[HN Gopher] Examining interactions between narcissistic leaders ...
___________________________________________________________________
Examining interactions between narcissistic leaders and anxious
followers
Author : tokai
Score : 100 points
Date : 2021-11-04 12:14 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
| ectopod wrote:
| > On the dark side, narcissists commonly display a lack of
| sympathy, a tendency toward cruelty and foresight, moodiness, and
| irritability.
|
| Is foresight a bad thing?
| stevespang wrote:
| Hah, put Beto out of Texas into that category . . . .
| greenail wrote:
| I have hope the real world does not reflect twitter behavior in
| any way.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| Do narcissistic people typically know they're narcissistic?
| papito wrote:
| You mean, admit a flaw? Riiiight. I also imagine narcissism
| closely correlates with Dunning-Kruger.
| tokai wrote:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3119754/
| SamPatt wrote:
| "One fascinating aspect of narcissists is their ability to
| make a very positive first impression. At first sight,
| narcissists have a reputation for being charming, likeable,
| extraverted, open to experience, and physically attractive"
|
| This reputation then changes the more people know them. I
| wonder how that's possible for attractiveness though? You'd
| think people's perceptions of that wouldn't change.
|
| Also if narcissists are generally regarded as attractive does
| that mean they are, and in this one dimension they aren't
| totally out of touch?
| evv555 wrote:
| >I wonder how that's possible for attractiveness though?
| You'd think people's perceptions of that wouldn't change.
|
| Arguably "attractiveness" is a proxy for ephemeral
| attributes like status and other sorts of signaling
| narcissists excel at.
| lazide wrote:
| Narcissists will sometimes spend an inordinate amount of
| time working on what they perceive to be physical signs of
| beauty in themselves, and ejecting or attacking those
| around them that are not willing to mirror back or validate
| their own feelings of beauty and superiority.
|
| Because narcissism is almost always driven by a deep
| feeling of trauma, inadequacy, and insecurity which was
| coped for by delusions of grandiosity - this comes out in
| various ways, and to various degrees of success based on
| how high functioning they are.
|
| A low functioning narcissist may be unable to get
| themselves in physical shape, or dress well, or groom
| themselves, or may have terrible plastic surgery, etc. and
| resort to attacking naysayers and spouting clear delusion
| that is easy to identify.
|
| A high functioning narcissist may be working out at the gym
| regularly, groom themselves well, and had any obvious flaws
| fixed with (high quality) plastic surgery - and be
| objectively physically attractive. They may be well
| practiced in debate and oratory skills, and have spent time
| improving social skills. These are relatively rare, as it
| takes SOME degree of awareness that these are not already
| perfect to get here, which a Narcissist will struggle with.
| There is a non-trivial overlap with what some high
| functioning psychopaths do here, but they are different in
| key and important ways.
|
| A different but related axis occurs around their ability to
| convince others of their delusions (and themselves). Low
| functioning, all but the most gullible or susceptible know
| it's bullshit, and avoids them. They can be self harming in
| clear ways as they aren't able to convince themselves well
| either sometimes.
|
| High functioning can be VERY VERY convincing, with almost
| everyone convinced and anyone who figures it out targeted
| quite successfully and removed from the social group (or
| sometimes from society in general, driven to suicide, or
| outright murdered depending on the degree of power and the
| amount of threat felt by that particular narcissist).
|
| They can convince themselves most (or all) of the time too,
| which makes it 'easier' as there is less cognitive
| dissonance. Those who disagree are clearly evil and out to
| get them, so no need to look at evidence or consider they
| might have a point.
|
| Where you draw the line on this for the clear pathology vs
| 'not really narcissism' is of course subjective and on a
| case by case basis.
| louthy wrote:
| Simple test:
|
| "Have you been staring into a pool of water for a very long
| time?"
|
| If your answer is yes: you're a narcissist
|
| If your answer is no: you're probably not a narcissist
|
| /s
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| The Disciple, by Oscar Wilde
|
| When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a
| cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads
| came weeping through the woodland that they might sing to the
| pool and give it comfort.
|
| And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of
| sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the
| green tresses of their hair and cried to the pool and said,
| `We do not wonder that you should mourn in this manner for
| Narcissus, so beautiful was he.'
|
| `But was Narcissus beautiful?' said the pool.
|
| `Who should know that better than you?' answered the Oreads.
| `Us did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie
| on your banks and look down at you, and in the mirror of your
| waters he would mirror his own beauty.'
|
| And the pool answered, `But I loved Narcissus because, as he
| lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his
| eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.'
| skim_milk wrote:
| Here's a real answer from one of the leading experts on
| narcissism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=achdyuKF9aI
|
| It doesn't matter. The narcissist is not psychologically
| equipped to use this information, if they even have it.
| Narcissists will more likely attempt to use their self-
| awareness against you for their own benefit semi-unconsciously.
| Narcissism is a reaction to deep childhood trauma that cannot
| be healed with drugs or therapy in figuratively 99.9% of cases.
| csee wrote:
| They might think narcissism isn't a real thing.
| _game_of_life wrote:
| Hmm, I think it's dangerous territory to use disbelief or
| skepticism of personality disorders as a potential diagnostic
| criteria.
|
| There are a lot of incongruities in research surrounding them
| that psychology fails to address and warrants skepticism.
|
| For example, more recent longitudinal studies on personality
| disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder (BDP) pretty
| consistently show that 80 - 90% of people once diagnosed with
| the disorder no longer meet the diagnostic criteria after a
| decade.
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-
| abst...
|
| I find this interesting, because Abnormal Psychology usually
| teaches that personality is resistant to change, and thus
| personality disorders rarely show improvement.
|
| Moreover, studies like this one
|
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%252Fs11920-014-044.
| ..
|
| indicate that Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is
| actually pretty controversial among psychologists, with a
| wide variation in how it is measured and diagnosed. They note
| a lack of longitudinal studies as well -- perhaps NPD shows a
| similar phenomena as BPD where 9/10 no longer meet the
| diagnostic criteria several year later (despite showing other
| social defecits).
|
| Am I a narcissist for challenging psychologists to provide
| better scientific evidence for the disorder? Hopefully not!
| Yet I still view the construct of personality disorders with
| skepticism.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| This seems potentially interesting, but I am _extremely_
| skeptical that they can build a machine learning model that
| accurately diagnosis narcissistic or anxious behaviors from 280
| character snippets and self-reported measures of narcissism:
|
| > To collect our ground truth dataset for the prediction of
| narcissism, we recruited participants via an article published on
| the webpage of Psychology Today. At the end of the article, a
| link to a short survey was provided, in which, after providing
| consent, participants were asked to complete a scale on
| narcissism by Konrath et al. (2014), namely "To what extent do
| you agree with this statement: 'I am a narcissist? (Note: The
| word 'narcissist' means egotistical, self-focused, and vain)"
| using a 7-point Likert scale (1 = "Not Very True of Me" to 7 =
| "Very True of Me"), and to provide their public Twitter
| username/handle for research purposes. In total, 1,067
| participants, located in the United States, completed the survey,
| indicated their public Twitter username, and provided consent for
| their social media data to be used for research. In total,
| 309,417 tweets were obtained from these participants.
|
| Psychology research already struggles with reproducibility issues
| at an alarmingly high rate. I fear that machining learning models
| are an easy way for researchers to get the answer they want from
| a dataset by tweaking the model until it produces the answer they
| want.
|
| Their model included variables like average Tweet length and
| number of upper-case words. Notably, they built the model on one
| demographic (volunteer Psychology Today readers) but tested it on
| a demographic using Twitter for entirely different reasons
| (public-facing leaders of companies on Crunchbase)
|
| It's not hard to imagine a model like this creating a lot of
| false positives when applied to public-facing leaders of popular
| startups they found on Crunchbase
| hirundo wrote:
| > (Note: The word 'narcissist' means egotistical, self-focused,
| and vain)" using a 7-point Likert scale (1 = "Not Very True of
| Me" to 7 = "Very True of Me")
|
| First, this study is clearly about me, but they don't admit
| that anywhere. Second, I am _not_ a narcissist, because among
| all other people, I 'm probably the least egotistical (I am but
| a modest demi-god), self-focused (the things I create are
| actually gifts to the world), or vain (my beauty is natural and
| effortless). So obviously I answered the poll with all ones,
| excluding myself from the training data and rendering this
| study pointless.
| ahthat wrote:
| Exactly. It's easy to lie, narcissists more than others are
| likely to flatter themselves. This kind of data is not all
| that accurate or helpful. It really doesn't tell you
| anything.
| austincheney wrote:
| Anti-narcissism is generally challenging to identify as such
| suggests a gravity away from the self. A key identifier may
| be degrees of humility, however that's defined, such that a
| person distrusts acknowledgements of success. Another
| identifier might be an inability to evaluate a group
| comparative to the self, which is the more rare high
| functioning side of Dunning-Kruger. Yet another identifier
| might be objective personality traits that preference balance
| and measures adversely to the self.
| dboreham wrote:
| Wondering how likely it is that a big-time narcissist will be
| reading Psychology Today.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| They will, looking for confirmation of how special they are.
| blululu wrote:
| There are plenty of highly narcissistic people with tenure
| and psychology departments are somewhat famous for being
| permeated with varying forms psychic peculiarities.
| themitigating wrote:
| Can you provide proof of that?
| blululu wrote:
| Absolutely not. There are plenty of studies indicating
| that narcissist tend to get ahead in institutional
| contexts and I see no reason to think academia to be less
| viciously competitive than anywhere else. As for psych
| departments harboring a greater share of crazies, this is
| just a personal observation in an area that falls beyond
| the normally accepted range of research topics. Ask
| around, you might hear similar things; you might not.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| Self-reporting seems to be fairly accurate for narcissism:
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| They didn't use the self-reported narcissists for the study,
| though. They were only used for training the model, which was
| then used to identify narcissist from a different set of
| Twitter "leaders" that they chose from Crunchbase:
|
| > Using an initial database of organizational leaders and
| employees, provided by Crunchbase (crunchbase.com), we
| randomly selected 500 highly active leaders on Twitter, and
| downloaded their public Twitter profile data.
|
| They trained the model on one demographic (readers of a
| psychology magazine) and then applied it to a different
| demographic (public faces of startups) and assumed that the
| model was equally accurate for this entirely different
| demographic.
| skim_milk wrote:
| Makes sense - narcissists have poor barriers, are the most likely
| to absorb other peoples' emotions and attempt to modify them.
| People with disordered emotional regulation (including anxiety)
| tend to attach to people that regulate their emotions for them
| and are more likely to pair up with narcissists. Not a ground-
| breaking study, but a really interesting way of gathering data to
| prove what therapists have been saying for a while but without
| much data to back themselves up.
| mckirk wrote:
| Thanks for the insight! I'd never thought about this way, but
| it makes a lot of sense intuitively. Did you formulate that
| yourself, or is there some source that might hold similar
| nuggets of wisdom?
| skim_milk wrote:
| Sam Vaknin is one of the leading experts on narcissism, he
| says this all the time.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzj7wouSe7A might cover this
| topic. Also, I wouldn't trust anyone on YouTube on the
| subject of narcissism other than Sam and the channel
| BorderlinerNotes if you want to keep studying this, there are
| heaps of trash on Youtube on this subject.
| jerry1979 wrote:
| >Since narcissistic leaders portray themselves as [!] favorable
| than the rest and show a sense of authority, deviance, and
| success, we propose that anxious followers favor and therefore
| interact more often with narcissistic leaders than non-
| narcissistic leaders.
|
| [!] Is it common to have grammar errors in publications like
| this? Wouldn't the author have preferred to say "more favorable"?
| motohagiography wrote:
| A link describing what NPD (narcissistic personality disorder)
| really is:
|
| https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-...
|
| The method of self-reporting seems like a real problem, as nobody
| is going to be reporting their dangerous pathologies out of a
| sense of civic mindedness. The crux of this seems to be they
| wanted to show they could use an ML model to their peers.
|
| It's worth looking at it more clinically instead of using it as a
| proxy for "kicking up," at leaders or charismatic people who may
| be otherwise pretty average. Elevating disorders to represent
| symbols of powerful evil and applying them to hate figures is
| superstitious villager quality reasoning.
|
| A useful example of narcisism is a more banal version, where
| someone manages their personal brand, and becomes actuated by
| external validation and the approval of others in a way that is
| pathological. Their neuroticism means they are much less likely
| to be leaders at all, and plausibly more like actors, lawyers,
| celebrities, academics, and indeed, politicians and other
| artifacts of fame and attention, but not because they are
| leaders. Rather, status occupations are watering holes for
| narcissists and their cousin pathology, psychopaths. A
| psychologist friend once quipped, if you want to see the
| Galapogos Islands of personality disorders in the wild just go to
| a strip club, which I thought was very insightful because the
| people there feel the attention and money and status but divorced
| from social norms.
|
| I would wonder in this paper whether they bothered to detect
| narcisism in the twitter followers, or is this just about
| leaders, and then, really, why? It's the need for reflected
| representations of status, and arguably not a leadership trait at
| all.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-04 23:01 UTC)