If we’re calculating that based on Supreme Court nominees, I would say it is quite prevalent. Don’t take my word for it:
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/false-rape-allegations
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I haven’t been able to get this out of my head since yesterday.
It seems to me that the “dark triad” of behaviors are somewhat less explanatory and more vague than they look on the surface; exaggerated expressions of normal stereotypical masculine qualities and otherwise qualities that can be used to describe any selfish aggressive behavior or criminal activity.
Narcissism and Psychopathy are I believe medically defined terms. “Machiavellianism” might be more of a…behavioral thing rather than a mental illness.
Even still, we’d be hard pressed to diagnose even a majority of people convicted of rape with narcissistic personality disorder or as a psychopath.
Those are academic terms describing a specific kind of aberrant behavior but, you know, a person with a big dose of any of those personality traits is going to be prone to every kind of violence, property crime or otherwise criminal behavior that exists; it’s not specifically sex related.
Psychopaths and antisocial personality disorder people all tend to have strong narcississitc elements, as well as histories of incredible dishonesty and scheming. Not usually clever scheming, mind you. Just compulsive attempts to manipulate that pay off due to volume rather than cleverness.
This perfectly describes an awful lot of jailbirds who commit an awful lot of crimes.
Reading up on it there is a medical definition for it as well, even a personality test for it.
Nah, Narcissism is one of the Big Five personality traits that’s overwhelming replicated and validated as a construct, and correlates directly with the problem here.
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The case for this is reinforced by the book, especially in the context of the evolved (maladaptive) bias to misinterpret women’s signals as favorable or encouraging when they are anything but.
Again, understanding why something is broken (in this case, a good chunk of innate male mating behaviors) is the first step to solving the problem. And for decades we haven’t been discussing it because of a bias against the idea that there are innate behaviors encoded into the brain in the first place.
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Sure, and rape is one of those crimes. I imagine one could plot on the ternary diagram of the dark triad, just like we did in geology for sand/mud/silt proportions, it’s a simple normalization.
They are a specific psychiatric diagnosis in the DSMV editions…actually…
Yes indeed… how one could embrace natural selection and evolution and not wonder how that would effect all aspects of human behavior…
There are a lot of ostensibly smart people who are in stalwart denial that evolution took place above the neck as well. A cabal of them in the 70’s did their best to completely excise an entire academic discipline: Sociobiology.
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Confirmation bias? The old "men and women are absolutely the same and equal in all ways "
Hell, my first wife had a big dose of that at Stephens College in Missouri…
This is really a good read. It’s more like a report of academic research at the layperson’s level, which makes it easy to read. In a way, though, it’s kind of like a lot of self-help books I’ve read, which annoys me a bit, but it’s straddling the line pretty well.
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Honestly the book in which that’s all detailed should be next on our list. It’s a quick, but infuriating read.
Basically, in the post WWII world there was a perfect storm of entrenched academics who believed the human mind was a “blank slate” (BF Skinner, etc.) combined with a legitimate concern about anything that could be remotely used to justify eugenics or racism, so a coalition formed to discredit “biological determinism” in psychology.
The book was written 20 years ago but the battle is still being fought, to such an extent that academics like Bo Wineguard are still getting (literally) cancelled for discussing it.
Ah, the “tabula rasa” thing.
Have you read the books on human body language? Shit, too much T8R in me to remember who wrote them… I 've got them out in the garage in a box, still, I think,
Desmond Morris, the Naked Ape, etc. That shit helped me to learn about social cues via body language. I was so introverted, it was sad.
Learning how to read cues from books…
And the funny thing is, to come full circle, he had a whole section on sexual posturing/etc by both men and women. The body language is mostly unconscious, and what he wrote helped me sort through whether or not a woman was interested in me or not.
If it comes off like that it’s because Buss is one of the top scholars in the field and he’s also toeing the line to be careful on that front I just mentioned.
OK, that makes sense.
You’re saying that this was an orchestrated effort? Was this intended to to discredit/combat absurd ideologies like eugenics and the racist psuedoscience tropes employed heavily by Western populist demagogues? Men like Alabama governor George Wallace, pre-reform Robert Byrd and David Duke for example. George Wallace used to publish a newsletter filled with all kinds of horrific incendiary pseudoscience. My grandpa related the story of one of these that someone gave him in the run up to the Civil Rights Act late 60’s that claimed black people were literally part gorilla.
It’s understandable why one would desire to cleanse people of certain notions and focus on what can be done to reform men. The Western world was recovering from such an ignorant dangerous background that gave rise to racism as a tool of warfare on a whole new level of destruction. I can sympathize with the desire to rid oneself from any conclusion that even sounds similar to it even if there is an element of truth on uniform human biology in all of the lies.
Edit: I can also see the utility of such a movement to suppress unfortunate biological truths on the nature of man in men who possibly wanted to suppress women’s rights. I attribute my understanding that men are inherently psychologically different than women to reading Jane Goodall’s work with lower primates. The woman really deserves a Nobel Prize. She is [edit: primatology’s] Marie Curie.
Relevant:
This second video to me indicates that the propensity for violence in the individual is less about the dark triad and more about a bounty of resources in the camp of the aggressors (which relates neatly with game theory as presented by a lack of need for cooperation) and the availability of targets of opportunity; victims that cannot fight back effectively.
That, to me, makes more sense as the real predictor of violence in individual men.
I believe that narcissism, social scheming and psychopathy (if those things can really effectively be differentiated from one another) are inherent to all men as a matter of biological programming and the only thing that limits these characteristics is a forced necessity for cooperation with others.
Edit: I grant you, some men have especially disordered thinking and lower ability to understand their capacity to transgress relative to society’s ability to police them. I wonder if that’s really it. Does it really come down to 1) ability to form an accurate model of their environment and 2)Ability to form an accurate model of their own capacity to master the environment? Could this abnormality be linked to a malfunctioning or underperforming amygdala or maybe something in the prefrontal cortex? Like the inverse of PTSD or what happens with victims of extreme abuse with an overactive amygdala.