Narcissism, Psychopathy, and Sadism: The Dark Side of Personality with Dr. Del Paulhus

Dan is joined by Dr. Del Paulhus, Professor Emeritus and personality researcher at the University of British Columbia.

Dig into the dark side and complexities of dark personalities, including the dark triad (Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism), and the addition of everyday sadism. Dan and Dr. Paulhus discuss the origins of these constructs, their overlapping traits, and the implications of callousness. Dr. Paulhus's work explores the role of impulsivity in psychopathy, the intersection of dark traits in politics, and the significance of separating these constructs for better understanding. 

Special Guest: Dr. Del Paulhus

Additional appearances & resources:
The Cram Podcast

The Jordan Peterson Podcast

Keynote presentation @ the 2015 International Society for the Study of Individual Differences

Paulhus, D. L., Gupta, R., & Jones, D. N. (2021). Dark or disturbed?: Predicting aggression from the Dark Tetrad and schizotypy. Aggressive Behavior, 47(6), 635-645.

Paulhus, D. L. (2014).  Toward a taxonomy of dark personalities.  Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23, 421-426.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Overview
• 1:12 Origins of Dark Personality Research
• 3:13 The Dark Triad Explained
• 5:04 Callousness as a Core Trait
• 12:49 Psychopathy and Its Social Consequences
• 15:45 Machiavellianism and Real-World Examples
• 17:45 Narcissism in Leadership and Society
• 20:21 Prosocial Machiavellianism
• 23:04 Everyday Sadism
• 26:33 Internet Trolls and Sadistic Behavior
• 32:38 The Debate on the Dark Factor (D-Factor)
• 40:06 Validating Traits Through Lab Studies

Transcript

0:00

[Music] Broadcasting from the most beautiful city in the world, I'm your host, Dr. Dan Cox, a professor of counseling psychology at the University of British Columbia. Welcome to psychotherapy and applied psychology, where we dive deep with the world's leading applied psychology researchers to uncover some practical insights, pull back the curtain, and hopefully have some fun along the way. If you find the show interesting and be much appreciated if you shared it with someone you know who might enjoy it too. It's a great way to spread the word and keep the conversation going. Today I couldn't be more excited to welcome the world's authority on the dark side of personality. In this episode we do a deep dive into the four dark personality traits, Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy, and Sadism. Diagnostically, we don't consider the different aspects of these traits and instead put them all under the labels of narcissism or anti-social personality disorder. But having this conversation helped me understand the nuance of these dark traits and how they may differentially represent themselves diagnostically and in real life. This episode begins with my guest talking about how we got into studying the dark side of personality. So without further ado, it is my pleasure to welcome my very special guest, Dr. Dell Paulus. While it all comes from one's advisor in grad school, they really set you up with an agenda for grad school and my advisors were Richard Christy who invented the term Machiavellianism as a personality variable. And I thought that was very clever. You'd just taken excerpts out of old writings and asked people whether they agreed with them or not. And my other advisor was Harold Sakai, who was into response styles and self-enhanced mental-social desirability. So I followed both of their paths and so my work on dark personalities. The third of the dark personalities came along because I worked at UBC with Robert Herr, and may have heard that name, he's kind of the emperor of the study of psychopathy. And we had lots of good conversations. And so those three topics started to merge for me. And eventually I, along with Kevin Williams, my grad student, near early 2000s. We concluded that people need to be warned that those three topics sound different. But when measured, they overlaps so much that, if you choose one of them to do your research on, you're actually getting a package. You're getting maculaeanism, you're getting psychopathy, and you're getting narcissism all at the same time. So very careful. It's very important that you be careful about controlling for the others. So I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think that because I really want to get into this, but could you give just a broad overview? And I don't know what would make more sense, right? Because first you start out with these three traits and the dark tetrad, then I want to these four, I'm sorry, the dark triad, and then it expanded to the four, the dark tetrad. So I don't know if it makes sense to explain these three now. And then later, get into everyday satism or just do them all now, whatever you think. Yeah, let's do the everyday satism a little later. So the first three, very brief descriptions. Narcissism is pretty clear, egotistical self-interest. Psychopathy is impulse of thrill seeking, and maculaeanism is strategic manipulation. So you've got somewhat nefarious characters, all of which we concluded shares a certain callous view of other people. They don't seem to have the empathy that most people have. And it plays out in three different ways depending on other personality aspects. So yeah, we did a lot of research just on those three under the name dark triad. And that was really picked up by a lot of people. Thousands of references and a lot of research still going on. And I'm actually going to Vienna this summer. A lot of the research is going on in Europe now. They're really flourishing there in terms of measurement. The Germans were always good at measurement. And so I'll be very interested in seeing how that wave of research, which came out of our laboratory, is being taken up over there and see who's for it and who's against it. So you have these three constructs. And like you said, the thing that the the trait that exists in all three is this construct of callousness. And that is a lack of empathy. And so in reading about this, one of the things I was trying to do is think about like, okay, if I were to if we were to create an item that actually measured callousness that I'm curious what your thoughts are. So I came up with the item. I don't consider how my behaviors impact others. How's that? Yeah, although that may be a little insightful. It's sometimes better not to give items that can be interpreted in a egotistical way. So I might refine that item a little bit, but it gets at the essence of it. How would you refine it? What was it again? So I don't consider how my behaviors impact others. Well, for for one thing, I might put the word I don't care rather than what did you say? Consider. Consider is maybe a little too generous for the callous folks. They don't seem to mind answering even extreme items about other people being idiots and fools and doesn't really matter what happens to them. But comes slightly different angles. We'll get you to empathy. There's a lot of work on empathy per se done by Frick and others. So many psychologists realize that that's the essence of the dark side. Right. I guess what one of the things I was thinking about with with callousness or with a lack of empathy, I generally think about empathy is sort of my ability to have a sense of how other people are feeling. I mean, broadly speaking. And so there are people who aren't who lack that capacity, but they still don't necessarily, but they still care about other people. So like you can think about I always joke with sort of in training, students are going on to be therapists is sort of say like the world needs engineers to. That there are that it's okay that there are people who lack that innate sense of feeling what other people feel. But that doesn't mean that those engineers don't care about other people. Right. So it's more than just in my understanding of calluses is not just being able to not being able to feel what other people feel, but it's also just not caring how they feel. Which I guess is exactly the change that you made to my item. Yeah. The I don't know if you know the work by Paul Bloom, which has really taken the opposite side to the the glorification of empathy to some extent because empathy is an emotional reaction. It's often irrational and a little off the mark in terms of doing what's right in a particular situation. Classic example is you don't put the you don't put that the oxygen mask on your child when the plane is going down. You help yourself first because you know then you can help the child better if you have that mask on yourself first. Even though your emotional reaction would be, oh, I've got to help my child obviously first. It turns out to be irrational. So it gets to be like prioritizing how prioritizing others and the example that you gave is prioritizing others above above yourself. Right. And like in that example, which is at first specific purpose, which is sometimes when you do that, you actually hurt both parties. Right. So that sort of irrationality or you know that that doesn't work. That in fact, if you do prioritize others even above yourself, you first in that situation, you need to take care of yourself in order to take care of others. Yeah. There is a distinction between cognitive empathy. Right. A little more I'll let from from a rational point of view, analyzing what's going on with a person as opposed to feeling the gut feeling that you get when you see someone in distress. But that that homeless person trying to get into the front door of your apartment building, your emotions tell you one thing. But your rationality should tell you something else. So in reading your work, one of the one of the things that I sort of one of my takeaways was it seems like psychopathy, which is the word that we use for, you know, to describe the trait of a psychopath. That psychopathy, psychopathy seemed to be the most problematic. Would you agree with that? Yes, it seems to have the most serious repercussions, at least in the short run. You've got Machiavelle and sometimes can manipulate thousands and thousands of people by the way they strategize and you try to think of the name of the stockbroker who manipulated so many people. Bernie made off. That's it. Yeah, Bernie made off, who even though he was the multimillionaire, seemed to want to garner more and more money. And at the same time, people loved him. He was the most lovable person in the office building. And he had a way of dealing with people to get them on his side such that he could manipulate them and squeeze more money out of them and everybody else who was in his business. So I've forgotten where I was going with that. But uh, oh, so I made the comment that psychopathy is the most socially problematic. Yeah, but the kind of offenses that psychopass commit are immediate and uh, serious, such a way that they lead to physical violence. So the criminals are more likely to be psychopathic because they don't seem to care about the repercussions of their actions. They may have the same kinds of urges that most people do, but they just can't control them, they grab and run. And that can get them into trouble, but somehow their impulsivity is out of control and they can't stop doing what they're doing. So they're mostly in prison at the extreme end, maybe not when they're college students, but ultimately they're going to end up in conflict with the law or at least with the clinical authorities, somehow they're going to get themselves into trouble. And the narcissist, uh, well, narcissist can be pretty successful in their own way. Like Donald Trump, for example, and other folks who show some kind of leadership because they exude confidence and they don't let other people stand in their way. They just charge ahead and sometimes like Steve Jobs changed culture forever. And then he was fired by his own people because he was so obnoxious. And so he's perfect example of where you have the high agency and poor communion qualities in the same person. And uh, sometimes having low communion helps you get away with runaway agency. And so he had the perfect combination, long of genius, of course, to to affect society in in more or less positive ways. So with I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah. I just wanted to finish up that pop. And so then yeah, psychopathy seems to be the most socially dangerous because there's no there's no breaks on the impulses of a psychopath. Whereas the other two have certain breaks on them. Can you can you say more about that the breaks? Well, just controlling your impulsivity. That is again, we all have urgency, ergens and goals and life. And the question is how do you qualify them to not impede on the the epiphany that you have to have to get along in life? So, you know, I'm preparing for this. One of the kind of neat things about preparing to talk to you about this type of work is you're just constantly thinking of examples. Right. In real life and in fiction. And so one of the examples that I thought of when I was reading about psychopathy was the I don't know if you ever saw the the show Dexter. Yeah. Okay, so I just saw a few episodes of it. But sort of the premise is there's this. So this is how I would have framed it before, but I'm not sure now. So I would have framed it as there's this psychopath. But he was sort of taught not to do bad. So even though he's this murdering guy, he only murders murders is kind of the idea. In order to get his get the pleasure that he so wants to get, he's channeling it in a questionably pro social way. But then in reading this work where impulsivity is so foundational to psychopathy, then I say, well, then that that doesn't fit with him because he was you know, very patient and structured and organized in his, yeah, in enacting these desires. Yeah, I watched a few of those episodes too. It just struck me that there's no such person that those two tendencies cannot be contained within the same human being. But we are my my group and I are working with something that we think is realistic and that is the notion of pro social macchiabellanism and that is to get good things done in society, you very often have to cut corners. And so the question is how much of a corner are you willing to cut to for the greater good in your opinion? Arguably terrorists are an example of that. They truly believe in abortion is bad or that capitalism is bad. Whatever their strong belief is, they think that any any anti social strategy is allowed for the greater good. And we're trying to collect them waiting for a data set to come in on that because I really think that politicians that kind of notion is essential to being a successful politician, you can't really be a totally nice guy and expect to get elected. You need to ignore this and cut this and overall make sure that your your sacred value is the most important thing. So sad to say that it's hard hard to distinguish at one level if one truly believes in the value why you're not going 100% of your time and ignoring all other considerations and focus on that because otherwise chances are you won't achieve your goal unless you ignore certain things and do your best in case of politicians to get elected. So then you can make it happen the way you want it to happen. So that's speaking, I'm sorry, sorry for the long aside there. No, so that's speaking to in some ways the callousness that we would that is common politicians like that that's what you're saying that the the corners that are cutting the potential even unintended consequences in order to pursue to be single-minded in pursuit of a goal that callousness is in fact very helpful for that because if you you know can't fulfill whatever obligation that you said that you would or you can't if you're not concerned so much about others then it does allow you to be sink more single-minded in pursuit of your goal. Right not to mention high activity level if you're the perfect human being sitting on your couch and complaining about people on television then you're not going to change society for the better you have to be energetic and and callous and single-minded to make the the good things happen good in your own point of view. So that's an interesting topic because it in a way it cuts across our assumptions that the perfectly good person is the one that is going to go down in history as as benefiting all. Right so so would it be reasonable to say that most successful politicians have elevations in both narcissism and Machiavellianism? Yeah yeah the narcissism helps certainly you have to have to really believe in yourself you have to believe that you have something to say that's more important than what others have to say and you need the high energy level that narcissists do seem to have and the ability to ignore peccadillos or minor minor issues in your in your perspective that get in the way of achieving greater good. So would it make sense now to bring in sadism or everyday sadism? Yeah sure yeah in a way that's that's the newest contribution to the dark side of personality. The first three of course were well-known personality variables that Kevin Williams and I just pointed out they overlap so much that you know know what you're studying and when we looked at the literature's people do tend to focus on their own pet personality variable and through the process of the spread of a construct construct creek we call it it tend to get wider and wider and what you're studying till you're overlapping with the other two of the dark tried but with everyday sadism it was more personal experiences that led me to to move in that direction several other people around the world too were thinking the same thoughts but I pushed it faster and farther than others did and that the personal experiences were things like seeing how much people enjoyed watching others get hurt you go to a hockey game hey Canada's favorite sport people cheer for the goals but it's nothing like they cheer for the fights. Fight seemed to be what draws them in and the announcers go along with them they play up the the fights as much as the goals and so even the referees say you want to fight go ahead we'll save a little bit of time and we'll get the crowd all excited so it's become a normal part of professional hockey and kind of ignoring the fact that every young man and a lot of young women seek to follow in their footsteps there's scoring goals and they're punching people in the face and that's what I want to do so one example the the other example that comes to mind is keeping in mind what young people what young men mostly like to see on their video games video games some young people spend the whole day in video games that's that's the most exciting positive part of their life so I remember going to the arcade around the 2010 maybe it was the arcade at UBC and it used to be that all the games were popular but after one came along everybody was at watching the one game so there were about 50 people gathered around watching this one video game the others now people didn't care about and the game was called Mortal Kombat and it was the first one that showed heads being torn off and blood spurting across the room and it appears that that's what pleasure the audience more than what other things that video games can bring you so I began to see other things that people enjoyed movies films video games sports and even in high school when people like to do at recess they like other people to fight so they can film it so it struck me that it's kind of being ignored and the notion of sadism was associated so much with sexuality that with a marquee decide etc that sure there's a sexual sadism but there's also a non-sexual sadism that used to be part of the DSM actually but they took it out for political reasons now it gets worked into psychopathy and other kinds of disorders but it struck me that it's now so common in part of daily life that's where studying on its own and one of the places that you've expanded this work as well as in the context of social media yeah that's right trolls just want to have fun as a title of one of our papers because we were wondering why no matter what the topic gardening or Justin Bieber fan club whatever it takes about 20 comments until you get nasty nests coming into it and people being so hostile that you're wondering well where did that come from and why is it necessary with those topics that have nothing to do with violence so yeah trolls internet trolls seem to be the internet version of sadists because when we ask them why are you doing that most common answer when well it's fun to do it we like to see we happy people messed up and we can really disorder their ordered existence by complaining about things that some people enjoy and messing it all up for them so yeah obviously the internet is a big part of the youthful experiences days and it's too bad that it's led to more sadistic activity than before the internet was around what could you do before the internet you could write what was the called a poison pen letter you can send a letter to the editor and may read it but they certainly won't publish it if it's really nasty so it's pretty hard to exhibit your your nastiness in the olden days before 1990 I was there I don't think you were I was I well you know I was a kid but I was so before the internet people I think enjoyed life a little bit more they and nastiness was not as easy to exhibit so when we think about sadism sadism it is getting enjoyment out of other people being hurt right and one of the things that differentiates sadism from psychopathy is the or there are few but I'm one of the things that sort of because I think that before I read more of your work and sort of dug into this I would have attributed some of those sadistic behaviors to psychopathy you know I would have said oh the people who posted this online you know psychopathic but that that you know one of the differences is that so the sadists aren't impulsive they don't have elevated impulsivity they're not yeah they're they're you know I get yeah actually could you could you help tease that apart just a little bit the difference between psychopaths and sadists yeah I think you've got it there that sadist want to wallow in the suffering of others it's it brings them some kind of pleasure that psychopaths just don't care they're after things and sure people get hurt but whatever but I got my money I got my sex whatever I was after and it was over pretty quickly but sadist will put in a lot of work and we showed in a couple of papers that they will in if we insist that they engage in a really boring task for a while so that they can inflict suffering on others they do it so it means a lot for them to have the opportunity to hurt people and so yeah more and more opportunities on the internet now but yeah so that debate is continuing because a lot of people think a lot of people think all the dark personalities are all psychopathy to some extent a semantic issue but you know some people like to separate what's that old phrase some people like to call things apart other people like to collapse them together and I guess we are on the the calling part I forget the word I'm looking for now but there is an optimal level I think because why don't you keep on separating them into some components and get more and more refined well at some point they're not as useful because they're so narrow and so we've had debates with the people who think we're not separating things enough other people think that we're separating them too much and so we have lots of people trying to show that we're on the wrong path because we're at the wrong level the people who think it's all psychopathy another people think you have to take each of your four components and chisel them away and do a whole bunch of sub components but we argue that the optimal level the gold elox level if you will although that doesn't seem to apply to dark personalities that there's an optimal level of analysis when you're analyzing things and it's been optimal because people have recognized those four kinds of dark personalities forever really in writing you go all the way back to Dr. Jekyll once you're hired and you see the same kind of separation of different kinds of nasty personalities and psychopathy has been around narcissism has been around and acuvalonism really didn't start until Richard Christie my advisor really put it on the map around 1970 and so I picked it up in the 80s and I've run with it ever since so to I have questions on both sides of this in terms of the the higher level and the the lower level the one of the areas that has sort of I think that has less been led by your team and more by others drawing inspiration from your work is the so-called de-factor you can talk about that a little bit yeah sure the de-factor well if you do factor analyses or any kind of multivariate analyses you know that if you ask sbss for one factor it will give you one factor so no matter what you're exploring it depends on how many factors you want to see and if you look at the dark side of personality and ask for one factor boom you'll get it but is it useful I don't think it's particularly useful because when you say well there's good people and there's bad people there's no psychologist who would agree with that psychologist believe that there's several days there's gray areas there's combinations of good and bad and and uh rather than saying well all of humanity can be scored at one place on the good to bad dimension is just too simplistic and that's what they're trying to say with the the dark factor so they have to be right in that if you ask for one factor you're going to get one factor and it's going to include among all the items the different components that we are emphasizing so it's I can't really complain about it can't really spend too much time arguing with it but yeah that's what they've done and I think I'll be able to chat with those people in Europe because they're mostly Germans so just to summarize that so they're taking all of for example they would take all of the items from these four factors that you have and then they're looking for the one characteristic that encapsulates all of those items all four of those factors that single latent variable that single um darkness I don't know and then so rather than have these four factors they have do they do they just call it a darkness factor or a darkness trait yeah the de facto okay and so they're just so they're sort of extracting out of that and they're just saying like just this general tendency towards darkness is what they're saying yeah well it would have been nice if when they looked at their one factor that it was clear that it was measuring one construct but really it's measuring all of them and you can see they've got some pretty long scales and you especially if you look at the longer ones all of the four kinds of dark personalities are all represented there so to me they didn't really clarify that there was a single thing going on now we claimed that psychologically it was callousness was the primary driver that was in common to the dark tetra so at least that's an understandable psychological variable I don't think the de facto is an understandable factor it's a psychometric necessity I guess that's what I was one of the questions I had is the dark factor the de facto so you're saying that's not just callousness well uh callousness may show up on that factor but so does psychop of the items so to say to the items all of the four tetrad are represented in that if it if it if it did happen that hey all the side issues go away and the main factor is all empathy items or callousness items then that would have clarified things along but that's not what happened instead it's a scattering of all four and one of the things and so this is I apologize to the listeners this might get nerdy for the next three minutes so if you just want to skip ahead that's fine one of the papers of yours that I read where you did you were taking all of the items and I think it was was with all four uh four traits you were looking at the what we call the different factor structure so how do these how do these things play out how's the best way to model them and the model again please correct your if I'm wrong the model that sort of was the best was the one where you had these four distinct but correlated factors these four distinct but correlated traits and you also looked at a model that had the four traits but then also model that but that included this D factor as well and that one didn't fit as well so in other words that including the dark factor in the model was not as good of an explanation of the of the data of of how people reported these things as simply having say simply as having the four traits and just having them correlated am I getting that correct yes although we didn't place too much emphasis on those model differences since they're the differences are captured by rather esoteric indexes that have been developed by psychometricians but one thing is pretty clear and that is when our people are trying to measure these dark traits they want to have an understandable label on them something that they can talk about and make predictions about and so this general factor that you can get from a bifactor model is not particularly useful for the person who wants to explore dark traits in the workplace or among the military or whatever you think these should be explored because you can't really get purchased on what that common factor means and especially this single factor that's psychometricians can pull out of a group of factors again not very useful in the real world I think the notion of a dark triad especially really caught fire because people found it useful in practical situations and people could say yeah I know someone like that and yeah it's important to differentiate psychopaths from macchibellians one you might actually want to hire for certain things the other avoid it all hosts excuse me when did you realize hey this is important that we find the uniqueness of these three constructs like what was that process like for you does that make sense well I'm not sure I can say much more than our consideration of a whole array everything that was in the literature that's smacked of anti-social character and then we we applied multivariate techniques factor analysis was was our friend and it showed that those three can be separated and so given that they were already well known constructs that we can make predictions and I guess one thing I haven't emphasized before is that we didn't believe necessarily the self-report data every time we wanted to show something we conducted laboratory tests or interviews or something more concrete than what people say about themselves and so for example even sadism which you might imagine is difficult to study in the laboratory we figured out a couple of ways of doing that that would not break the the rules of IRBs but at the same time demonstrate that some people seemed to have a willingness to hurt and I don't know if you saw our paper on bug killing but it was quite strong variance of course it's all about the variance when you're studying personalities you don't want to see people doing the same thing like social psychologists perhaps would emphasize huge variance on things like willingness to kill him kill bugs some people said well I've done a bunch of bug killing if you got any more hanging around to kill can you walk through can you walk through the procedure a little bit because I think people would be interested yeah we had this machine that that's a wrap on the first part of our conversation as noted at the top of the show be much appreciated if you spread the word to anyone else who you think might enjoy it until next time[Music]