypotheses about how and why the human brain ends up in
a particular persistent state. It provides a rubric that allows _researchers_
(not doctors; not laymen) to craft tools that find this state, and to make
predictions based off of the presence of this state.

Researchers in possession of those tools can then use them to do other things.
Like, say, medicine. But the basic research comes first.

~~~
ianai
The concept of a measure implies a way exists to bin people. So after
measurement we may safely confine a person to a bin and never reconsider their
lot in life again. Our culture is full of that mindset, and it’s unethical
when applied to autonomous beings. People are ends in themselves - only to be
defined by that person.

More simply, I personally believe I need a reason to do something mean, but I
don’t need a reason to do something nice. Is binning people mean or nice? It’s
definitely mean. I suggest corrections but also the possibility of redemption
for offenders.

~~~
derefr
Is “epileptic” a bin?

Separately: is life better or worse for epileptics since the creation of the
concept of epilepsy-as-neurological-disorder?

Consider what reifing this concept has allowed medical science to do, that it
was not so empowered to do under previous explanations for the same
behavioural phenomena.

When you cleave concept-space the right way, you create a node in your schema
that corresponds to something you can actually affect, through e.g.
therapeutic or pharmacological interventions.

A “bin” that stays such—just something to label people with, is a wrong cut.
It is a concept that does not expose something “raw” and concrete enough to
actually touch.

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mindgam3
The general idea of a Dark Score is not a bad concept; you can think of
psychopathy as a spectrum from "a bit of an asshole" to "serial killer". But
as someone who takes psychology seriously, and who grew up in a family
environment rife with psychopathic behavior, I have some problems with this
article.

First, echoing dboreham's comment below, the problem with a self-reported Dark
Score is that no real psychopath is going to rate themselves accurately. You
just don't get very far on the spectrum if you have the ability to truly
introspect and self-reflect. In my experience dealing with psychopathic
individuals (I'm talking behavior leading to lawsuits, major crimes, and
death), I can trace this lack of self-awareness to severe childhood
trauma/abuse causing a sort of split or divided self. The true psychopath is a
stranger to themselves.

Second, I think that creating a simple online self-report quiz trivializes
some very real and very dangerous aspects of personality. I think it does a
disservice to the field of serious forensic psychology. It is possible to
study the type of minds of that cause tremendous suffering for others in a
rigorous scientific way. But fun online quizzes aren't the way.

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rossdavidh
So, as I understand it, they're saying that someone who is (for example) a
psychopath, is a lot more likely (than most people) to be narcissistic,
someone who is sadistic is a lot more likely to be self-interested, and so on.
This is perhaps a good thing to go out and check, but mostly this does not
seem surprising to me; it would have been news if it turned out not to work
like that.

~~~
denzil_correa
> but mostly this does not seem surprising to me

I know what you're tying to say but I'd just like to put it out there that
conclusions from scientific studies do not have to be surprising. Scientific
exploration is to find out the truth - sometimes it is "common sense" and
sometimes it is surprising.

~~~
rossdavidh
Absolutely. And the underlying paper is entirely justified. The Scientific
American article about the paper, is I believe trying to turn this into big
news. But I agree with your point.

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jl2718
#9 is really interesting, and apparently the most correlated with all forms of
malevolence. Are we just kidding ourselves when we do things like take
political action, or even punish criminals? Is it really just feeding our need
for hate and malevolence? Is hatred necessary? If it’s all based on self-
justification, how do we know when it is appropriate?

I think this is the metaphor with lady justice. She is blind but very exact.
She does not interpret, she executes. She has no empathy nor malevolence.
Because we know that those are the seeds of our delusion.

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aasasd
Noob here, and only read the article. It sounds strange since afaik some of
the mentioned manifestations are full-blown disorders in the physiology, or at
least work like that―namely psychopathy. Now, there would be no surprise if
the conclusion was "you need to have less empathy if you gonna be evil," but
apparently the scores don't depend on any single one of the manifestations.

Also weird for a research paper like this one to have its own site that looks
like a startup landing page.

~~~
foozed
Not sure what you mean by "research paper", but scientifamerican is "just" a
magazine.

"""Scientific American, the longest continuously published magazine in the
U.S., has been bringing its readers unique insights about developments in
science and technology f or more than 170 years.""" \- from the about page
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/page/about-scientific-
ame...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/page/about-scientific-american/)

~~~
aasasd
There's a separate site linked in the article:
[http://www.darkfactor.org/](http://www.darkfactor.org/)

~~~
foozed
ah ok, wow you're right that does look like a startup landing page. Instantly
makes me lose trust in it tbh

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8bitsrule
People have been reflecting on their own natures, and the natures of others,
for thousands of years. Some of those reflections grew into systematic
traditions leading to real understanding.

Apart from their scientific-ness, finding one of these traditions can be
helpful in sorting out self. E.g. in Jung's psychology, we all have a shadow
('dark core'). But beyond that is a greater Self. E.g. in Buddhism, we learn
that desire is a primary cause of suffering ... But we can grow, through self-
mastery, beyond our suffering. And share. There are more examples.

Yes, these old systems pre-date science, but several are firmly grounded in
centuries (or more) of shared human experience. Finding one of these
traditions that 'talks to you' (while avoiding schemes) can be very helpful -
in a pragmatic sense. All are part of what Huxley called the 'Perennial
Philosophy'.

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beautifulfreak
This reminds me of the Parallax View, the 1974 Warren Beatty movie, in which
the evil Parallax Corporation recruited psychopaths it identified with a
standardized test, then put them to work doing evil things. The story proposed
that those tests were hard to fool, because the questions were intricately
cross referenced (so Beatty didn't even try, he just had a real psychopath
fill in the answers) and that the traits sought by Parallax were not ordinary,
but were complex and rare. Contrast that with tests to identify the D-Factor.
They'd be easy to fool, if one knows they're looking for self exaltation. And
D-Factor traits are not complex or rare, they're present in everyone to a
degree.

I just don't see why the notion of a D-Factor would surprise anyone, or why
this study is regarded as "big news."

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mooneater
I really want to know, to what extent the D score can change, and what factors
can change it.

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User23
It’s more or less pointless to worry about physical or neurological mechanisms
in this context. Psychology isn’t really a science, but done rigorously it is
a legitimate phenomenology. For practical purposes it doesn’t matter what
causes g or d to have the value that it does, only that various correlated
behavior patterns are observable.

For example the NFL and US military both successfully use tests of g to select
more capable recruits.

Unfortunately I don’t believe any test of d will be useful, except maybe in
very low g high d individuals. This is because there is usually no incentive
to score low on a g test, but there is on a d test.

~~~
denzil_correa
> Psychology isn’t really a science

Why not?

~~~
brohee
Reproducibility crisis.

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splitdisk
I've tackled this issue from a bunch of different angles, and have never come
to any comfortable conclusion. But one can assume that, there is a semi-random
distribution of these traits based on genes and inheritance. So these people
are going to keep cropping up, and maybe even more of them. Given that there's
no way to stop people with certain personality traits from being born, what to
do with them? Unless we're making exceptions, these people also have human
rights as well.

~~~
ianai
Once you know someone will hurt you to get ahead - avoid them and avoid being
the throat they need to step on. Sometimes you can’t help it. The best you can
do then is not leave openings and have some solid backup plans.

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dre85
Coming to a Facebook quiz near you! Discover your D-factor! Are you darker
than your (also discoverable) celebrity alter - ego?

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mikert5671
This is obvious, most personality traits are normally distributed and
biologically driven

~~~
dang
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
jl2718
Just want to call myself out on this one. Thanks for the reminder to be
better.

