The headline of an article that a Lovefraud reader recently sent to me is:
Why women really do love self-obsessed psychopaths
With a headline like that, of course, I had to read it. The article, from 2008, describes research on the “Dark Triad” and mating behavior. The Dark Triad refers to the personality disorders of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. I had some problems with the article, but before I ripped into it, I figured I’d read the original study. Here it is:
The Dark Triad: Facilitating a Short-Term Mating Strategy in Men
This study was published in the European Journal of Personality in 2009, and the lead author is Peter K. Jonason. To be honest, I find it hard to believe that the study was considered to be a contribution to the field of personality research. But before I rip into it, let’s review the Dark Triad.
Dr. Liane Leedom posted an article about the Dark Triad on Lovefraud back in 2007. Here it is:
Choosing a love partner? Beware of The Dark Triad
Dr. Leedom wrote:
The Dark Triad is Psychopathy, Narcissism and Machiavellianism. To varying degrees, all three personality types entail a dark, interpersonally destructive character with tendencies toward grandiosity, emotional callousness, manipulation and dominance. Psychopaths and Machiavellians have high self-esteem, and are charming and fun but psychopaths are also impulsive and cunning. Narcissists are grandiose and have high self-esteem, and may also be intellectually gifted. Research has shown that these three personality types are all a bit different and yet also highly overlap.
So what do these three personality types have in common? They are preoccupied with dominance and power, and deficient in love and empathy. To anyone who is looking for a love relationship, Dr. Leedom offers the following advice: “Avoid, at all costs, connecting with a member of the Dark Triad.”
Dark Triad and mating strategy study
I realize that scientific papers aren’t supposed to offer advice, but the degree to which Jonason tries to remain “objective” in his study is ridiculous. Here is how he describes the Dark Triad:
Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy—collectively known as ”˜The Dark Triad’—are traits that are linked to negative personal and societal outcomes, and are traditionally considered maladaptive. However, the persistence of these traits over time and across various societies, as well as linkages to positive traits, suggests that the Dark Triad can be advantageous in some ways. For instance, subclinical psychopathy is associated with a lack of neuroticism and anxiety, which may facilitate the pursuit of one’s goals through adverse conditions. Similarly, narcissism is associated with self-aggrandisement, and Machiavellianism is associated with being socially manipulative, both of which may aid in reaping benefits for oneself at the expense of others, especially in initial periods of acquaintance. (Citations omitted.)
So Jonason ascribed to psychopaths the positive quality of persistence in overcoming obstacles—would he be referring to stalking? And self-aggrandisement—drawing attention to one’s own importance—helps in stepping on people? But what is the real value of Dark Triad personality traits, according to this author? Exploitative, short-term sex! Here’s what he wrote:
Although most studies have focused on the negative aspects of the Dark Triad, our evidence suggests that there might be some up-sides to these anti-social personality traits. We found that the scores on the Dark Triad traits were positively related to having more sex partners, an unrestricted sociosexuality and a greater preference for short-term mates.
Study subjects
So, how did Jonason conduct the study? He offered extra credit to 224 undergraduate psychology students to fill out self-report questionnaires. The group included 88 men and 136 women. They were aged 17 to 43—the median age was 21 and the average age was 23.5.
The students filled out three separate inventories to test for their level of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism. Then the students were asked about their views on sex, and about their sexual behavior.
So how do you think hormone-drenched, strapping young adults in today’s sex-crazed culture would respond to the following: “I can imagine myself being comfortable and enjoying casual sex with different partners.”
I assume the answer was: “YEAH!”
Then the students were asked, “With how many different partners have you had sexual intercourse within the past year?”
I assume, especially among the males, that the answer was an exaggeration.
If the popularity of Jersey Shore is any indication, my guess is that plenty of 20-somethings think lots of casual sex is just fine, and if they weren’t getting it, they’ll lie and claim that they were. Jonason even admits that this may have happened in his study.
Evolutionary argument
Nowhere in his report does Jonason indicate that he actually interviewed any psychopaths, narcissists or Machiavellians. He merely asked a narrow and unrepresentative sample of human beings to answer questions about themselves on standardized tests. Jonason subjected the responses to a myriad of statistical analyses. It appears that he dazzled the journal editors with his math, because I wonder about his conclusions.
First, he says people with Dark Triad traits have more sex. Even though he based the conclusion on testosterone-enriched young adults, I’m sure he’s right. Then, Jonason portrays this casual, exploitative, short-term sex as a successful mating strategy in the march of evolution. He writes:
Our study indicates a connection between the Dark Triad and more positive attitudes towards casual sex and more casual sex behaviors. To the extent that lifetime number of sexual partners is a modern-day marker of reproductive success, and given that the Dark Triad traits are heritable and exist in different cultures, we speculate that these traits may represent one end of a set of individual differences that reflects an evolutionarily stable solution to the adaptive problem of reproduction. (Citations omitted.)
So he’s saying that casual sex benefits the survival of the human race. I have to wonder about this argument. According to Wikipedia, “Natural selection is the process by which biologic traits become more or less common in a population due to consistent effects upon the survival or reproduction of their bearers.”
Psychopaths have been called intra-species predators. They exploit other human beings, and some have been responsible for killing others, ranging from a few to millions. If the members of the Dark Triad were so successful, I would think there would be more of them in the population. But this would be bad for the species, for human beings, as a whole. Would natural selection encourage an adaptation that has the potential of killing off other members of the species? I hope not.
Back to the news article
As is now obvious, I have a low opinion of this study, and my opinion of the news article is even lower.
First of all, consider the headline, Why women really do love self-obsessed psychopaths. Nowhere in the study does Jonason claim that women love psychopaths. Whoever wrote the headline converted the idea of casual, exploitative sex into love.
Then there’s the first paragraph of the article:
Bad boys, it seems, really do get all the girls. Women might claim they want caring, thoughtful types but scientists have discovered what they really want — self-obsessed, lying psychopaths.
The article completely omits the study’s description of duplicity in the sex pursued by personalities of the Dark Triad. As we well know, most of us who have been intimate with psychopaths, narcissists and Machiavellians were conned into it. We didn’t want, “self-obsessed, lying psychopaths.” We were deceived. But the author, Science Editor Steve Connor, went for the sensational rather than the accurate.
Finally, there’s the idea of using James Bond as an example of the Dark Triad, or at least the most recent James Bond from Casino Royale, starring Daniel Craig. This James Bond, you may recall, fell in love. He was ready to quit being a spy so he could be with his love—until she betrayed him. Even then, Bond attempted to save her life.
A real psychopath wouldn’t do that.
Dear Redwald,
To start with, this “study” was flawed from a scientific standpoint, but your conclusions about psychopathic males (assuming they do mate with more females) would pass on more DNA by virtue of more offspring.
However…we no longer live in caves where food is scarce and the offspring of a woman without a man die of starvation. There are food stamps etc. so being a “single mom” does not convey the life or death of the infants any more.
In fact, as IQ and education go up, women are having fewer and fewer children, and those on the bottom end of the Bell curve with IQ and education are having more children which are being supported by public assistance and food stamps.
I can’t remember who, I think it was Dr. Leedom, mentioned here on LF a study in London that 25% of the children in the public housing there were sired by psychopaths.
It used to be that women with juvenile diabetes died before they were able to reproduce….now many women with type I juvenile diabetes have offspring, which perpetuates the genetic tendency.
So with good social services and medical services, women who would never have been able to produce much less raise offspring from a passing by psychopath are now able to do so without the assistance of a man in such as in a hunter-gatherer society. So actually civilization is changing what is successful evolution in our own species.
Redwald,
Thank you so much for your posts. I absolutely agree with everything your wrote. In fact, you nailed the points I was trying to make.
First of all, I agree that James Bond is not a psychopath, and probably doesn’t qualify as a narcissist either. We’ve seen in film after film that he does care about others. He is loyal. He risks his life to prove his patriotism.
Secondly, thanks for the thorough explanation of reproductive strategies. That’s exactly the point – if there were too many psychopaths, they’d kill off the rest of us and there would be no one left for them to exploit.
I suggest we start killing them off by teaching the world about this disorder so that no one mates with them. It may take time, but it will work.
Interesting and important blog entry analyzing the faulty study method and subsequent article, Donna.
Sky, nice different take on the “winning” aspect, et al. It doesn’t seem to come down to winning as much as defeating and finding joy in others’ misery. Although I do think they have an inordinate urge to “win” as it pertains to gaining for themselves.
Redwald, that “r vs. k” reference was what came to my mind, too. Found your comments funny (the former) and informative (the latter, well both, really).
Oxy, “actually civilization is changing what is successful evolution in our own species” poses an ethical dilemma that I’ve pondered. Are we doing ourselves in with empathy? That is, empathy compels us to help those suffering, but in so doing do we perpetuate hereditary problems? Well, yeah. But as empathetic people, how do we deny such aid, or how do we help without hurting?
Donna, I love your humane way of “killing them off”.
Good Morning…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTrR_twYtfM&feature=related
Have a peaceful day!
Much Love,
E
Thanks, Donna. I’m glad if I could help to make that clear. The way evolution works can be very complex, with results that aren’t always obvious. And I do agree: we should choose the person we mate with VERY carefully, with an eye to the future of the human race!
Oxy, yes, our breeding policies are a matter for real concern. While we don’t like to see people dying—of disease, starvation, all the many hazards that used to afflict people before we created our modern industrialized living environment—just the fact that we’ve suspended natural selection itself in the developed nations leaves us open to the increase of hereditary defects, as SocioSibs pointed out. On top of that we’ve got to add the reality that modern “welfare” policies actually have a DYSgenic effect on our population. Those individuals who contribute LEAST to society—and in many cases are actively harmful to it, like those psychopaths—are being subsidized to breed FASTER than the more valuable contributing members of society. Psychopaths and other criminal types are a major problem in themselves, but it extends beyond that insofar as the least intelligent (and in general least capable) members of society are statistically breeding faster than others. If that’s permitted to continue indefinitely, at some time in the future the minority of capable and contributing citizens will be swamped by a mass of “marching morons” and other undesirables, and there will be no “civil society” left as we know it. That’s unless some other event intervenes, some of which are equally unthinkable.
Possibly one solution in the future could be genetic engineering, in which we actually modify the human genome to correct certain defects and deficiencies and produce better specimens of humanity. But I can’t say I relish the idea of interfering with Nature in that way either. The specter of a “Brave New World” is not necessarily an attractive one.
Hi Redwald, Donna, and others….
This is my first post here, but considering this topic of the “Dark Triad” is something I am intimately familiar with, I felt it appropriate to comment.
First of all, I have read the Jonason, Li, Webster, and Schmitt (2009) article. All of your instincts are correct, it is poor science. I personally know each of these researchers, and I have no beef with them and find them very pleasant to interact with. Moreover, they have each done phenomenal work in *other areas* of psychology. But their Dark Triad work is very poor. Moreover, they should have thought about this article more before sending it off in a hurry (it had many mistakes in it, among other issues).
What is true about the article is that members of the Dark Triad are each OK with casual sex. That has been documented since the 70’s and 80’s when the scales were each first developed. This finding is not surprising, and the same casual sex inclination exists among many personality types (e.g., borderline, social dominance, sadism, avoidant attachment, and the like).
However, the article claims that the traits are the same because they all correlate with casual sex inclination – which is utter nonsense. There is 15 years worth of data showing how these variables are different, but they ignore the entire body of literature.
The statistics are deplorable. Their “exploratory and confirmatory” factor analyses were both done on the same sample (never do that), second they enter three items into the same procedure…. By definition, one factor must emerge due to degrees of freedom issues. At any rate, everything they do (minus the simple correlations) is wrong.
But at the broader picture, I saw some debate about “r-K” theory of mating. What the originators of the theory such as Rushton and others will tell you in the “r-K” dimension is that it is only adaptive to be “r” selected in very limited situations: Ecological instability, unpredictable environments, etc. Most of the time r gets trumped by K because K is required to produce properly socialized offspring. Otherwise, why aren’t all men “r” selected?
We are very social creatures, and *grandchildren* – not children – is the mark of evolutionary success. So having a lot of sex is not inherently adaptive. It is mostly neutral. It depends on the *quality* of offspring that result and whether they have offspring themselves. So yes, getting 50 women pregnant is a step in the evolutionarily adaptive direction – but if all die from poor parenting or malnutrition, you wasted your time.
I have a tremendous amount of research coming out trying to set the record straight. However, I resent the fact peer reviewers and editors are not doing their job by shutting the door on this nonsense.
More importantly, however, is the message. “Bad boys get the girls” has resulted in “asshole training” that I’ve seen on the internet. Sales of “The Game” and “I hope they serve beer in hell” have gone up. I’m not saying because of this article (I doubt that many people have read it), but it is not a step in the right direction. Guys feel that they have to be jerks to women – and that is the virtue they strive for.
Psychopaths (according to my research, and that of others) are *not* picky about their mates. They will sleep with whomever has a pulse (maybe even some that don’t) and “yes” isn’t even required. I hardly feel that this is an enviable pattern of behavior. Moreover, it accounts for a good chunk of the findings. Remember, the finding was that psychopaths, narcissists, etc. report *more* sex partners. So, it isn’t the case that women *like* these guys, it is the case that they have higher numbers because they will sleep with whomever. A very important distinction.
So, in the end, I would lay this piece to rest as a shining example of how peer review is not infallible and we all need to read and understand articles before we cite them in our own research or conversations.
I’m pleased to see I’m not alone here.
emopro_D3 –
Welcome – and thanks for the further explanation!
Dear Emopro_D3,
Welcome to Lovefraud and thanks for your great response to this article.
There is a lot of “bad science” out there….
Welcome Emopro,
You said:
‘Remember, the finding was that psychopaths, narcissists, etc. report *more* sex partners. So, it isn’t the case that women *like* these guys, it is the case that they have higher numbers because they will sleep with whomever. A very important distinction.’
And I posit that any information *reported* by a spath is empirically false.
emopro_D3:
It’s interesting you say that psychopaths are not picky about their mates. The word “picky” stood out at me because my former spath told me that he WAS very, very, very, very (yes, he used that many “verys”) picky about who he was with. HA!!! Now I can see that he only said that to manipulate me…to make me think that if he was extremely picky then I must be special because he chose ME!!! Yay, this blog has opened my eyes to yet another one of his cons.