Every boyfriend is narcissistic or has borderline personality disorder.
This could be a result of privileging the hypothesis, considering these possibilities without enough evidence to properly suggest them, possibly because studying psychology makes them salient. An approach to getting this point across might be to show her An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem, and really work through the examples of interpreting medical tests. Then apply that concept to diagnosing narcissism. Find out how frequent it is in the population, and how likely a narcissistic/normal person is to exhibit a given behavior. Explicitly tracking the evidence for (and against!) narcissism may help your roommate see that her boyfriends, like everyone else, occasionally display narcissistic behavior, but that does not make them narcissists.
That’s possible, and it’s also possible that she’s getting involved with that sort of man, either because she’s attracted to them or because they’re attracted to her and she doesn’t have the tools needed to turn them down.
I would NOT suggest analyzing either statistical evidence or assuming that she is perhaps right about her exes. The odds are of course not with her when we ask if she has had multiple boyfriends with borderline or narcissism. What we are more likely to find is that she has the same issues many of us here on this site do, which is that she is partially mind-blind and is taking shots in the dark as we all would if we were too close to the situation
This could be a result of privileging the hypothesis, considering these possibilities without enough evidence to properly suggest them, possibly because studying psychology makes them salient. An approach to getting this point across might be to show her An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem, and really work through the examples of interpreting medical tests. Then apply that concept to diagnosing narcissism. Find out how frequent it is in the population, and how likely a narcissistic/normal person is to exhibit a given behavior. Explicitly tracking the evidence for (and against!) narcissism may help your roommate see that her boyfriends, like everyone else, occasionally display narcissistic behavior, but that does not make them narcissists.
That’s possible, and it’s also possible that she’s getting involved with that sort of man, either because she’s attracted to them or because they’re attracted to her and she doesn’t have the tools needed to turn them down.
Both occurred to me. Your suggestion fits the conventional plot better. I have no direct experience myself, but I hear it in stories all the time.
I would NOT suggest analyzing either statistical evidence or assuming that she is perhaps right about her exes. The odds are of course not with her when we ask if she has had multiple boyfriends with borderline or narcissism. What we are more likely to find is that she has the same issues many of us here on this site do, which is that she is partially mind-blind and is taking shots in the dark as we all would if we were too close to the situation