Brayden Hall

So you can't flirt with your professor, but I can because that's okay because I'm special.

But most of this view that this is less morally troublesome comes from just a dimmer view of morality.

So they just find...

And we call it darkness tolerance.

So they're more tolerant of dark behavior or immoral behavior.

They just don't see it as that bad or that big of a deal.

Oh, yes.

I mean, the overwhelming majority of all the participants said that this was like totally morally inappropriate, which is an important point to make that many people miss when reading studies like this.

We're looking at where we're saying that narcissistic people just found it less immoral, not that they found it like totally moral.

So no one is out here wholly endorsing that you should be like winking at your professor in class.

Everyone seems to recognize that that's pretty bad.

Yeah, so we didn't look at that, which was an idea for a future study.

But the previous study in the 80s, they looked at that.

And that was pretty much what they found, that most often students were doing it to get better grades or to get in better graces with the professor.

And there's some research suggesting that narcissistic or grandiose narcissistic people want things that are forbidden to show their superiority.

So if I have...

If I have a painting that no one else has, then my painting is extra special and I'm extra special because I have it.

But yes, so the idea and the theory is that many students are doing this in order to get preferential treatment or things like that, or at least an easier grader at the end of the day.

Yeah, so I originally, that's actually what I wanted to look at.

But through talking with my advisor and other people, we sort of thought that trying to ask a bunch of professors at the university how often they flirt with their students would probably not go over very well.