I read this and the previous article, and also skimmed through the Choices article in the psychopathy series. I agree with the traits identified with narcissism, echoism, and sovereignism, and with the idea that being high in these traits is not inherently toxic or disordered. Rather, it is the degree and nature of a person’s reaction to shame and related personality organization that determines whether these traits become maladaptive. I also agree that these traits are likely correlated, though they can also appear independently.
One of my interests is understanding what people need environmentally to perceive the benefits of reducing shame-based and exploitative coping strategies. It seems likely to me that one of the greatest challenges in encouraging change is that it is difficult for people to have the kinds of life experiences that shift their perceived values regarding cooperation, emotional safety, idealism, and attachment. My current theory is that this generally requires a long-term foundation of stability and safety, followed by one of two conditions.
The first is sustained primary immersion in an environment where those values are consistently incentivized and their benefits are made clearly visible. The second is a series of particularly engaging, rewarding, or disruptive interactions over time that gradually reshape a person’s expectations and values. Contemporary society makes both pathways difficult to access, and many of these traits also involve behaviors that steer people away from those opportunities in the first place.
Riffing off how this article explores different expressions of sovereignism, narcissism, and echoism across different attachment styles and contexts, I wonder whether some people also express these traits differently depending on whether they are evaluating themselves, other people, or social norms. I’ve noticed differences between what people feel comfortable expressing themselves, what they value or expect from other people, and what they perceive as baseline expectations or social norms.
This relates to a broader model I’ve been developing that maps dark triad traits, moral values, and altruistic orientations across these three perspectives. My hypothesis is that people’s preferences across the perspectives of self, other, and social norms deeply influence how rewarding they perceive social interactions to be, as well as how appealing and harmonious they find potential relationships and shared endeavors.
Yeah, I’d be down for a call sometime ^^. I’ll take a look at your calendar.
Oh, it’s cool you mentioned Amanda Diekman. I was looking into polyvagal and PDA parenting books for a while last year while trying to understand how children (and people generally) with extreme neurotypes or trauma can be optimally accommodated and have their needs modeled.
Yeah, speaking in a nonjudgmental, descriptive, and empathetic manner makes sense for reaching out to people generally. Though, yeah, there’s only so much literature can do for people if they’re self-loathing and have a lot of aversion to the topic.
I meant that a lot of economic and social structures reward pathological versions of echoism, sovereignism, and narcissism. I also meant that, in contemporary Western society, people are fairly siloed off, and if someone doesn’t already have relevant skills or connections, it can be difficult to access on-ramps to social groups that model healthy intimacy and healthy self- and world-modeling. Lastly, I also meant that intensely pathological versions of these traits tend to push away people who might otherwise offer long-term modeling or positive experiences.
This is something I’m still tinkering with in terms of how to formulate and contextualize it, but I can elaborate on it in a rough form. I’ve noticed polarizing differences in the kinds of communication and value judgments that people find comforting. I think this can be broken down into three kinds of people with different primary preferences: moralizers, stabilizers, and challengers. This split doesn’t map particularly cleanly onto echoism, sovereignism, and narcissism, but it seems to capture a lot of overlapping phenomena. I suspect these preferences arise from underlying game-theoretic preferences in establishing in-groups and out-groups, along with the resulting antagonism and standard-setting.
Furthermore, these three kinds of people don’t necessarily prefer interacting only with people like themselves. On one hand, there are moralizers who most appreciate input and social norms constructed with other moralizers and find challengers and stabilizers stressful. On the other hand, there are also moralizers who prefer a contrasting collaboration with challengers. I think all of the possible dyadic combinations are observable in people and establish different optimal practices in terms of expressing opinions and articulating goals.
In terms of specific examples, the neutral, third-party, default therapist approach you described your friend receiving would fit the stabilizer-stabilizer dyad. This may serve people who value that dyad particularly well while being less effective for people who value other dyads. I think this framework can be applied to communities at large, too. For example, I suspect the rationalist community tends to lean toward the values of the moralizer-challenger dyad. This often looks like argumentative and strongly worded descriptions of particular value systems that establish clear in-groups and out-groups, with those clear standards of value paired with bluntly phrased evaluations of power, violence, rewards and loss.
At the same time, the way these dyadic values are expressed can look very different depending on people’s political and social beliefs. For example, fundamentalist Christian and Marxist communities could both primarily express moralizer-challenger dyad values despite having radically different belief systems. My model would aim to predict individuals’ relative comfort with particular forms of conflict and problem formulation, while treating this as secondary in importance to the impact of differing social and political beliefs. One potential use would be explaining why two people with approximately similar values nevertheless find each other’s ways of evaluating issues aggravating. The framework could also help identify collaborators who are likely to be stable and fulfilling over the long term, as well as explain persistent social tensions or recurring difficulties addressing particular issues within specific communities or institutions.