A short while ago, Tucker Max—one of the world’s most famous narcissists—sat down on my couch and revealed his psychological test results.
Unsurprisingly, he scored high (31/40) on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI). He scored high on the Exploitative Dimension, which includes items like “I find it easy to manipulate people” and “I can read people like a book.”
I also gave him the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test, which assesses your ability to accurately perceive someone’s emotions based on looking at their eyes alone (you can take the test here ). In keeping with his NPI scores, he scored extremely high on this test, getting 33 out of 36 correct answers.
But then I noticed something else. On the Big Five personality traits test, he scored very low on Empathy, a dimension of friendliness. Now, anyone who’s read his books (most recently, Hilarity Ensues ) knows that he’s not known for his empathy. But I have empirical proof.
At the end of the interview, I jokingly told him to use his powers responsibly. But it occurred to me that his low levels of empathy, coupled with his heightened ability to read people, might enable him to achieve his goals. But this raised a dilemma because the “Reading the Mind Through the Eyes Test” is supposed to measure the theory of mind, a uniquely human ability to reason about the mental states of others. Some psychologists argue that this ability underlies our ability to cooperate, get along, and have lasting friendships.
But his levels of empathy and compassion were low. So I wondered: Could the Reading the Mind Through the Eyes Test be measuring a separate component of the theory of mind—perhaps a darker one that evolved for manipulative purposes?
Recently, psychologists have been stepping outside the clinical setting and gathering research on how the dark side of human nature differs among the general population. What has become abundantly clear is that the “dark triad,” which consists of a combination of Machiavellianism (which involves personal strategies to manipulate others), narcissism (which involves an inflated view of self-worth and grandiosity), and psychopathy (which involves deceit, extreme impulsivity, recklessness, and manipulation regardless of the cost to others), is a universal trait that everyone possesses to some degree. Some people have more of it than others.
The common thread running through the three traits is low empathy and low friendliness. However, the three traits are only moderately correlated with each other, and recently researchers have begun to assess the independent predictors of each trait separately, and how people with different balances of Dark Triad traits approach their goals differently (note: I gave Tucker a Dark Triad score and he did not score high on psychopathy).
In a recent paper in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, Michael Way and Niko Tilopoulos looked at the empathic nature of Dark Triad individuals. They distinguished between two types of empathy: cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. Cognitive empathy involves the ability to understand the emotional states of others without experiencing emotional contagion (i.e., without being able to feel what they are feeling). Emotional empathy, by contrast, involves sharing an emotional response in response to another’s feelings. This form of empathy facilitates altruistic behaviors. Previous research has shown that individuals with high-functioning autism have poor cognitive empathy, but are no different from typical individuals in emotional empathy. The exact opposite seems to be true for dark triad individuals.
The researchers asked 139 college students to complete measures of dark triad personality, and they also gave them an empathy test. In the empathy test, they asked the students to view a series of photos of people with different facial expressions. For each photo, they were asked to rate how they felt about the person. This was a measure of affective empathy. They also asked the subjects to choose the emotion they thought each photo expressed, and their answers were scored on how correctly they identified the emotion being expressed. This was a measure of cognitive empathy.
Those who scored high on narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy all reported positive feelings when looking at sad faces. They seemed happy when others were sad. Interestingly, only narcissists were accurate at recognizing anger. So, of the three dark triad traits, narcissists appear to have enhanced cognitive empathy. This is interesting because recent research by Peter Jonasson, Glenn Geher, and myself suggests that of all the Dark Triad traits, narcissism is most closely related to openness and a willingness to engage in social interactions. Perhaps their enhanced cognitive empathy facilitates short-term, superficial interpersonal interactions and relationships.
Emotional empathy is also clearly crucial to harmonious social interactions. How can Dark Triad individuals achieve their personal goals without this trait? The researchers claim that
“Individuals with Dark Triad traits appear to exhibit an empathic profile that allows them to retain their ability to read and assess others’ emotions, and to later use this sensitive information to formulate strategies to get what they want, while their lack of emotional empathy may lead them to ignore or discount the potential harm to others in the process.”
But there’s more to this puzzle. If ToM evolved to facilitate harmonious social interactions, why do Dark Triad individuals score so highly on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test—a basic measure of ToM?
It turns out that there are at least two main dimensions of ToM. The social-cognitive component of ToM involves the ability to determine the mental states of others using immediately available nonverbal cues (e.g., eyes, face, hand gestures). This is consistent with the cognitive empathy component, which is measured by the Reading the Mind Through the Eyes test. This component of the theory of mind emerges early in development and is associated with the medial temporal and orbitofrontal regions of the right hemisphere of the brain.
In contrast, the social-cognitive component of the theory of mind (not to be confused with cognitive empathy) involves the ability to reason about the mental states of others and to use this reasoning to predict or explain their behavior. This ability involves inferring what others know or believe to be true, regardless of what you know or believe to be true. This is a skill that develops later and relies more on language abilities. This component of the theory of mind relies on left-hemisphere circuits that include the medial frontal regions and the temporoparietal junction.
Daniel Nettle and Bethany Liddle found a relationship between the social-cognitive component of the theory of mind, but not the social-cognitive component. It appears that the kind, compassionate, and altruistic side of our human nature is only associated with the higher-level social-cognitive component of the theory of mind.
Now, let’s move on to the last few pieces of the puzzle.
Research by Elizabeth Austin and colleagues has shown that the one component of emotional intelligence that Machiavellian individuals do not have is the cognitive dimension, which involves the minimal cognitive ability to decode emotions in faces and images. Not only that, but they also show a relatively stronger ability to manage other people’s emotions than their own. This may be related to their deficits in empathy and perspective-taking: Not only can they not automatically sense what others are feeling, but even if they could, they would have difficulty labeling or understanding what those emotions mean. In addition, Machiavellian individuals endorse emotionally manipulative behavior. So, in their view, they are good at manipulating others.
In Hungary, Sophia Esperger and Tamás Periczky wondered whether Machiavellian individuals, despite their lack of theory of mind, tended to think more than others—in other words, despite their low emotional intelligence, did they still plot, plan, and try to infer other people’s intentions significantly more than those who were less Machiavellian?
So they looked at this motivational component of the theory of mind as separate from the ability component. To measure spontaneous thinking, they asked 112 undergraduates to look at 12 pictures depicting everyday situations. For each picture, the students were asked to write two to three sentences about each picture. The responses were then automatically coded by a computer, which looked for words and sentences that represented spontaneous thinking.
They found large individual differences in spontaneous thinking: Some people were not motivated to try to think continuously about the people in the pictures, while others couldn’t stop thinking spontaneously! Those who scored high on the Machiavellianism scale tended to focus more strongly on the mental states of others than those who were less Machiavellian. They concluded that
“In real-life, everyday situations, people may have primal strategies that help them focus on the mental states of others. All of this may be related to Machiavellianism; by using automatic reasoning, people with a tendency to manipulate others may always try to stay one step ahead of others and gain important knowledge that can be profitable later in deception and fraud.”
Now we can put the pieces together. Andrew Whiten and Richard Byrne argue that primate intelligence stems from “Machiavellian intelligence”—the ability to manipulate and deceive others in competition for scarce resources [pdf]. According to this view, manipulative tendencies evolved along with the ability to read minds.
However recent research suggests that this may not be the whole story in humans. As Daniel Nettle’s work shows, our uniquely human ability to think about the thoughts, beliefs, and desires of others (what philosopher Daniel Dennett refers to as “second-order intentionality,” or what some psychologists refer to as “metacognition”) is linked to a socially acceptable orientation. Thus, the key skill is the ability to cognitively separate one’s thoughts, beliefs, and desires from those of others. These advanced theory-of-mind skills—along with emotional empathy—are critical to harmonious functioning in social settings. Daniel Dennett has argued that second-order intentionality is a fundamental precursor to human consciousness! For most of our evolution, cooperation and empathy were beneficial. But along the way, some selfish individuals learned how to manipulate others to get what they wanted. They lacked empathy, perspective-taking, and self-awareness (i.e., metacognition). However they had sound theoretical-level mental abilities at the lower level, and these abilities were enough to enable them to manipulate others. Their low levels of empathy and their high levels of strategic planning and spontaneous reflection worked to their advantage: While most people intuitively feel like they’re doing something wrong when they hurt others, these Machiavellian individuals didn’t receive the same emotional cues, so they persevered in their selfish, short-term goals. In the process, they got more mates. And so they stayed in the human gene pool, along with their short-term mating orientation.
This seems to be the case in modern humans. Peter K. Jonasson and his colleagues have repeatedly shown that the dark triad is associated with various dimensions of short-term mating, but not long-term mating. “The dark triad facilitates a short-term exploitative mating strategy,” Jonasson argues.
Does this mean that this is the only path to reproductive success? Certainly not. I believe that our most advanced and highest level of mental faculties evolved to facilitate harmony and cooperation. Perhaps those who are empathetic, receptive, and self-aware have reaped the greatest benefits throughout human evolution, especially when it comes to building long-term relationships, gaining a positive and valuable reputation, and earning the trust of others.
