How is a G.N. different from a psychopath?
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Here’s an article discussing the difference. There are common traits and a lot of co-morbidity, but they’re considered different diagnoses.
Both types are toxic people that should be removed from your life ASAP (not always easy, since they’re sometimes foisted on us by family, work, or a broken Electoral College system).
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About $200/hour?
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I am reminded of another paper in the same journal*. The results of some simplistic on-line questionnaires showed that from a cross-section of random anonymous strangers, the ones who claimed to enjoy trolling on the internet, also enjoyed winding up researchers by ticking the more outrageous boxes on on-line questionnaires.
*Founded by Eysenck for the noble purpose of legitimizing racism and evo-psych bafflegab.
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This feels like a personal attack! 
But anyhoo, what’s interesting to me about that article is this: it suggests that trolling is just one type of activity a troll might engage in online, and that activity is not connected with others like conversations or gaming. That struck me because it sort of acknowledges that trolls are full-featured humans leading complex lives. They’re not always “on”.
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I just feel that there is a problem with recruiting a group with the criterion “must be willing to lie outrageously to strangers on the Intertubes”, and then treating their anonymous self-reported personality traits as meaningful data. Even if those results fit our expectations.
A similar problem to the present paper.
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clinical narcissism, “which is characterized by anxiety, a fragile self-concept, and low self-esteem,”
How is that distinguishable from some you know who is just going trough a rough patch?
My layman’s understanding until now was that a narc was someone who felt insecure just like everybody else, but then went all in on the effort to compensate for this by projecting an inflated sense of self.
This definitely lines up much more closely with a previous boss than the narcissism or sociopathy we had tried to ‘explain’ her behaviors with. No longer having to hear about some damn Educator Of The Year award over and over and over again was one of the fifty best things about her suddenly and mysteriously leaving a year after starting the department. Her replacement described the situation as “an entire department with PTSD”, which I took as well-intended but somewhat-distasteful hyperbole at first, but only later realized to be scarily accurate.
What sucked is that I was hired to be the tech expert on the team, so the disdain for expert opinion that contradicts the narcissist was not exactly a minor annoyance. She went to fucking war with me, repeatedly, and neither I nor other team members could ever figure out why.
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“[Donald Trump] may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.”
“When people are bad, they should be labelled appropriately and denounced for their behaviours. We should not use mental illness to slur someone. It’s a very strange society that thinks that it’s somehow worse to call Donald Trump mentally ill than to call him evil.”
These are quotes from Dr. Allen Frances, the psychiatrist who wrote the definition of narcissistic personality disorder for the DSM.
Of course this article only hints at what the author means, but that has been the gist of the conversation in the US. Not only is it a massive error to conflate negative character traits with mental illness, or to conflate criminality with mental illness, but it’s also a rejection of experts.
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From my inexpert understanding, it’s that those characteristics are chronic and on-going for diagnosed narcissists, to the point when (for example) any person whose actual expertise exceeds their own is seen as a threat to be attacked or undermined.
Of course, a person behaving that way might just be an insecure arsehole, too.
Grandiose narcissism is a subtype of narcissistic personality disorder, while grandiosity is one facet of psychopathy. However, it is worth noting that all this armchair psychiatry does an enormous disservice to those of us who actually suffer from mental illness and are bone fuckin’ tired of the bigotry. Please stop trying to smear people with diagnoses.
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I share your skepticism of studies like this. There are three key issues, in my opinion:
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There are a lot crappy preliminary studies that get published, especially in the social sciences. Bad noisy data sets, small effect sizes, questionable methods, p-hacking, etc
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The media loves to report credulously on any and all such studies. Any psych abstract that appears to confirm something a lot of people want to believe is guaranteed to go viral.
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Basically all of psychology is done on pools of white, mostly male undergrads at universities because this is the easiest pool that researchers have access to. This is an acknowledged problem in the field and people are trying to be better about it.
This is all over and above psychology’s massive reproducibility problem. The whole field has a long history of p-hacking and other flaws that went unnoticed and are now taken as gospel. The Marshmallow Test is the classic example. For decades nobody questioned it and we built entire parenting systems around it, but the original study has since been shown to be garbage.
I’ll end the rant here before I start to sound like a Scientologist. Psychology is a completely legit field, but it is also plagued by a lot of systemic problems which they are aware of and working on. However overeager press who breathlessly publish every preliminary catchy study headline that falls out of a grad student are making the world a stupider place.
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You forgot “racist” and “con-man” in that phrase. You’re welcome!
Thanks for the explanation. I hope I didn’t cause anyone grief, and if so I apologize.
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Indeed, I have never once forgotten that fact; it simply goes without saying… as it is not only a given, but those traits are not germane to this particular conversation.
Narcissism and sociopathy are mental/emotional maladies, whereas bigotry and thievery are just moral failings.
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The grandiose narcissists have issued the following statement:
“No we don’t!”
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A Narcissist’s Prayer
That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
And if it is, that’s not my fault.
And if it was, I didn’t mean it.
And if I did…
You deserved it.
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How about specialists not swiping words from colloquial use, and then insisting that when the general public carries on using them colloquially that it is somehow inappropriate?
Trump is fairly clearly a narcissist in colloquial terms; whether he is or not in clinical terms is between him and his mental health care specialist, and I wouldn’t presume to make a diagnosis on that basis. And I don’t. But “ego-driven, self-regarding, careless of others’, etc, etc” is a bit wordy, and I’m not sure that I’m not still using words that psychiatrists and their ilk might prefer me not to.
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This is a fair assessment. The important thing is to focus on behaviours rather than diagnoses or (to quote the FAQ here) on making “assumptions as to anyone’s mental state”. To say that Biff exhibits the suite of behaviours associated with the clinical diagnosis of narcissism or that he’s a narcissist in the colloquial sense is not the same thing as saying he’s a clinically diagnosed narcissist or (to use a flaggable example I’ve seen twice in the past 24-hours from two different users) “Mark Zuckerberg is autistic”.
I also see no harm in personally dealing with someone who consistently displays the laundry list of toxic behaviours associated with certain diagnoses as if that person was diagnosed (“avoid, avoid, avoid” is my motto in regard to narcissists).
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I like the framing that suggests; it allows for a distinction between presuming to diagnose the human, and describing the behavior of the office/officeholder that we can all plainly see.
So let us presume that Trump may indeed be the sanest, healthiest, and smartest man ever to have manned. And that every bit of his public persona is both carefully calculated and perfectly executed to give the outward impression that he wants the world to believe.
Can we not then agree that role he is playing up there on the world stage is that of a very toxic narcissist? Can we not, as Josiah Bartlett asked his priest to do when he insisted on being called ‘Mister President’, consider the office separately from the man?
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