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Office Hours with Arthur Brooks
The 9 Signs You’re Dating a Dark Triad (and How to Spot Them Early)
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Dark triads and romantic relationships. This is really where the damage tends to get done. And it's especially the case that women have who have relationships with men who are dark triads are the ones who have the most horror stories. Why? Because men tend to be dark triads more than women. And they're most predatory toward women that are looking for a relationship and tend to get swept off their feet in relationships. They have these characteristics. Let me give you the five characteristics and then talk a little bit more about what they look like. Number one, they tend to be extremely confident and outgoing. Here's what dark triads are good at in romantic relationships. Knowing what you want to hear. Let me back up. When you get into a romantic relationship, whether you're a man or a woman, what do you want? You want somebody if you're falling in love who's also falling in love with you. What you don't want is somebody who will never fall in love with you, but act like they will so they can get what they want out of you. If it's a they want to use you physically, if they want your money, if they just want your companionship, if they want your status, whatever happens to be. You don't want somebody to use you. You want somebody who actually loves you. Dark triads are really good at acting like they love you even though they don't. They're confident and outgoing because they have skills in figuring out what you want to hear. As a matter of fact, and this is really bad, especially for a. There's a syndrome that we, that I've written about in the past, a little bit called hemophilia. I'll put something I've written about that in the show notes as well. And that's not hemophilia, that's not with an H, that's a blood disorder. Hemophilia is E M O P H I L I A hemophilia. And that is the tendency to fall in love very, very quickly, to go through the stages of falling in love. And falling in love is a neurochemical phenomenon that starts with the. With the stimulation of sex hormones estrogen and testosterone. It goes into neuromodulator activity, most notably dopamine and noradrenaline. So you get the feeling of anticipation of reward and euphoria. And then it goes into serotonin, which will make you kind of ruminate on the other person. All this is happening within a period of weeks until you're getting more of this oxytocin and vasopressin release Those are neuropeptides that will bond you to the other person. That takes time. It doesn't necessarily take years. As a matter of fact, if it's taking years, it means it's not happening. But it certainly doesn't happen in two days. And there are people in the literature, a non trivial number of people, especially women, who go very, very quickly through it, if that's you. Dark triads know who you are. They know how to prey on you. And that's a really scary thing because they're going to say exactly what they know you need to hear because they have lots and lots of experience dealing with emo Felix. So you have to protect yourself. Now it's a good thing to know that if you fall in love too quickly to how to protect yourself from that in general, but especially when dark triads come into the picture. So number one, they're outgoing and confident because they know what you need to hear. Second, they have a strong preference for short term mating. Okay, this is just, this is just, you know, how behavioral scientists talk about hookup culture. They want to hook up, they don't get married. Or if they want to get married, it's hugely incidental to the kind of relationships that they typically have. They're really, really good at figuring out how to induce you, no matter who you are, into a short term relationship by making you feel like you've been swept off your feet so much. As a matter of fact, they favor short term relationships so much because some would say they're kind of incapable of falling in love, which is the essence of a long term relationship, that they're almost incapable, as far as the data have shown, of being faithful to their partners. They cheat all the time. That's one of the characteristics of when I say number two being strong preference for short term relationships. That means infidelity, among other things. So they go from person to person to person unethically, and they tend to be unfaithful in a relationship that's supposed to be monogamous. This is a very, very strong trait in relationships of dark tria. They're extremely attractive. They're really, really good at coming off as extremely attractive. And once again, especially to women because they know how to make themselves extremely attractive. Look, somebody who wants a mutual loving relationship has no incentive for you to fall in love. If they're not falling in love, that's just a fact. Somebody who wants you to fall in love even though they're not, that's evidence of a broken person. And so somebody who's trying to do that on the basis of superficial characteristics. That's going to tend to be a dark triad as well. Number four is that they. They tend to exaggerate their success, status and commitment. Once again, this tends to be a male characteristic. There's a fantastic. One of the great social scientists of our time is David Buss at the University of Texas at Austin who does work on. He's really the leading expert in evolutionary psychology, in other words, understanding psychological patterns with respect to our ancestral environment. When people behave the way they do, you can usually find reason in our ancestral environment. Why? Because our brains are really formed in an environment that suited us to what we were doing 250,000 years ago, the Pleistocene. We haven't evolved physically very much. Our worlds have evolved. So when we see weird anomalous behavior in mating, for example, usually there's a reason for it that goes back a long, long time. One of those things is that. That when we're looking at new potential mates for the very first time, that men tend to look for cues of youth and fertility and women tend to look. And again, your results may vary. I'm not being dispositive about your situation. This is not case closed. This is a tendency that David Buss talks about in the evolutionary psychology women tend to look more at because of the investment that they have to make in family life and raising children and status and success and commitment and resources. The result of that is that dark triads, they tend to, when they're meeting somebody, to exaggerate those things. I'm more successful than they really are, higher status than they really have, more committed than they really are going to be, richer than they really are. What are they trying to do? They're trying to seduce you is the bottom line. Typically that's the case. Again, they specialize in saying and doing what you want to hear, not what is authentic and honest. They're con men and con women. Now, when you have a relationship, a romantic relationship with the dark triad and the breakup comes and it inevitably does, it's going to. You're probably not going to change the dark triad. I have literally never seen a case where somebody falls in love with a dark triad and saves the dark triad from her or himself. When the breakup comes, it's always ugly. You don't get out nicely from a dark triad. They're known for what they're what psychologists call cost escalation. They're going to make you pay. That's what they're going to do. Why? Because they don't Care how much they hurt you and they feel no remorse. Look, if you break up with a normal person and it's hurtful and something bad happened, you know, they're not trying to hurt you per se, because they don't want to, because they have some love for you, they have some tenderness for you. And besides, they don't want to be a horrible person. They, they think of themselves as somebody who's fundamentally ethical, at least not a completely horrible human being. But dark triads don't think that way. That's the problem. They will cost, escalate and manipulate you and openly confront you because they're Machiavellian and they have psychopathic, psychopathic tendencies. I'm willing to hurt you for my interests and I don't feel any empathy and I don't feel any remorse. Okay? Avoid those characteristics. Trust me on this. This is how you protect yourself. Let me give you the kind of the meta list of things to look out for to detect a dark triad so that you can protect yourself through avoidance. Most importantly, number one, self importance. I'm the most important person in the world. When they exhibit traits of self importance, be very wary. Second is a sense of entitlement. Look, it's all about me. And when things aren't going my way, they should be. Come on. Number three is vanity. You know, the whole idea, the vanity of wanting, wanting everybody to look at them is. And again, that can be as simple. By the way, when you're going out with somebody for the first time, every time they go by a car window, they look at themselves. That's a tell. I mean, that doesn't mean they're a dark triad, but at least your spider sense should be tingling about that. Number four is a victim mentality. People who are willing to hurt other people are always suspicious of the motives of others. And they tend to think that anything that goes wrong for them, it's because people had it out for them. They tend to be paranoid, they tend to be aggrieved, they tend to act like their victims, which activists always do, by the way. And so do politicians, generally speaking, not all politicians, but a lot. Number five, they tend to bend the truth or even openly lie. Why? Because they don't care if they're doing something that hurts you, something that's damaging. What they don't realize, of course, is damaging to them because ultimately people get it figured out. Number six is manipulativeness. They want you to be bent to their will and they will manipulate you with pretty. With pretty untruthful Means if necessary. Number seven is grandiosity. Because they're going to exaggerate. They're going to exaggerate their accomplishments, they're going to exaggerate their past, they're going to exaggerate their status, they're going to exaggerate their ambition. Why? Because they want to insinuate themselves with you. They want to get into your good graces as quickly as possible. Not because they love you, because they want you to love them. Number eight is a lack of remorse when they do things wrong, which is baffling to normal people. It's so weird. I've met people who, they do something and I think it's impossible that they did that. I would never do that. Well, it turns out that doesn't work when you're working with a dark triad. And number nine is an absence of empathy and remorse. They don't care when they do these things. Those are the nine characteristics of when you're dealing with a dark triad. And generally speaking, if you have a long term relationship, sorry, but you're going to see all these things. One other thing that actually shows up in the literature that's really interesting, that it's a technique that dark triads use when they get caught. So let's say that you're in a romantic relationship with a dark triad. Terrible. You're going to probably find this person is unfaithful to you emotionally or physically as being unfaithful to you. And when you confront the dark triad, they have a technique that's called Darvo D A R V O. That's an acronym. It means Deny, Attack and Reverse Victim and Offender. Number one is they lie, say they didn't do it, then they turn the whole thing around and attack you. Then they reverse the victim and offender by saying you're the offender and they're the victim. And so it goes something like this. No, no, I didn't, I didn't sleep with that person. No, I've been completely faithful to you. Well, I got the receipts, man, I got the receipts. I mean, it's like, what is this Marriott bill, you know, in our city. And it's like, oh yeah, well look, it's really your fault because you've been driving me away. So the first one is deny. And then when you can't anymore, it's attack. And then they say, and you know what, I'm pretty tired of this line of questioning all the time and the suspicion that we have. And that's really what's been driving me away. And it's been. You've been a pretty terrible partner for a long time. You know, I'm the person who really is the victim here. So if you start seeing that, you know, you're a full blown dark triad and you've gone down the path to the point where they're actually using Darvo on you, it's time to move on. I don't see too many exits besides the big exit of the relationship itself. I want to end on a happier note. And then I want to go to some questions that you've written in. The questions are great. Really appreciate it. What should you look for instead while you're trying to avoid the dark triad? Scott Barry Kaufman, I talked about him earlier, he talks about something called the light triad. That's the opposite of the dark triad. This is somebody who has faith in humanity, they trust others. Humanism, that's what Scott Barry Kaufman talks about, you know, believing in the dignity and the worth of every individual and a belief that there's a universal moral law, there's just right and wrong things you shouldn't do to anybody, even if you don't like them. Those three things he finds actually are characteristic of about 50% of the population. And that's where you want to look, authentically good people. And how do you know? There's a lot of work in psychology on something called moral elevation or when somebody has these characteristics, you feel warm inside. Not the kind of warm inside like I think this person is falling in love with me because it's a dark triad trying to manipulate me, but because that's somebody I really morally admire. That's kind of a tell on that. It's a beautiful thing. And you've all felt that that's what to look for in a colleague, in a friend, in a partner, romantic partner. Those are the people you should actually for. Look for that. And when you do, they might not be displaying all the things that you want to see in the very first moment you meet them. And the reason is because they're trying to figure out if they like you. And that's exactly what you want to have a mutually beneficial, mutually loving relationship. That's what we all should be looking for. Look for the light triad, just as you avoid the dark triad.