That’s really interesting, and I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts and ideas and experiences, thanks so much.
I don’t have much to add (we’re beyond the limits of my understanding!), just a couple more random comments.
First, not sure how this fits in to what you wrote, but fun fact about NPD (as I understand it) (copied from something I wrote once):
Contrary to what you might think, NPD is not especially related to the everyday meaning of “narcissism”; indeed, there’s a “narcissistic personality inventory” survey, but it turns out that NPD patients get the same score on the survey as controls (!!). The issue seems to revolve around self-esteem. A “narcissist”, as the term is used in everyday language, is a person who thinks they’re really special and great—they have high self-esteem by definition. Whereas an NPD patient need not think they’re really special and great. But if they don’t think that, then boy do they feel lousy about it. (As discussed in that paper, DSM-V emphasizes that “individuals with this disorder have a grandiose sense of self-importance”, but also notes that “vulnerability in self-esteem makes individuals with narcissistic personality disorder very sensitive to ‘injury’ from criticism or defeat”.)
Separately, I hadn’t heard of covert vs overt narcissism until your comment and still don’t know what to make of that division.
For the record, most of what I (think I) know about NPD comes from a handful of blog posts, videos, and podcasts by Spencer Greenberg. Let me know if there’s other sources you like.
guilt/empathy got heavily inhibited/surpressed over time from being so exhausting and miserable for me to feel
That story makes sense to me! The only part that’s confusing me: if this is a thing that can happen, why does it happen in so few other people? (Why isn’t it in the literature / DSM / whatever? Or is it? Or you’re just unusual? Or the literature / DSM just sucks and I shouldn’t pay much attention to it?)
The thing with empathic concern is that from what I understand, it requires a kind of additional component on top of emotional contagion empathy? Like ‘youre in pain and that hurts me’ + ‘so i will care for u’. Even when I was young and the first component was in full swing I’m not sure I ever really developed the second. So that might be less of a ‘alexithymia’ + ‘emotional suppression’ thing and more of a social stunting thing??
Here’s an analogy, maybe. If some area in the park is unpleasant because of one little piece of unsightly litter on the ground, I might fix the problem by cleaning it up myself; but if there’s a giant smelly dumpster’s worth of trash spread out on the ground, then I’m not gonna try to fix that problem, instead I’m just gonna just leave for a different part of the park that’s more pleasant.
By the same token, if I feel bad that Person X is distressed, I might naturally try to alleviate that feeling by helping them, OR, I might naturally try to alleviate that feeling by shutting them out and not empathizing with them. (Or by getting angry at them—cf. the 2×2 table of §1.1 in the OP, where it feels OK or even good to know that other people are suffering as long as they’re an “enemy” on the bottom row.) Intuitively, I would think that, the more that my bad feeling feels awful and overwhelming to me, the more appealing is the latter option (shutting them out) compared to the former (trying to make them feel happy), other things equal.
(But there’s a horseshoe-theory thing where, way over on the opposite end of the population distribution, you have the people who simply aren’t bothered by Person X’s distress at all in the first place, and they also won’t feel motivated to help them.)
childhood learning experiences
When different adults (in the same general country / culture) have different personalities, I generally prefer explanations in terms of them having different strengths of their innate drives (and related things), rather than how their childhoods differed, mostly because of the heritability literature (but with a bunch of caveats discussed in my post Heritability: Five Battles).
Oh yes I’ve seen that paragraph of yours about NPD vs folk-narcissism before. This actually relates to the cover / overt distinction think? With overt narcissism referring to the more folk-y grandiose narcissism, while covert manifests as hyper-insecurity. The study you posted about NPD patients getting the same as controls was using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. I took a look at the items and they’re all very stereotypically grandiose. I actually score only around average on grandiose measures like the NPI myself, while scoring very above average on ‘covert’ measures like ‘The Maladaptive Covert Narcissism Scale’. My guess would be if you got NPD patients to do these more ‘covert’ scales then you’d start getting the expected results (covert narcissism also gets called ‘vulnerable narcissism’ or ‘hyper-sensitive narcissism’). Anecdotally from looking at people talk about their experiences with narcissistic ex-partners or parents or such, as well as seemingly falling close to that cluster of symptoms myself, their behaviour seems much more vulnerable / sensitive than grandiose / boasting. This might be a case of the folk concept of narcissism impeding scientific research into the real phenomenon?
The only part that’s confusing me: if this is a thing that can happen, why does it happen in so few other people? (Why isn’t it in the literature / DSM / whatever? Or is it? Or you’re just unusual? Or the literature / DSM just sucks and I shouldn’t pay much attention to it?
I feel like autism research has been stunted by seeing autism as fundamentally about ‘social deficit’ in some sense rather than some underlying shift in sensory priors à la the Intense World concept. I guess the correlation you’d be looking for here is ‘early life emotional hypersensitivity’ with ‘later life emotional empathy deficits’ (or something like that) which from my brief Googling has simply never been studied. So it may be just that no one’s looked yet. But it links into the general Intense World concept pretty well I think? Like if ‘eye contact is ultra arousing’ seemingly can cause ‘I avoid eye contact’, then I see no reason why it wouldn’t generalise to ‘expressing sympathy and care is ultra arousing and difficult while ignoring/self-blunting is calming’ causing ‘its extremely difficult to feel care for others and I tend to ignore others feelings’. There is pretty good evidence implying above average empathic distress (1) (2: meta analysis) in autism that supports the idea. If the Intense World Model is even approximately true-ish you’d expect a ton of heterogeneity, which you could look for, but would also make results look inconsistent and maybe make practitioners miss the pattern. Perhaps I just found empathic concern particularly distressing and/or was particularly capable of suppressing it relative to the typical autistic person. I don’t know :)
With the horseshoe theory thing: I guess this is how you end up with people diagnosed with / who have strong clear clinical-level traits of both ASPD and autism (I have met such people).
When different adults (in the same general country / culture) have different personalities, I generally prefer explanations in terms of them having different strengths of their innate drives (and related things), rather than how their childhoods differed, mostly because of the heritability literature
Ah you believe like most personality differences between same-cultural individuals are mostly due to genes and not early-life experiences? I’ve seen that this applies to ‘big’ traits like the Big 5, but do you think this’d carry over to individual facets / smaller traits too? (like ‘dominance’ or ‘empathic concern’) Question: do you feel like this kinda invalidates narratives of personality that centre childhood experiences? Or might they still be useful as like- ways of predicting / understanding the specifics of how one’s dispositions might have been reinforced / triggered during development, and the day-to-day specifics of the ways they manifest in adulthood?
Ah you believe like most personality differences between same-cultural individuals are mostly due to genes and not early-life experiences? I’ve seen that this applies to ‘big’ traits like the Big 5, but do you think this’d carry over to individual facets / smaller traits too? (like ‘dominance’ or ‘empathic concern’) Question: do you feel like this kinda invalidates narratives of personality that centre childhood experiences? Or might they still be useful as like- ways of predicting / understanding the specifics of how one’s dispositions might have been reinforced / triggered during development, and the day-to-day specifics of the ways they manifest in adulthood?
I assume it carries over to “smaller traits”, but I think I’ll know more when I (hopefully someday) analyze a heritability-related dataset that goes down to the individual questions on personality tests, which I swear someone sent me but I filed it away until I find time to properly study the personality literature.
At least in principle, heritability data can be compatible with a mechanism whereby childhood experiences are the path by which how innate drives and dispositions unfold into adult behavior. It would just have to be “innate disposition → childhood experience → adult behavior”.
For example, I think some people are innately prone to having socially traumatic experiences, and then something will happen to them at some point in their childhood that they experience as social trauma, and then they’ll carry that memory forwards. And this memory can be a legit proximal cause of adult feelings, and legitimately relevant for adult therapy. But I think that if they had grown up in a different family, they would have just been traumatized by something else.
The theory here is: By and large, I think people try different ways of acting and thinking throughout life, well into adulthood. Introverted adults will still go out sometimes, happy people will still brood sometimes, nice people will still act mean sometimes, etc. And if they try it and it feels innately appealing, then they’ll do it more often in the future. So over time, adults will gravitate towards ways of being that are a good fit to their disposition, by and large. I have a (mercifully much shorter) earlier post on heritability making that point: Heritability, Behaviorism, and Within-Lifetime RL.
Ah your explanation of this makes a lot of sense yeah! Thank you!
Just checking but its not like the proximal cause explanation applies always? Like it’s not as if personality is >85% genetic, things like spontaneous trauma unrelated to innate dispositions presumably can often still play a major role. (?)
What on earth this is wild. I was actually going to particulate in a TMS study to enhance social cognition a while back but didn’t go through. Kind of scary although its not like this is typical obviously. I wonder how this happened.
Identical twins are still definitely different in some ways (whether raised in the same family or not), and I think the source of those differences is not well understood. See “§1.4: What is E, really?” here.
Random example on my mind: My spouse is noticeably more happy and well-adjusted this year than last year, in a way that I figure would probably have a small but measurable effect on a personality survey, because she left a job she hated for a job she liked. But she obviously has the same genes now as she did last year.
But she obviously has the same genes now as she did last year.
Leaving the job is not an example because it could have increased the heritability of her personality survey. Pretty much all traits change in heritability over a lifetime (eg. Wilson effect for IQ or think about, say, psychiatric disorders) and other variance components as well, so you can’t point to a single change and say it is an example of E because ‘A didn’t change’ - well, neither did C (if an adult) or D, they could all be increasing due to that single change (you can view it as regression to a mean as she finally leaves an outlier job, as most people do not ‘hate’ their job), so in fact, it may be any of ACD!
I think you’re misunderstanding what I was trying to say, sorry I left out the details. Here’s what I had in mind:
In the methodology of a classic twin study, . So the question “why is E more than zero?” is the same as asking “why do identical twins reared together not get exactly the same scores on personality questionnaires and health questionnaires and vocabulary tests etc.?”
Now, my spouse (call her S) had a job she hated at age 39 and a job she liked at age 40. If she had an identical twin (call her S’), and the two of them happened to participate in a heritability study when they were both age 40, would S’ have also had a job she liked? Or if they had participated in a heritability study when they were both age 39, would S’ have also had a job she hated? Probably at least one of those questions has an answer “no”, right? Unless there’s an extraordinary coincidence where S & S’ find their ways out of bad job situations in the same year, well into adulthood.
And if one of those questions has an answer “no”, then that’s a kind of thing that would have pulled r down from 1.0, a.k.a. contributed to E, at least for a certain fraction of adulthood.
I’m not saying this one thing is a BIG effect, but I think there are a lot of things like that, and if you add them up, I do think it explains some noticeable fraction of E. I’d put it in the “luck of the draw” category in my breakdown of §1.4 here.
(That’s assuming I’m right that the bad job was dragging her down enough to show up on a personality survey, but I really think it was, not hugely but nonzero.)
My point is that in your scenario, it is entirely possible that S’ had managed to obtain a job she liked because she was genetically predisposed (eg. having a nice personality), but that S had not for exogenous random bad luck, and that if they were measured at age 39, they would seem unusually discordant twins—except it was just bad luck, and S would regress to her mean at age 40 and now they would be concordant. You can’t just handwave it and say, ‘S just got a new better job! Heritability must be going down!’ The new job could well be heritability going up. Your ‘random example’ is just poorly chosen and irrelevant to the discussion since it’s not at all obvious that it is an example of E going up and ACD going done just because “she obviously has the same genes now as she did last year.” There could be a time reversal: the bad job could have been the E, not the good one!
I agree with what you wrote. I never said anything about E going up or heritability going down. I’m not sure how I gave you that impression.
It seems that we’re on the same page that bad luck exists (and good luck also exists), and that bad and good luck can affect one’s life circumstances in a way that may impact questionnaire results, and can thus contribute to identical twins being discordant, at any given time. That’s all I was saying. It’s meant to be a simple and obvious point.
That’s really interesting, and I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts and ideas and experiences, thanks so much.
I don’t have much to add (we’re beyond the limits of my understanding!), just a couple more random comments.
First, not sure how this fits in to what you wrote, but fun fact about NPD (as I understand it) (copied from something I wrote once):
Separately, I hadn’t heard of covert vs overt narcissism until your comment and still don’t know what to make of that division.
For the record, most of what I (think I) know about NPD comes from a handful of blog posts, videos, and podcasts by Spencer Greenberg. Let me know if there’s other sources you like.
That story makes sense to me! The only part that’s confusing me: if this is a thing that can happen, why does it happen in so few other people? (Why isn’t it in the literature / DSM / whatever? Or is it? Or you’re just unusual? Or the literature / DSM just sucks and I shouldn’t pay much attention to it?)
Here’s an analogy, maybe. If some area in the park is unpleasant because of one little piece of unsightly litter on the ground, I might fix the problem by cleaning it up myself; but if there’s a giant smelly dumpster’s worth of trash spread out on the ground, then I’m not gonna try to fix that problem, instead I’m just gonna just leave for a different part of the park that’s more pleasant.
By the same token, if I feel bad that Person X is distressed, I might naturally try to alleviate that feeling by helping them, OR, I might naturally try to alleviate that feeling by shutting them out and not empathizing with them. (Or by getting angry at them—cf. the 2×2 table of §1.1 in the OP, where it feels OK or even good to know that other people are suffering as long as they’re an “enemy” on the bottom row.) Intuitively, I would think that, the more that my bad feeling feels awful and overwhelming to me, the more appealing is the latter option (shutting them out) compared to the former (trying to make them feel happy), other things equal.
(But there’s a horseshoe-theory thing where, way over on the opposite end of the population distribution, you have the people who simply aren’t bothered by Person X’s distress at all in the first place, and they also won’t feel motivated to help them.)
When different adults (in the same general country / culture) have different personalities, I generally prefer explanations in terms of them having different strengths of their innate drives (and related things), rather than how their childhoods differed, mostly because of the heritability literature (but with a bunch of caveats discussed in my post Heritability: Five Battles).
Oh yes I’ve seen that paragraph of yours about NPD vs folk-narcissism before. This actually relates to the cover / overt distinction think? With overt narcissism referring to the more folk-y grandiose narcissism, while covert manifests as hyper-insecurity. The study you posted about NPD patients getting the same as controls was using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. I took a look at the items and they’re all very stereotypically grandiose. I actually score only around average on grandiose measures like the NPI myself, while scoring very above average on ‘covert’ measures like ‘The Maladaptive Covert Narcissism Scale’. My guess would be if you got NPD patients to do these more ‘covert’ scales then you’d start getting the expected results (covert narcissism also gets called ‘vulnerable narcissism’ or ‘hyper-sensitive narcissism’). Anecdotally from looking at people talk about their experiences with narcissistic ex-partners or parents or such, as well as seemingly falling close to that cluster of symptoms myself, their behaviour seems much more vulnerable / sensitive than grandiose / boasting. This might be a case of the folk concept of narcissism impeding scientific research into the real phenomenon?
I feel like autism research has been stunted by seeing autism as fundamentally about ‘social deficit’ in some sense rather than some underlying shift in sensory priors à la the Intense World concept. I guess the correlation you’d be looking for here is ‘early life emotional hypersensitivity’ with ‘later life emotional empathy deficits’ (or something like that) which from my brief Googling has simply never been studied. So it may be just that no one’s looked yet. But it links into the general Intense World concept pretty well I think? Like if ‘eye contact is ultra arousing’ seemingly can cause ‘I avoid eye contact’, then I see no reason why it wouldn’t generalise to ‘expressing sympathy and care is ultra arousing and difficult while ignoring/self-blunting is calming’ causing ‘its extremely difficult to feel care for others and I tend to ignore others feelings’. There is pretty good evidence implying above average empathic distress (1) (2: meta analysis) in autism that supports the idea. If the Intense World Model is even approximately true-ish you’d expect a ton of heterogeneity, which you could look for, but would also make results look inconsistent and maybe make practitioners miss the pattern. Perhaps I just found empathic concern particularly distressing and/or was particularly capable of suppressing it relative to the typical autistic person. I don’t know :)
With the horseshoe theory thing: I guess this is how you end up with people diagnosed with / who have strong clear clinical-level traits of both ASPD and autism (I have met such people).
Ah you believe like most personality differences between same-cultural individuals are mostly due to genes and not early-life experiences? I’ve seen that this applies to ‘big’ traits like the Big 5, but do you think this’d carry over to individual facets / smaller traits too? (like ‘dominance’ or ‘empathic concern’) Question: do you feel like this kinda invalidates narratives of personality that centre childhood experiences? Or might they still be useful as like- ways of predicting / understanding the specifics of how one’s dispositions might have been reinforced / triggered during development, and the day-to-day specifics of the ways they manifest in adulthood?
Thanks for all that, very interesting!
I assume it carries over to “smaller traits”, but I think I’ll know more when I (hopefully someday) analyze a heritability-related dataset that goes down to the individual questions on personality tests, which I swear someone sent me but I filed it away until I find time to properly study the personality literature.
At least in principle, heritability data can be compatible with a mechanism whereby childhood experiences are the path by which how innate drives and dispositions unfold into adult behavior. It would just have to be “innate disposition → childhood experience → adult behavior”.
For example, I think some people are innately prone to having socially traumatic experiences, and then something will happen to them at some point in their childhood that they experience as social trauma, and then they’ll carry that memory forwards. And this memory can be a legit proximal cause of adult feelings, and legitimately relevant for adult therapy. But I think that if they had grown up in a different family, they would have just been traumatized by something else.
The theory here is: By and large, I think people try different ways of acting and thinking throughout life, well into adulthood. Introverted adults will still go out sometimes, happy people will still brood sometimes, nice people will still act mean sometimes, etc. And if they try it and it feels innately appealing, then they’ll do it more often in the future. So over time, adults will gravitate towards ways of being that are a good fit to their disposition, by and large. I have a (mercifully much shorter) earlier post on heritability making that point: Heritability, Behaviorism, and Within-Lifetime RL.
(…But that’s not to deny that adults can durably change via therapy, drugs, crazy story of an autistic person getting long-dormant ‘feelings’ back via Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, etc.)
Ah your explanation of this makes a lot of sense yeah! Thank you!
Just checking but its not like the proximal cause explanation applies always? Like it’s not as if personality is >85% genetic, things like spontaneous trauma unrelated to innate dispositions presumably can often still play a major role. (?)
What on earth this is wild. I was actually going to particulate in a TMS study to enhance social cognition a while back but didn’t go through. Kind of scary although its not like this is typical obviously. I wonder how this happened.
Identical twins are still definitely different in some ways (whether raised in the same family or not), and I think the source of those differences is not well understood. See “§1.4: What is E, really?” here.
Random example on my mind: My spouse is noticeably more happy and well-adjusted this year than last year, in a way that I figure would probably have a small but measurable effect on a personality survey, because she left a job she hated for a job she liked. But she obviously has the same genes now as she did last year.
Leaving the job is not an example because it could have increased the heritability of her personality survey. Pretty much all traits change in heritability over a lifetime (eg. Wilson effect for IQ or think about, say, psychiatric disorders) and other variance components as well, so you can’t point to a single change and say it is an example of E because ‘A didn’t change’ - well, neither did C (if an adult) or D, they could all be increasing due to that single change (you can view it as regression to a mean as she finally leaves an outlier job, as most people do not ‘hate’ their job), so in fact, it may be any of ACD!
I think you’re misunderstanding what I was trying to say, sorry I left out the details. Here’s what I had in mind:
In the methodology of a classic twin study,
Now, my spouse (call her S) had a job she hated at age 39 and a job she liked at age 40. If she had an identical twin (call her S’), and the two of them happened to participate in a heritability study when they were both age 40, would S’ have also had a job she liked? Or if they had participated in a heritability study when they were both age 39, would S’ have also had a job she hated? Probably at least one of those questions has an answer “no”, right? Unless there’s an extraordinary coincidence where S & S’ find their ways out of bad job situations in the same year, well into adulthood.
And if one of those questions has an answer “no”, then that’s a kind of thing that would have pulled r down from 1.0, a.k.a. contributed to E, at least for a certain fraction of adulthood.
I’m not saying this one thing is a BIG effect, but I think there are a lot of things like that, and if you add them up, I do think it explains some noticeable fraction of E. I’d put it in the “luck of the draw” category in my breakdown of §1.4 here.
(That’s assuming I’m right that the bad job was dragging her down enough to show up on a personality survey, but I really think it was, not hugely but nonzero.)
My point is that in your scenario, it is entirely possible that S’ had managed to obtain a job she liked because she was genetically predisposed (eg. having a nice personality), but that S had not for exogenous random bad luck, and that if they were measured at age 39, they would seem unusually discordant twins—except it was just bad luck, and S would regress to her mean at age 40 and now they would be concordant. You can’t just handwave it and say, ‘S just got a new better job! Heritability must be going down!’ The new job could well be heritability going up. Your ‘random example’ is just poorly chosen and irrelevant to the discussion since it’s not at all obvious that it is an example of E going up and ACD going done just because “she obviously has the same genes now as she did last year.” There could be a time reversal: the bad job could have been the E, not the good one!
I agree with what you wrote. I never said anything about E going up or heritability going down. I’m not sure how I gave you that impression.
It seems that we’re on the same page that bad luck exists (and good luck also exists), and that bad and good luck can affect one’s life circumstances in a way that may impact questionnaire results, and can thus contribute to identical twins being discordant, at any given time. That’s all I was saying. It’s meant to be a simple and obvious point.