.
Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche refers to itself as N-cubed, which is cute, but I will continue to use NNN. It has a regular feature of "12 Things Everyone Should Know About..." which includes Violence, Dark Triad, Evolution and eleven others, and counting. The whole series is here. Without a subscription you only get the first one or two of each, but those are often interesting as standalones. Plus graphs!
The most recent is Conspiracy. Few people endorse even all the conspiracies on their own "side."
But the single strongest personality predictor is narcissism. Narcissists are particularly prone to conspiracy theories because they have a strong need for uniqueness, are prone to paranoia, and can also be remarkably gullible.
He breaks them down into those liberals check the box for and those conservatives do, along a continuum. So I guess I likely have narcissism held in check, because I looked at some of those conspiracies and said "OK, not really true, but hey, based on a true story. There's evidence for some of that!" My sons are forbidden to comment about the narcissism.
1 comment:
I wonder how many "narcissists" are just different. I'm sure some people adopt eccentric opinions and behaviors to attract attention, but many people simply have eccentric opinions and behaviors. The implication of the quoted line is that almost everyone would behave and think like everyone else if they did not have a discreditable psychological need to think they are special. We've all known people who take this too far and make themselves obnoxious, but I suspect those people who see "narcissism" everywhere are conformist bullies. Freud once said that "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," which I believe means psychology should remain silent so long as a person is not causing any great harm to himself or others. This is your wheelhouse, but, barring blatant lunatics, I assume a man thinks what he thinks because he thinks it. He may be wildly wrong, but be drew inferences from data and was not working out psychological issues.
Post a Comment