*Preview* Decoding Academia 27: Dark Triad Authenticity
We do bonus episodes every month that are focused on analysing academic content or discussing research and we thought it might be useful to let new listeners know! So find attached a preview...In this episode of Decoding Academia, Matt and Chris delve into a paper that explores the complex world of dark personality traits and their impact on authenticity. They examine how traits like narcissism and psychopathy might intersect with the concept of the true self, and consider whether cultural differences in self-conception play a significant role. The episode also features reflections on Logan Roy from Succession and a friendly disagreement between Matt and Chris about labels in psychology.Paper referenced: Bulbuc, A. A., & Visu-Petra, L. (2024). Shedding a light on authenticity in high dark trait individuals: A morally grey territory? Personality and Individual Differences, 224, 112632.The full episode is available for Patreon subscribers at the Revolutionary Genius tier (1 hr 9 mins).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus
Welcome to Decoding Academia, a sub-production of Decoding the Guru's TM podcast with the psychologist in residence, Matthew Brown, the cognitive anthropologist in residence,
me, Christopher Kavanagh, and you, the kind listener, here to discover what's going on in academia.
What accent was that?
Yeah, that's a reference.
So what's his name?
The English chameleon.
What's his name?
Oh, I know.
Steve Cook and Alan Patrick.
I did him doing an impression of Irish people, but then I mixed it in with other accents.
Yeah, very confusing.
It was confusing.
Chris, you just told me this morning that GPT-4-0 dropped and I checked it out immediately.
And yeah, we're just saying it's that movie, Her, was pretty much on point.
I gave it a bit of a go and GPT-4 has had that sort of conversational thing happening before, but it wasn't this smooth.
It didn't like I just had a very uncanny impression of talking to.
Yeah, it was, that's apparently a Spike Jonze movie, written by Spike Jonze.
And I was just looking, Matt, and saw that that's actually the last movie he made.
So, you know, maybe he'll make another one, but the last one.
And when you asked me when it was, I was like, oh, it's, you know, a couple of years ago.
Yeah, I thought it was a couple of years too.
Yeah, 11 years.
11 years ago.
My God, where is my life going?
I'm going to be 70 before I know it, Chris.
It's not fair.
It's just flashing before my eyes.
I know, but it was a prescient movie.
For those who haven't seen it, it's about an AI assistant in a near distant future setting.
But it's proving to be rather prescient.
Prescient, although you don't need to have the AI delivered, it just comes in your phone.
They get a little box where they install it, but you don't seem to need that.
No, thanks to the cloud.
My wife was telling me that a couple of her friends said that they don't really need Friends anymore because they can't just talk to the AI about anything they want and they sort of find that the AI is just much more attentive and much more polite and always available and never sort of rude or selfish or any of the things that human beings are.
Even before this version though?
Because it's not like...
That's what she said.
That's what she said.
Okay, maybe your wife's friends.
Because interacting with the AI is useful, but they're not exactly great conversationalists at the minute.
In terms of they respond to what you...
Are talking about, but that's all.
Chris, it depends what your options are, right?
I mean, you've got me.
I can see why it's not so impressive to you.
But, you know, many people, they, you know, they don't have me at their beck and call.
They can't just summon me up on a whim.
That's it.
They don't have your lamp.
Matt's a genie that's been trapped and unfortunately I won't release him.
So just he has to...
What's your first wish?
Endless podcasts for the end of time.
You bastard.
I know.
I have to trick you into making some other stupid wishes.
You sure we don't want to tell anything else, Chris?
Anything else I can do for you?
A cup of tea?
A biscuit?
Would you like a biscuit?
For those who cannot see, you do look like a genie.
You have like a turban on.
Like a stripy turban.
It's a bandana.
It could be a turban.
It just depends on the angle that you look at.
But yes, you could be in.
It's actually a t-shirt, Chris.
It's actually a t-shirt.
Is this what you Australians do?
I know, it's weird.
You mad bastards.
No, not all Australians.
Just me.
Well, my hair's gotten really long and out of control.
And you have a shower and it's wet and it's just annoying.
So I need to tie something to keep it out of my face.
I was wondering.
You're a little bit like an 80s wrestler tag team guy.
Or a pirate.
Or a pirate or a genie.
There's many things that you could be.
But that's not what we're here to talk about, Matt.
We've passed the allotted banter time.
The alarm has went off.
And we are now here to look at a paper that was suggested by someone on the Patreon.
And it is from 2024.
So this year, it's in Personality and Individual Differences.
And the title is Shedding a Light on Authenticity in High Dark Trade.
"A Morally Gray Territory" by Andrea A. Bulbic and Laura Vissupetra.
Romanian, these offers are.
Yes, so a recent paper, and as I'm often telling my students, the type of paper, it's a theoretical paper.
It is attempting to combine...
Two theoretical models and produce some ideas for future research.
So, it is not an empirical paper, and it is not a, I suppose, a little bit of a review, but it's more of a think piece, if you will, in academia.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A review and a think piece.
So, yeah, these are often good, you know, like and below them.
They're, you know, it's not all just...
Primary research, empirical studies, experiments and surveys and, you know, we asked this specific question and we found this thing.
Sometimes you've got to step back and look at the bigger picture.
So all power to them.
I like the way they started it with a quote from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
With every day and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck that man is not truly one.
But truly, too.
Have you read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?
Of course you haven't.
I know you haven't.
It's very good.
It's very good.
I quite like Victoria.
I've got a soft spot for Victorian literature.
Stuff like Jules Verne, Jones to the Center of the Earth.
Yeah, Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Mary Wollstonecraft.
You look very convinced of that, Liam.
But yeah, well, to be fair, I haven't read much.
Victorian fiction, but that I have from that era nearby, I have often been impressed with, probably because I'm reading things which are considered classics of that era.
And the old Sherlock Holmes novels.
I had an edited volume of that, but they were released as serials, weren't they?
Yeah, originally they were serials and magazine serials.
But yeah, they're short stories.
Yeah, I like them too.
Nothing wrong with that.
But, Matt, I'm going to make a note here to demonstrate my cultural sensitivity.
Because I remember discussing with students about papers in Japan, I mean, here.
And it was around a controversial issue.
And they weren't totally engaged by the various controversies.
It was actually related to DEI and stuff in academia.
What they were more annoyed by was the tendency for academic papers in English to use classical literature quotes that are only meaningful to those versed in English literature sources and then discuss English philosophy.
And here, you get that quote, then you get reference to Socrates and Greek.
No, it's mainly just Socrates, so that's fair, just one.
But the point is, it did exactly what they said, which is making reference to the Western literature and philosophy from the Greek tradition or whatever.
So I was just thinking, yeah, we are living up the cultural stereotypes in Western academia.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know, I mean...
What are you going to talk about?
I mean, is it alright to quote, you know, Sun Tzu?
Is that okay?
That's your comparison.
I have to admit, I am myself a product of my culture, Chris.
I'm not down with all of the...
Mr. Miyagi.
Why do we have Mr. Miyagi?
We could start quote the Karate Kid to be culturally sensitive.
That would be cool.
I'm just noting that people read that and I never considered it because I Enjoy those aspects often because, you know, I have that background.
But then I was like, yeah, that would be annoying if every paper started with like a quote from Confucius and referenced, you know, the great sage, what he said about, I mean, it wouldn't be annoying, but it would be annoying if it wasn't most papers,
right?
Or it was a common motif.
So, yeah, that's all.
I'm just appointing invisible power structures that exist.
In our society.
But that's not what the paper is about.
But actually, it is relevant, Matt, because I'm going to, we should say, describe using the abstract what the paper is.
Maybe that's the place to start before I offer any big level thoughts.
So the abstract is a bit long, so maybe I'll try to summarize things, but I'll start off.
Pursuing personal goals above communally shared interests is incompatible with socially sanctioned norms, yet represents the hallmark of high levels of dark traits, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.
One yet unaddressed question is how this conflict affects subjective authenticity, traditionally defined as a natural tendency to perceive and present oneself as a...
Genuine rather than contrived person.
In this theoretical paper, we propose a novel perspective on the nature of the true self, recasting Kernis and Goldman's processors-orientated framework of authenticity to accommodate high dark triad individuals' particular authenticity paths.
And they go on to explain how they're going to do that, right?
So the basic thing is that they want to look at this.
Framework of authenticity.
So they're talking about authenticity, true selves and presentation of true selves and how to incorporate to that the nature of dark triad style personality types where people's true self may be antisocial in certain ways or,
you know, harmful as opposed to a being of light and pro-social goodness.
So if that is your personality type.
Being true to your authentic self might seem in conflict with some of the models which present that as a socially desirable outcome, right?
Yeah.
In simple terms, if you're a bit of a bastard, then maybe that's how you really are.
Not being true to yourself.
Yeah, being true to yourself is maybe not the best thing.
So, yeah, it's kind of, I mean, the big picture of it, there's a lot of details, obviously, but the big picture, Chris, is that it's trying to map together this sort of positive psychology notion of authenticity being a good and wrap that or relate that to the dark triad stuff.
And I guess one aspect of it is that people that are high in manipulation.
And lack compassion and have all these other sorts of things.
I mean, like they're very, like duck-tried individuals tend to be quite duplicitous, right?
They're kind of not showing, they're not being honest, essentially.
I mean, I think people who even aren't familiar with personality psychology understand that psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism are not desirable traits, typically, and are regarded as...
If you are high in all of those, you're likely to be a manipulative, self-centered person, right?
So, like you say...
Yeah, but putting aside a judgment of it's good or bad or anything like that, then, I mean, you can just describe, I mean, just in neutral terms, without making a moral judgment, you can say that they are less honest about their motivations and things like that,
right?
It depends.
I think it depends because they highlight that there are distinctions between which trait that you're high in.
So if you're high in Machiavellianism, then yes, you may not present authentically.
But if you're high in, I can't remember, it might have been psychopathy, then yes, you're using people, but you don't mind being antisocial and just expressing your desires and stuff.
But psychopaths can be manipulative too, so it's all...
And narcissistic people, right?
They generally do believe that they are special, deserve special consideration and so on, and they act like that.
So, yeah, I guess it is kind of authentic.
Yeah, I was thinking of the Machiavellianism.
Yeah, but, well, you said, Matt, though, and the authors of this are at the end of the paper talking about the need to not...
Necessarily layer moralistic judgment on top of these.
But in some sense, by the very nature of the descriptions, it's called the dark triad, right?
These are things that are morally vealanced.
And I feel that there's a bit of an inescapable component where manipulative, dishonest, and self-centered Personality traits are never going to be regarded,
including by psychologists, as just neutral aspects of a personality.
No, no, but you can set that aside.
No, I don't have an issue with that, Chris.
Because I'm a psychologist, I've had a lot more experience dealing with psychological questions than you.
And, you know, there's a long, long tradition of you have...
Yes, you understand that some things are implicitly...
Better than other things, like you're trying to promote health, you're trying to promote well-being, you know, people being upset and people being distressed and stuff like that is bad, right?
But you can just set that aside and go, okay, well, let's understand the properties of narcissism or machiavellianism and you can set aside the...
The question of whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, because it's not really relevant to understanding how these things work.
My experience of psychologists is that they are not so objective as that, because positive psychologists, grit, well-being, resilience,
these again are not treated as things which are Neutral stuff out there in the world to be observed and codified and quantified.
Very much, they should be cultivated and increased and we should seek to oppose those who, or not oppose those, we should seek to help those who suffer from lack of self-esteem and whatnot.
So, I'm just saying, I think that there is a degree of moralizing which is somewhat unavoidable and desirable that it is not there.
But it will inevitably be there when you're a social primate describing negative antisocial behaviors.
No, but that's what I'm agreeing with you.
But I'm saying that...
Yes, you can say all of these things are probably good and you can write about ways in which they could be encouraged or people could develop more grit or resilience or whatever.
But it doesn't really affect your understanding of what these things are.
I mean, like narcissism and Machiavellianism.
For instance, right?
And the same with psychopathy.
I mean, one of the things that strikes me, thinking about it neutrally, is that these are all types of social, well, not social cognition, but social behaviours, right?
Like, psychopathy, you could sort of describe as a kind of treating people as if they're objects, right?
So, in other words, ignoring the kinds of pro-social and empathic kind of things that most societies tend to do.
To encourage.
Machiavellianism is obviously that manipulation of other people in order to get them to do the things that suit you.
And narcissism is very much that sort of lack of, again, that lack of a sense of equality, of reciprocity, because you deserve more.
Now, all these things, there are ways in which they're adaptive, right?
There are ways in which they are helpful to you if you're good at it, right?
Yeah.
And I think, you know, we are social primates, as you said before, and so because we do, just like a lot of primates and a lot of social mammals,
we do tend to have to cooperate a lot.
In order to do well.
And in complex societies, you tend to have to cooperate more.
So the notion that things that interfere with cooperation, like long-term effective cooperation, should be disapproved of at a group level.
Yeah, you teach your kids not to do this and to share and things like that.
It's understandable that they come to be treated as social, as virtues.
But, I mean, for individuals in terms of what actually suits you, then it is in your best interest to sometimes manipulate people a little bit.
Most people...
I'm narcissistic to some degree, right?
Like, when they do surveys and they ask people, do you think you're a better driver than the average driver?
Everyone thinks they are, right?
So, almost by definition, and everyone, you know, we're all individual little atoms, you know, separated from other people.
So, we are inherently kind of egotistical.
So, you know, I think all of these things, there's a spectrum of them, obviously.
And there are people that are too much so, in the sense that it doesn't even really work for them.
They kind of interfere and destroy the...
Or damage, rather, the social networks in which they're a part of.
Like anyone who's shared a workplace with someone who's high in the dark diatrodes knows that it is actually detrimental to the functioning of the group.
And they often don't do that well.
Psychopathic people tend not to do.
Some of them who are very intelligent, very good at it, might do well.
But the majority of them actually don't do that well in their lives, right?
Because basically other people cotton on to you and you damage too many relationships.
So, you know, I guess all I'm saying is that, yes, you can acknowledge that these things are considered to be anti-virtues, to be sins, but you can understand why they have that social opprobrium.
But you can sort of set that aside and step back a little bit from it and also understand why these things tend to persist and why most people have them to some degree.
We're not Christ-like figures always valuing other people's well-being to the same degree as our own.
Sorry for the speech.
Go ahead.
No, that's correct.
But I think you're slightly misunderstanding the objection.
I'm saying if you want to cultivate that attitude of being capable of recognizing, you know, like certain potential positive aspects of them or...
And not ramping up the moralizing, you might not refer to them as dark triad.
It's like laying them the three evil elements.
It implies whatever you then go on to talk about them, that there's a...
And in place of judgment, which is unavoidable, I agree.
I'm just saying that, like, liables matter.
I think you read too much into it.
Like, psychologists tend to, like, it's tongue-in-cheek.
It's kind of tongue-in-cheek, right?
It's not tongue-in-cheek.
Yes, it is.
Yes, it is.
It's like the duck tribe, because it's acknowledging that they are disapproved of, right?
Yeah, but psychologists are constantly giving talks about this in a very rarefied way.
And also, the...
The dark triad, you could have called it, you know, it's a quirk of history.
What would you call it?
Give me a snappy alternative.
I can't, but I bet ChatGP2 could with a little prompting.
And actually, this paper makes this argument.
It explicitly says at the end of it that there's a need to expand the model and to recognize that there's like Various, the light and dark aspects is like attaching a value judgment to things that might not be particularly serving for the psychological community.
So this is psychologists making the same point.
I'm just agreeing with them.
But I don't mind whatever you call it.
I kind of like it because it's, you know, got a...
I'm just saying that I think it gets in the way a little bit with the admirable goals that you're describing.
So, the other part, though, this is possibly the part that I have the most issue with, this paper, in a way, and it's not entirely these authors' fault, because they are, like we said,
they're basically trying to combine two frameworks.
One about authenticity and the nature of true self, and one...
About the dark triad model, right?
And they make the point that we talked about at the start, the reasonable point that, like, if you're telling everyone to be true to themselves and that this is a positive, good thing and is recommended, like, that this implies that everyone's core is kind of good and pro-social.
But as we've talked about on the show, what if you are an arsehole?
But also, but...
But one of the other assumptions that they mention as well, not only they assume there's a true self and they assume it's somehow good to be authentic.
I mean, they don't.
Let's be clear.
No, no, no, they don't.
Yeah, the other.
No, and they mention this question.
I mean, they raise it skeptically, I think, which is that maybe there isn't a true self.
Like, this is debatable, right?
Well, that was...
Do they raise that?
That much, because this was part of the issue.
I mean, I did see them kind of flag up that there is some alternative perspectives about the nature of a true self.
But this, to me, is like a fundamental issue, because I think, and again, this is a little bit, I feel like I'm falling into the indigenous psychology territory, but nonetheless, that In East Asia,
where I live, the highly contextualized notion of self is king.
That, you know, there is values that are considered more core to you or whatever, but it's fundamentally considered mature and responsible to adjust your presentation depending on the context.
And that your particular...
Preferences, values, personality traits might have to give way to the social good.
Instead of you changing the world to suit what you truly believe, it may be often necessary for you to compromise in order to be an adult person.
Yeah, you adjust your behaviour depending on the context, and that is entirely appropriate and good.
Whereas I, and this is speaking as a Westerner, right, I've always been a little bit suspicious of people that kind of switch modes.
Like I see them at work, say at a meeting, you know, in that context, and they're like this, and then afterwards having a drink is like, they're completely different.
And I've never particularly liked that.
I tend to be, I think, I'm more similar from context to context.
And so that--but that's a very--you know, I think you raise a good point that's very much
Right, but I mean, I share those intuitions as well, but I think they are a set of cultural intuitions.
And this is important in the sense of you're discussing models of the self because Unless it's models of the self that only apply in a Western context, then I think you have to be more careful.
And this is my impression of a lot of the literature on the nature of self in psychology, is that it's very much talking about the American context of...
Self and identity.
And if you want to be kind, you could say the Western, but I actually think it is more the North American self.
And then you have people who come in and occasionally problematize it by saying there are other concepts of self and raise cross-cultural psychology points.
And I think they raise legitimate objections, but it's just that there's a large literature around the nature of selves.
You mentioned that not presenting yourself The same in different contexts can be presented as being false or deceptive.
And Mark Zuckerberg, back in the early days of Facebook, he was talking in some interview about the fact that people were concerned that their boss was in the same circle.
as their friend, right?
So like, you know, if they want, this was back when social media was a bit different and now there are probably ways to, you know, like separate off that a little bit.
Most of them, or most of the social networks have at least experimented.
If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at patreon.com slash decoding the gurus once you do.
You'll get access to full-length episodes of the Decoding the Gurus podcast, including bonus shows, gurometer episodes, and Decoding Academia.
The Decoding the Gurus podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support.
Subscribing will save the rainforest, bring about global peace, and save Western civilization.
And if you cannot afford $2, you can request a free membership, and we will honor zero of those requests.
