PAPER: Virtuous Victimhood Signalers as Dark Triad Personalities

We all know this, but always good to have priors confirmed.

Ok, Ekin, Yi Qian, Brendan Strejcek, and Karl Aquino. 2020. “Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, July.

We investigate the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue. In our first three studies, we show that the virtuous victim signal can facilitate nonreciprocal resource transfer from others to the signaler. Next, we develop and validate a victim signaling scale that we combine with an established measure of virtue signaling to operationalize the virtuous victim construct. We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits-Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy-more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies. In Study 5, we show that a specific dimension of Machiavellianism-amoral manipulation-and a form of narcissism that reflects a person’s belief in their superior prosociality predict more frequent virtuous victim signaling. Studies 3, 4, and 6 test our hypothesis that the frequency of emitting virtuous victim signal predicts a person’s willingness to engage in and endorse ethically questionable behaviors, such as lying to earn a bonus, intention to purchase counterfeit products and moral judgments of counterfeiters, and making exaggerated claims about being harmed in an organizational context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The authors argue that the combination of the egalitarian principle in Western societies, coupled with increased concern for human suffering, provides virtue victimhood signalers with the perfect environment to flourish.

So I suppose it should consequential important to “fact check” whether somebody is really a victim and virtuous.

But problem is that that too is blocked off by the Machiavellian manipulators. While the George Floyd fundraiser is now at close to $15 million, try telling his worshippers that he was a criminal scumbag who died of a drug overdose.

Anatoly Karlin is a transhumanist interested in psychometrics, life extension, UBI, crypto/network states, X risks, and ushering in the Biosingularity.

 

Inventor of Idiot’s Limbo, the Katechon Hypothesis, and Elite Human Capital.

 

Apart from writing booksreviewstravel writing, and sundry blogging, I Tweet at @powerfultakes and run a Substack newsletter.

Comments

  1. Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.

    If you are new to my work, start here.

  2. RoatanBill says

    No one should listen to a word of what a psychologist has to say because they can’t prove a damned thing one way or the other. They are frauds masquerading as professionals when in fact they don’t know what they’re talking about.

  3. songbird says

    The Left has a serious free-rider problem. It could not maintain many of its current positions for long, except for the fact that it is very good at offloading costs on other people.

    I’m convinced that the secret to forming any stable, prosperous, and mostly free society is to find effective mechanisms for preventing them from transferring these costs or otherwise escaping them.

    People who embrace Somalis should immediately be sent permanently and irrevocably to Somalia. People who advocate affirmative action should be placed in low-paying jobs, where they have at least three layers of black bosses. Liberals who white flight should be forced to live-in the darkest neighborhoods and send their children to the blackest schools. People advocating for open borders should bear the entire tax burden for the project.

  4. Almost Missouri says

    Agree, but I think you mean that the “Left is a serious free-rider problem” or the rest of society “has a serious free-rider problem” .

    Also P.S. to Anatoly, since I’m proofreading today: Headline is probably meant to be “Virtuous” rather than “Victuous”.

  5. RoatanBill says

    I’m convinced that the secret to forming any stable, prosperous, and mostly free society is to eliminate government that transfers costs to those that appear not to object by continuing to vote in the next government that does exactly the same damned thing.

    FIFY

  6. But problem is that that too is blocked off by the Machiavellian manipulators. While the George Floyd fundraiser is now at close to $15 million, try telling his worshippers that he was a criminal scumbag who died of a drug overdose.

    I think this will be less of a problem going forward. The Grand Wizards of Washington Post have declared that its OK to be White. So we are all going to be victims now.

    This style change also prompts the question of how America’s largest racial community should be identified. Stories involving race show that White also represents a distinct cultural identity in the United States. In American history, many White Europeans who entered the country during times of mass migration were the targets of racial and ethnic discrimination. These diverse ethnicities were eventually assimilated into the collective group that has had its own cultural and historical impact on the nation. As such, White should be represented with a capital W.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2020/07/29/washington-post-announces-writing-style-changes-racial-ethnic-identifiers/

    White liberals don’t need to worship blacks anymore to feel like the victim, as long as they still sign up for Jeff Bezos’ Race War Army. Embrace Your Race! As long as you leave the ruling oligarchy intact. This is a sad development for the country, for blacks or whites.

  7. What do you have, specifically, against paychologists? They do seem to have a mostly coherent taxonomy of personality types.

    Are all psychologists bad?

  8. Kent Nationalist says

    They do seem to have a mostly coherent taxonomy of personality types.

    So did Plato 2300 years ago

  9. RoatanBill says

    Psychologists. psychiatrists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists and many others are just BS artists that make up stuff with no real empirical evidence. Any experiments, test, etc that they do run are so subject to interpretation that they are worthless.

    They are a priesthood that has invented their scam and has used lots of mumbo jumbo to sound important.

  10. Diversity Inclusion Equality Youth Team says

    Holy shit I just realized my ex was (is?) a psychopath…
    A decade past, the puzzle dissolves with a seemingly unrelated click
    Thanks for this post

  11. The Alarmist says

    The authors argue that the combination of the egalitarian principle in Western societies, coupled with increased concern for human suffering, provides virtue victimhood signalers with the perfect environment to flourish.

    Those things merely give them a foothold. It is TV ad campaigns that prey on the increased concern of the average viewer and solicit small, recurring monthly donations charged either to the phone bill or credit card that allow the virtue signallers to flourish. Sort of like a Ponzi Scheme with no promise of reward to the victim.

    https://youtu.be/AkjssRCdGB8

  12. Stogumber says

    As Jews were more virtuous and more victims than everyone else, this article is a bit embarassing for Jews, isn’t it?

  13. But problem is that that too is blocked off by the Machiavellian manipulators. While the George Floyd fundraiser is now at close to $15 million

    How much money is going into the pockets of these people who are pretending they care for economic gain? Well according the NY Post:

    The Minnesota Freedom Fund said it’s spent “well over” $200,000 in bailing protesters out of jail — despite receiving more than $30 million in donations.

    “We are working on doing more,” the fund tweeted on Monday.

    So they’ve spent 1/150th of the money. Maybe the rest of the $29m will go towards administrative costs!

  14. Justvisiting says

    Great book that deconstructs the psychiatric profession:

    https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Mental-Illness-Foundations-Personal/dp/0061771228

  15. Barack Obama's secret Unz account says

    I heard about this Washington Post thing the other day, but I thought it was a joke. Good lord.

    There’s an argument to be made, though, that the Washington Post is just ahead of the curve here: (1) relentless demonising of whites will eventually cause whites to glom together, if only in self-defence; (2) there is a gap in the market for a unifying identity for America’s white population, and both “American”, “hyphenated-American”, as well as various religious or ideological alternatives, are insufficient. Ergo American whites will eventually come to define themselves as white.

    This argument would also apply to all other countries with large white populations, unless that population does not face racial demonising, and/or has a strong alternative identity, e.g. a prevailing ethnicity or nationality.

  16. Barack Obama's secret Unz account says
  17. animalogic says

    I don’t trust psychologists or psychiatrists either. But that doesn’t mean the world is not full of sociopaths, psychopaths, manic-depressives, obsessive-compulsives, narcissists & so on. Who needs covid to sometimes want to isolate…

  18. RoatanBill says

    That the world is full of sociopaths, psychopaths, etc is readily apparent because the world has a political class.

    I’m not saying there are no crazies and dangerous people. I’m saying there are and that no one knows why they are so and no one knows how to ‘cure’ them. Pretending to cure them with psychoactive drugs, shock treatment, lobotomy and other measures is in the realm of witchcraft.

    The real problem is the university system. No one should be allowed to get a PhD in an opinion. Economics, cosmology, a huge portion of medicine, the entirety of the ‘social sciences’ and ‘humanities’ and others are nothing but opinion and should max out at a Bachelors Degree. If and when they can prove something, these fields should be allowed to reach higher levels.

    The advanced degrees should be awarded only for fields of study that can prove what they say is true with verifiable, repeatable, empirical evidence. That would eliminate a huge number of impostors in the society that only have the pretense of knowledge where none actually exists.

  19. This is not new, of course. Anglo-Saxon Puritanism was overflowing with virtue signalers because the entire Judaizing heretical movement was a demand by the ‘virtuous victims’ to cleanse and purify with fire and sword.

    All Yankee WASP liberalism is the same.

  20. Whites glomming together is good only if they do so under the aegis of traditionally conservative, non-Judaizing, culture.

    That eliminates any good coming from continuing to operate out of WASP culture.

  21. I agree. It is rather disappointing though. Victimhood culture is a mind virus that removes all sense of agency and introspection. It turns people feral.

    They started with the blacks (see Chicago mayor blaming rural Indiana gun owners for her own denizens going feral and shooting their neighbors), then they came for the women (see feminists yelling about the world raping them because sexism), and now they go after the whites.

    If whites go feral, who is going to maintain infrastructure and society? How many Asians we got? And they too are going to be brainwashed at some point. I don’t know what our overlords are thinking pushing this.

    We need to be moving in the opposite direction and instilling a sense of agency into blacks and females, not brainwashing whites to drag them down to the same level.

  22. This explains why the most unhinged SJWs are always demanding money from anyone and everyone.

    Some of it is really messed up: ‘Fat-friendly feminist’ blogger Melissa McEwen demanding some guy donate the last few bucks in his bank account, despite her husband being vice-president of an investment firm; PZ Myers writing a blog about his shiny new $3000 laptop, when a homeless blogger on his network was e-begging for a second-hand one. Total sickos.

  23. Daniel Chieh says

    Wtf I love Anglo-Saxons now

  24. Haruto Rat says

    I don’t trust psychologists or psychiatrists either. But that doesn’t mean the world is not full of sociopaths, psychopaths, manic-depressives, obsessive-compulsives, narcissists & so on.

    Your ability to classify, understand, predict and navigate the world isn’t much impaired if you just stick to calling them assholes, dickwads, jerks and so on.

  25. Maybe the increase in conspiracy mongering among the fringe and not so fringe right is a psychological stress reaction to a culture that has turned against white people?

  26. I pin this problem solely on the left’s long march through the institutions, which led to all of them being compromised in some way, without that, the white right would not have felt that the instutions are no longer neutral, and hence can not be trusted. Also once the centre falls away, it should not be surprising for the remaining fringe to act in a let us say, fringe like manner.

  27. You’re saying that if someone had given Floyd Naloxone (Fentanyl antidote), then Chauvin could have knelt on him all day? Two qualified to give an opinion people, one highly qualified expert in chokes, strangles and neck cranks and the other in experienced in applying live threatening ones to the point of unconsciousness in law enforcement situations. think otherwise. Joe Rogan says anyone putting their shin across a training partners neck like that in a Jiu Jitsu class would be instantly told get it the fuck off. Ex supermax guard David Layman said the duration of restraint was clearly unnecessary and Chavin knew it because he was nonchalantly resting his hands on his thighs for several minutes while kneeling on Floyd.

    Floyd was a 250lb middle aged man in poor shape face down on a rock hard surface with his hands tightly cuffed behind his back and substantial weight on his back (where Chauvin’s other knee was), all of which certainly constricted his ribcage and restricted his breathing. Even without anything on one’s neck, the ribcage constriction alone will result in eventual unconsciousness then death. Most people who die in crowd crushes die that way. The autopsy said pressure on his torso was substantial part of why he died by the way.

  28. Father Coughlin says

    Only like 1 out of 75 people wearing masks in a St. Petersburg subway

    Livecam feed… see if u can find many masks:

    https://www.geocam.ru/en/online/great-gostiny-dvor/

    Is this because they dont have a Presidential election coming up? Or is it just because they have a less-signally culture??

  29. Father Coughlin says

    The autopsy said pressure on his torso was substantial part of why he died by the way.

    Which autopsy!?

    At any rate … without Chauvin having read a book on the subject “50 Easy Non-Obvious Ways To Kill a Person” the night before, it’s not murder.

  30. As Jews were more virtuous and more victims than everyone else, this article is a bit embarassing for Jews, isn’t it?

    Quite. I’m surprised this one slipped through the cracks.

    And what are the implications of this for White people’s ability to articulate legitimate grievances?

  31. I’m not saying there are no crazies and dangerous people. I’m saying there are and that no one knows why they are so and no one knows how to ‘cure’ them. Pretending to cure them with psychoactive drugs, shock treatment, lobotomy and other measures is in the realm of witchcraft.

    To a certain extent I’d agree with that. Psychology and psychiatry are not as scientific as their practitioners would like us to believe.

    Psychiatry got lucky because some drugs were developed that did actually relieve some of the worst symptoms of some forms of craziness (although often with fairly horrific side effects). Psychiatrists have only the haziest notions as to why these drugs sometimes work. But those drugs helped to give a pseudoscience an underserved degree of scientific respectability.

    Unfortunately more recent psychiatric drugs (such as SSRIs) are of much more dubious usefulness but that aura of scientific respectability persists.

    I wouldn’t go quite as far as saying that psychiatry is witchcraft. It’s more of a grey area. Not quite voodoo, but not quite science.

    The real problem is the university system. No one should be allowed to get a PhD in an opinion. Economics, cosmology, a huge portion of medicine, the entirety of the ‘social sciences’ and ‘humanities’ and others are nothing but opinion and should max out at a Bachelors Degree. If and when they can prove something, these fields should be allowed to reach higher levels.

    Yeah, I’d be inclined to go along with that. Economics is pure voodoo. Economists and “climate scientists” aren’t even that great at predicting the past, much less the future.

    We should regard such people the way we regard film critics and fashion gurus – as people who might sometimes offer interesting insights and opinions which are harmless as long as no-one makes the mistake of thinking their opinions are anything other than totally subjective.

  32. Maybe the increase in conspiracy mongering among the fringe and not so fringe right is a psychological stress reaction to a culture that has turned against white people?

    It’s probably a psychological stress reaction to the realisation on the fringe right that the fringe right is going to remain marginalised, irrelevant and despised. They thought they were going to become a significant political force. It hasn’t happened and it seems unlikely to happen. So the fringe right has retreated into a world of make-believe, a world full of dragons and evil sorcerers.

  33. American Boomer conservatives still write donations to the leftist universities they attended long ago.

    Even WF Buckley realized in the 50s that this was a problem.

  34. I pin this problem solely on the left’s long march through the institutions, which led to all of them being compromised in some way, without that, the white right would not have felt that the institutions are no longer neutral, and hence can not be trusted.

    Yes. The inevitable result is a crippling paranoia.

    Also once the centre falls away, it should not be surprising for the remaining fringe to act in a let us say, fringe like manner.

    Yes.

  35. New Dealer says

    No one should listen to a word of what a blogger has to say because they can’t prove a damned thing one way or the other. They are frauds masquerading as professionals when in fact they don’t know what they’re talking about.

    See how that works?

  36. RoatanBill says

    Psychiatry was on its way to becoming another Phrenology when big pharma saw an opportunity to sell potions into a market with undefined ailments. A bonanza for the real drug pushers in the society. Not one of their arbitrarily named conditions has an empirical test to back it up; not one. The entire DSM is a hallucination for the benefit of the psychiatric cabal.

    Economists are the whores to the banking industry. They’ll write any king of nonsense to justify what the bankers want to do. Not only can’t they predict what’s to come with any accuracy past what the average person has in common sense, but they can’t even properly diagnose forensically past economic incidents.

  37. Obvious enough for Lane, his far less experienced colleague, to beg Chauvin to turn Floyd over before he died. Contemplating what will happen to him behind bars, Lane is thinking if he had it to do over again he would brook no argument.

    https://i.pinimg.com/originals/88/7c/95/887c95a9efab3caf7dcf4ea83e3e9c38.gif

    Be it ever so’ Easy Non-Obvious’ its felony murder, and even if he were not a cop, ignorance is no excuse. Many men and women are doing life without the possibility of parole for far less than Chauvin did.

  38. RoatanBill says

    Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, especially from someone without the intelligence to put forth an original thought.

    However, in your case, you can’t even produce a proper imitation.

    I never claimed any form of ‘professional’ status as you intimated. Therefore your childish attempt at twisting my words falls flat on its face.

    Bravo!

    “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.” – Mark Twain

  39. Father Coughlin says

    Be it ever so’ Easy Non-Obvious’ its felony murder,

    What felony, please?

  40. Assault, as the prosecutors have said. Causing death while committing a felony, even if unintentionally, carries a sentence of twelve years minimum. He is as good as convicted, especially as he cannot claim previous good character with the nine tax felony charges, each carrying a sentence of up to five years they are also going to try him for with the same jury. If they want a guy put away as bad as they want Chauvin then they get him. I expect he will serve twenty years actual time. Dead before he gets out or will wish he was.

    There are times when the normal rules do not apply and the man who holds to them is lost. Lane was an empty uniform; lacked the balls to save himself. You know what happens to cops in prison? He is about to find out.

  41. I don’t get the anti-psychiatry thing. We know that high IQ correlates with anxiety and depression, not to mention a certain degree of eccentricity. Society is harsh on those who are different, and probably always will be. What is the point of denying people an opportunity for relief?