Braden Hall

And so the world owes them tons of things that they don't owe other people.

And then there's Machiavellianism, which is based off Machiavelli's The Prince, which is basically people who are very tactically manipulative.

So they see people as kind of a means to an end and as kind of like pawns in the game they're playing.

So they almost always have like an ulterior motive to do whatever they're doing.

And then psychopathy.

These people are like very callous and unemotional, but they're also very erratic and impulsive.

So these people like the like the guy who like does like like wheelies on his motorcycle, but like doesn't really have like a lot of empathy for people like he's he's a little psychopathic.

So not a lot of people have studied the personality traits associated with flirting, and a lot of psychologists just tend to study the things that help us in the world and the things that...

like, make us happy and, you know, allow us to flourish and stuff.

And until recently, people have seen these dark traits as very... just, like, wholly bad, basically.

Like, they cause people to be less satisfied with their life.

They cause them lots of personal problems.

But there are a few areas of life where these personality traits actually confer somewhat of an advantage.

And so I was always interested in...

how these traits can actually be advantageous to the people that have them.

And so flirting is an area where these types of people tend to do rather well.

And they do so with this like instrumental flirting because it's very easy to, you know, like woo someone or whatever when you don't really care whether they get upset about anything.

You're just trying to get something from them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, totally.