Money Talks: Psychopathy and Success

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2:57Hello and welcome to Money Talks. I'm your host Elizabeth Spires and today I'm joined by Dr. Leanne Tenbrink. Dr. Tenbrink, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us about your new book? Sure. I am an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. My background is in studying deception, dominance, and dark personalities. And my new book, Poisonous People, is on that latter topic. So it's about dark personality traits, how we can detect them, and how we can manage interactions with them, perhaps when we can't leave. And I I hope to actually have a pretty optimistic perspective in my book.

3:35This topic can get pretty dark, but I think I try to illustrate how these are a small number of people. And if we have tools to manage them, we can really improve the lives and the productivity of ourselves and the people around us. We wouldn't normally do a very prescriptive book on our podcast, but what fascinated me was your background in studying this in a business context. Your postdoc thesis, I believe, was about hedge fund managers and whether psychopaths generate better returns. I have kind of a varied background. You know, I started studying these personality traits in a forensic population.

4:10So people who were incarcerated after a few years of studying deceptive murderers. That was my my my Ph.D. dissertation. I was like, this is a real bummer. You know, I still loved the topic, but I wanted to go somewhere else with it. And it was around this time when I started to think about, like, there must be some situations where these personality traits are beneficial or helpful. And so I thought, oh, maybe if I go to a business school, I can study instances in which these people achieve great success or something. I can try to find the place where they kind of belong. And so I went to Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and I was working with Dana Carney and Dacher Keltner there.

4:50And it was with Dacr that we started studying the personality of hedge fund managers in particular, and whether these dark traits led to improved performance. I totally thought they would. Like, this is a place where I thought they would shine. And I have no background in finance. But I just got the sense of like, oh, this is ultra competitive. You got to be willing to take risks. Maybe you need to be willing to backstep. Exactly, right? It looks like, sure. Totally. And so I was totally of the mind that these personality traits would help hedge fund managers make more money. Dacker, the idealist, was like, no, more collaborative and positive, virtuous traits would lead to more success.

5:32Dacker was correct. So this is a really good kind of lesson in learning to test your assumptions because my hypothesis was completely wrong. We had access to a video database of about 100 different hedge fund managers. who were just like describing their investment strategy and kind of outlook on the investment landscape for the coming year. And we coded their behavior in them. So I don't think they would have been particularly receptive to me calling them up and being like, hey, can you fill out this personality questionnaire? It's all about your darkest traits. Rather, we looked at their verbal and nonverbal behavior and the extent to which it was consistent with what we know about dark personalities and how they behave.

6:17And what we found is that those who had displayed more behaviors that were associated with psychopathic personality traits in particular, made less money every year, about 1 % or so less money every year. But over 10 years, you know, as that starts to compound, that can really add up. And so this intuition, I didn't have any money at the time, nor really now. So I wasn't investing with these people. But if you had followed my intuition at the time, you would have ended up with less money in your pocket now than if you had invested your money with someone with fewer of these traits. That's a little reassuring that maybe they're not good at their jobs because of these traits.

6:57You also had a stat in the book that said something like, one study found that there are three times as many people with psychopathy per capita and senior management positions than in the general population, which strikes me as something, when people talk about having had bad bosses, it sort of makes you think they're not lying about it. Yeah, absolutely. I think we know that people with these personality traits are really interested in power and they're not interested in like the power that is gained via respect and trust so much as the power that comes from having relative dominance over other people.

7:29They want to feel bigger than other people. They want the people below them to feel small. And so it's probably not surprising that they would seek out leadership positions. And once they get into those positions, they become those bad bosses that we all seem to have a story about. And they tend to be more likely to bully subordinates, leading to high stress and high turnover. Let's back up a little bit. How do you define psychopathy? I feel like we throw that word around kind of casually, you know, they'll say, well, Donald Trump seems like a psychopath, but in the clinical sense, what is it?

8:03And how is that different from a dark personality? As you say, you know, throw the term around a lot and use it kind of jokingly. Sometimes, you know, someone who takes the, you know, edges off their sandwich, it must be a psychopath or socks and sandals, a psychopath, whatever. We actually have a very specific definition for this. So psychopathy is a constellation that is a set of personality traits, and it exists on a continuum. So from very low to very high, psychologists do define like a clinical level. So an extremely high level, you might be able to call someone, they have a psychopathy, but all of us land somewhere on this trait from very low to very high.

8:44And psychopathy involves kind of four buckets of traits. One is interpersonal. So these people tend to be very manipulative, grandiose, and have this kind of superficial charm to them. They also have these emotional aspects to them that are different from other people. So they tend to have a really shallow emotional experience. They tend not to experience remorse or guilt when they do something wrong. And even other emotions like anger might be very kind of short-lived. It's not that they can't experience any emotions. They do experience things like excitement, exhilaration, but they have deficits, particularly in some of these areas where it constrains our behaviors.

9:24It keeps us from doing bad things to other people because we're worried about feeling guilt or remorse later. They tend to have much diminished levels of those emotional experiences. They also tend to be pretty impulsive. So they tend to kind of live the fast life. They're more likely to take risks. And because of all those things, they also tend to engage in a lot of antisocial behavior that is kind of broad rule breaking. And so it's probably not surprising if you think about that combination of things I just mentioned that this set of personality traits has really gained a lot of traction in terms of research in the criminal population.

10:01But it's not like reserved to that situation whatsoever. Yeah. You also just use the phrase dark personality. Is that just sort of a broader categorization of maybe not clinical psychopathy, but people who have some cluster of those traits? Yeah, absolutely. So when psychologists talk about the dark personality traits, they talk about the dark tetrad. So it's a combination of four traits, one of them being psychopathy. So the set of dark personality traits would include psychopathy, but is not limited to that. So it would also include Machiavellianism, narcissism, and sadism. And all of these different traits overlap at callousness and manipulation.

10:45And then they have kind of unique flavors from there. But certainly these are also traits that exist on a continuum. Everyone lands somewhere from low to high. And you certainly don't need to have kind of clinical levels of them in order to really have kind of an outsized negative impact on the people around you. To go back to your study with the hedge fund managers, what were you looking for in those videos that indicated to you that these people had dark personality traits? So what we're doing is we're looking for verbal and nonverbal cues that we have found in previous studies to be associated with these dark traits.

11:20So there are things like interrupting constantly, but refusing to be interrupted, having like a weird sense of calm. Psychopathy, I mentioned, is associated with these kind of emotional deficits. So they might come across as very calm when you would expect them to be experiencing some stress. they might also engage in these kind of ambivalent emotional displays. One thing we've previously found is that they will use really angry or hostile language while smiling quite broadly. So you get this kind of mismatch between verbal and nonverbal behavior. With narcissism, probably unsurprisingly, people with high levels of this tries to talk about themselves a lot, and they tend to be very kind of overly concerned with their appearance.

12:02They might be more likely to kind of like flirt with the interviewer, be kind of overly ingratiating. You also sometimes see things like schadenfreude or sadistic smile when they're talking about the failures of other people. And so of course, none of these behaviors are like a Pinocchio's nose. They're not like, if you see that behavior once, it's not like, oh, you have really high levels of this dark personality trait because any of us can do that at some point. But on average, they tend to be more likely to engage in those behaviors. So we were taking like random snippets of their interview.

12:38And by virtue of doing that, any random snippet by someone with this personality trait should be more likely to include those kinds of behaviors versus someone with low levels of those traits. One of the really fascinating aspects of your book is how often you sort of return to the theme that some of these traits are traits that we confuse for good leadership traits, and then they backfire. So what are some examples of that? Yeah, I think particularly when people are experiencing stress of some kind, like when they are uncertain because there's real economic instability or because there is military conflict, people tend to seek out a strong leader.

13:17Strong is kind of a vague term. We're not entirely sure what that means, but it does overlap with some of these traits a lot. being very domineering. As I mentioned, people with these high levels of these dark personality traits tend to be very interested in dominating other people, not in leading through other things like respect or their impressive competence. Similarly, when it comes to narcissism, they're amazing at things and they communicate very confidently, right? And we tend to confuse that confidence for competence. And it's not until a little bit later down the road that we start to realize like, oh, they're kind of like all talk and like a lot of bluster and a lot of action, for example.

13:58Looking for that strong person, sometimes ruthlessness, you know, or like they're willing to be kind of action oriented, right? To run into that burning building. These are things that can be really a double-edged sword where they have positive outcomes at all. And in other cases, it's just like they're willing to manipulate anyone in anything. Maybe they're willing to manipulate someone you perceive as your enemy and that you might think as a good thing, but they might also be very willing to manipulate you. And so the likelihood that that trust that you extend to them is warranted is definitely a questionable proposition.

14:38How do you think that affects the way people, I'm thinking about the tech industry in particular, when they're hiring people, they often ask explicitly for people who are what they refer to as agentic or having a bias toward action where they don't think about it too hard, act, they want people who are results oriented. You have some stuff in the book about how that tends to attract a certain kind of person who maybe has those dark personality traits. Yeah, absolutely. So how do you control for that? I think you want to be like careful, kind of what you're putting out there, what you're selecting for.

15:10And so the study that you're referring to essentially had these job ads and some of the job ads, you know, they're emphasizing collaboration and straightforward communication and a process orientation. That sounds boring, right? But relative to job ads that said things like, you know, someone who is ambitious, thinks outside the box, is a tactical communicator. Those job ads were very attractive to people with high levels of narcissistic traits. And so the like, what you put out there for like, this is what we want, this is what we need in this role is going to be a bit of a filter for the people who come to you.

15:48Now, certainly not every person who applied to that more action oriented ad had really high levels of those traits. But I think whenever you are looking for those traits, you want to make sure that, you know, their ability to take actions is because they are able to quickly weigh risks and consider the outcomes, not because they are reckless and impulsive. And so if you're putting that information, out there that this is what you want. I think you want to be particularly careful about the personalities that you're getting in that net, so to speak. Yeah. One of the things you talk about is how these personalities, especially when they do have power, they sort of create a little bit of a toxic culture and people start imitating them.

16:31And so I'm thinking about, again, the tech industry and people like Elon Musk, who's very impulsive, who does have the sort of grandiosity that you talk about, or Sam Altman, who reportedly has a habit of lying about things. What do you do when you have an entire culture that's being shaped? It's shaping the way an entire industry functions. You know, this isn't just one company. It's just sort of a broad culture that's developing. And maybe these people in charge do have these personality traits and they're determining what everybody's job looks like in that industry. So I guess one of the recommendations that I give is don't put people with these traits in positions of power.

17:10Perhaps it's a bit too late for that in some cases. But we do know that working under or working with someone with these personality traits really shapes the context in which. So I already mentioned, you know, it tends to be very stressful, tends to lead to high turnover intentions in the political sphere. You know, it increases negative campaigning, which increases polarization. And so we can get this where one bad apple is really ruining the barrel kind of effect. We also see things like zero-sum thinking. So that impression that in order for me to win, everyone else must lose. That kind of competitive thinking, when that's held at the top, that tends to trickle down into the employees as well.

17:55And that, you know, not only kind of shapes the industry, but I think also can shape the extent to which a group is actually functioning very well as a set of employees. Because if I start to now see my colleagues as competitors, I'm no longer like celebrating their wins. I'm, you know, cutting them down. I'm not willing to share my knowledge, my resources, whatever the case may be. And so I think we sometimes have these like very visible set of people who at least seem to have high levels of these dark traits and positions of power. And we tend to think like, oh, that's what it takes in order to succeed in that organization or that business or spear or whatever it may be.

18:38But I think it's really like a few loud people that are kind of sucking up a lot of the oxygen. I would call it like sampling on the dependent variable. Like we're only sampling those people that like hit those really high levels because we're focused on the kind of negativity that they tend to bring. Whereas we're kind of forgetting all the other people, all the other CEOs and managers who are also incredibly successful, but don't take that kind of approach to their interactions with employees and their organizations. We'll talk more about that after our ad break.

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22:22What do you do if after listening to this podcast and reading your book, you realize that you're working for a psychopath and you can't change jobs, how do you deal with that situation? Yeah, I think if you come to the conclusion that you can't leave your job, I mean, maybe it doesn't bother you. Maybe. But the data would suggest that the higher the level of psychopathic traits of the person that you are working under, the more likely it is that you'll be experiencing this kind of stress and wishing you could go. We even find that that stress can like trickle out into other areas of your life.

22:59Of course, you like get in your car, you come home and that stress doesn't immediately go away, right? So people who work under bosses with high levels of psychopathic traits tend to report more family conflict as well. But that doesn't mean that you're like powerless to do anything. So you can engage with people with high levels of these traits in a slightly different way that is less likely to lead to them kind of blowing up or shutting down or manipulating you. So there's a few different things that you can do. One is establishing tiny common ground. Research on people with dark traits suggests that they're not particularly concerned with like not harming you or being very fair to you, but they still do have this kind of sense of in-group allegiance.

23:48And so if you can kind of start your conversations by reminding them that you are on the same team, it can be with like really little things. Like maybe you both went to the same university and they played a game this weekend and you can like mention how your team won or whatever, or you can mention how you grew up in the same place, whatever these tiny little things that you share, starting your conversation with that before you maybe give them some like negative feedback or some bad news can decrease the likelihood that they will kind of react aggressively to that. Other things that you can do are, you know, changing the way that you deliver that feedback.

24:27So we know that people with high levels of narcissism in particular, they've got these pretty fragile egos. And so giving them negative feedback can lead to pretty, they're not going to listen to you and you might get a really aggressive response when you were just trying to help to make the process better, right? So one thing that you can do is to kind of soften the way that you share that information. You can, instead of saying, the way that we write these reports is terrible, like you really need to change the format of these reports because they're unreadable. Okay, that's not probably going to go over very well.

25:02If you frame it as a question, something more like, what do you think about changing the way that we format these reports to make them a little more readable, they're going to be more likely to just like hear you and potentially do something about it. So there's little things like that you can do in order to just like soften the communication, especially when you need to deliver kind of bad news. Yeah. What about, how do you set boundaries with people like that? Boundaries are, and just like having rules in place are really important. Now it is absolutely not a guarantee that they will follow the rules because as I mentioned with psychopathy, breaking the rules is kind of part and parcel of the personality.

25:43But they don't, they're not like completely out of control, right? So if there are rules in place, they're more likely to follow some than others. The ones that they are more likely to follow are the ones that are written down. So for this book, I talked to someone who has been diagnosed with psychopathy, and she has basically made it a habit to like only follow the rules that are like explicitly written down. There's all kinds of rules out in our lives and, you know, the way that we interact with our colleagues that are not written down. Right. They're just kind of like social norms. She's not worried about those because like there's no no one can come back at her and say you contravene this rule.

26:23These are the consequences. So research does suggest that just writing the rules down and saying like, we'll be watching and we'll do something if you don't follow these rules improves their behavior. It's not going to improve it every time, but it's really helpful to think about in my workplace, we have a respectful workplace policy, which sounds like something that we should not need. Like most people don't need this, but it can be really helpful for these handful of people that do need those rules explicitly written down. And then if they break the rules, you actually have something that you can like, say, bring to HR, for example, as opposed to like saying your colleague was rude to me, but there's no rule against that.

27:07So what can we do about it? Yeah. How do you think about the relationship between lying and these traits? Because I also think of that as something that's endemic to certain industries, or rather, especially with early stage tech and maybe early stage finance, people are encouraged to exaggerate the growth of their business. And sometimes that the line between exaggeration and just outright lying just gets blurred and people learn how to do this. Do these traits kind of get worse over time or can they be mitigated or exacerbated? I mean, that reminds me of like the Forbes 30 under 30 to prison pipeline, right?

27:44So like, there's like a shocking number of people who have been on that list and who have found themselves in prison for exaggerating the claims of what their technology can do. And actually, once when I was giving a presentation in Silicon Valley, I was once asked by someone if I could teach people how to avoid a polygraph test or how to like beat a polygraph. And I was like, that's not a good sign. I was like, I could, but I'm not going to. Right. So yeah, not a great sign, definitely some industries where this kind of overconfidence that might lead into outright deception is pretty common. So manipulation is like at the core of these dark traits.

28:27And so deception, therefore, is highly likely. So research suggests that on average, people with high levels of dark traits are much more likely to tell lies than people with fewer such traits. And it's not something, these personality traits, by virtue of being a personality trait, we define them as something that is pretty consistent over time. So they're thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that occur across time and context. And so things aren't kind of magically going to change one day. And often people with high levels of these traits are not particularly motivated to change. It's more like a you problem than a them problem.

29:07However, some people have taken that to mean, And I think there's a sense that means our personalities are like set in stone, especially after a certain age. And that's not the case either. So you can change over time, but it's likely to be kind of small increments. And you really need to be committed to that change. Like you need to follow through on trying to encourage yourself to like have more gratitude, to take other people's perspectives, to do kind things every day. if you want to become more agreeable and have fewer dark traits. And so it's not an easy thing. If anyone's ever tried to change anything about themselves, even getting up and exercising every day, or I'm going to be better at taking notes in meetings and be more conscientious, it's really hard.

29:52It's totally possible to see improvements in these traits over time, but only if that person is committed to that change. Yeah. So you also have a chapter in the book that I found fascinating. It was, how did I spot a dark personality in 10 seconds or less? So how do we do that? So that is looking for a lot of those same cues that I talked about earlier that we were looking for in the hedge fund managers. And so lots of those interrupting, pushing on boundaries. Like if you say something like, yeah, you know, at work, I don't talk about my personal life. And they keep trying to figure out like where you live and are you married and all this stuff, even though you've told them not.

30:34Laughing at other people's pain is associated with sadism, talking about yourself a lot, associated with narcissism, those inappropriate emotional experiences associated with psychopathy. And so there's these little kind of, I think of them as like red flags, but really they're just little pieces of data. So they're little pieces of data that you can hold onto, and then you can use them to form a running theory. Because yeah, you can look to that data. And research does suggest that people get a kernel of truth about people's personality after, you know, five seconds, 10 seconds of interacting.

31:09But because personality exists across time, it's really more of a first impression that we should update as we get further information about them across time and across context. There are studies that talk about people with extreme levels of wealth displaying some of the traits that you're talking about. Do you think that if you already have a dark personality or you have those traits that are kind of latent, does extreme wealth make them worse? So we do know that power kind of activates the self. And this is one of the reasons why I say, you know, don't give people with these dark personality traits power over others because power does corrupt.

31:47So research suggests that on average, if you give people power over others, they tend to be more self-focused. They tend to be a little more selfish, less fair. However, it's not the same for everyone equally. So research by Katie DeSellis at the University of Toronto measured the extent to which people were, they thought that morality was really important to them, right? So they had a moral identity. It was really important to them to be fair and to be honest. And when those people got power, they actually became more generous to other people, whereas most people became less generous when they got power over other people.

32:25So it kind of power, kind of broadly speaking, including extreme wealth, I assume, can activate kind of who you are. And so if you have some of these latent traits, it would be very unsurprising to me that you're very, you're then very unconstrained in terms of displaying those traits. Not having massive wealth myself, I cannot say out of personal experience. Me neither. There was a video a while back of the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, and he was doing an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin from The Times. And in the video, all of the things that you're talking about as being things that you would recognize in 10 seconds or less, Karp was basically doing.

33:07And he behaves like this a lot. And when he's asked about it, he says that it's because he's neurodivergent. And Elon Musk says the same thing. He says he's autistic. And I have an autistic friend who insists that that's just a lie. He's just an asshole. How do you think about the way that some people could conceivably use the sort of label of neurodiversity in order to excuse some of these dark personality traits? Have you seen that in your work? That's a fascinating question. So certainly, say, when it comes to like ADHD, there is this like weak to moderate correlation between psychopathic personality traits and ADHD.

33:46But it's only related to that impulsivity piece. So like people with ADHD don't have the like callousness, the manipulation. It's only when it comes to the impulsivity. So these personality traits are like they don't exist in a vacuum and people can have a personality and also have a neurodivergent kind of diagnosis and they can co-occur. So that's entirely possible. I think one of the things that I don't know to what extent those neurodivergent experiences get used to kind of excuse that behavior. I think that it would make some sense when it comes to that overlap with impulsivity, perhaps, but it really, the callousness, not really, and the manipulation, maybe not.

34:34I think there's emotional differences, right, for perhaps both of those groups, but it's very different forms of empathy that differ, right? So one of the things that is really interesting about empathy is that we kind of lump all of these different forms of empathy together. One form of empathy is cognitive empathy, and that's the ability to understand what's going on in other people's minds. And that tends to be impaired in autism, but is totally present in psychopathy. In psychopathy, it's affective empathy or like kind of care and compassion for other people that is diminished, whereas that is not the case in autism.

35:14And so So if you think very broadly, some empathic differences are across these two groups. But if you drill down, you see that they're different types. So what are the costs of these people who have dark personality traits being in charge? What's the cost to society and to the individual and the organization? I mean, the costs are incredibly huge with respect to stress, days off work for that reason, for illness, just because you don't want to be around your boss, turnover and the cost of hiring a new person to take on that position. It's hard to really put a number on it in the organizational context.

35:54I think one place where we can better put a number on it is in the criminal context. And so research suggests that in the U.S., if you put together all of the cost of crime, what are all the costs associated with the breaking of laws? And that includes not only, you know, like cost to the victim for medical treatment, for example, incarceration, the legal system, all that paperwork that has to get done, but also the security systems that we put around our house, the time that we could spend on other things. It turns out that's like$5 trillion a year that could be spent on other things, right? And if you take into account just those people with clinical levels of psychopathy, they make up about 20 % of the incarcerated population, but they account for about 50 % of all serious crime because they tend to commit lots of crimes, not just one.

36:51And so we can kind of pin like 2.5 trillion of those dollars on just that very small group of society. And I think we recognize in our day-to-day lives that there's always like, there's like this one person who's causing a whole lot of problems. But we don't often see exactly how big that discrepancy is in terms of like how small or how few a number of people create these huge problems for the rest of society. Similarly, I don't think we think about the benefits of early intervention enough. So some research on youth with high levels of psychopathic traits suggests that if we provide them with treatment early, every dollar that we put into that treatment saves us$7 just in criminal court costs, not to mention all of the improvements in their behavior and the improvements in their relationships with other people that come from that.

37:43And so I think people recognizing that it's a really small number of people that have this incredible outsized harm. And if we can do something to manage that small, you know, set of people, it can be really quite powerful. So what do those interventions look like? So a lot of the interventions look like cognitive behavioral therapy, and it is, you know, recognizing what triggers you thought patterns that are likely to lead to problematic behaviors down the road. It's not anything that's like dramatically different than other kinds of treatment. It's getting people with these personality traits to stick with it.

38:24That seems to be the more difficult problem. One thing that is a little bit different about how treatment occurs or how treatment can be beneficial for youth with these traits is that research suggests that punishments don't hit very hard for people with high levels of psychopathic traits. Like literally their brains process punishment differently than people with fewer such traits, but they are very reward motivated. And so if you can like create some rewards for kids with these traits and consistently reward them for doing good things, then that can be a really powerful way to shape their behavior for the future.

39:03Would this work on a president, do you think? It is unclear to me. Asking for a friend. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us. You are so welcome. So that's it for Money Talks. Thank you to our wonderful guest, Leanne Tenbrink, for joining. And thanks to Jessamyn Molle of Seaplane Armada for producing. We'll be back on Saturday with our regular edition of Slate Money.

39:48WashingtonWise, an original podcast for investors from Charles Schwab to hear the stories making news in Washington right now. Host Mike Townsend, Charles Schwab's Managing Director for Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, takes a nonpartisan look at the stories that matter most to investors, including policy initiatives for retirement savings, taxes and trade, inflation concerns, the Federal Reserve, and how regulatory developments can affect companies, sectors, and even the entire market. Mike and his guests offer their perspective on how policy changes could affect what you do with your portfolio.

40:23Download the latest episode and follow at schwab.com slash Washington Wise or wherever you listen.

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