Human Lie Detector: The #1 Sign They’re Lying To You, Catch Liars Instantly! | Dr Leanne ten Brinke

Key Takeaway

When a story feels off, do not rely on eye contact, fidgeting, or your gut alone. Ask an open-ended follow-up—“Tell me more about that”—then assess whether the person can offer specific, consistent, verifiable details. Treat vagueness, unexplained gaps, and visible effort as prompts to investigate further, not proof of lying. This approach works because truth-tellers can retrieve lived details, while liars must invent, track, and protect a story in real time.

Episode Overview

Dr. Leanne ten Brinke explains what deception research actually says about spotting lies and navigating people with elevated psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and sadism traits. She debunks popular body-language myths, outlines evidence-based questioning tactics, and shares practical ways to set boundaries, negotiate, and reduce harm without assuming people will fundamentally change.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Human Lie Detector: The #1 Sign They’re Lying To You, Catch Liars Instantly! | Dr Leanne ten Brinke from Diary of a CEO. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

This episode is brought to you by Hard Lessons, a podcast from Morgan Stanley. Some investing lessons only become clear after you see how a call plays out. On Hard Lessons, iconic investors sit down with Morgan Stanley leaders to go behind the scenes on the critical moments, both successes and setbacks that shaped who they are today. Watch or listen to Hard Lessons wherever you get your podcasts. How long does it take someone to spot a psychopath? About five seconds. So most people think a psychopath looks dangerous.

They picture the villain in a movie, but that's not how it works in real life. We've done some research in my lab and we found there are certainly some things that you can look for. Have they ever done that with lying to figure out if people can spot liars? Thousands of times. You ask people, what's the number one cue that someone is lying to you? They will say they can't look you in the eye, but there's no research to suggest that that is true. However, there's an essential tool for detecting lies, which is...

Oh, fuck. I know I study dark personality traits and I found that there's four different elements, which are psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and sadism. And what we found is that people with higher levels of these traits engaged in Duchenne smiles, which is the activation around the eyes. And they also use a lot of hand gestures. Where does this come from? Well, research suggests that abuse, cold, uncaring, parenting style, but also overvaluation of a child early in life may lead to more narcissistic views later. Is there any other fascinating questions you've pursued in your lab?

Yes. We studied the extent to which psychopathic personality traits could increase the amount of influence you have in government. And also there are three common mistakes people make when dealing with dark personalities. We'll get into this more later. I'm wondering if you can spot any of these dark personality traits just by looking at dating profiles. All right. So this is Ryan. This feels like a red flag. And then there's Haley that would be associated with psychopathy. Okay. David is a brain surgeon. Very impressive. But I'm seeing narcissism.

So I guess this begs the question that if someone has those traits you've described, can they be cured? So in my lab, what we found is that... Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on the show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button.

But also it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better. I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much. Professor Leanne Tenbrink, at the very heart of your motivations, why is it you do what you do? I want to make people less cynical about human nature, which I think might seem kind of paradoxical given what I study, because I study deception and dominance and so-called dark personality traits.

But I think when you understand those topics and also that there's something you can do about it to make these interactions better, it's incredibly powerful and can give us a more accurate view of the world. And why are the population at large so interested in these subjects? Because they are, they're fascinated by it. But what is underneath all of this sort of fascination and the curiosity, what are they trying to figure out when people are interested in psychopathy? You know, I think one of the reasons why we are so interested in psychopathy is because it's quite foreign to us.

So most of us move through life caring about other people, having compassion for other people, telling a few lies here and there, but by and large being very truthful and honest and kind of playing by the rules. And that's like the opposite of psychopathy. And so I think when you are faced with this personality that is quite the opposite of your whole experience of being alive, you're like, what's going on? And I want to understand that. I think there's also an element, there actually is some research on like true crime specifically and why people are interested in true crime tends to be a largely female audience.

And some of the motivations that people report is like wanting to understand and wanting to avoid, you know, becoming a victim of these people. Is it possible to spot someone who is a psychopath? Yes. How long, according to the research, does it take someone to spot a psychopath? Okay, you can get a kernel of truth about someone's personality, the extent to which they're psychopathic, in about five seconds. Explain the research to me. Okay. So this is research by Scott Lilienfeld and his colleagues. And basically what they did is they showed people five second, 10 second and 20 second clips of these interviews where criminal offenders were being interviewed by a psychologist and rated on their psychopathic personality traits.

And then you had random psychology student volunteer for research watching five seconds of that interaction and making a rating of like, you know, how callous do they seem? How manipulative do they seem? And they found that there is actually a pretty reasonable correlation between the ratings of these, like, you know, naive folks who watch five seconds and the trained clinical psychologists who did hours long interviews and gathered collateral information. And so we partnered with Scott and we got these videos and we coded the, like, verbal and nonverbal behavior.

Like, are these people behaving differently? And what are people paying attention to? And what we found is that people with higher levels of these traits engaged in these, what we call Duchenne smiles. They're a genuine looking smile, but they, yeah, that's the one. Okay, so what distinguishes these two kinds of smiles is the activation around the eyes and it's the creation of, like, crow's feet. So you kind of get, you know, lines in the corner. So a genuine person will have crow's feet when they smile, theoretically?

Theoretically. Again, there can be Botox and all kinds of things getting in the way of this, but, okay. So it's in the eyes. Yes, it's totally in the eyes. Whereas a non-Duchenne smile, you know, you have the same kind of upturned lips and maybe you're showing your teeth, you got a big grin, but no activation around the eyes. So you don't get those crow's feet. People who are high in these psychopathic personality traits, they were showing these kinds of, like, you know, very happy looking smiles as they were saying really hostile things.

So they were using, like, happy expressions, hostile language, at the same time. So you get this kind of, like, weird emotional presentation. They also used a lot of hand gestures. We call them illustrators. Those seem to be things that just, you know, random observers paid attention to and used to help guide their judgments, which of course is, like, such little information to go on, but it does suggest that, you know, you can get a sense of someone relatively quickly. But again, personality is something that exists across time and context.

So you're going to get better data the more data that you have across those different times and places. I've got two more facial expressions here. So this is sadness. So some of the research that I've done has actually looked at people who've gone on TV and asked for help trying to find their missing loved one. And in some proportion of those cases, they were actually guilty of killing that person. So they are, like, falsely pleading for help for someone they know is never coming back. Wait, isn't this your PhD?

This is my PhD, yeah. What was your PhD in? In psychology, but I was in a more, like, forensic context at that time. So I was studying behavioral cues to emotional high-stakes deception. Are you trying to spot someone who was, say, in the media saying, I can't find my wife. Please help me. A thousand percent. But they had killed their own wife. Yes, yeah. So I was comparing a bunch of those cases to a bunch of cases where people genuinely had no idea where their missing loved one had gone.

And they were, you know, desperately pleading to have them home. And this is one of the differences that we saw in that set of videos where, like, maybe you can try to do this with me, Stephen. Are you up for it? I'm up for it. I'm always up for everything. Okay. So in genuine sadness, you get the, like, downturn lip corners. Okay, so you did that pretty easily. What tends to be more difficult is this combination in the eyebrows. So just your inner eyebrows comes upward and together.

Oh, you're pretty good. Nicely done. It was hard, though. So what we saw in the people who were lying was more, like, surprise. So, like, they were able to kind of pull the lip corners down. But instead of, like, the inner eyebrows going upward and together, the whole inner and outer eyebrows would go up, but not together. So it's kind of like... And you could predictably tell from footage if someone had done it or not. Like, was there correlation? Yeah, so we were able to use four different cues, so two verbal and two non-verbal, to predict with about 90% accuracy who was lying and who was telling the truth.

Caveat to that. We tried to replicate that more recently, and we found much more modest. We found much more modest effects. But we did find consistencies, especially with the verbal stuff. And there was the number of words that people used, as well as tentative words. So liars would tend to say things like, if you see this, come home or call or whatever. It was kind of like a little vague about what this person should do if they saw it. Saying things like, it wasn't like an argument per se that we were having.

So they kind of left a lot of gray area in the things that they were saying, whereas the truthful people were like, when you see this, call me. They were more sort of high conviction and precise. Yes, exactly. Yeah. I think down there we have some cards that say three signs someone is lying. So one cue to deception is sparse or ambiguous information. So the most consistent effect we have that differentiates people who are telling the truth from people who are lying is the amount of detail that they give.

So people who are lying tend to give fewer details. Interesting. I thought it was the opposite. Yeah. I hear this a lot where people are like, no, but liars will like, you know, natter on and on and on. That's not what we find in the research whatsoever. Especially, especially when people don't have time to prepare. So whenever people have time to prepare, they can start to look pretty much like a truth teller on the amount of information they have. But if you get someone on the spot, the truth teller just has to like, say, remember what happened and like spit it out and tell you.

Right. And you can even ask for more information, like, tell me more about that. And they can come up with more information about that because they were there. Right. The person who is lying has a much harder task. We call this, they have increased cognitive load, which means that like, they need to come up with details on the spot. They need to not contradict themselves. They need to make sure they remember it for the next time they need to tell this lie. They also need to try to imagine like, what do you know already?

And how do I not contradict or essentially step in it? Right. Whenever I'm trying to explain what actually didn't happen. They must have high blood pressure anyway, just from knowing that they're not telling the truth. And that must make your cortisol spike to know that you're like. Yeah, we actually, we've done some research in my lab to show that people who are lying tend to have an increased cortisol reactivity relative to people who are telling the truth. You know on this one, the reason why I was surprised to hear it is because when I, I'm a big true crime fan, like obsessed.

And I often watch the interrogation videos. And I think, I thought I heard before that when they're interviewing someone who is guilty, they will give lots of like, irrelevant detail on other parts of it. I was watching the Jesse Smollett interview he did on TV. Again, he had time to prepare. So maybe that's the caveat. And he really described a bunch of pointless stuff. He was like talking to the journalist. He was like, you know, and then I landed and I call my manager who was in Australia because my manager is on tour with someone else.

And then even when he talked about going to Subway and getting the Subway wrap, he mentioned that it was like a tuna wrap. So like the details he was sure on, and that were probably true. He seemed to really expand out. And then when it gets into the other stuff, which is where the bulk of the lies took place, allegedly, it was quite vague. Yeah. Yeah, so we call that embedded lies, right? So like he's giving lots of detail where it's truthful. Yeah. And then almost no detail where it's a lie.

Right. And then lots of detail where it's truthful. So you can, you can also kind of like compare someone's like baseline. Like do they tend to give lots of detail? Do they tend to be sparse on information? You can look for kind of deviations. And so if you notice that like someone tells you a really long story, there's tons of detail about all these other things. And then in this part of the story, there's like very little information, very sparse or ambiguous information, right? That can be a red flag.

And I think what's important to remember is that there is no Pinocchio's nose. There's no like one cue. And so what you're looking for is just like these subtle cues that are like red flags and encourage you to follow up, ask more questions, dig in to that topic a little bit further. You know, in the same way they did the research to figure out if members of the public could just on the surface tell if someone was a psychopath in 5, 10 or 20 seconds. Have they ever done that with lying to figure out if people can spot lies?

Literally thousands of times. Really? Yeah. So in my lab, we've actually had them steal a $100 bill from a room and then we had someone come in and essentially interrogate them and everyone had to deny it, right? So the people who took it were lying and the people who did not take it were telling the truth. And we put $100 on the line, right? So like if you're able to convince this person that you didn't take it when you actually did, you can keep that Benjamin.

And then we showed these videos. to other people, right? People are not very good at detecting these lies or really any kind of lies. On average, people perform at about 54% accuracy. Like if I gave you 12 videos, six are liars, six are truth-tellers, you'll get like six or seven, right? What if someone is trained? Do the stats increase? So, they can increase a little bit, yes. What is better, actually, is learning how to ask better questions. Oh, really? Yeah. So, instead of just being like, here's a video of someone lying or telling the truth, that's all you get.

And just look at that and tell me if they're lying or telling the truth. Good lie detectors ask for more information, or they ask unanticipated questions where people haven't prepared for them. And then those cues of deception, that sparse information, that sense that they're thinking really hard, is really going to go off the charts. And so, learning how to ask good questions is actually a really essential tool for detecting lies. I mean, we're going to have to go into that rabbit hole. I've got to be careful here, because people are going to take this out of context.

Say that I suspect my partner is cheating on me. And I sit them down and I go, babe, listen, are you cheating on me? And they go, no, absolutely not. What would be a good question to ask to ascertain if they are actually cheating on me? So, I think where you first made a mistake is you asked a close-ended question. Are you cheating on me? No. You didn't even give them an opportunity to have to come up with something more difficult, right? If you were like, okay, well, I think last Friday night you said you had to work late, but I don't really believe that.

I think you were out with someone else. You would say, tell me about work on Friday night. And so, then you're asking an open-ended question. Okay, let's role play. Okay. You're the one that suspects I'm cheating. And last Friday night, I was up to something. So, that's the context. Let's do this. Okay. I know you had to work late on Friday night. What were you working on? Yeah, it was a big investment deal that we're working on with a couple of the colleagues. We had to get a deck together.

So, I stayed till 3am in the morning or something crazy like that. And I ended up falling asleep on my desk. And yeah, that's a long one. Anyway, what are we doing today? What's for dinner? Okay. A red flag. So, I would ask more questions. I would be like, oh, like what client were you working on this for? What's the deck about? Yeah. So, we're doing an investment deal with Google. So, it's Google's. Yeah, it's Google. Yeah. I could ask you like, okay, tell me about like what was in the deck, right?

And you give me a little bit kind of sketchy information. A great question to have in your back pocket is just tell me more about that. Like you don't even have to like try very hard to figure out like where am I gonna stump him, right? If you just ask, tell me more about that, at some point, the liar is going to have a lot more trouble coming up with additional details than the truth teller who's going to be like, oh, well, this is what the project was about.

Like it was actually super annoying because I couldn't get the font on the slide deck to stay on the slide, whatever. Like you as a truth teller, you were there and you know all those annoying little things that maybe you didn't include in the first version of the story. But if someone asks you for more detail, you could go into more detail. Whereas the person who's lying, who's making this up, that's much more difficult for them to do because that didn't actually happen. So they're going to be somewhat vague.

Yes, vague. And the details are going to be really difficult to verify. So if they do give you some details, it might be like the things that you don't know the co-workers that you were working with, right? Oh, it's the new guy at work. Like you don't know him. So in general, liars tend to give fewer verifiable details. And there's this actually really fascinating study that sometimes we're trying to dissect someone's behavior. We're paying attention to their words. We're paying attention like, oh, are they fidgeting or something, which is actually not a good cue to deception.

We're looking at their eye contact, also not a good cue to deception. And we are trying to create this crazy algorithm in our head, like adding up all of these different behaviors to try to determine whether I think you're lying or telling the truth. Actually, research suggests that if you just ask how verifiable was that statement, that's a better strategy for trying to accurately detect lies than trying to use all of these other cues that actually don't work. If you ask yourself, yes, how verifiable is the excuse this person I think his line gave me?

Yes, exactly. I think the broader finding is just that it is better to focus on one cue that works than to try to put together all of these little cues that mostly don't work at all. The third one, we've kind of touched on it, but it's just visible cognitive effort. So all of this stuff, the details that people need to come up with is really hard to do. And they might be speaking really slowly. They might be using lots of ums and ahs and errs. They might be kind of like furrowing their brow, trying to figure things out.

Again, it's important to remember that you could pause for a million different reasons that are not deception related, right? You could just be trying to remember something. You could be furrowing your brow because, I don't know, your forehead's itchy, whatever. So none of these are Pinocchio's nose, but they are reliably associated with deception. What about body language? People always talk about body language. People put a lot of stock into body language, particularly into like gaze aversion. So if you go around the world and you ask people, what's the number one cue that someone is lying to you?

They will say, sketchy eye contact. And there's no research to suggest that that is true. And if you think about it for like a hot second, it makes so much sense, right? Because I sometimes tell a lie. You sometimes tell a lie. We all know the stereotype that liars can't look you in the eye. So if I want you to believe me, I'm going to make sure I control my eye contact, right? And that's something that's well under our control. – And there's neurodivergence and things like that, which means that some people who have sort of certain neurodiversities struggle with eye contact, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're lying.

– Exactly. So there's some emerging research to suggest that people who are on the autism spectrum are perceived as lying more when they're actually telling the truth. And that's because of this eye contact thing, which people are using as a cue to deception, but in fact is unrelated to deception. I mean, there's also like cultural differences, right? In some cultures, it's more respectful not to look at you in the eye. And so that can also lead to kind of errors in our judgment. – And there's this sort of dark personality trait thing I hear a lot.

Is it a triad? – It was a triad. Now we've got a tetrad. – Okay. So is that what this is? – Yes. – Okay. So if you want to reveal what each of those is one at a time. – Psychopathy, for example. – What is psychopathy? – Psychopathy is a constellation that is a set of personality traits. So it's not just one thing. Having kind of a superficial charm, they're quite manipulative, and they tend to be pretty grandiose, so they've got a pretty inflated view of themselves.

There's also emotional components. So they tend to have pretty shallow emotional experiences, a lack of remorse and guilt for harming other people, and they tend not to take responsibility for their own actions. In addition, they tend to be pretty impulsive. So they are kind of living life by the seat of their pants, and they're not really, you know, planning far out into the future. And so they might, you know, kind of mooch off of family members or a romantic partner. And then lastly, they tend to break a lot of rules.

So this might be just like workplace rules or social norms, but psychopathy has largely been studied in criminal populations, so this could also be laws. The other three of the so-called dark tetrad share some elements but also have some like unique flavors. So the next one we've got here is Machiavellianism, and that is, you know, named after Niccolò Machiavelli, who wrote The Prince, which is a kind of how-to manual to like gain and wield power effectively. So as a personality trait, they tend to be pretty cynical about other people.

They tell a lot of lies, and they try to like manipulate people, but it's more like three-dimensional chess, you know? Like they might learn a little tidbit about you, Steven, and they'll be like, you know what? I could use that against him later. I'm just gonna like put that in my back pocket, and you know, when I need to manipulate or like blackmail you in the future, right? They'll have that available to them. So this is, they're very interested in power, which of course is where the name comes from.

Next one is narcissism. You know, that's one that people know pretty well, right? So these are people who tend to be very entitled, and they're very willing to exploit other people in order to get what they think they deserve, right? So it's like very relentless kind of self-focus. This word has been used quite a lot in culture. It's thrown around all the time. Constantly, yes. What's your view of that? I mean, narcissism, like all of these traits, exists on a continuum, okay? So you or anyone else, myself, could take a measure, a self-report measure of the extent to which I have these traits, right?

And you can land anywhere from very low to very high. Now, some of these traits, narcissism being one of them, actually has a, there's a personality disorder diagnosis at the incredibly high end, right? So this appears in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is basically like a list of different mental disorders. You could go to a psychologist or psychiatrist. They could assess you and diagnose you if you have like extreme levels of narcissism. But like people land everywhere, right? So I think part of the problem is that people say, oh, she's a narcissist, right?

He's a narcissist. Are they a narcissist or a psychopath? And they make this kind of very binary distinction there, right? I guess I have qualms with those words for a couple of different reasons. These exist on a continuum. There's no clear moment where it becomes you are a narcissist versus not a narcissist. And so as with all of these other traits, it's a bit of a mouthful, but I think it's more accurate to say they have relatively high levels of narcissism or psychopathy or whatever the case is.

And you said that there's two main types of narcissist. Yeah. So increasingly, personality psychologists are identifying this kind of vulnerable type and a grandiose type. And so grandiose is like one that we all know well where it's like they've got this ego. It's huge. It like cannot be popped, right? It's like they get this negative feedback and it's like nothing gets through to them and they always think they should be the one in charge, etc. For those individuals, they tend to get very angry with a particular kind of threat to their ego.

And that is like a failure to achieve. Like they wanted this promotion at work. They didn't get it. Vulnerable individuals actually have kind of a very fragile ego. Interesting. So it can be popped very easily, essentially. So if they get negative feedback from people, maybe they get like socially rejected, that's when they become quite angry. That's more of a trigger for them. And is it you using the word angry as the outcome of both those types of narcissists? But I guess one would assume that maybe just from the wording that a vulnerable narcissist would get more upset or more self-critical or something like that.

The research at least was focused on anger in response to these kinds of threats to their ego, but certainly emotional, you know, like combative. This is when you're going to get like a really negative response. Like someone who is relatively low on narcissism of both kinds, you know, could take that kind of feedback that like, no, I don't think a second date is really for us, right? Like someone with vulnerable narcissism is going to respond badly. Do you want to ask the question? It's just a friend of mine because of a conversation I was having the other day where we were interviewing someone.

And during the interview process, they were very quick to say, to claim credit for like all of the things the company they worked at had done. And they were also very quick to say that they were like good at everything. Even as I walked out of the room with them and I said, Oh, can you, can I message you on this particular app? They said, I'm amazing at that app. Again, I'm not anonymizing. So a lot of this is slightly changed. And I walked out of the room weirdly having interviewed thousands and thousands of people over the years thinking to myself, they were so lovely, but it felt to me like it was more coming from a place of insecurity.

And when you look at their story, it's a story of someone who has been continually counted out, overlooked for opportunities and almost has this a bit of a chip on their shoulder to try and be, prove themselves. Now, when I, another person I think would look at that same pattern of behavior and say, Oh, that person's a narcissist. So when I had a vulnerable narcissist versus the sort of grandiose one, I was wondering if is at all linked what I'm saying. For vulnerable narcissism, the reason that they would respond so poorly to this kind of rejection is that they need kind of constant admiration and positive feedback from other people to keep their ego like going.

I called this person's former employer to get a reference. And they said about him that one of the quotes was he always needs a gold star. What's the difference between deep insecurity and narcissism in this regard? The deep insecurity, it would need to be coupled with these, like, entitlement. Oh, okay. Like, there's still a grandiose sense of self, it's just that it is quite fragile. So, they're like, they think they're really good and they're willing to exploit other people to get what they think they deserve.

And they may feel like they've been victimized, right? And that's why they haven't gotten all of the accolades that they think they deserve. Now, I think, kind of regardless of where this person, you know, sits on this continuum, you know, they might still have, like, incredible skills. They might have the abilities that you're looking for. And so, is this something you can manage or is this going to create problems? I didn't get any sense that they were entitled or that they would use other people to their advantage.

I got the impression that people would generally like them and that they weren't entitled at all, but they still had these sort of self-promotional traits. And I think in society, the minute someone's, like, overly self-promotional, we run to the sort of narcissist category versus it could be other things, I'm presuming. Yes. I mean, I think in that situation, right, you need to be quite mindful of the situation as well, right? So, like, our behavior is kind of a combination of both our personality and the situation that we're in.

And so, if you're at a job interview, like, your whole goal is to show people, like, I can do this job. I've got the skills that you need. And so, in a job interview, we might kind of come across as, like, a more confident, more, you know, we're presenting ourselves in the best possible light. But I think we're very quick to rush to a personality assessment. It's called the fundamental attribution error. So, it's like when I see someone behave in a particular way, like, they're maybe being self-promoting, saying all the things that they can do really well, I could be like, oh, that's narcissistic, right?

That's a personality trait. And we tend to be more likely to do that to others. But if I was in their shoes, I would be like, I was just trying to show Steven, like, what I could do. It's the situation that made me act kind of bigger than my britches, right? So, we need to also be aware of, like, the situation can impact our behavior. And so, we want to be not too quick to make a personality attribution where the situation could explain that. And that's maybe a really important point to make here is that personality is a consistent pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving over time and across contexts.

So, if you've only got one interaction with this person, you probably get a sense of their personality, but you might see them, you know, out with their friends or with their family, and they might not be kind of so boastful, right? And that might suggest that this is really the situation talking, not the personality. And what are the gender differences in narcissism in terms of both different types of narcissism? You mentioned vulnerable narcissism and also grandiose narcissism. And then I guess there might be some other gender differences in our ability to, like, spot these behaviors.

So, when it comes to all of these traits that we're talking about, men tend to score somewhat higher than women, and that's quite a consistent finding. That is not to say that women cannot score, like, very high on these traits. There are certainly cases, and there's quite a bit of overlap, but on average, you know, the averages for men tend to be higher than the averages for women. And there's a fourth brick. That's the newest and the latest one, which is sadism. When you hear sadism, you might jump to, like, pretty extreme.

Yeah, I was thinking of, like, the devil and stuff. Yeah. I mean, I first started studying sadistic behavior in the context of, like, sexual homicides. Like, I was reading through these descriptions of criminal behavior, and I was looking for signs of sadistic treatment of the victim. So, like, it can get incredibly extreme, right? And that's probably where our mind goes, but there's also, like, kind of more everyday versions. One good example is, like, online trolling. So, we know that people who are relatively high in sadism tend to, they take pleasure in other people's pain, right?

And so, you could do that in incredibly, like, gruesome, horrifying ways, or you could just be, like, pushing people's buttons online, trying to get people upset. They all share kind of three things. They are callous. So, they don't care about other people. They don't care about your feelings or your outcomes. They're manipulative. So, they're willing to lie and cheat to get what they want, and they're hostile toward other people. So, that's kind of, like, the core of all of these traits. That's what they share. Facades.

Mm-hmm. Are they good at hiding it? Yes. In fact, some of the, like, earliest descriptions of psychopathy, in particular, described it as, like, a mask of sanity. And so, it's, like, they can seem quite kind of normal on the surface, but if you kind of get a look underneath the hood, you see that they're not running the same kind of operating system that you are. What is the inverse of all this stuff? Because we've pointed at the traits, and a lot of those are things people understand.

But there's also some misconceptions. There's also the opposite, which is, like, people think narcissists or psychopaths can't hold eye contact. It's one of the ones you hear all the time. What are some of these ones that, through your research, you've been able to debunk as not being true? So, I think one of the biggest ones is that all people with high levels of psychopathy are violent, and that's absolutely not the case. It kind of links to your tweet here. Yeah. So, most people think a psychopath looks dangerous.

They picture the villain in a movie, but that's not how it works in real life. So, you probably noticed that, like, in that description that I gave you, kind of a long-winded description of psychopathy with all those four different elements, I did say that there was rule-breaking, right? And sometimes that's criminal rule-breaking. So, that could be violent behavior, but it's not necessarily so. So, psychopathy is, like, a risk factor for violent behavior, but there's plenty of people who would score relatively highly and never engage in violent behavior.

They might break rules in other ways, right? So, I think whenever we hear the word psychopathy, what comes to mind is, like, a Ted Bundy, right? Ted Bundy-type character. He reportedly scored, I think, 39 out of 40 or something on the psychopathy checklist revised, which is a measure that psychologists will use to assess how psychopathic someone is. So, yeah, he's a bit of a poster boy for those traits, but certainly people can score highly without being, you know, a serial murderer. In terms of the amount of the population that have one of these dark personality traits, what are the numbers?

How common is it? So, this is a complicated question because, as I told you, you know, all these traits exist on a continuum. So, the proportion of people that we say are high on these traits depends on where you put that cut point, right? If we're talking about psychopathy and clinical levels, that means a score of 30 out of 40 on the psychopathy checklist revised or higher. That's about 1% of the population. Narcissistic personality disorder, so, again, very extreme levels of those traits, enough to warrant a diagnosis, that would be 2% to 5%.

We don't have clinical cutoffs for sadism and Machiavellianism. What we do have is a ton of data of people who have completed self-report questionnaires. So, like, one way that you can kind of get a sense of how many people are high on these traits is by looking at the proportion of people who, on average, agree with the items. Like, if I say, I am a born leader, to what extent do you agree with that? That's a narcissism item. If you say, yeah, I agree with that.

To what extent do you say, you like to see other people get hurt? Sadism trait, yeah, I agree with that, right? So, if you just look at the people who, on average, agree with the items that we use to self-report, assess these traits, it's about 10% of the population. And where does this come from? Does this come from childhood trauma? When you think about some of these individuals you have on these photos in front of you here, where do you think their antisocial or dark triad or dark personality behaviour stems from?

Is it something that happened in their childhood? Is it genetics? Is it something else? Jennifer The answer is both. So, the research suggests that with respect to psychopathy, narcissism, quite similar, the variation in someone's score on that personality trait is about 50% genetic and about 50% environmental experiences. And so, you know, it can, in some ways, make us realize that these people didn't ask to be this way. Because, I mean, you don't get to choose your parents, so you don't get to choose your genetics. And then when it comes to those environmental experiences, often they're, like, early life experiences and not good ones.

So, research suggests that, you know, abuse, really kind of cold, uncaring parenting style early in life can increase the likelihood that someone will have higher levels of these traits later in life. For narcissism, another variable is, like, overvaluation of a child early in life may lead to more narcissistic abuse later. So, there's one study, it was a longitudinal study, and they asked parents, like, the extent to which they, you know, told their kids, like, you're special, you're, like, better than other kids. And the more the kids got that kind of feedback, the more likely they were to be more narcissistic later down the road.

Like, they thought they were exceptional. They thought they were entitled to things that other people were not entitled to. And that's different than self-esteem. We want our kids to have high self-esteem. We want them to know that they are, you know, cared for and worthy. That comes from something different. That comes from, like, a warm, responsive parenting style. In that study, I was thinking about causation. And I was wondering if the parents themselves had a genetic disposition to be narcissistic. Is it conceivable that they then spoke highly to their children?

And actually, maybe it wasn't the nurturing part, it was their nature, i.e., that child also shared the genetics as the parent who had the proclivity to tell them that they were the most amazing thing ever. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. I mean, mostly, I think about this in the context of psychopathy, where, like, sometimes you've got, like, a perfect storm, right? So, like, you might have a parent who has really high levels of these traits, so they're passing on that potential genetic risk factor. But if you've got someone, you know, a parent in your household who is callous, manipulative, impulsive, it's going to be very difficult to maintain, like, a pretty stable home life for that child.

And so, they might end up experiencing, you know, some of those, like, abuse and cold kind of parenting styles that are also environmental risk factors for developing psychopathy later in life. So, they kind of get, like, a double whammy. From all the research you've done, and all the studying of these dark personality traits you've done, and self-esteem, and everything in between, is there any way to increase one's probability of being a good parent? Like, from everything you've seen, what is the, like, right approach? I know that's a difficult thing to say, because kids are all different, but… I mean, warm and responsive parenting, is it?

Like, when you look at treatment for kids who are showing early warning signs of these callous and unemotional traits, that's the treatment that seems to work. And actually, that's kind of, like, the silver lining in this whole, you know, kind of dark research area, is that early intervention with kids really can help reduce the likelihood of them developing high levels of psychopathic traits as they grow older. And usually, it's, like, it's training parents. You know, it's not like a kid comes in and talks to a therapist, like, once a week, and then we're good, right?

It's more training parents about how to respond in ways that don't, like, escalate, create these kind of, like, dominance contests when the kid acts out, but also to reinforce and kind of model this warm and responsiveness. But what's fascinating about psychopathy and callous and unemotional traits in kids is that they tend to be not very responsive to punishment. They're very responsive to rewards. So, if you see kids doing something kind or helpful, the, like, parent-child interaction training teaches parents to repeat what they said, say, that was a very kind thing to say.

Just, like, repeating, showing, responding to them, paying attention to their behavior when they do something good or kind, reinforcing it, and giving that attention to increase the likelihood that you see it in the future. And so, the inverse of that, in terms of a bad way to respond to a child that might lead to some of these dark personality traits in the future, would be? A cold and unresponsive parenting, getting angry, getting frustrated with them. I mean, physically harming them, that's child abuse, is associated with increased likelihood of developing these traits over time.

You mentioned dominating, in terms of dominating conversation, trying to outdo them. Yeah. So, I mean, and this is something that I think is not exclusive to parenting kids with CU traits, but sometimes, you know, if a kid is having a tantrum, you'll, like, you'll see a parent saying, like, no, you can't have that. And then they'll, like, you know, increase the tantrum level. Like, no, you can't have that. But then once it gets to a certain point, you, like, give in, right? What that teaches is that you just need to escalate your behavior.

You need to continue to, like, dominate your parent, like, kick it up a notch, and then at some point, you're going to win as a kid. So, that kind of parenting is not going to extinguish the negative behavior very effectively. And there's a brain scan there in front of you. What is that brain scan? This is a scan of of functional MRI. So, what they're pointing out there is the prefrontal cortex. So, research suggests that people who have high levels of psychopathy tend to have less active and less connected prefrontal cortex.

That's associated with impulse control. It's also associated with kind of moral reasoning, moral thinking. If their, you know, brains are less active during the same moral or impulse control task in those regions, this might help us to explain why they're more likely to behave impulsively, to, you know, not be empathetic to other people. There's also the amygdala, which I don't think you can see on here, but, and it's on the inside. You can open it up. Oh, yeah. Let's see. So, other research on psychopathy suggests that the amygdala, which is deep within our brain, is also associated with emotional response, particularly fear.

And so, we know that people with high levels of psychopathy tend to have, they experience pretty low fear, and they're not very good at, like, aversive conditioning, right? So, like, if we get punished for something, we learn that whenever we, you know, come up against that stimuli again in the future, we're like, oh, that turned out really badly last time. I'm going to avoid that. So, amygdalas in people with high levels of psychopathy tend to be both smaller and less active. So, there is, like, you know, brain differences, neurological differences between people with high levels and low levels of psychopathy.

So, I guess this begs the question that if someone has those traits you've described, or if there are any one of these four things in this dark triad, these dark personality traits, can they be cured? So, some change is possible, but, I mean, some, some being an operative word there. So, most of the research we have on psychopathy, in particular, comes from criminal offenders. So, individuals who are incarcerated have to take part in some treatment while they're inside, and the research finds that they're not particularly motivated to change.

So, that's a big problem with, like, all of these things, because they don't particularly care about other people, and it tends to be other people that they are hurting with their behavior. And so, it's like, why would I change? This is like a you problem, not a me problem, right? So, motivation can be difficult to come by with this population, but if they do consistently engage in cognitive behavioral therapies, you can reduce the likelihood of recidivism, so the likelihood that they will re-offend upon release. Again, we're talking about incarcerated individuals.

When it comes to lower levels of these traits, there's really interesting research by Nathan Hudson had people do these agreeableness challenges, and agreeableness is kind of like the opposite of these traits. So, you would just, like, ping them on their smartphone every day and would say, like, oh, you should give a compliment to a friend. You should reach out to a friend and just offer them some encouragement. You should, you know, buy coffee for the person behind you in line at the cafe today. These little things where people were encouraged to be kind, be helpful to other people, to see other people's perspectives, and people who actually followed through on those did report having lower levels of these traits after four months than at the start.

And in your book, under the section that says hard truths and dark personalities persist, you write, poisonous people aren't likely to change very much. Personality traits are, by definition, enduring. Although some evolution of our character happens naturally, it takes a decade. Data suggests that people become a bit more agreeable over time, and research with incarcerated men finds that even those with clinical levels of psychopathy are less likely to re-offend as they get older. Even so, waiting it out is likely to be a painful strategy. One study asked more than 1,000 people who knew individuals who were psychopathic for a long time whether their behaviour had improved past the age of 50.

Almost all respondents, 93%, said that as researchers put it, quote, the behaviour was just as bad or worse after age 50 than it had been previously. Just as bad or worse. I mean, it's their personality, right? So, it's kind of like asking a tiger to change their stripes. So, if you're not motivated to do it, as we know, people with these traits tend not to be very motivated. That's where that, you know, 90-some percent of folks come in as like, they're not dramatically changing unless they find some reason to do so.

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It is the worst-kept secret in productivity. If you want to give it a go, head to whisperflow.ai.steven to download it right now and give it a try. And once you try it, I think you'll realise why we let them sponsor this podcast. It's amazing. Is there anything else in this bucket that you find interesting? Because I know you may or may not be working on a book that really focuses on deception. But is there anything else that we haven't covered here that you think is pertinent?

Or any research that you uncovered that was fascinating? So, in my lab right now, I've become increasingly fascinated with how we respond to people who are lying to us when we're not suspicious at all. Because most of the research is like, I give you a bunch of videos and I tell you some of these people are lying, some are telling the truth, and you make judgements about them. But that's not how real life works at all, right? So, usually, we're having some sort of interaction with people.

No one comes in and says, you need to judge the veracity of this person. We're just having a conversation. And so, I've been really interested in how conversations unfold, how interactions unfold when one person is lying and the other person is just like none the wiser. And so, we keep finding these small but consistent effects that people feel less close to their interaction partner when someone is lying to them. Peteer Close. Heather Yeah, it's like, so, we actually had this study where we got people to just converse, right?

Talk to a stranger. One person was told to lie in response to everything, the other person had no idea that was going on. And at the end of that study, the dyads that had a liar in them said, like, I feel, you know, less connected to this other person than dyads where both people were telling the truth. And so, we also found that the more lies that people tell, they just, you know, self-report on how much they lie in their everyday life, the more lonely they feel.

And so, we're finding this kind of bi-directional effect. And I think often people lie to, like, spare the feelings of others. That's for the average person, not necessarily these traits here. But for the average person, most of the lies that we tell are pro-social in nature. Like, I tell you a lie because I don't want to hurt your feelings. But we are finding that that actually creates this, like, social distance between us as opposed to bringing us closer together. And so, I've been really interested in just kind of, like, the negative impacts of telling lies, even when we do it for quote unquote, good reasons.

Peteer In that you talked about how when, if we were both sat down and you were asked to lie to me, I would walk away feeling like I was less close, i.e. slash connected to you. What is it in your behaviour, or in my perception, that you think is causing this feeling of disconnection? So, we are finding that people who are lying are perceived as less warm, they're perceived as less competent, they're perceived as less moral. Also, if we think about, like, some of the cues to deception that we talked about earlier, when people give relatively few details about themselves, conversations are based on this reciprocal exchange, right?

Like, I tell you something about myself, you tell me something about yourself, and, like, we start to know each other, right? And so, if you've got someone who's lying to you, they're giving you less information about themselves, for example. And so, I don't feel like I know you at the end of our conversation. Even though I'm not, like, actively suspicious that you're lying to me about your likes and your interests and what you did on Friday afternoon, it comes across because you gave me less information.

And maybe I think, he didn't really want to talk to me. I mean, I'm so fascinated by this, the fact that you have a lab that tests this stuff. What are some of the fascinating questions you've gone in search of answers for in your lab? One that I love is how much sympathy people feel for individuals who are lying or telling the truth about how sad they are. So, like, think back to the pleaders, right, that we talked about. If you look at this face, right, versus this face, like, how much empathy do you have for that person?

How sad do you feel? How willing are you to donate money to whatever cause they're looking for? So, like, we studied this with the pleaders that we talked about. So, people who went on TV and asked for help trying to find their missing loved one, half of whom were actually responsible for killing that person they pleaded to find. And we showed people, again, they weren't aware that some of these folks were lying and some were telling the truth, but we showed them these videos and we said, how much sympathy do you feel for this person who's asking for help trying to find the missing individual?

And how much money would you donate to a theoretical GoFundMe that would, like, help support the search for this missing person? And we find really consistently that people are more willing to donate money to the genuine pleaders relative to the deceptive ones, and they feel more kind of sympathy and compassion for them, even though they're not, you know, they don't know that some of these folks are actually, like, deceptive murderers. And the effects are, like, you know, not gigantic, but it does suggest that, like, we're not completely clueless moving through the world.

But when we reduce it to a simple binary, is this person lying or telling the truth? We lose a lot of kind of, like, the nuance of how we move through our relationships and, like, oh, I'm feeling kind of close to this person, closer to that person. I'm willing to help this person more than that person. Yeah, so those are the kinds of things I've been interested in. One of the things, I spoke to Vanessa Van Edwards on this podcast a few times, and she does a lot of stuff around, like, body language and how you show up, and she talks about warmth and competence, and how some people can over-index on warmth, and maybe that brings them down on competence, or they can over-index on competence, but be less warm.

I wanted to know if you had a perspective on this, like, how, like, through your research and through all the studies you've done, can you be warm and competent at the same time, or is there a bit of a trade-off? And, like, what – even you used the word warmth a second ago – what is it to be a warm person? Is it to be, like, how? Or is it, like, you know, like – No, it's, like, it is the sense that someone is kind and honest and trustworthy.

It is your benevolent intentions toward another person, right? So, we trust people to the extent that they are both warm and competent, in the sense that, like, I'm going to trust you if I think you have benevolent intentions toward me, that I think you, like, want to be kind to me. But also, if I think you can actually execute on that thing, like, do you have the competence, the ability to actually, you know, do that thing, make that connection for me at work, right? It's, like, if you are just warm, but, like, you've got no – you don't have, like, the ability to back it up, then we tend to trust those individuals less.

So, this warmth – high warmth, high competence – tends to be associated with high trustworthiness. And does high warmth come with certain behaviours? Yeah. I mean, one is just smiling. Okay. Yeah. Eye contact, you know. It reminds me of the research by Alison Woodbrooke, who I know has been here before as well, and, you know, being engaged and interested in your conversation partner, right? These, like, immediacy cues, like, you're leaning in, you're paying attention, you are smiling, you're making eye contact – these things are associated with warmth.

What about resting bitch face? I am occasionally guilty of this thing when I concentrate. So… When we have very little information about a person, we're just trying to pick up on anything, right, in their body language, their nonverbal behavior, to try to make an assessment of them. If we've just got like a quick look at your face and there's a bit of a scowl on it, that signals to us anger. And anger is not a very—that's not a warm thing, right? And so that tends to decrease our perceived trustworthiness of people.

Any other fascinating questions you've pursued in your lab? So I've been really interested in psychopathy as it relates to like leadership outcomes. So whenever I finished my PhD, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next, and I was kind of bummed out thinking about murder all the time. I was like, I really love these topics, but I gotta go somewhere else and like think about this in a different context. It was shortly after like the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme kind of fell apart, and I was like, oh, maybe like business school.

Like I could go to a different context and study these same like personality traits just in a different area. And I was also interested in like this notion of successful psychopathy, because like since really early descriptions of psychopathy, there's been this suggestion that these traits can actually help you to succeed, right? And I often hear that from people where they're like, yeah, like that's terrible behavior, but like, you know, sometimes that helps, right? And I'm like, does it? Like what does the data say on that?

And so I work with Dacher Keltner. Oh, Dacher's been here as well. Has he? Yeah. I love that guy. He's so wonderful. I love him. And so we studied, you know, the extent to which psychopathic personality traits could increase the amount of influence you have in government, and also the amount of money that you make as a hedge fund manager. Those are kind of the two contexts. Because I was like, these hyper-competitive contexts, right, where maybe in government you can kind of like backstab and backroom deals and whatever, you might be able to get lots of co-sponsors on your bills if you're using kind of these backroom tactics.

And then I thought with respect to money, maybe you're willing to take more risks, right? You're willing to cut people or companies down in public. You're not so worried about hurting other people. So I, of course, was like, these are situations where people with high levels of psychopathy can shine. Dacher was like, no, it won't be. So we were kind of pitting these like good versus evil concepts against each other. And consistently, we found that high levels of psychopathy was associated with less influence in government.

It was also associated with making less money as a hedge fund manager, whereas it's very like counterintuitive, I think, to people. What about some of these other ones, like narcissism and Machiavelli? What about those ones? So it really depends on like how you define success. So there is some research to suggest that narcissism, Machiavellianism can be associated with kind of rising up in ranks, maybe having a higher salary level, but they're not associated with like teams doing great, right? And honestly, most of the research is on psychopathy.

The work that I'm interested in is that people with high levels of psychopathy, they talk a really good game, and they make people think that they're a great like tactical communicator. They're very strategic thinkers. But if you actually ask them, like, how good are they at their job? They say that they're a terrible manager. They tend to bully their subordinates. They create a huge amount of stress for other people on their team, and their teams have worse outcomes because of it. So when you're talking about team performance, you're saying narcissists typically aren't good at leading teams over the long term?

They tend to come across as like leadership material early on. And there's this one study by Del Paul House, which shows this quite nicely. It's like they had these student groups, and they would work together throughout the term. After the first meeting, they all made judgments about each other, how likable they were, et cetera, et cetera, whether they seemed, you know, confident and smart and, you know, agreeable. The people who were high in narcissism came across really well in that first interaction. Like they said, they knew what they were doing.

They came across very confident. They seemed like they could lead. They wanted to lead. But then as the course of the term went by, people were like, this person is actually really hostile and like doesn't do their work, and they're a pain in the butt. So certainly the, you know, the thing that can make narcissism look good at the outset is our confusion of confidence and competence. So when someone says they can do something, and they say it very confidently, we're like, oh, they got this, right?

But that's not the same thing as actually being able to do it. We have some cards here, which are people's dating profiles. Okay. And I'm wondering if you can spot any of these dark personality traits just by looking at dating profiles or any clues that might be associated with it. All right. So this is Ryan. He's a chief of staff in Washington, D.C., professionally trained to argue my point. So yes, I'm probably going to win the debate about what to have for dinner. Okay, this feels like a red flag.

Savvy, strategic, and persuasive by trade. I mean, this feels very much like Machiavellianism, right? Kind of like controlling the situation, being kind of a smooth talker. Savvy, meaning like they're controlling you, they're maybe using information to get you to do what they want. Strategic, right? We talked about that very kind of strategic social style, where like, they're not kind of impulsively behaving like someone with psychopathy. They're more like playing three-dimensional chess, right, to get what they want. So that's quite a strategic behavior. Off the clock, you'll find me exploring the city, enjoying great food, traveling, and keeping life interesting, looking for someone who makes me laugh.

So I think the words to me that are like, might be used as like euphemisms, essentially, for some of the Machiavellian traits would be savvy, strategic, persuasive, like I can get anybody to do anything because I'm just going to manipulate them into doing it. Now, these could be red flags. He could be a perfectly nice guy. But these are things that I would like go into that conversation thinking like, okay, does he seem very cynical of people? Is he quite power hungry? Is he willing to manipulate other people to his own ends and kind of step over other people for what he wants?

What about that last line about makes me laugh? I found that to be quite self-serving in a way because you're looking for something yourself there. That obviously can be true. We're all looking for someone that can make us laugh. But whether you'd write that is, I don't know, just interesting. Potentially. All right. So this is Haley, who is a lawyer. My friends call me Hurricane, but you can call me Haley, equal parts chaos and good company. Chaos is immediately bringing up potential psychopathy because that's like that impulsivity.

You kind of don't really know where she's at. In women in particular, psychopathy can be associated with pretty volatile emotions and connecting with, we seem really close one day and then I'm really angry at you the next day. I'll happily spend the weekend trying a new workout class or plotting a harmless prank on my friends. That's a sadism. Red flag. So someone who is maybe delighting in someone else getting hurt, that could be concerning. Outspoken, tough enough to handle myself, toughness is associated with psychopathy. Do you think you can handle me?

That's up to you. Okay. David is a brain surgeon. Very impressive. So he's a surgeon by day, theater enthusiast, and cocktail appreciator by night. I'm confident enough to pick the restaurant, self-assured to admit when I'm wrong occasionally. And my friends would describe me as the life of the party. So this is giving like potential narcissism cues, right? So loves a lot of attention, life of the party, confident enough to pick like he won't be wrong about picking the restaurant, self-assured enough to admit when I'm wrong occasionally, he put in brackets.

So you might not see a ton of that behavior. Don't worry, I'm sure I can find the time for you somewhere. Winky face. So you might not be a priority. But you know, again, so I'm seeing narcissism vibes here. That's something I would, you know, pay attention to in our conversation would be like, does he ever ask anything about me? Or do we just talk about him and how fabulous and amazing his life is the whole time? So dating, you know, profiles are like an advertisement that you put out there.

So this is not an entire person's personality. So we can gather more information over time. But some red flags there. This Chad, he's in law enforcement in Texas. He's barbecuing in the picture, which feels on brand looking for my wife who will join me for life. No debt and no kids. Don't worry, ladies. I'm house trained. When I'm off duty. I'm very independent. Y'all find me hunting outdoors grilling or challenging my buddies looking for someone genuine to share life's adventures with. Nice guy. Seems okay. Yeah.

Yeah. I wonder what he's grilling. Yeah. Okay. If I was to go on a date with any of these people, Haley, Ryan, David, Chad, from these dating cards that we just read out, what are the type of verbal and nonverbal quick cues that I would be looking for, whether I was dating them or in a relationship with them to figure out if they had any of these dark personality traits? Again, these are kind of early warning signs that you can look for. Things like, do they interrupt you often but refuse to tolerate it when you interrupt?

Right? And so this is kind of an indication of that impulsivity as well as potential dominance over other people. They want to dominate you. And I mean, sometimes people get excited and they just want to like interject and share something. Here, what we're really interested in is it's a cue to impulsivity, but like refusing to tolerate it when you interrupt. That makes them quite angry. Do they consistently ignore personal or professional boundaries? So, you know, maybe you're at work or maybe you're on one of these dates, right?

And you say, I'd really rather not talk about my family right now. And they continue to ask you about your family and you're like, I really don't want to talk about that right now. Okay. Yeah. Tell me about your brother and this terrible relationship you have with them. So, kind of always pushing on boundaries, even when they're set explicitly. Do they seem weirdly calm? This is related to psychopathy and that kind of shallow emotional affect. Like they're not experiencing fear or sadness or concern for other people when you expect they would in a conversation.

Do they seem to be an authority on every subject? This is a narcissism vibe, right? Like they know everything about everything and you don't know anything, right? So, they need to be the authority. Do they offer impulsive, off-the-cuff responses to your questions? So, they're not really thinking about things. They're just saying whatever comes to their mind immediately, a sign of potential impulsivity that's associated with psychopathy. Do they seem to come across as tough, combative, or cruel, right? So, psychopathy associated with aggression, wanting to dominate people, cruelty, of course, sadism.

So, Haley here, she said about throwing pranks, she's called herself tough and asked if we could handle her. So, maybe that's links. Yep, exactly. This one's interesting. So, do they make intense eye contact with you, seeming to peer into your soul? One of the things that clinicians have noted with people with high levels of psychopathy is that they tend to make really intense eye contact. Okay. Do they seem to lack emotions related to self-awareness, such as embarrassment or shame? These are the kind of broader self-conscious emotions like remorse, like guilt that are associated with psychopathy, a deficit in those.

Do they spend a lot of time talking about themselves and show much less interest in you? That's our old friend narcissism. And when others are struggling, do they find it enjoyable, annoying, or boring? And that would be associated with sadism. This is something that I've made for you. I realize that the Diverseo audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards.

The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps. And we call this in our team the 1%. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries. And we released these last year and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diaries.

So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours at thediary.com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. With two things in mind. The first thing is that these dark personality traits are very common relative to the impact they can have on lives.

I think they're extremely common. And the second thing is that, according to your book and some of the research, people don't tend to change. So this leads me to the conclusion that we might have to figure out how to deal with these people. Because if we work in a company or a team, or even if we work in a family, if I look at some of those stats around antisocial personality behaviors, it would suggest roughly one in five people are going to be antisocial in some way.

So we can't just hope to avoid them in our lives. No. I mean, everyone's got a story. I think. And I think people feel relatively powerless, like, because the approaches that we tend to take with other people when they hurt us don't work very well for these individuals. Like, when someone hurts us, we might be like, we show them, we tell them, that really hurt me, and then they feel guilt and they might apologize, right? Or we might punish them in some way, and then that leads them to avoid that behavior in the future.

These are precisely things that people with psychopathy, for example, like, doesn't really work, right? And so, we're left being like, how do I deal with this? Like, my tools are not working. But I think what's really kind of powerful to know is that there are things that you can do. So, we've got seven rules for dealing with people with dark personalities. So, the first one is to establish clear boundaries. And I want to kind of preface this by saying, like, setting out the rules is not like a guarantee that they won't be broken, right?

We've talked about, with respect to psychopathy, that they tend to break some rules. So, it's like a defining feature of that personality. But research suggests that establishing clear rules, making them explicit, decreases the likelihood of kind of selfish behavior, for example, compared to if there's no rules whatsoever, right? So, sometimes, like, you know, in my workplace, we have a respectful workplace policy, which when I read it was like, why do people need to be reminded of this? This seems so obvious, right? But there's really good reasons to have a respectful workplace policy.

One is that it makes very explicit how we expect people to be treated here. That is going to decrease the likelihood of people, even with, you know, kind of moderate levels of these traits, let's say, will violate those rules. And more than that, if they do violate the rules, you've got something written down that's like, you're not supposed to do this. Otherwise, it's very hard to kind of do anything about it, right? In a relationship, you can make this really clear, like, what's okay, what's not okay in this relationship.

And you've got to tell the other person that. It can't just be in your head, right? So, you've got to make these rules explicit. And it can also help to, like, read in a buddy. Like, if you've got a friend, and you're like, okay, these are the things that I want out of a relationship partner. These are like no-goes. These are behaviors that cross the red line. Having, you know, a friend that knows what those are, that can tell you when your boundaries are slipping can be really useful.

I was thinking of one particular context that I know, and I'll keep it anonymous as well, where there's five people that I know. It is a family that I know of, and they have five kids. And one of the family members was telling me that they are the only one that has maintained a boundary against one of the older parents who's got a track record of, like, some of these dark personality traits. And she was telling me that because she has always maintained a boundary against the father, who is the person that has dark personality traits, the father has almost left her alone and has gone for the other four siblings, more so.

And that the other four siblings are suffering because they don't have an established boundary. Whereas what I'm saying here is it's interesting that someone who has a boundary seems to be preyed on less by the narcissist or person with Machiavellian personality than those that haven't established one. And if that is true, then what is it about the psychopathic or narcissistic person that is choosing easier targets or boundary-less targets? Does that hold as truth, or is that just anecdotal? – So we do know from research that this is mostly in workplaces, that workplaces that have kind of codes of fairness, people with high levels of these traits are less likely to, you know, keep a bunch of the bonus money for themselves instead of share it among their team fairly.

So there's evidence of, like, having rules in place increases the likelihood that they will follow those rules relative to, like, a no-holds-bar kind of situation. There's also research on, you know, how people with high levels of psychopathic traits kind of choose who to prey upon, essentially. And individuals who are not very assertive tend to be more likely to, you know, kind of, it's almost like they're, like, picking, you know, the weakest of the herd or something like that. So having asserting some boundaries can help to, you know, not have that target on your back.

– I was thinking about a guest that I interviewed on this podcast that was telling me she had gone through domestic violence, and she was telling me about, like, the love-bombing process as to how this individual had, like, broken down her boundaries and her confidence over time, and then had isolated her from her friends and family, wouldn't allow her to call her mum, would give her a script when her mum called, and those kinds of things. And one of the remarkable things I observed is how, over time, they'd sort of broken down their confidence in order to be able to seemingly control them.

Is this common practice? – Yeah, in a domestic violence situation. You know, it kind of reminds me of the kind of emerging research on gaslighting, where someone would, you know, make their partner kind of doubt their sense of reality, kind of, you know, correcting them all the time, like, you're being too sensitive, you don't see the truth around you. And I think what's kind of so insidious about that is that it makes you dependent on that other person, and then the isolation can really decrease your ability to kind of, like, get out of it, because you don't have someone else who can, you know, check your sense of reality, that you really are seeing and feeling and remembering things that really did happen, even though they're telling you that it didn't.

– What is gaslighting? Because we throw around the term all the time, the minute someone lies, we say, you're gaslighting me. – Yeah, it's a pattern of denying someone's version of reality, so you might tell people that, you know, they shouldn't be feeling the way that they're feeling. Things didn't happen like they are remembering they happened, that they can't trust their own, you know, sense of, you know, perception of reality. And so, it can be incredibly kind of destabilizing and isolating. And what is worrisome about that is that we really need other people to help us see reality.

And so, if we're only seeing it through, like, their lens of, we can't be trusted, our own eyes, our own memory can't be trusted, we start to depend on their perception, which is essentially a control tactic. And research does suggest that people with high levels of these traits endorse these tactics. Like, they don't see anything wrong with doing that to a romantic partner, which would probably follow, that they would be more likely to engage in it. A lot of romantic arguments would sound like gaslighting, I think, within that definition of, like, you know, let's go back to the cheating example we said.

Last Friday, I was doing something dodgy. You suspect I'm lying. So, you say to me, no, you weren't, Stephen. You weren't at the office till 3am. And I go, yeah, I was. I was at the office. You don't know what you're talking about, Leigh-Anne. You weren't there. You're making this up in your head. Who was gaslighting who there? Because you said you denied my reality, and now I'm denying your reality. Wait, but were you actually at the office? Does it matter? Like, Jeremy, I'm trying to figure out which one of us was gaslighting behavior there.

Yeah. I think it would be like, if I say, like, you know, I feel insecure, I feel threatened by, like, whatever you were doing on Friday. And you're like, no, you don't. Or you shouldn't feel that way. There's no reason for you to feel that way. You're blowing things out of proportion. It's essentially like denying someone's actual experience. My experience is that I feel threatened. And so, it's like, even if I might be wrong about that, that is my experience. So, I could deny the facts, theoretically.

I could say, no, at 2am, I was falling asleep on my desk. I could maybe argue with the facts, but it's when you start arguing with someone else's perception of reality, of their own subjective experience, that's when you stray into this gaslighting. In the example I gave earlier from my guest, that's exactly what happened to her. What he started to do is he started hiding her stuff in places. So, he put her car keys in the fridge to make her feel like she'd gone crazy. Yeah, yeah.

Which is absolutely bonkers. That's wild. Okay, that makes sense. So, that was establishing clear boundaries. Really, what I was getting at is, do they try and erode those boundaries, or do they leave you alone? So, they're likely to try to push on them, but less so than if you have no boundaries at all. Okay. Yep. So, the next one is, don't give them power over others. We've talked about kind of all of these different traits and that they, you know, Machiavellianism is actually kind of named after the pursuit of power.

Psychopathy is associated with domineering people. Narcissism, I'm better than you. I'm a born leader. All of these are kind of related to power. People with these traits tend to be very interested in having power over other people, but we know from research that this does not tend to go well for those individuals who are working underneath them. So, at work, for example, we know that people who are working under a boss with more psychopathic traits report being more stressed out. They also tend to be more likely to bring that stress home, and that creates more family conflict.

So, it kind of spreads. It doesn't stay where it is. They tend to create division within teams. They also tend to increase the likelihood of turnover intentions. So, you know, if you're working for a boss with these traits, you're like, I gotta get the hell out of here. So, you're churning through staff, right? So, giving them power over others is not a great way to kind of deal with them. So, you don't want to give them power over others even when they want it, but there's other things that you can give them that they do want, and this is essentially like negotiating 101, right?

So, you can look for win-wins when you're negotiating with them. Recognizing that what they consider motivation to get to this win-win might not be what you consider to be motivation to get to this win-win. So, imagine that you've got this employee who is bullying his subordinates, and you're like, you really need to treat your team better because they are so stressed out, and they, you know, are going home from work, and they're crying to their spouses, and, you know, they're bringing it home, and they're getting sick because of this.

You're trying to make them feel compassion for other people to get them to behave better toward their team. That's not motivating to them, right? It might be motivating to other people, but people who with high levels of these traits, right, were callous, not concerned about other people. However, that doesn't mean that they can't do something kind or helpful, right? They might just do it for a different reason. So, if you know that the team is suffering under this person's current, like, bullying management style, you could say, you know, you've got this, you know, sales bonus that's coming up, but your team is so stressed out that you're not going to meet that target, and you're not getting to get your bonus, right?

You need to treat your team differently. Money, they like money. They like power. They like status. And so, it's not that they can't behave better. It's that they might do it for a different reason. So, trying to understand what motivates them and trying to figure out how you can use that. The next one is use the carrot, not the stick. So, we've talked about this a little bit where people, particularly with high levels of psychopathy, very reward-sensitive, but not very punishment-sensitive. So, you can try to punish them, but literally, their brains don't process punishment in the same way.

They don't develop that kind of link between, if I do this behavior, then fear of punishment. So, like, they're more likely to repeat it than people with low levels of these traits. So, punishment, you know, there's a place for it, I suppose, but it's like it's not going to be as effective with these personalities in particular. And I think what's terrible, what we are losing a huge opportunity on is that we don't use the carrot instead when the carrot is so powerful. So, sometimes people are like, they're a bad person.

I'm not going to reward anything that they do. Like, I'm not going to give them any kind of positive feedback because I think they're terrible, right? But if they do something kind or honest or helpful, oh my god, reward them. Reward them, not with power over others, but maybe with, like, a bonus at work, with, like, a job title because they really care about status. That's a reward that they will really like, and you are going to increase the likelihood that you get more of that behavior in the future.

I think there'll be some people listening right now that are thinking, shouldn't you just fire these people? Shouldn't you get all of these people out of your life if they've got sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy? Shouldn't you just throw them out your life? Yeah, I think given that there are, you know, a reasonably sized minority of the population has some elevated level of these traits, you're going to be chucking a lot of people, right? And they also might genuinely have some, like, really useful skills that just, you know, you want in your company, you just need to learn how to manage this personality trait.

And so I think even if, you know, you have kind of a low tolerance for these personality traits, you're not going to be able to completely avoid them at all times. It might not be your decision to chuck them out of the company. Yeah, exactly. It might be a person that you, like, you want to have a relationship with them, even if that relationship is not perfect. You know, maybe it's a brother-in-law, right? And you're like, he's such a pain in the ass, but I see him, like, twice a year, and I don't want to cut him out because that means I don't get to see my sister anymore.

And I love my sister, and I want to support my sister. And so I think there's just, like, the, you know, stay or go question is just so complicated. And there's so many reasons why you might not be able to do that. And so we need to learn the skills to manage interactions with these people as well. Next one is emphasize your common identity. People with high levels of narcissism are not particularly interested in, like, you know, of being fair to you, or like, you know, being kind to you, but they are interested in loyalty.

There's these studies that are really fascinating where they just tell people like, oh, you guys have the same birthday, or you have the same fingerprint type, which I don't even think is a thing. Is that a thing? Anyway, but people think we have some sort of commonality. Then people are, people with high levels of narcissism get less angry when you give them negative feedback, if they think you've got something in common with them. So if you start your conversation with, you know, maybe that uncle at Thanksgiving, who's like always combative and talks about himself all the time, and you're like, oh, you know, we went to the same university, we root for the same football team, whatever it is, you start with what you have in common, you're like, okay, we are one, right?

And then if you need to say, you know what, you really need to pick up your game and help him with the care of grandma, he might be more willing to listen to that as opposed to just like getting negative feedback. You know, people with high levels of narcissism don't like that. So emphasizing your common identity can help to tamp that down. I'd sat here with Tali Sharot, who's this neuroscientist, and she'd looked at the subject of disagreement quite extensively. And she'd put people in these brain scanners, and basically got them to disagree with each other at some point, and looked at what happened in their brain.

And what she told me she observed is essentially, you know, I'm generalizing wildly here, so please do fact check me on the screen. She basically observed that the brain changed when someone disagreed with you. And I was on a phone call the other day with about 10 different people from a company we're doing a deal with. And I just observed that one person would often open up their rebuttal when they felt had a difference of opinion with the phrase, I completely disagree. And then they would make their point.

And so funnily enough, I got straight off the call, even though I'd written about this previously, I got straight off the call and like, did a bit of research as to whether I, I just find that to be quite ineffective behavior, or if there's research around it. And what I found is it says, yes, there is extensive research across social psychology and behavioral economics and linguistics showing that opening a counter argument or rebuttal with explicit adversarial phrasing like I disagree, actively will hinder your ability to persuade somebody.

When you start a rebuttal with I disagree, several psychological mechanisms trigger in the other person's brain. And that goes into the detail about what goes on in their brain. I just, it seems somewhat linked to what you're saying there about like how you keep the other person receptive. Totally. Okay, so this reminds me of another study on I think it's like really domineering bosses. If you need to give them negative feedback, like, I don't know, say you hate the way that we're running this particular process.

These three forms should be one form. Like, why are we spending so much? This is like, you know, the bane of office existence. If you say, this is so stupid, you need to change the way that we're doing, you know, like kind of coming in hot. Particularly people with high levels of narcissistic traits are like, we don't like this kind of, you know, ego threat, you're threatening, you're criticizing me, you're giving me negative feedback. I'm just like shutting it down. Right? I'm not, I don't even hear what you're saying.

Whereas if you phrase it as a question, like, what do you think if we turn these three forms into one form? Phrasing it as a question just kind of like makes it softer and makes them more willing to just hear it. Like maybe you, you ultimately won't get to that one form, but you'll at least get a little bit further in that conversation. I think that's true for, you know, it's true for everybody, but especially when it comes to people who are really domineering, which these personalities tend to be.

Okay. So like you kind of co-create the solution. Really, you know, okay, interesting. Yeah. Okay. Become a detective and notice their cues. So we know that they tend to lie a lot. Being manipulative, telling lies is kind of part of their MO. That's what all of these traits share. And so being able to identify, know what those cues to deception are, know that we're not looking for gaze aversion. We're not looking for fidgeting. We're looking for those lack of verifiable details. We're looking for relatively few details.

We're looking for signs of cognitive strain and maybe like following up, right? If we start to see some of those red flags. And finally, avoid face-to-face negotiations. So this is like a really simple move that can be really helpful. So some research out of same university as me, University of British Columbia, had people with various levels of these dark traits engage in a negotiation. It was just over like the price of concert tickets. But what they found is that whenever those negotiations occurred face-to-face, the person with the high level of psychopathic traits or any of these dark traits, they got a really good deal.

They were able to command a whole bunch of money for these concert tickets. Whereas if they engage in this negotiation over text, that wasn't the case. So if you need to negotiate with someone, these dark traits can be like really domineering, really kind of superficially charming sometimes in person. And then you can kind of like let your guard down and they're going to take advantage of you. If you reduce them to words on the page, they lose some of that charisma, right? But there's also other practical reasons like you've got a written version of what was agreed upon.

You can't gaslight me and tell me I'm misremembering what we agreed upon later. I've got a written version here. I've got some time to think about how I want to respond. Yeah, exactly. And if violence is a concern, say you're talking about this is a domestic violence situation, you got to get out of the house. You got to maybe negotiate some sort of settlement in a divorce or something. Like being face to face can be dangerous, right? It literally puts some physical distance between yourself and that other person if violence is a concern.

So there's all kinds of potential upsides to like, if you got to negotiate, like pop it into text, put it into the chat, as opposed to sitting down face to face. I was thinking about all the things that are linked to just having a bit more time, but also like the medium of text. And one of the things that came to mind is if someone does have those dark personality traits, they are probably more cautious about what they say if it's permanent and it's written. So like, if I was sending you an email, I might say something to you in person, but if what I wrote that same thing on an email, and the other one is in written form, you as the person that's receiving the being on the receiving end, you have time to show other people and get another perspective, even if it's like putting into AI or asking Google or checking if the facts are right, or asking your husband or partner if this is appropriate behavior.

Totally. And like, involving other people can be so helpful. So research suggests that whenever we discuss with other people before making a truth lie judgment about someone else's statements, we tend to be more accurate. Whenever we're making judgments about someone's personality, if we're talking as a group, we tend to be more accurate. Another study that Dacher Keltner did, he talked to a bunch of girls in a sorority and asked them who gets talked about the most, like in gossip, and also had people rate their personality.

It was the Machiavellian, the more Machiavellian girls who were talked about the most. Talked about positively or negatively? Negatively, yeah. And so, you know, people sometimes hear about like whisper networks too, like stay away from that guy at work or whatever. So I would, you know, caution just believing everything you hear in the rumor mill, but sometimes people, you know, spread information about this was my experience with this person. And we can learn from other people's experience before having to go through it ourselves if we pay attention.

And you've got three final cards down there, which I think are... These are three common mistakes people make when dealing with their personalities. So the first one is just believing there's nothing you can do. So, you know, we've talked about how some of our go-to responses when people hurt us, like trying to make them feel badly, trying to make them apologize to us, like trying to punish them don't work so well. But we've also talked about all of the things you can do, right? So we don't need to feel completely helpless.

Another is assuming they have the same inner experience as you. You know, when we're trying to figure out what motivates people, again, we talked about this with respect to negotiation, right? Like what motivates you to do a thing might not be the same thing that motivates me to do a thing. I need to try to get into their head, figure out what their goals are, what would be motivating to change their behavior in this situation and try to, you know, frame our interaction in that way, try to convince them to change their behavior for that reason, not because I think they should, or not because I would feel guilty if I did what they did, right?

But lastly, you know, is thinking you can change them. So if your ultimate goal is like, I'm going to stick around and they're going to be kind and honest, and they're going to be super conscientious and helpful all the time, they're never going to break any rules, like I think we also need to be kind of clear-eyed about the likelihood of that happening. And so instead, we need to kind of deploy some of these strategies for making our day-to-day interactions a little more positive, as opposed to just hoping that someday they're going to wake up, you know, with a different personality.

What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about as it relates to your work? And again, zooming in on the people that are listening, that might benefit them in their lives. I think it's like a matter of numbers. So, you know, we've talked about the, you know, 10% of people would generally agree with items that we use to measure these traits. That means that 90% of people would generally not agree, right? So I want people to keep into perspective that like 90% of people, right, are good and kind and honest and not breaking the rules.

We've got this 10%, right? That's not to say that 10% is causing little harm. In fact, they're causing hugely outsized harm, right? So like with respect to psychopathy, that's about 1% of the population. They have clinical levels of it. Offenders with clinical levels of psychopathy account for about 50% of all serious crime. So these people are like doing incredibly outsized harm, and we also feel that in our lives too, right? Not necessarily in criminal rap sheets, maybe, but we've got like one person who's like constantly making things hard because of these traits.

They're causing strife at work, they're abusing people at home. And so if we can learn to mitigate the damage from just this small, relatively small group of people, then we can dramatically improve our lives, our workplaces, our interactions day to day. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is somewhat relevant. I like that you got this one. What is one great lie we've all been told?

I think one great lie we've all been told is that to be successful, you have to be in it for number one, and you need to exemplify some of these traits in order to get that promotion, to get that raise, to run that company that's worth millions of dollars. And even I went searching for evidence for that to show that people with high levels of psychopathy could use their kind of callous, cunning, fearlessness in order to make more money as hedge fund managers, and I found the opposite.

And so I think even in those areas where we think these traits lead to success, they fall short. And really, taking other people with us and thinking about success as prestige and respect from other people, caring concern about us from other people, is a much truer version of success. Leigh-Anne, thank you so much. Thank you for writing a book that is incredibly illuminating in a way that is research-based, whilst also being just unbelievably engaging. And I think these subjects are so pertinent to everybody listening, and I know that they're going to love this conversation because much like you were when you started your career, we're all just trying to figure out the ultimate barrier and opportunity that all sits in front of us, and that's just other people.

And again, as you said on one of the cards, but you articulated really nicely earlier on, we kind of go through the world thinking that everyone else's internal experience is a mirror of ours. And it's very easy to get frustrated or to feel like you're the problem or you're inadequate, if that's the lens that you take to life. And I think through your research, you do exactly what you said, which is, in a weird way, you do make us more empathetic and maybe more optimistic and less cynical about the nature of human experience.

And so this is a wonderful, wonderful book for anyone that wants more information. I'm going to link it below. Poisonous People, How to Resist Them and Improve Your Life. But also, it might be a good opportunity to buy this book for someone else who you know is dealing with a slightly poisonous person. Where do people go to support your work and to find more from you? They can find that book wherever books are sold. They can also find me on Instagram at Leanne Tenbrink on all the socials, TikTok on YouTube.

And I post little things about studies and findings that I think are interesting, and hopefully they'll find it interesting too. Thank you so much. Thank you, Stephen. This has been so wonderful. So, if you're running a business, people have probably told you to use AI or get left behind. And I get that urgency. Still, AI doesn't fix a messy business, it exposes one, because AI can only work with the information it can see. So if you ask AI something about your business, about stock or sales or customers or about your team, that information needs to be connected to the AI to be useful.

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