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Spotting Dark Personality Traits

1:03:56 recording · EN · 2 speakers

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Brief overview

Dark personality traits are consistent patterns you can learn to spot but never hope to change.

  1. Spot the pattern, don't hand out labelsTenbrink says it is more accurate to note high psychopathic or narcissistic traits than to decide whether someone 'is' a narcissist.
  2. Watch how they treat people who aren't youLove bombing looks perfect one-on-one; the Uber driver, the barista and the hostess show the real pattern, and eventually you stop being the exception.
  3. Slow down and don't assess aloneWe detect lies and read personalities better with trusted people around us, and that network is what helps you leave or cope.
Executive Summary AI
  • Mel Robbins welcomes Dr. Leanne Tenbrink, professor of forensic psychology at the University of British Columbia and director of the Truth and Trust Lab, who has spent two decades studying manipulators, chronic liars and dark personalities.0:47
  • Tenbrink defines a poisonous person as someone with elevated levels of callousness, manipulativeness and hostility toward other people, traits they report about themselves and simply do not care about.7:38
  • She walks through the dark tetrad — psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism and sadism — explaining they are moderately correlated, so it is rarely either/or and more often yes-and.10:02
  • She cites Scott Lillenfeld's research in which untrained viewers, given only a short definition and five seconds of video of incarcerated men, rated psychopathy about as well as psychologists with long interviews and case files, because the men said hostile things while smiling broadly.45:17
  • She closes with the context: roughly 1% of the general population meets clinical criteria for psychopathy and about 10% endorse the dark-trait statements, which means nine out of ten people are honest, kind and helpful.58:23
Key Quote
“This one bad apple can really ruin the barrel.”
— Dr. Leanne Tenbrink4:56
Key Quote
“Eventually, you're not going to be the exception anymore.”
— Dr. Leanne Tenbrink30:55
Key Quote
“I think it's to slow down because personality is a pattern.”
— Dr. Leanne Tenbrink57:07