Dark villains can also be idiots
Maybe you have also liked some dark villains in movies, whether it is the neurotic and crazy Moriarty in "Sherlock", or the elegant and elegant Moriarty in "The Silence of the Lambs" The cold Hannibal , they all attracted the love of thousands of viewers because of the image of "high IQ, ease, strategizing, and strong control" created by the movie - it seems that being antisocial means being extremely smart, but Is this really true?
There are three independent but intertwined trait groups in antisocial dark personality: Machiavellianism , narcissism, and psychopathy (together known as the dark triad). Machiavellianism believes that others are stupid and beyond reach. Human beings always have unsatisfied desires and inflated ambitions. They are always influenced by interests, seek advantages and avoid disadvantages, and are selfish. "As long as the end justifies the means," is a perfect illustration of Machiavellian personality.
This kind of cold and arrogant attitude that "justifies the means" is sometimes the attraction of those villains, and they are often very clever in doing whatever it takes - but a recent study refutes this idea.
Research by a psychology team at the University of Alabama found that people who tend to be strategic, deceptive, and even good at manipulating others to achieve personal goals are not necessarily smarter than others on a social cognitive level. Researchers have explored the connection between dark personality and social cognition from different aspects of dark personality.
Researchers have divided Machiavellian personality traits into five distinct characteristics:
Confrontation - cold, exploitative, selfish and immoral tendencies.
Plan - Discreet, detail-oriented approach.
Ambition - extremely high ambition and tendency to struggle for power.
Strategy - Similar to tactical confrontation, tendency to manipulate and exploit.
Cynicism – A world-weary view of human behavior.
At the same time, social cognition is divided into two aspects:
Social prediction - predicting people's psychological experiences and behaviors. Ability to empathize with others and persuade others.
Personal Perception - Accurately "reading" other people's personality traits, emotions, and motivations.
After conducting a series of measurements and analyzes on 461 college students, the study found that the "planning" characteristic of Machiavellianism corresponds to higher social cognitive abilities, while the "confrontation" and "strategy" characteristics is closely related to lower social prediction and personal perception.
In other words, researchers provide a more scientific explanation: The reason why we sometimes feel that people with Machiavellian personality are smarter is because their careful and detail-oriented processing style gives them higher social cognitive skills , can survive well in society and appear to be very smart, but at the same time, their coldness, selfishness, and immodesty often lead to their failure.
Researchers stated: "This seems to be related to narcissism. People with high narcissism have unrealistically positive yearnings for intelligence. They believe that high intelligence is a resource that can bring benefits to people in multiple fields. , and they think they have this resource. Therefore, it is those people with high narcissism who yearn for dark personalities. "
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