How to spot psychopaths and narcissists, with Leanne ten Brinke

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1:52Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

2:10The N10 Brink is a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia and an expert on narcissists, psychopaths, and liars. Her debut book, Poisonous People, debunks misconceptions about these kinds of dark personalities, replacing common myths with real information about how to expose a lie, how to spot the early signs of psychopathy, and how to deal with narcissists. I've long been a fan of her research, which is full of surprising clues on how to recognize dark traits in others. One of her favorite signals is yawning. Hmm.

2:45So there's a set of studies that show people with various levels of psychopathic traits yawns, and they just watch them and see how they react. And the research shows that people with higher levels of these psychopathic traits are less likely to yawn in return. You know, I posted something on social media about this research, and some people even in the comments were like, every time you said yawn, I started to yawn, right? So we're incredibly reactive to the people in our midst, whereas people with psychopathic traits are much less so. And you can see that even in these kinds of reflexive behaviors that other people take for granted.

3:27It's such an interesting finding. And of course, it raises lots of questions for me about what's behind it. So is a psychopath less likely to notice someone else to begin with? Or is it just not contagious? They don't catch it. So there are some differences with respect to attention and how people with psychopathy look at the faces of other people. So they tend to scan other people's faces somewhat differently, which can lead to decreased ability to detect certain emotions, particularly fear and sadness. They tend to be a little bit less accurate than other people. However, there's also that automatic piece for sure.

4:07So when we talk about empathy, we're actually sometimes talking about or conflating a whole bunch of different things. So empathy, sometimes people use that to refer to, you know, like catching other people's emotions. That's kind of an automatic process. And that's the thing that they tend not to have or they have at much diminished levels. Whereas other forms of empathy, like cognitive empathy, being able to understand what might be going on in someone else's mind, that's still present. And so it's at least part of it is that very automatic piece of empathy of catching other people's emotions.

4:42So I might see it, but I don't necessarily feel it or absorb it in you. Yeah, exactly. And so that's why there's this kind of famous quote about people with psychopathy kind of knowing the words, but not the music of emotion. So like they get it, but they don't have that same kind of inner feeling that the rest of us have. So you have not limited yourself to studying psychopaths. You have studied all kinds of poisonous people. How would you define a poisonous person? Yeah, so when I talk about poisonous people, I'm talking about people who score relatively highly on what we call the dark tetrad.

5:19And so this is a set of overlapping traits, including psychopathy, which I've spent a lot of time studying, but also Machiavellianism, narcissism, and sadism. And so if you think of like a Venn diagram, right, and there's overlap between all of these different traits. They overlap at callousness and manipulativeness and kind of antagonistic. So they're hostile toward other people, but they all each have their own like certain flavor that is distinct from the others as well. So with respect to psychopathy, they tend to be highly impulsive, whereas Machiavellian, much more calculated and strategic in their pursuit of power.

6:02Narcissism, of course, people are pretty familiar with with respect to grandiosity being very entitled. And sadism is a more recent addition to the literature. And those are individuals who are really feel pleasure in other people's pain. What's a bit difficult in the definition of poisonous people is kind of like where to draw the line, because these personality traits, they exist on a continuum, right? So like you and I, Adam, we also fall somewhere on each of these traits from low to high. And we also know that while there are, you know, personality disorders that can be diagnosed, for example, at the very high end of narcissism, we also know that, you know, high levels but not clinical levels of narcissism can also bring a lot of conflict into social situations.

6:53And so I've been trying to figure out, okay, where is that line between not clinical, not diagnosable, but still likely to cause a lot of trouble in our social interactions? We often measure these traits using self-report. So you can basically look at how someone self-reports on these items, whether they agree that, yes, I'm callous. Yes, I am impulsive. Yes, I think I'm better than other people. and if they tend to agree on all those items, then you can say, okay, you are at the high end. And it turns out that's about - 10 % of people. What I think people find so surprising about this outside of psychology is that anyone would admit to that.

7:37But if you understand a narcissist or a psychopath, they don't see anything wrong with saying, I'm better than others, or I don't feel what other people are feeling. That's totally right. And I think we also have quite a bit of evidence now to show that people who are antagonistic, right, who have these kind of hostile approaches to social interactions are not particularly interested in changing because it doesn't bother them, right? They're not, they don't feel remorse whenever they lie to other people. They don't feel shame whenever they, you know, break the rules. And so they don't feel, you know, that kind of motivation to change often.

8:17they think of it more of like a you problem than a them problem.

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11:00There's so many things that I love about your research on the dark tetrad, or I think as regular people would call it, the dark quad. And academics should not be allowed to name things. But one of the things that I found eye-opening when I was first reading your research was that you also found that there are some unexpected ways to identify these traits. If you can't survey somebody, for example. I loved your finding that when talking about other people's failure, that the people with dark traits actually smiled more and felt schadenfreude. They enjoyed others' misfortune. Yeah. And I'd love to hear you riff a little bit on what are the other clues that somebody might be over the line.

11:43David Cosson and his colleagues created this interpersonal measure of psychopathy. And it was intended, you know, as kind of a gut check for clinical psychologists. It's not a diagnostic tool, but like, hey, can we have some like structured first sense of whether this person might have high levels of these traits? It includes things like interrupting the other person in the conversation really often, but refusing to be interrupted yourself, ignoring personal and professional boundaries. So, you know, if you say, oh, that's a topic I'm not really interested in pursuing in this conversation, but they keep trying to go back to it, right?

12:19Keep pushing, rambling, going off into strange tangents. Sometimes they might try to impress you by like using really big words or acronyms. But if you think about it, they use them incorrectly. And then with respect to psychopathy, there's these emotional distinctions. So they might be weirdly calm or have really short-lived emotions. Whenever I was studying these thin slices of behavior of people with really high levels of psychopathy, essentially there are these like five-second clips. and Scott Lillenfeld and his colleagues found that people could detect with some level of accuracy how psychopathic this person was based on just watching five seconds of their behavior, which was really incredible.

13:09And so then I reached out to him and was like, can we code these videos? Are you willing to share those so that we can look at what are people relying on with just five seconds of behavior. And one of the things we found was that the people with high levels of psychopathy had this really weird combination of emotions where they would be using words that were really angry or they would be saying things that were really hostile while they were engaging in this big, broad smile. And so this inappropriate combination of verbal, nonverbal displays of emotion tended to be a cue that people used. You're drawing a line in the sand saying, look, if people have these four traits, if they are narcissists, psychopaths, sadists, Machiavellians, they're poisonous.

14:00And I think in some ways, this has been a trend on Instagram and TikTok, right? To label people as toxic and then write them off. And I'm seeing more and more backlash against that. People saying, hey, wait a minute. A lot of problems are endemic to a relationship, not a person. That person you're calling toxic, maybe you're the toxic one and you don't like the fact that they won't do what you want them to do. And every time I see this pushback, I think, no, your research is really rigorous. It's very careful. There is a subset of the population that is problematic. And I'd love to just hear you wrestle with this tension a little bit.

14:41How should we be thinking about toxic or poisonous people? It's not a simple answer, and I think it's why we have this back and forth. And maybe it's kind of like a pendulum swinging, right? So we've started to recognize that in our culture and throughout time, there's been these types of dark personalities. And we're starting to become less tolerant of them, let's say. And we have all this data to show that they cause incredibly outsized harm. So that is true. At the same time, these traits exist on a continuum. And so it becomes a little bit difficult to figure out where is that line. And so if you are unwilling to tolerate any level of those traits, then you can pretty quickly get to the point where you are like cutting out everybody.

15:31So like anybody who has ever, you know, talked too much about themselves in a conversation or who has interrupted more than you would like, you're like, they're a narcissist, cut them out. And I think that we're going too far in the sense that we're not actually learning the skills to manage these types of interactions with dark personalities. And if we're able to figure out like, you know, cut and run is not the only solution. We can learn how to mitigate the damage that these personalities do. then I think we can become in a sense more tolerant but also just like diminish this damage. We can kind of take that whole set of research that we know about where dark personalities cause outsized harm and we can start to tamp that down.

16:21Okay I want to talk about how before we do that though there's a lot of I think popular discourse about how like well psychopaths you know are disproportionately likely to be CEOs, or they're overrepresented in institutions like Congress. True or false? So true, but I think people... So we do have this study, this fantastic study by Paul Babiak and Bob Hare, Craig Newman, and they showed that among CEOs, about 3 % of them would have clinical levels. So extremely high levels of psychopathy. Now, our best estimate is that 1 % of the general population would have that same level of psychopathy. So yes, like three times more likely, but I don't think that necessarily means that psychopathy always leads to this kind of success, right?

17:20Because if you look at the prison population, about 20 % of incarcerated individuals have high levels of psychopathy. So like the likelihood that someone with these traits will end up in prison is much, much higher than the likelihood they'll end up in the kind of upper echelons of business. Wow. And just to underscore that, what I also hear you saying is, yeah, CEOs are three times more likely to be psychopaths than, you know, maybe the average person would be. But also, 97 % of CEOs are not psychopaths. Good news. Yeah. And so I think it's really useful to turn those data points around when we're considering those lower levels of these dark traits.

18:02So not necessarily diagnosis-level personality disorders, but still what I would refer to as poisonous people. Say that's 10-ish percent of the population. That means there's 90 % of the population who are not that way, who are genuinely kind and helpful and concerned about other people. And so while we spend a lot of time, you know, focusing on this small set of individuals who cause a lot of harm, it can be really helpful to zoom out and think about that is not all. It's not even close to all of humanity. And there's much, there's a ton of reason for optimism and hope about our social interactions.

18:44I think so too. And I think that's an important message. I do think, though, that as you pointed out earlier, the small minority of the population that has these dark traits is able to wreak a lot of havoc on the world and on our lives. And it's almost impossible to talk about this topic without talking about politics. I think we know clearly that the trolls who cause the most harm on the Internet tend to be people with dark traits. Even the people doing a lot of the moral grandstanding for their own party are doing it out of narcissism or Machiavellianism in many cases from my read of the data.

19:21And it does seem that Congress is overrun by people who have figured out, yeah, I can be a virtuous victim. And I don't have to claim that I'm a good person. I could talk about how I've been wronged and get lots of attention that way and maybe run our society and make laws that way. Can you just paint a portrait of how dark is U.S. Congress and are narcissists and Machiavellians and psychopaths and sadists more likely to make it there? Are they more likely to succeed there? I know you've studied this in depth. Yeah, so when I was at UC Berkeley, Dr. Keltner and I had the idea of like, I wonder if we could code the behavior of U.S.

20:09Congress people and try to get a sense of their personality, because they're very unlikely, you know, to fill out self-report questionnaires for us. But we can, we know that there's some cues in their verbal and nonverbal behavior, so we can try to use that. So we watched like a vast amount of C-SPAN and we coded the extent to which they showed behaviors consistent with psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism. And what we found was that those who had higher levels of those traits were actually not more influential than other people. They were actually less influential. So even once they rose to this like committee chair position where they have objectively a lot of power, they were less able to get other people to work with them.

20:55So it was really interesting to show that kind of like stagnation that can come if we have too many of these personalities in Congress. But it does seem like, and we know from other research, these personalities are very interested in power and status. And so, you know, Who has more power and status than people at the upper echelons of our government? So it would be unsurprising to see higher levels of these traits there. Yeah, there's clearly a gravitation. And then also there's skill there, right? I think about the superficial charm that people with dark traits tend to bring to the table. And narcissists are often very likable on first impressions until you have to deal with them on a regular basis.

21:45And it sounds like that's part of what you're picking up when you say, well, but they were less influential when it came to getting their bills passed. On the one hand, these people are great at building followings online and making noise and getting attention. On the other hand, if you have to collaborate with them day to day, not so fun. Exactly. So they can talk a big game, like look very persuasive, but they end up creating a whole lot of conflict. And we see this even in political campaigns. People with these personalities tend to be more likely to go negative, right? And then that also creates a kind of a spiral where their competitors also feel like they need to go negative in order to combat this, and we end up in this kind of dark spiral.

22:28Sounds all too familiar. So what do we do about it? Let's go to the practical advice. I think in some cases, the only option is distance. If you have a family member who is certifiably dark, you probably don't want to deal with that person on a daily basis. But we often can avoid them. What if we're stuck in their house? What if they're our boss? What is your guidance on how to deal with somebody who might be a little bit toxic? Yeah, I think there's definitely this kind of fork in the road, right? And it might come up multiple times along this road where you need to make the decision as to whether to stay or go.

23:13I hope that people recognize that, you know, feeling conflicted about this decision is totally normal and doesn't mean that you're making the wrong choice if you decide to leave. Humans are built for social connection. We're not built for breaking off those connections. even when it, you know, it hurts to stay in them. And also, you know, sunk costs are going to keep you in something that you've devoted time and resources to, even though it may not be serving you. And your commitment to them changing does not equal their improvement, right? Now, of course, you can leave and you also want to be somewhat careful doing that, especially in domestic situations where violence is a possibility.

23:57You know, I talk about in the books and things that you can do to stay safe, like, you know, leaving when they're not around, not announcing it, because violence tends to be more likely to occur when someone is in the midst of leaving, when they're breaking off that relationship. But if you decide to stay, it's like you're not resigned to be a victim. And there are things that you can do to manage their behavior. So say it's just like someone at work and you have to interact with them on occasion. It's not so bad that you're like, I'm going to quit my job, but you really wish those meetings could be better.

24:35OK, there's some things you can do. One is, you know, establish like tiny common ground with this person. So people with dark traits are not particularly interested in fairness or not causing harm to other people, but they do care about loyalty, like a lot of other people care about loyalty. And so if you can create this kind of in-group with them just by saying little things like, hey, did you watch the team that you both cheer for on the weekend? If you create some sort of little connection with them, one study showed that if people thought they had the same like birthday or fingerprint type, which I don't even know if that's a real thing, then people with narcissism were less likely to blow up whenever they got negative feedback.

25:21And so you can try to create this tiny common ground to make people more accepting of your feedback. Another great little tidbit of advice is you can pose your feedback in the form of a question as opposed to a statement. So you can say things like, what do you think about changing the report so that they read this way instead of that way? Instead of we really need to change our reports to read a different way. And so just framing it as a question feels less like a shot to their dominance. And so you might be able to mitigate some of the blowups by just rephrasing the way that you communicate with these individuals.

26:03I had this idea. I have no idea how to get other people on board with it. And you are highly skilled at influence and persuasion. Can you help me? And of course, they're the person I'm trying to get on board. Yeah, absolutely. I do feel like as I was writing these descriptions of like, hey, these are some things that you can do. I've really wanted to stay away from trying to beat them at their own game or doing something that might work short term, but would backfire long term. So like if you start like ingratiating them, you know, being like, oh, you're the most amazing XYZ when in fact they are not just trying to, you know, get your idea across in that moment.

26:46You're actually kind of building up that ego and you're going to run into it again later. And so I really think there are ways that we can interact with them that don't feel like we're selling ourselves out because we start losing bits of ourselves if we try to kind of beat them at their own game. Oh, I think that's a really important point. And it's, you know, whenever I've advised somebody to seek advice, I always put the caveat in, look, you have to be genuinely interested in the person's advice. And I've landed in the same place that you have, which is I would much rather be transparent with the person than even, you know, a little bit manipulative for a good cause and say, look, you know, it seems like you're not buying into this idea.

27:31and I'm actually really invested in trying to make it happen. What would make this a win for you? Can you walk me through what would get you excited about this idea? Because I don't want to trick you. I don't want to tilt you. I do want to get you on board. Can you help me with that? Yeah. I mean, that's like negotiation one-on-one in some ways. It's trying to understand what matters to them and what's going to bring them on board. And so they might not want to pursue the same thing that you do for the same reasons, but you might get them there for a different reason. So, you know, if you're concerned about fairness and, you know, being kind to other people, those are not necessarily the concerns of a dark personality.

28:15But if the same kind of behavior or agreement can get them attention or get them a bonus, money, you know, that might be something they're willing to get on board for. And so while they might not engage in the same behavior for the reason that you do, it's not that they're completely unable to do something kind or honest. It's just that they might have a different motivation to do so. So trying to get in their brain a little bit can be helpful. This episode is sponsored by Kohler Smart Toilets. The objects we interact with most are often the ones we notice least. Kohler's Smart Toilet challenges that assumption.

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31:13Let's go to a lightning round now. First question is, what is the worst advice for dealing with a toxic or poisonous person that you've seen? I think it's to try to best them at their own game. Like, if they are lying to you, you try to lie to them. If they are trying to dominate you, you try to dominate them. So I watched this documentary. Sorry, should this be short? I'm terrible at lightning round. No, it's good. What is your best advice that we haven't covered yet for dealing with someone who has some dark tendencies? A really good piece of advice is to identify some boundaries and make them explicit.

31:51So in a relationship with a dark personality, they like to push on rules, but the easiest rules to push on are the ones that you never say and you never make explicit. And so at least doing that gives you kind of some hope. And even in the workplace, for example, if they contravene them, then you've got some rule that they violated that maybe you can pursue some disciplinary action for. But without it, you're kind of up a creek. We'd love to get an example or two of what it would look like to set a boundary with a dark personality. And does that look different at all than the way I might communicate a boundary to somebody who is lighter?

32:28You want to do it in a way that, you know, doesn't kind of threaten them quite so much, saying something like, you know, I'm not really interested in talking about that topic. Like if you come back to that, I'll have to end this conversation. Just something like that. Wow. All right. That's very matter of fact. I like it. All right. What's something you've rethought or changed your mind about with respect to poisonous people? You know, I had a conversation with someone with psychopathy recently, and they brought up this point about diversity in the workplace and the importance of having diverse perspectives on the team.

33:05And I was like, oh, I totally agree with that. And then they pivoted into that means you should have dark personalities on your team, which is very, you know, was not where I was self-justifying. And then I was like, oh, am I internally inconsistent in my beliefs about diversity on teams? And I think, you know, these are people with skills and abilities and talents, just like anybody else, but they also had these antagonistic traits. And so I think the problem with that kind of diversity on the team is that it can bring a lot of personal conflict, not just task conflict. And so if these personalities are going to be on a team, like everyone needs to be well-versed into how to manage those aspects of the behavior.

33:50Otherwise, it all devolves and you're just, it's just like shouting matches and fear and stress. You get to study anybody in human history with dark traits at a dinner party. Who are you inviting? Okay, this is maybe a weird answer to that question. I went to a talk by Franz de Waal, and he talked about bonobos and experiments that he did that seemed to suggest they had empathy and they were very cooperative and they played. I thought it was so fascinating. I think I'd like to have dinner with him and maybe Scott Lillenfeld, who is really like a giant in the field of psychopathy. He actually helped create a measure of psychopathic personalities that could be used on chimps.

34:31And I'd love to understand how other primates manage these personalities. And I'm not above taking advice from a bonobo. I'm glad you didn't invite the chimps to dinner. Well, I mean, that could be interesting, but probably messy. Yeah, agreed. Okay, leaving the lightning round, let us go to office hours. So we're trying this new segment where we let the guests come to my office and ask me some questions. Did you have anything on your wishlist? I do. So in my reading on dark personalities in leadership, I came across the work by Taya Cohen about guilt-prone leaders and all the positive outcomes that they can have on teams.

35:15And so it occurred to me that they're kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum from people with psychopathy, right? So guilt-prone people tend to be good at resolving conflict and keeping others' interests in mind, but they also tend to be pretty reluctant to take on a leadership role, right? The opposite of psychopathy again. So my question for you would be, how can we make leadership not suck for people with these traits so that they might be more willing to take on the role and will be totally emotionally spent by doing it? Oh, that's such a good question. I'm going to give you a very concise, maybe unpopular answer.

35:54You ready? Hit me. The best way I can think of to make leadership roles more attractive to people who care about others is to redesign leadership roles so they're shared as opposed to just held by a single individual. Okay. I love this idea. Do you? Yeah, I totally do, because it's almost like you can use a little bit of diffusion of responsibility to make the person who takes on way too much feel like they don't need to take on everything. So they're still taking on a ton, but maybe they're not completely crushed by the weight of it. It's not just like we're alone feeling like we're pushing a boulder up a hill.

36:35I think that's so compelling. And there is a growing body of research on shared leadership. There's even evidence that co-CEO structures may outperform single CEOs with relatively similar companies, assuming the co-CEOs can divide responsibilities effectively and they don't end up with such a steep power and status hierarchy that one person is basically the de facto COO. But I think we really underrate shared leadership. And I think that – I just look at a lot of leadership jobs and I think these are too big for one person. How can one person be president of the United States? How can one person run a huge company?

37:13I mean, we don't trust one person to run a family if we can help it. You know, think about all the challenges that single mothers and single fathers face. That's a leadership role. We want two in an ideal scenario. And it seems insane to me that we entrust these jobs which have only grown in scope to a sole person as opposed to two or even three people who could be in charge together. Yeah, I love that idea. So Leanne, as we wrap up, one of the things that you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation was there are lots of different ways to draw the line on whether somebody might be dark or poisonous or toxic.

37:51You also said this is a spectrum. Well, these are spectra, and each of us fall somewhere along the continuum. And I think the most responsible way to deal with thinking about dark traits is to recognize that very few of us score extremely high, but also very few of us score zero on all four of them. And I think from this conversation, one of the things that I'm rethinking, which makes me a little bit uncomfortable, is the one of these four traits that I occasionally see in myself is a willingness to manipulate others if I think the cause is worthy. And I don't even think about it as manipulation.

38:27I think about it as motivation and persuasion. So I think this conversation has left me thinking, I need to watch out for that tendency in myself and make sure I don't cross the line from motivation and influence to manipulation. How do I do that? And what guidance do you have for our listeners who might be worrying about occasional flashes of any of these traits in themselves? That's a great question. And it's one that I actually love to hear because I think most people will ask me, how do we reduce the effects of this kind of dark personality in the world? The easiest place, well, it's not easy, but the one place where you have the most control is by reducing it in yourself.

39:10Because as you say, we're all land somewhere on the spectrum. So even if we're relatively low, there's room to turn the dial down. So a set of studies that I love that pursued this was done by Nathan Hudson. And he had people do these agreeableness challenges over the course of like 16 weeks. He would ping them and he would be like, hey, today you should, you know, show gratitude to someone that you usually don't show gratitude to. You should do something kind for someone. You should, if you start to get annoyed with someone, take a moment and try to take their perspective. And what he found was that over the course of those like 16 weeks, people reported being more agreeable and having fewer of those dark personality traits over time.

39:59Our personalities are relatively stable, but they're not cast in stone. So we can change them with time and effort. And so that awareness and also commitment, I think, is really important to reducing the darkness in the world. Well, thank you, Leanne. I think your work is always thought-provoking. But one thing I did not fully see until this conversation is how much hope your work brings. It's easy to get depressed or discouraged talking about toxic people and dark traits and the poisonous effects that humans can have on others. But I think my takeaway from this conversation is that toxic tendencies are more rare than we might think.

40:41And they're also more malleable than we might think. And so it's good news if there are fewer poisonous people in the world than we assume. And also if we can actually reduce the number of them. That I think is maybe hope for a better world. Absolutely. I think every bit of like energy and time and dollar that we put into mitigating these traits, I mean, especially in youth, returns to us sevenfold by one estimate. So I think, you know, recognizing this, managing it early, it's just going to make the world a kinder, more honest and I think productive place. Bring it on. Thank you. Thank you.

41:49Thank you.

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