The Dark Tetrad in the Real World with Dr. Del Paulhus

Dan is joined for part 2 by Dr. Del Paulhus, Professor Emeritus and personality researcher at the University of British Columbia.

Part 2 continues the exploration of dark personality traits, including sadism, psychopathy, and narcissism, examining their implications on behaviour, gender differences, and personal well-being. Dan and Dr. Paulhus discuss the methodologies used in research, the correlation of these traits with various psychological measures, and the ongoing debates within the field of personality psychology regarding the classification and understanding of these traits.

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 Welcome
• 1:15 Bug-Killing Experiment: Studying Sadism
• 5:42 Self-Report vs. Behavioral Measures
• 9:00 Callousness as the Core Trait
• 12:30 Gender and Developmental Differences in Dark Traits
• 17:00 Differentiating Types of Narcissism
• 20:00 Dark Traits and Well-Being
• 24:20 Narcissism's Interpersonal Costs
• 27:55 Clinical vs. Subclinical Perspectives
• 35:00 Trait Continuums and Personality Disorders
• 39:20 The HEXACO Model and Personality Space
• 42:15 Pushback and Controversies in Dark Trait Research

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 fleeting applied psychology researchers, to uncover practical insights, pull back the curtain, and hopefully have some fun along the way. If you find the show useful, be much appreciated if you shared it with someone else who might enjoy it too. Today, I can be more excited to welcome back the world's authority on the dark side of personality. In this conversation, we discussed the adaptive and maladaptive roles of the dark side of personality in people's lives. I also really appreciate how Dell talks about the limitations of self-report measures and the importance of being able to see these traits in action. This episode begins with my guest talking about how they tested sadism in the lab by leading people to think that they were killing bugs using a coffee grinder. So without further ado, it is my pleasure to welcome back my very special guest, Dr. Dell Paulus. Yeah, we had this machine that was really a coffee grinder, and we had these little bugs that I forget the technical name for them, but we gave them names that sort of answered morphize them in a cute way. So I think muffin and buddy and I forget the names, we tried to make them as cute as possible. And so people had to take the little container holding the three bugs, well one bug each and pour them in the coffee grinder and then physically pressed down and it made up a grinding sound which was actually a coffee ground in there, not the bug. And so then they had to take the next one and do all three. And it was pretty well that you're going to do one, you do all three and ask for more. So other people when we described what they had to do with these bugs, they said, I'm out of here. They left the room. I don't want to do this. Huge variance in the way normal undergraduate students reacted just to the instructions. And it turned out that a correlated highest with our everyday satism measure. Although I think so a copy that they also played a role, not as strong with as with satism. So you have to come up with inventive behaviors where you actually see it happening rather than asking people, well you scored high on the satism measure. Would you also do all these other things and get self reports or relating with self reports. You want to see different modes of human activity, self report, sure that's valuable, but actual act behavioral activity is in a way the ultimate criterion that you've got something when you've got variance in an external criterion and you can predict it with your self report measure success. So how did you how did you realize that that overlapping piece between these traits was callousness? Well usually you start with a self report and when we looked at all the self reports we could see items on there in this measures that were around before we came along. There was a bit of callousness in each one of them. So and logically we concluded well, that's probably what those three have in common is willingness to hurt people. So there have been a few other speculations about what the common factor might be, but I don't think they I don't think they compete with callousness being the core. And it's interesting that manipulation also shows up on the core. It seems unfortunately part of the human character is that if you have low empathy then you find that you start manipulating people because you find that works for you. Having no care on what you're doing to other people allows you the opportunity and the ability to manipulate people because the breaks we were talking about earlier is when your empathy kicks in and you say no that's going too far or oh sorry about that I'm guilty I feel bad what I did. If you don't have any of that you're fine. Well I can tell people lies and I can cheat and commit fraud etc. It works for me. Right yeah I guess I'm sort of thinking there's a reason it's called the golden rule. Yeah yeah that's true I didn't think of that but a bunch of other people did. Can you talk about gender differences and like developmental differences in terms of these dark traits? Yeah I'm not a developmental psychologist but I do know that you can track conduct disorders in children and find out a certain number of children exhibiting conduct disorders and a couple of the others that I've forgotten. Do ultimately end up with adult dark traits but the road is complicated and they don't exactly map on through each other because a lot of things happen to you between the time when you're defiant and exhibiting negative conduct and your full adult repertoire comes up but what was the other part? Gender. Gender yeah it seems like all of these negative traits are higher in males than in females and in a way that bothered us because very common notion is the mean girls idea and that as girls can be nasty to each other but they do so in different ways like spreading rumors but each other and criticizing each other in ways they know will hurt the other person. So we tried to come up with a component that women would actually be higher on and we tried and mostly failed in that but my student Erin Buckles who is now professor at University Winnipeg she's pursued quite a bit and looked at different types of of sadism and found that although verbal sadism turned out to be more or less the same in men and women that she could find out these she could come up with a few that I just mentioned a few tendencies among women that are slightly higher than men but for the most part it's been very difficult for to get women to report their meanness. So what were the things she was able to get higher in women? Spreading rumors and cutting people in ways that hurt those kinds of variables facial expressions that show smugness or show disdain for somebody those she's found are paying off and actually are higher in women's self-reports than men's she hasn't got a standard measure published yet but she's working on it. Got it and so that would so is it that she's then finding differences on would that perhaps be Machiavellianism when she modifies those items or is it just on very specific behaviors that she's finding that women are higher than men? Well it's been the sadism component that she's focused on separating different kinds of sadism that surely mean girls has a sadistic flavor to it. Picking on girls that can't stand up for themselves or who are lower in status. Again seems to be well accepted. Some girls do that so it's been the sadism dimension that she's focused on and those tendencies that I measure do have a sadistic quality to them and so I hope to see that in print soon. Yeah so one of the things that I was wondering and you brought this up a little bit in terms of sort of like the higher level and the lower level. What do you think about breaking down these dark traits into more specific types and one of the ones that that sort of came to mind was and there's lots of different variations but one of the more I would say popular ways of breaking down narcissism is talking about grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism. What are your thoughts about that? Yeah to me those are so dramatically different that a true they both have the vulnerable narcissism on them but they're totally different and the dynamic the vulnerable narcissist to someone with low self esteem and just can't connect with other people so people interpret that as a kind of narcissism because they won't engage as opposed to the grand grandiose narcissist who's in your face telling you how great they are 24 hours a day so they happen to have the same name on them partly by coincidence I think. Okay okay so you're sort of saying almost like a rather than thinking them thinking of them is like two factors off of narcissism it's kind of a whole different kettle of fish. Yep. Okay so one of the things I think there's this really fascinating story about how these dark traits relate to my word well-being and specifically looking at how they relate to personal well-being I don't know if that's yeah I think you use the term interpsychic versus interpersonal well-being. Could you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah I think it may be alluding to people who have looked at connections between dark personalities and well-being and there seems to be some ability of the dark traits to fend off depression and other kinds of anxiety and disturbing interpsychic problems seem to be I find mostly they just don't connect at all with the dark personalities where some people might make speculations about various ones and surely that must make them feel guilty or sad or miserable but for the most part they don't seem to connect with well-being but you may be alluding to a couple of studies where I saw that the argument was that you can actually fend off any kind of cognitive interpsychic problems if you have the dark personalities I think in particular though that may be referring mostly to narcissism and you never know about narcissists are they thinking it? or do they really believe this stuff and I think it's it's a bit of both I think narcissists really believe they're superior and they have no problems. Sure sometimes their life falls apart and they don't understand why if I'm a superior being how come my wife left me and I got fired from my last three jobs and everybody seems to hate me and so but normally they seem to get through the problem areas since most of the problems come from conflict with others they can either rationalize those or you can strong self-deception to ignore what other people have to say so that's all I know but you probably know more about this than I do. But I think you I think you kind of hit it I think what was interesting was that I think positively sorry narcissism was positively correlated with this sort of personal adjustment well-being kind of a thing but then when they looked at the sort of more the interpersonal adjustment sort of or interpersonal well-being that's where the the the dark tetride seemed to have packed the punch that's where it seemed to get in people's way and I think two of them in particular were psychopathy and sadism that were particularly elevated that these these that those traits really have these interpersonal costs to them. Yeah it's been strange in the past the people have lumped them together and assumed that if you have into personal conflict you must have a disturbance within your own mind but it's pretty clear that the most hated person in the US Donald Trump was also elected as their leader so people can separate those things you can actually vote for someone you hate and because you think they can get things done perhaps but yeah the interpersonal and the interpsychic can be separated especially in narcissists and they find a way to do it in a way the funniest part strategy that narcissists use is doubling down so if someone shows shows your face to face look you got it wrong and I actually seen this in the laboratory where you get people to say they know things that they know that can't be known and you hold it up to them but it in their face they double down oh sure that's wrong I know what I know and that's wrong so you can see that Trump does that on a regular basis you'll say sure I'm the smartest in history, smartest president in history and people will say well we shall we looked at the polls and they say no you're not and of course you'd say those polls are wrong in fact I'm the smartest person in history not just president smartest person so doubling down on it somehow somehow works for him interpsychically and the anger that comes in when you're insulted I've seen that in the narcissist too that that makes people say never mind come bother and just don't deal with the person you're working in counseling department I imagine you've had more face-to-face experiences with these four-dark personalities do and do any particular examples come to mind I mean I think about you know the narcissists that I've worked with I always think that they're the worst that it's just but that's I think that's just a you know a personality there's just just a group that I find particularly I lack empathy towards there but then again you know for just like with anything clinically if you're working with you know if you have a one-off person here or there it's difficult to really get accustomed to or learn the skills to or be able to create empathy or you know that which is different than if you're working with a lot of these folks right then your clinical experience of it will be different because you know the reality is that you know really high elevations on end of any of these traits I'm really high you know the is relatively uncommon right so that you know so that you're not dealing with them of course it's also context specific right if you're working in the prisons that you're going to see more of some of these than if you're working in other places I would imagine if you're working in the ivy leagues be more likely to see some of these than in other places right I mean that would seem reasonable to me and that sort of got me thinking about like the non-linear associations with the dark traits with any number of outcomes that right these are we all have some elevation on these four traits even though it might be very low right we're probably not a zero and that in fact there are most I think many people would argue perhaps not some Buddhists but many people would argue having a little bit of callousness that there's value in that because just as you said right if it was if you were solely concerned about how your behaviors impacted others then it'd be very difficult to get anything done because you're constantly thinking about other folks and so but in reading your work it did get me thinking about is it the are there threshold effects are there places where yeah some elevations some variants on these constructs is fine and is helpful in different contexts but then once it hits a certain point that's when you're really in trouble that's when you're not going to be able to maintain long-term relationships that's when you're going to prison or jail that's when you're you know going from trying to be nice to your boss right that sort of a a Machiavelli and Nistik kind of a thing right sort of playing be trying to have positive relationships with people who have power and that sort of thing that's okay and that's even probably adaptive but it's when you're really going really far to manipulate many people around you that you're going to get yourself in trouble yeah that's a good point that I think is overlooked when you look at simple correlations because you don't know which distinctions along the line of the variables are or the actionists and just because you labeled the whole dimension in one way doesn't mean that the results you're getting are happening because of the way you labeled it I don't know if I'm making sense but if you so we should be looking more at that exactly are there optimal levels are there catastrophe points where things fall apart and the the distinction between our work and the people who are expert on personality disorders is key to to this distinction because they come from a clinical perspective looking for disordered minds and so sometimes they end up with the same variables that we look at at a subclinical level but all the data that I'm concerned with is in normal people people who have jobs who have relationships etc so we refer to it as subclinical there they're at a good university they're able to study and get good grades whereas the people studying disorders presumably are more interested in the extreme maladaptive levels now it's right at the nexus of the conflict between the old DSM and the new trait level DSM that they're pushing toward it seems to me that there's still arguments for some categorical psychological variables where you got it or you don't got it and things like Tourette's or some other psychosis seems to me there's a good argument that there are cutoff levels and you should be comparing below the cutoff and above the cutoff and that's your focus as opposed to variables that we study at subclinical levels are being studied in work populations or student populations so we consider them all to be normal or subclinical people who are not who don't break the barrier of being maladaptive so I think things are happening right now between people like us who study subclinical the traditional clinical people who think in terms of categories and the psychometrically oriented clinicians who want to see everything on the trait level and I don't know how it will settle down eventually maybe in the next DSM it'll all be traits although I doubt it I don't think certain phenomena can be handled strictly at a trait level so lots lots of things to happen in the future between those three groups yeah and I'm so I you know I'm I've been pretty convinced and I think your point about Tourette's and other disorders is well taken and that for if we're just talking about the personality disorders that the trait level approach sort of thinking about these things on a spectrum does make a lot of sense and I think it's reasonable to say that you know one can say low medium and high and those sorts of things and sort of create general cutoffs which are obviously problematic in certain ways but you know it's not too bad to think about that like yeah you know when you're at around this this level you might be getting into trouble that maybe we should take this seriously and think about how to help you deal with this you know I had Bob Krueger who was really involved in this sort of the trait level or continuous sort of approach for the personality disorder stuff and I'm actually going to have him back on because they've done a lot of work with this just with the DSM as a whole in the the high top model as they call it because you know as I was reading your work and I noticed several places in your work you would sort of say like and we're not talking necessarily about clinical you know you'd sort of like have that caveat sort of sprinkled here or there but I as I was reading I was sort of like I mean to me yes sure you're looking at it continuously so you are looking at that range from low to high but that this these but once you hit a certain point whatever that is that does seem to be you know likely is going to correlate with problematic stuff that I would classify as you know likely clinical and we certainly know right there are lots of folks who on many indices are high functioning but are also suffering quite a bit or struggling quite a bit or have elevations and all sorts of you know psychiatric distress so so I think you know even though you're looking at university students at a you know a good university so these people do have to have a certain level or likely have a certain level of IQ and congenitiveness and these sorts of things that there's still going to be a lot of people than there who are going to have you know who who who would be diagnosed with any number of psychiatric disorders maybe but you're not convinced well it's hard to say and again usually the evidence comes in in some sort of maladaptive behavior happens but there's so many ways of being maladaptive that that's not totally clear given that 50% of Americans think their president is psychiatrically disturbed are they right well you're not supposed to be doing diagnoses from distance anyway but they've got all the evidence in the world and again in the context too if you're with certain what what did I call them there's certainly jobs where having a certain kind of disturbance may not be a problem if you're like punching people in the face we could give you$50 million over the course of your career if you'll punch them really hard so what's what's going on there well that particular job benefits from having a personality that enjoys that kind of behavior and were these the guys in the army that have to toughen you up I forget what they call them drill sergeants they are nasty I was actually any army for a summer and they went out of their way to be nasty even to volunteers who were just in there for the experience and so yeah maladaptive or not hard to say depending on the particular I wish I could remember that term but jobs or contacts where it might be called upon to have that particular kind and again narcissism good or bad well if you're a genius it actually promotes you coming up with glorious ideas and ignoring people and say it's stupid to think that people will have computers on their desktop what a dumb idea everybody said that except for one and he was right and if he wasn't massively narcissistic it wouldn't have happened at least not so dramatically from one person so I think your point is well taken though looking at possible cutoff point for various kinds of maladaptive outcomes although I think you'd have to specify probably pretty narrowly what that outcome is rather than well there's a tipping point here for psychopathy beyond that you have a disorder before that no you can get along people won't like you but you can get along so that the criterion problem is one that psychologist always run into psychometricians especially where where does it change where is the change even Bob Hair I don't know if the event you did or not but he used to think that psychopathy was a category and given that he was so important in generating interest in that construct uh people had a lot of respect for that point of view and so 32 on the PCL and you're a real psychopath 31 now you're okay but now he's joined with me and developing continuous measures and so he doesn't say that anymore but this morning I had some rather unpleasant dental work I had to have and as I was sitting in the chair and of course thinking about our conversation this afternoon I was just sitting there thinking I wonder if dentists are sadists at this moment you know of like huh that's interesting and then I kind of freaked out a little bit as I was sitting in there and the chair helplessly but then as the dentist was working on me I was like no he I think he actually cares about how I feel and I don't think he's getting any pleasure out of this but I didn't have that thought I mean I sort of going on what you're saying that like uh that some of the it how adaptive some of these traits can be in certain contexts yeah the surgeon cannot be bothered by spurting blood and horrific looking accidents it cannot be a factor they have to look at it totally objectively that liver looks like it needs to be removed that's all ours to do it interesting that you bring up to zenis though because there's immediate feedback for a dentist which puts the brakes on their ability to hurt the hurt people to doctors to surgeons well they're dealing with unconscious clients so in some ways that allows them to do whatever they want to to the body and with no repercussions it's a little bit different but so are there any other traits characteristics that you think could turn this could be added that you would consider or people have brought up that you've considered as possibly fitting into this group before and making it a group of five I don't know what I don't know how you go from I don't know what comes after tetrad but well I do get asked that and there have been a few nominees here and there but again I remember the term I was trying to think of earlier that analytic approaches are either lumperes or splitters and so we argue that you should split but only to a certain degree and so people want to add more really hard to say I don't know you're probably familiar with the big five personality traits and also a big six which has honesty humility in it and that one is a great interest to us because personality space is rather amorphous and if you rotate the dark personality traits with respect to the big six they tend to float under one factor and that happens to be the new one that was added HH honesty humility and yeah the inverse exactly and but big five advocates of course don't like that because takes on a religious quality for some big five advocates they believe that's it and don't touch it so they want to put the the dark personalities under one of the big five and it fits best under agreeableness reversed again right disagreeableness sure but it's also there under low conscientiousness so it's it's a mixed bag when you attach them there right because you have the impulsivity piece and that would certainly go under low conscientiousness right right that's right good example and so our group has drifted toward the big six and not that it matters a lot but you've got large personality inventories like the big five that is supposed to cover everything at a broad level and have happened to be labeled in positive ways except for neuroticism but for us being concerned with the dark side seems that they fit better with factor six the one that's been added to the big five by cubomly and michael ashton canadian goes that you could also interview and is your sense being a personality researcher is your sense that the big six which is also called the hexa co that is a better fit that that is a psychometrically a better explanation than the big five or is it more complicated than that well yeah it's almost like a semantic issue of where you want to draw the line and people have thought for a long time well we think there's something extra beyond the big five but for the moment let's stick with the big five because at least there's a consensus that there is personality which was dubious back in the sixties where social psychologists were saying no personality is not an issue it's not of interest and walther michelle in particular pretty will destroy the personality psychologist with his hard work and analysis but when the big five came along yes we personality people do have something to say and there it is so let's stick with it for a while at least and so it's it's a slight modification and as i said the rotation of factors in personality space is somewhat arbitrary and it boils down to utility i think so the utility for us is to find out what's the best match between normal personality and these dark traits and we have preferred to go with the big six and in particular the hh factor what was the reason or what was the argument for there is no such thing as personality all for one thing there were a thousand traits what do you do with that there were just too many couldn't decide so it took some hard-nosed personality people who had computers and could do factor analysis and not with a slide rule or just mental gymnastics but could show with factor analysis then indeed they clustered into subgroups and you could name the subgroups and call them meta personalities and they turned out to be pretty useful because they did resonate with people yeah of course there are extroverts and the they are also high in activity level and enjoyment of a variety of things and there are conscientious people sure so they all resonated with people and so finally they could say yes we do have we've decided there is personality and here they are five traits so yeah that was prepared for your time but it was it was an existential threat to personality people back in the 60s so we've talked some about I don't know pushback is the right word to your work because in talking about the de-factor but are there any other is there any other pushback that you've experienced towards your work oh yeah lots of it so from from both ends that we should split the factors more or we should merge them more and they correlate too much and it has to be observed that when you try to repeat factor analysis they don't always turn out the same you know it was slightly different sample slightly different language then you're going to get some overlap that didn't exist before and people believe their own data so if someone comes up with a high correlation between a couple of them then they believe they've destroyed the entire enterprise but no they've just shown that variants can be partitioned in slightly different ways in different populations so different members of the dark tetrad have been complained about in terms of their overlap with other members but other other complaints well every day say doesn't much we think is the the most novel contribution people think no no such thing it's psychopathy and to some extent they fall back on either the it's all psychopathy or we have a sample in which say is them correlates with other factors so it doesn't exist on its own as a separate variable so yeah you name it we've even had people complain that calling things a dark is racist because people are going to say you're promulgating the notion that people with dark complexions are evil that's a pretty desperate complaint I think and there have been other complaints well we call things psych culture people psychopaths when they're not actually categorically psychopathic so if you use the word psychopath you are making a mistake a categorical mistake and people are going to be misled by whatever you're saying so pretty murky stuff but it's pretty clear that people have been a lot of people have resented the success and the activity level that the notion of some clinical but dark personalities adds something to our understanding of people interesting yeah I was when I was working on this I was sort of like thinking about I was just thinking about it mostly in reference to Star Wars the dark side that was my that was my reference point and really thinking about when you know I was going down the rabbit hole about how these traits are manifested in the in the Star Wars universe in terms of the dark side and let me think about that well oh so what one thing before I let what let you go Dell is I always like to ask folks if there are you know one or two resources that for folks who are listening that want to learn more that you would you know sort of point them to to learn more about your work well I do have other podcasts out there and it's interesting that you've asked me questions that the others haven't necessarily asked so they might want to look at some of the others um even Jordan Peterson had one that uh was useful because he is a personality psychologist himself so he knew all the nuances of everything that we were talking about in research on dark personality but there's a bunch of others out there too I could send you those links that you can you said you'd add them to the note yeah anything anything you have or any papers or books or anything that you think they they're like just let me know and either if you just I can look them up and add the full citations but be happy to add them yeah I can certainly uh send you a list of props the the most seminal papers in this area and and maybe the most recent ones might have been of interest I'll send you those that'd be great well Dell this has been fantastic I can't tell you how much I appreciate it I enjoyed it too it's great ladies and gentlemen dr. Dell Paulus that's a wrap on our conversation as I 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]