
The Dark Core of Personality (2018) - cscurmudgeon
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-dark-core-of-personality/
======
kstenerud
The wording of some of the questions is unfortunate.

"1\. It is hard to get ahead without cutting corners here and there."

This is actually (unfortunately) true. The powerful have the largest sway over
the rules, and therefore the rules (and more importantly their enforcement)
favour the powerful. You're left with the moral dilemma of being the nice guy
and potentially a doormat, or engaging in varying degrees of rule breaking in
order to protect your interests. Mind you, this can also be used as
justification by those who are not actually at a disadvantage.

"8\. I try to make sure others know about my successes."

This is a piece of advice that everyone would be well advised to follow. If
nobody knows of your success, you won't get very far. Or even worse, people
will only see your failures, because negative things tend to stick in the mind
much easier than positive things.

~~~
hliyan
I believe the wording is deliberate. Perhaps it's crafted to differentiate
between "justifying beliefs" associated with the D-factor and accepting that
there are people who get ahead by doing bad things _without_ taking that as a
justification to join them. I do believe that "people who cut corners make
life harder for everyone else", but I answered "strongly disagree" to 1.

Perhaps your answers to 1 and 8 just revealed a dark trait in you?

~~~
kqr
That is definitely the case at least for me -- I scored low in general, but
relatively high on moral disengagement, which I think that question is about.

It just blows my mind because I, like the person you're responding to,
couldn't even imagine there being a different way to view it until I started
thinking about why they put that question in there! ("It must be because with
a different personality, the answer is not an obvious agreement." I just
hadn't imagined someone might view the world like that. Love this type of
thing.)

------
sradman
2018 article and paper [1] suggesting that the _Dark Triad_ [2] of personality
traits, comprised of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, can be
generalized into a _D-factor_ similar to the _g-factor_ in intelligence.

From my perspective, the Dark Triad seems to be an obsession with zero-sum
interactions or possibly discounting positive-sum interactions (narcissism and
Machiavellianism?) while simultaneously miscalculating/misunderstanding the
cost of being socially ostracized in response (psychopathy?).

[1]
[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Morten_Moshagen/publica...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Morten_Moshagen/publication/326364629_The_Dark_Core_of_Personality/links/5b4b322e0f7e9b4637da7d66/The-
Dark-Core-of-Personality.pdf)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad)

~~~
specialist
Great links, thanks.

re zero-sum vs positive-sum (nonzero)

What is Larry Ellison's game playing style called? Where it's not enough to
win, but that others must also be crushed.

"negative-sum" somehow doesn't capture the obsessive, malignant part of
Ellison's strategy.

I dimly recall von Clausewitz advocated something like total war and
unconditional surrender. But my quick scan of his wiki entry doesn't help jar
any further details.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz)

Edit: Sorry for the updates. I'm struggling with how to phrase my question.

~~~
sradman
Winning a negative-sum game is a pyrrhic victory [1]. Charitably I'd call
Larry Ellison very competitive but the uncharitable description is cut-throat
(i.e. Machiavellian). Enterprise software sales is a naturally zero-sum game
and Ellison is a salesman as much as he is a technical/business strategist.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory)

------
mellosouls
One important thing that doesn't appear to be noted in the article is another
important reason that these unpleasant traits persist (in men) - they are
often attractive to women (perhaps because they bring social success?).

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886913012245)

~~~
klyrs
I've met 3 year-old boys and girls who display these traits. Why are you
focused on what women find attractive? Under that line of reasoning, if men
didn't find these traits attractive, (a) women wouldn't display these traits,
and/or (b) these traits wouldn't be common in male-dominated C-levels of
organizations around the world. On an evolutionary timescale, I hardly think
it's fair to characterize this as a result of women's sexual preferences, as
pregnancy/marriage following rape (a consequence of entitlement, callousness,
sadism, shortcutting, etc) was bracingly common until quite recently (not that
it isn't still happening) and abortion of such offspring is still nowhere near
100%.

As a thought experiment, I propose a dark corollary to Popper's paradox:
should we eradicate people who display these traits? Well, that's a catch-22;
the only people liable to agree with that are the very ones bound for the
chopping block.

~~~
mellosouls
_I 've met 3 year-old boys and girls who display these traits. Why are you
focused on what women find attractive?_

I'm not "focused" on what women find attractive; if you have a link to a study
that backs up your anecdote that attraction to dark triad attributes is evenly
distributed between the sexes, please post it.

------
roenxi
Looking at a relation between one human and another, I would argue that we can
classify it as either exploitative (they have resources, I could take them) or
creative (if I make sure they have the tools, maybe they'll make me a house).

In my little world it is hard to place someone on that spectrum without
implying some elements of Machiavellianism/Moral Disengagement/etc/etc or lack
thereof. I can't claim this result is obvious, but it is easy to rationalise.
It isn't so much people being inherently good or not, it just happens there is
a very fundamental choice to make about how to approach resource acquisition.

~~~
082349872349872
Compare Veblen, _Theory of the Leisure Class_ or Jacobs, _Systems of
Survival_.

Although the former pretty much makes the exploitative/industrial distinction
you have, the latter argues more subtly that the "guardian syndrome" can be
good (one _wants_ government regulators who are disciplined and punish
transgressors) and that the "commercial syndrome" can be good (axiomatic on
HN) but that organisations which combine the two (the mafia, policemen on the
take, "Cocaine Import Agency", etc.) are usually bad.

(for the recent apparent popularity of manichean politics in our world,
consider _1984_ 's emphasis on the explanatory power of sadism: "Unless he is
suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?"
vs. _Brave New World_ 's emphasis on the explanatory power of masochism: "But
I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want
freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.")

------
Kednicma
Psychometrics is fascinating because it might be obvious and clear bullshit,
but people are so insistent on classifying and measuring each other that they
don't care. The g-factor might not exist, and similarly this new D-factor
might not exist.

Honestly, I can't believe that I have to use phrasing like "might" and "might
not". The burden of proof for psychometrists is still on them to show that the
g-factor is not simply measuring socioeconomic and situational effects. Is
there perhaps some correlation between the D-factor and wealth?

This is quite important to the philosophy of law and order. Are people all
roughly equivalent in their capacity for crime, evil, and damage to society?
Or are some people especially dangerous from birth? Our society needs to
assume the former in order to have reasonable carriage of justice, so if it's
in fact the latter, then we're operating society in a very wrong way. This is
why it's so important for these claims to come with more evidence than just
statistical correlation.

Mostly I just want to see an end to psychiatrist-measured thoughtcrime.

------
playpause
“I honestly feel I'm just more deserving than others.”

Surely it’s common for people to avoid admitting to agreeing with statements
like this whether or not they really do, because they don’t want people to
think they’re an asshole.

Can with more knowledge of this field tell me how psychologists address this
kind of problem when designing diagnostic Q&A tests?

~~~
chadcmulligan
Well, apparently not, narcissists for example quite happily agree that they
are narcissists - any other way to be seems dumb to them:

[https://psychcentral.com/news/2014/08/06/it-takes-just-
one-q...](https://psychcentral.com/news/2014/08/06/it-takes-just-one-question-
to-identify-narcissism/73260.html)

~~~
playpause
I’m sure that phenomenon exists but I doubt it’s universal. It seems obvious
that many narcissists, in wanting to be loved, have learned to avoid making
statements that make a majority of people dislike them.

~~~
username90
Psychologists only looks at how you act and not how you feel. So if a
narcissist can suppress his narcissistic traits to get love then he isn't a
narcissist.

I don't really agree with that though, we call persons racists even though
they say that whites aren't the superior race etc, the same should apply to
narcisists.

~~~
grugagag
They only suppress it in the courting phase also known as love bombing. Once
they have their subjects invested they show their unmasked face. Narcissists
also suppres or wear a maks to the outside world and oftentimes they project
an image of dependable and likeable people. Think of policians and what they
say or the image they build to garner votes vis a vis of what they actially
do, their actions, which don’t correspond with their projected image.

------
082349872349872
I like to think of the cardinal virtues as providing opposite tensions,
keeping one in the mean.

So _fortitude_ gives us the courage to pursue the things we could do, but
_temperance_ gives us the decline in marginal utility to question when they
are things we should do.

Similarly, _prudence_ gives us the ability to discern actions that are to our
own advantage, but _justice_ gives us the ability to eschew using
externalities to others' disadvantage.

If a D-factor exists, would ancient greeks have diagnosed it as an excess of
prudence and deficit of justice?

~~~
krick
Personally I'm sure this article is an utter bullshit and doesn't deserve any
attention whatsoever, but, accidentally I think I can answer your last
question. At least if your definition of "ancient greeks" includes Homer,
reading Odyssey would leave no doubt that the correct definition for them
would be "an excess of prudence" which is, staggeringly, perceived as a very
noble trait.

------
arauhala
Isn't this the same as the inverted honesty/humility personality trait from
the HEXACO personality model?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honesty-
humility_factor_of_t...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honesty-
humility_factor_of_the_HEXACO_model_of_personality)

~~~
082349872349872
Looks similar to me, but the same group has published on HEXACO and
honesty/humility, so they may make a distinction.

[https://www.uni-ulm.de/en/in/psy-pfm/research/publications/](https://www.uni-
ulm.de/en/in/psy-pfm/research/publications/)

from researchgate:

> "In theory, D ... is distinct from the low pole of Agreeableness or Honesty-
> Humility ... in several defining features, especially the representation of
> sadistic and spiteful tendencies and the broad inclusion of justifying
> beliefs (see Moshagen et al., 2018). ..."

------
2gwghiu
g the statistical myth
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200624122604/https://bactra.or...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200624122604/https://bactra.org/weblog/523.html)

------
rmrfstar
Also known as a "rogue actor" in corporate newspeak.

Take this stuff seriously.

~~~
zozbot234
Rouge actors tend to be an issue in all large organizations. Because as an
organization gets larger, its middle and top levels are increasingly dominated
by zero-sum political games, as opposed to directly relevant outcomes. And if
you're a rouge actor, that's precisely the setting you're most comfortable in.

------
throwaway13337
An interesting angle here is on interpretation of one's self.

An individual? A family? A community? All humans?

Depending on how a person intrinsically feels here could change their measure
of altruistic behavior for an outside observer.

Maybe none is altruism but rather different interpretation of self.

------
TulliusCicero
Looking at the nine traits, one of these is not like the others:

> Egoism. The excessive concern with one's own pleasure or advantage at the
> expense of community well-being.

> Machiavellianism. Manipulativeness, callous affect and strategic-calculating
> orientation.

> Moral Disengagement. A generalized cognitive orientation to the world that
> differentiates individuals' thinking in a way that powerfully affects
> unethical behavior.

> Narcissism. An all-consuming motive for ego reinforcement.

> Psychological Entitlement. A stable and pervasive sense that one deserves
> more and is entitled to more than others.

> Psychopathy. Deficits in affect, callousness, self-control and impulsivity.

> Sadism. Intentionally inflicting physical, sexual or psychological pain or
> suffering on others in order to assert power and dominance or for pleasure
> and enjoyment.

> Self-Interest. The pursuit of gains in socially valued domains, including
> material goods, social status, recognition, academic or occupational
> achievement and happiness.

> Spitefulness. A preference that would harm another but that would also
> entail harm to oneself. This harm could be social, financial, physical or an
> inconvenience.

Eight seem to involve doing things at the expense of others, or feeling
(inherently) superior to others, but not 'self-interest'. Wonder why that one
was included.

~~~
throwanem
I would assume that "at the expense of others" is implicit in the article, but
not on the paper on which it's based. It's very easy to take popular science
reporting more seriously than the quality of the work really deserves.

------
codeulike
Linked from the article:

 _To take the self-assessment created by the researchers of the dark factor
study, go to:[http://qst.darkfactor.org](http://qst.darkfactor.org) ._

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685733)

------
0134340
>"There have been times when I was willing to suffer some small harm so that I
could punish someone else who deserved it"

Is this really a dark trait? I admit to thinking this in the past but now I've
learned to let things go and let someone else deal with it. I have sometimes
thought about this and wonder if this is the darker version. I guess
"correcting" someone is better but often these can be such obvious things that
you'd think people would know anyway.

~~~
082349872349872
My translation of "willing to suffer some small harm so that I could punish"
was "willing to play _negative_ sum games."

(chess is like war in that the declared winner is the player who has lost the
least.)

~~~
yyyk
Think of the common experiment when people are offered an unfair but still
beneficial exchange (they get $10 while the other side gets $1000), and still
refuse. Is refusing that (which nearly everyone does) a dark trait?

The typical behavioural article would have linked this to sociability, and
considered _not_ doing it leading to a worse result in the long run.

~~~
082349872349872
People accept the $10/$1000 situation all the time: it's often called "working
on commission". Maybe I need to refresh my game theory, but I wouldn't call
that a negative sum game, but a positive sum (+$1010) one, and refusing still
leaves everyone in the status quo (+$0/+$0).

My recollection of a negative sum game is that the overall outcome is
negative. For instance, paying $10 (to get access to the car park) to cause
$1000 worth of damage (slashing tyres).

(I'm having difficulty imagining someone spending $1000 to make someone else
worse off by $10, but can easily imagine a vindictive someone spending $1000
to make a much poorer someone else worse off by only $500.)

------
jariel
The paradox missing from this equation, is that without an incredibly degree
of self belief - nothing would ever get done. This self belief conflates with
all these ostensible D-traits.

Literally YC teaches the standard mantra of 'you have to do believe in
something when everyone else thinks it's dumb'.

You have to have a kind of outsized ego to reject the common assumption of the
world around you and to consistently throw your vision up against it.

Every great leader has to have a number of narcissist traits, there's simply
no avoiding it - otherwise, their vision would have been trounced long before
they become popular.

And FYI leaders that 'seem' humble are actually just curating the image of
being that. Their actions dictate humility, not their personal propaganda. You
can see this with 'empathetic' political leaders who play on people's
emotional sympathies, while at the same time, do some very Machiavellian
things.

It's a hard thing to do, to have an incredible degree of self belief, to
maintain one's own vision, but then to not let that cloud one's own ability to
be self aware, to recognise one's own faults, to not recgonize how one's
actions might hurt others - even actions that are possibly beneficial to
others.

An amazing case study is this 'WE Charity' in Canada.

I think there is truly a great deal of goodwill on the part of these guys, and
that they have 'done good'. At the same time, they've fallen into a trap of
making 'good work' highly superficial, and their own actions and defences have
been very ... self centred, egoist, glib lacking in awareness, arrogant etc. -
a lot of the D traits on display.

~~~
Kednicma
YC deliberately cultivates these "leadership" traits in order to ensure that
the abuses built into corporate hierarchies are perpetuated. It's all part of
the system.

In your example, YC deliberately advises conflating stubborness, or the
ability to resist peer pressure, with self-confidence. The idea is to
encourage a me-vs-the-world mindset.

"Every great leader", huh? This sounds like the sort of situation where if I
name anybody who's not obviously a narcissist, then you'll quibble that
they're not truly great or truly a leader. Certainly I'd agree that it's
common, but even just in the USA, there are examples like Eisenhower or Carter
where they manifested not just a modicum of humility, but genuine altruism and
empathy above and beyond the typical American sentiment. I will agree that
nobody gains ambit without ambition, but even a society with no leaders can
still be lead by somebody unready.

You also need to keep in mind that no leader leads without a following, and
leaders are never alone in silent rooms. The actions of a government or a
business are rarely due to a single person. No single man has ever carried out
a genocide on his own.

At some point, you'll need to confront the difference between business ethics
and ethical business: When do you choose not to do things, even when they're
both good for business and legal? And YC doesn't have answers for you there
other than to be extremely self-confident and take the Zapp Brannigan path.

~~~
jariel
No, YC is absolutely not trying to carry narcissistic behaviour into the
corporate world.

I'll be that on the whole, YC companies probably have better, more self aware
leaders.

That you can name 2 presidents of many with more legit humility than ego
actually makes my point for me: the rest are mostly egoists to a greater or
lesser degree.

Also - those leaders worked in the field of public service wherein the
ostensible motivation is inherently public oriented, it's a little easier
there to be 'clean' because the opportunity for fraud and graft doesn't really
present itself very often while wearing an Army uniform, for example.

------
m3kw9
Define an asshole: “ the basic tendency to maximize one's own utility at the
expense of others, accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications for
one's malevolent behaviors“

------
chadcmulligan
The next thing I'd like to see is - are people born or made this way? and can
they change?

~~~
Viliam1234
As a first approximation, people don't change. If they do, it is usually
because they must; because the situation changed in a way that makes their
previous behavior impossible.

People don't change because you ask them nicely to. They also don't change
just because the consequences of their behavior hurt other people. They might
change if the consequences hurt them.

~~~
jariel
People definitely change as they are children though, which is the point.

I believe that entitlement, narcissism, selfish behaviours are 'conveyed' just
as much as anything else.

I had a roommate in college, who would brag that his father, owner of several
cab badges, would beat the smack out of drivers he thought was ripping him
off. This is a perspective said roommate will probably carry on.

~~~
chadcmulligan
indeed, but if that same person wasn't raised comparatively wealthy would he
still be a jerk? I suspect yes - a counter example, many people are raised
wealthy but aren't narcissistic, and I know of people with narcissistic traits
that aren't raised particularly wealthy, and indeed are comparatively poor and
yet those traits come out. They have brothers and sisters that aren't
narcissistic and yet given the same environment etc they behave like so.

~~~
jariel
So you're getting at 'wealth<->narcissism' which I'm not sure is necessarily
correlated. I don't know.

I was getting at 'nature vs. nurture' \- and there is definitely a 'learned'
aspect to narcissism etc..

~~~
chadcmulligan
it is interesting - perhaps a sense of entitlement I was thinking - more
likely to be from wealth, but not necessarily.

~~~
jariel
Yes actually that's probably true.

But prisons are full of narcissistic personality disorder types as well.

Most wealthy people score very high on levels of conscientiousness - they
generally behave well, not recklessly.

But that includes doctors, etc. - not so much the bankers, executives and
people that can get into situations of real leverage and power.

It's

~~~
chadcmulligan
> Most wealthy people score very high on levels of conscientiousness

references?

------
YeGoblynQueenne
A gentle reminder that g is a measure of correlation without any causative
explanatory power (factor analysis aims to identify correlations between
observed and hypothesissed, hidden variables). The idea was subject to
criticsm, though not directly from inside the field of psychometrics itself
(which is usually a big red flag):

 _Other criticisms_

 _Perhaps the most famous critique of the construct of g is that of the
paleontologist and biologist Stephen Jay Gould, presented in his 1981 book The
Mismeasure of Man. He argued that psychometricians have fallaciously reified
the g factor as a physical thing in the brain, even though it is simply the
product of statistical calculations (i.e., factor analysis). He further noted
that it is possible to produce factor solutions of cognitive test data that do
not contain a g factor yet explain the same amount of information as solutions
that yield a g. According to Gould, there is no rationale for preferring one
factor solution to another, and factor analysis therefore does not lend
support to the existence of an entity like g. More generally, Gould criticized
the g theory for abstracting intelligence as a single entity and for ranking
people "in a single series of worthiness", arguing that such rankings are used
to justify the oppression of disadvantaged groups.[61][176]_

 _Many researchers have criticized Gould 's arguments. For example, they have
rejected the accusation of reification, maintaining that the use of extracted
factors such as g as potential causal variables whose reality can be supported
or rejected by further investigations constitutes a normal scientific practice
that in no way distinguishes psychometrics from other sciences. Critics have
also suggested that Gould did not understand the purpose of factor analysis,
and that he was ignorant of relevant methodological advances in the field.
While different factor solutions may be mathematically equivalent in their
ability to account for intercorrelations among tests, solutions that yield a g
factor are psychologically preferable for several reasons extrinsic to factor
analysis, including the phenomenon of the positive manifold, the fact that the
same g can emerge from quite different test batteries, the widespread
practical validity of g, and the linkage of g to many biological
variables.[61][62][177]_

 _John Horn and John McArdle have argued that the modern g theory, as espoused
by, for example, Arthur Jensen, is unfalsifiable, because the existence of a
common factor like g follows tautologically from positive correlations among
tests. They contrasted the modern hierarchical theory of g with Spearman 's
original two-factor theory which was readily falsifiable (and indeed was
falsified).[30]_

 _Joseph Graves Jr. and Amanda Johnson have argued that g "...is to the
psychometricians what Huygens' ether was to early physicists: a nonentity
taken as an article of faith instead of one in need of verification by real
data."[178] _

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)#Other...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_\(psychometrics\)#Other_criticisms)

Note in particular: " _solutions that yield a g factor are psychologically
preferable for several reasons extrinsic to factor analysis_ ".

