Q: Speaking of dark, could you tell us about the dark triad?
R: Yeah, so the dark triad, so we've been talking about sex differences on average, but there are critical within-sex individual differences, and the dark triad is one of the most important ones. The dark triad consists of three personality characteristics, so narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Hallmarks of narcissism are things like grandiosity, the person thinks that they're more intelligent, more attractive, more dazzling, more charming than they actually are. The think they're the greatest person since sliced bread. Importantly, with narcissism, you also get a sense of entitlement. So they feel entitled to a larger share of the pie, whether that be the financial pie, the status pie, or the sexual pie. Machiavellianism is high scorers tend to pursue an exploitative social strategy. So they might feign cooperation, but then cheat, you know, on subsequent moves. They view other people as pawns to be manipulated for their own instrumental gains. And then psychopathy, one of the hallmarks of psychopathy is a lack of empathy. So most people have a normal empathy circuit where if a child falls down and gets hurt, we feel compassion for the harm that that person is undergoing. Or if a puppy gets a hit by a car or whatever, we feel compassion, psychopaths don't.
That is those high on this, it's a dimensional thing, it's not a categorical thing. So those high on psychopathy basically lack empathy. And so if you combine these qualities, narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, you have well, some very bad dudes.
And I say bad dudes 'cause men tend to score higher on these things than women, especially on the psychopathy dimension. So when you talk about clinical levels of psychopathy, it's estimated to be something like 1% of women and about 4% of men. So men are much higher on that. So why is this important?
Well, it's important in the mating context, because those who are high on dark triad traits tend to be sexual deceivers for one. So they're very often very charming, very good at seducing women, and then abandoning them sometimes with, after fleecing them or draining their bank account. They're very good at the art of seduction, they also tend to be sexual harassers, serial sexual harassers, and sexual coercers.
So when it comes to forms of sexual violence, high dark triad guys tend to be perpetrators of this. And so like most men I think, would be, find it ethically abhorrent to sexually harass a woman in the workplace, dark triad guys, in part maybe they feel entitled to it, and in part they do.
I mean, in some cases that I report in the book, there are like literal descriptions where the guys are writing in these journals, I knew she was attracted to me. You know, that's why she met me in the Xerox room just when I was there, 'cause she wanted to admire my bulging biceps or whatever.
Q: It's all about them.
R: Yeah, and they, and this gets into a bias that I talk about, which is the male sexual misperception bias, where a woman smiles at a man, man thinks, oh, she wants my body, she's attracted to me. And women are thinking, oh, I'm just being friendly, I'm being polite or professional.
But these guys high dark triad guys are more susceptible to the sexual over-perception bias, and they literally believe that the woman is attracted to them and sending them signals, green lights to sexually approach. And so if you combine dark triad traits with the dispositional pursuit of a short-term mating strategy, that's an especially deadly combination. That's when you get sexual harassment, sexual coercion.
So these are very bad dudes, also predictors of intimate partner violence.
Q: What approximate frequency in the male population have all three of the dark triad traits. And I realize that they're on a continuum, sociopathy, narcissism.
R: That's why you can't say because they are on a continuum, and it's sort of arbitrary where you draw the line. But I think it's a minority of men. It's a subset of men who commit the vast majority of these acts of sexual violence. And that's why it's not like, if you look at victims of sexual violence, they're more numerous than the perpetrators of sexual violence, because the perpetrators tend to be serial offenders, so to speak.
One guy in the workplace, harassing 15 different women, one guy sexually coercing, you know, multiple women. That's why you have like, in well-known cases in the news, like Harvey Weinstein, you know, probably over a hundred different women, Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein, some of these more famous cases, these are a large number of victims, but pretty much [indistinct] the perpetrators.
And there's no question that these guys like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein were definitely high on dark triad traits.
Q: You mentioned stalking briefly. Maybe we could just talk about some of the less known features about stalking. I think I once heard you give a lecture where you said that one of the scariest things about stalking is that sometimes it works.
R: Yes, yeah. So, well stalking has multiple motivations, but one of the most frequent motivations is a mating motivation, where either there's a breakup and the woman dumps the guy and the guy doesn't want to get dumped, he wants to maintain a relationship with her.
And I should say that, when it comes to criminal stalking, there's a huge sex difference. About 80% of the stalkers tend to be men, about 20% women. So there are women stalkers, but they're, about a fourth of the number compared to men.
So the motivation of the guys tends to be either an attempt to get back together with the woman, either sexually or in a relationship or, and/or to interfere with her future mating prospects. And it works in some of the time in two senses.
One is it does interfere with her attempts to remate. So in fact, it scares off some guys. So like you show up and pick up a woman at her apartment for a date and her ex is sitting out there glaring at you.
Q: Or, I'm actually familiar with the circumstance where early in a relationship, somebody mentions that an ex has made veiled threats about surveillance, for instance. I've actually had that happen several times in my dating history where someone would say, you started opening up about previous relationships a little bit, as it's appropriate, and someone says, yeah, you know, he mentioned that he was going to, you know, send someone around to, you know, to surveil me, you know, that kind of thing, which is a very interesting factoid to pick up.
But I heard it enough times, and people I know have reported hearing this enough times that I'm guessing that that's probably more frequent than people actually trailing people in cars and things of that sort. But planting that, it's like the psychological seed of surveillance is a form of harassment in some sense.
R: Yes, absolutely.
I think that you're right, there's that planting the psychological seeds, but then also with surveillance, some surveilers remain hidden, so you don't know necessarily.
Q: Yeah, I confess in this case, it did not act as a deterrent for continuing the relationship, but that's another story. So, how often do women respond? I have to put this in quotes for those that are listening, air quotes end quotes, positively to stalk. I mean, how often does it work to re-secure the partner after they've been broken up with.
Q: So in our studies, it's a minority of cases that it works to reestablish. I think something like 15% of the time that it works, either to temporarily reestablish a sexual relationship, or lure the woman back in for a more permanent relationship. So most of the time it doesn't work. But one woman in our study said, the guy, every time she went out with another guy, he would threaten the other guy. And she said after about six months, there were no other guys. He basically scared off all the other guys. And so she went back to him because there were no other guys around.
