To start, I'll define what I view "dark traits" to mean personally to me. They mean having an internal moral system where it is acceptable to harm others in some ways.
The more harm a person is willing to do, the more we generally label those people with the personality traits that we say are "dark".
There is some measure of psychology that would indicate that many such people who we label that way have neuro-atypical thought patterns. They may even simply feel differently about things.
I personally view freewill / personal decision as the primary factor in harming/not-harming others though.
A single person can be all of the following simultaneously:
1. Empathetic ( able to understand what others feel and also feel those emotions themselves )
2. Willing to harm others ( disregarding how they feel )
3. Successful.
4. Appear to be neurotypical ( for the most part )
5. Be "team players"
6. Be narcissistic
7. Be manipulative
8. Be happy
The false conclusion made by most is that harming others is incompatible with the other modes of thinking. That is unreasonable as it is relying on "holistic stability of the mind". There is no guarantee that the thought process or emotions of a human being are internally consistent.
There is also no guarantee that the observable actions of an individual reveal their internal processes.
Since this is a throwaway, I'll take this a step further. I'm okay with actively harming others, either for my own amusement or my own gain.
I can understand how those I would harm feel about it, and understand how terrible that feeling is. It doesn't prevent me from causing this feeling in others. I simply choose to do so. I may occasionally become overly fixated on the emotion, but I am capable of dismissing it.
I am very successful and command a high salary. I am well liked by my peers. I am commended regularly for my work. I am considered a "team player" and am regularly asked to mentor others ( and do so as well ).
Those around me believe and say that they think I am neurotypical even when I have confronted a select few that I am not.
I morally believe that taking advantage of others is "wrong", but I still am capable of doing it, and I do.
I'm happy about who I am. While I do occasionally ponder the morality of my actions, and feel what you might call "guilt" over them, I choose to actively dismiss these emotions and carry on anyway.
I don't think I'm the only person who is this way. In fact, I'd wager that the majority of people are capable of harming others for their own gains, and able to dismiss guilt over it given a bit of effort.
I do agree that I am atypical in the amount of harm I could do and easily dismiss it... but I don't think any of these studies are able to easily "detect" me.
Put simply: if there exist light/dark people, I'm definitely on the dark side, and it absolutely enables me to succeed in ways those on the light side could not.
I will though meter this statement a bit by saying that being on the dark side also can be constraining. There is less mental effort needed to simply choose a solid moral base and stick to it. Most of the atrocities in history have come from highly religious groups with strict principles. Blinding believing in some set of morals is very enabling.
So it is inaccurate to say that being dark/light will cause success either way. There is simply too much variance and complexity with the ways a human can approach life.
Well I don't outright physically harm others ( such as with my fists, fights, weapons, etc )
I don't though seem to have a problem urging others to engage in dangerous behavior that could cause them physical harm.
This is essentially a throwaway account but I've decided to continue to use it till it gets banned into oblivion.
Ycombinator themselves still have the IP address though, and I'm not bothering with Tor and VPNs for its usage, so I could be held accountable should I admit to anything illegal.
There is nothing I am doing that I know of that is outright illegal, but I do believe that some of the things I am involved with do in turn cause probable harm to others. ( of their own accord )
I unfortunately can't give the concrete examples that cause me to believe what I've said, as it would both lead to telling more about myself than I wish, and also expose me to even greater criticism.
I'll give one example that I think is fairly common: I have no issue verbally abusing others, especially in a workplace scenario. I was, in fact, encouraged to do so during my time at Amazon. Anything for the results.
Cussing someone out to their face in front of others, berating them very strongly telling them that their work is absolute garbage is something I have done on occasion and feel almost zero guilt about. I feel they deserve it.
The trouble is that I feel this notion of "other people deserve to suffer" for the majority of humans. I personally dislike crushing bugs... but the idea of a human being harmed somewhat pleases me because intellectually I think humans deserve mostly to suffer.
I have seen personality studies that have detection for people attempting to fool the study in the following ways:
1. Answering too extreme to any particular known "psychological profile" will throw flags. Unless you are trying to manipulate your answers, generally you won't perfectly match any particular profile. I do though account for this when I answer psych tests by diversifying my answers and not being perfect in my manipulation of the test.
2. The same question is asked in multiple ways to see if a person will answer it different ways when asked from a different perspective. This is an attempt to detect the person "spinning" their answer based on the way it is asked. It is pretty easy to spot these questions though, at least within a single session of questions, so I usually notice these and attempt not to answer them in a conflicting way.
3. Questions are asked that are overly personal or probe to traumatic areas. I've had shrinks attempt to goad me into overly emotion reactions when I am carefully answering questions in the way I want to present myself. The best way to combat this is to intentionally believe in a particular set of emotional responses and to not attempt to hide any emotions. One cannot completely suppress whatever emotions you have, therefore you can only really be deceptive well about things you don't feel emotional about. Fortunately, over time one will tend to believe and experience the feelings that you act like you have. Eg: If you feign love for someone, it isn't that hard for it to appear entirely real, and you do feel it to some degree even if you know it "isn't real". The trouble here is feigning too intense reactions in an attempt to live up to the "real portrayal" of the emotion. Example: The person you love is belittled by someone and you react angrily defending the person you "love". Those faking will tend to go overboard with the reaction.
We wish to cast humans into profiles, sort of like applying stereotypes to people. This will seem to work and make some statistical sense out of how people act, but it fails terribly at the corner cases.
People are internally as complex as we can possibly imagine.
The tests and analyses given tend to work for specific debilitation. They do not work for intentional malfeasance. If you are "healthy" for a general psychological perspective, you can simply choose to be a dark person for no particularly good reason other than deciding to be.
I'll admit that one typically chooses to be dark due to the experiences you have in life. Do you, though, know all of the traumatic experiences a person has had that you meet? How could you possibly? Supposing you knew, must we assume automatically that many traumatic experiences absolutely cause continuing problems in life?
This reminds me of a question I had early in life on a test to work in a retail sales position. The question was "would you steal or borrow $5 from the register", followed by "$1", then "10 cents". I of course dutifully answered "I would never steal or borrow any amount".
The trouble with my answer is that it is not a human answer. Most normal humans beings, if we answer such a question truthfully, would not care at all about borrowing 10 cents. Depending on the job and the amount of money, $1 also would be meaningless.
The amount that it becomes acceptable to "fudge" increases as you deal with larger amounts of goods and money. You begin to realize that small amounts really are irrelevant and not worth thinking about too hard. This is normal healthy behavior.
A person who is a stickler and insists that no amount of money can ever be borrowed/stolen... watch out. Such a person is dangerous.
> personality studies that have detection for people attempting to fool the study
Interesting to hear about that, and what you've found.
What you write, makes me think about the feelings part of the brain, and that those parts are really old, like, from the dinosaur age. And they're a bit stupid and predictable, I think.
The emotional intelligence tests try to "measure" those old and silly and predictable parts of the brain -- but maybe the new and fancy cerebral cortex logical thinking parts of an intelligent person's brain, can always learn and understand how the feelings parts of the brain, would react in different situations.
Maybe it's impossible to create accurate EQ tests (that cannot be gamed by a bright person with some life experience), because the EQ parts of the brain are too simple to understand how they work, for the thinking and reasoning parts of the brain.
> you can simply choose to be a dark person for no particularly good reason other than deciding to be.
Apparently you can -- I cannot though. The long term effects of my decisions, needs to be friendly to others (or have no effect), otherwise my brain produces strong unpleasant feelings.
- - -
Interesting to read about the $5 from the register question. I'd never think about that way at looking at the answers.
Instead I'd thought that never never taking $1 would have been a bit too rigid, inflexible, a trait that I d guessed could cause other types of problems (but what do I know).
The more harm a person is willing to do, the more we generally label those people with the personality traits that we say are "dark".
There is some measure of psychology that would indicate that many such people who we label that way have neuro-atypical thought patterns. They may even simply feel differently about things.
I personally view freewill / personal decision as the primary factor in harming/not-harming others though.
A single person can be all of the following simultaneously: 1. Empathetic ( able to understand what others feel and also feel those emotions themselves ) 2. Willing to harm others ( disregarding how they feel ) 3. Successful. 4. Appear to be neurotypical ( for the most part ) 5. Be "team players" 6. Be narcissistic 7. Be manipulative 8. Be happy
The false conclusion made by most is that harming others is incompatible with the other modes of thinking. That is unreasonable as it is relying on "holistic stability of the mind". There is no guarantee that the thought process or emotions of a human being are internally consistent.
There is also no guarantee that the observable actions of an individual reveal their internal processes.
Since this is a throwaway, I'll take this a step further. I'm okay with actively harming others, either for my own amusement or my own gain.
I can understand how those I would harm feel about it, and understand how terrible that feeling is. It doesn't prevent me from causing this feeling in others. I simply choose to do so. I may occasionally become overly fixated on the emotion, but I am capable of dismissing it.
I am very successful and command a high salary. I am well liked by my peers. I am commended regularly for my work. I am considered a "team player" and am regularly asked to mentor others ( and do so as well ).
Those around me believe and say that they think I am neurotypical even when I have confronted a select few that I am not.
I morally believe that taking advantage of others is "wrong", but I still am capable of doing it, and I do.
I'm happy about who I am. While I do occasionally ponder the morality of my actions, and feel what you might call "guilt" over them, I choose to actively dismiss these emotions and carry on anyway.
I don't think I'm the only person who is this way. In fact, I'd wager that the majority of people are capable of harming others for their own gains, and able to dismiss guilt over it given a bit of effort.
I do agree that I am atypical in the amount of harm I could do and easily dismiss it... but I don't think any of these studies are able to easily "detect" me.
Put simply: if there exist light/dark people, I'm definitely on the dark side, and it absolutely enables me to succeed in ways those on the light side could not.
I will though meter this statement a bit by saying that being on the dark side also can be constraining. There is less mental effort needed to simply choose a solid moral base and stick to it. Most of the atrocities in history have come from highly religious groups with strict principles. Blinding believing in some set of morals is very enabling.
So it is inaccurate to say that being dark/light will cause success either way. There is simply too much variance and complexity with the ways a human can approach life.