Dr. Leanne Tenbrinke

Whether they think they're better than other people when it comes to narcissism, for example.

And they self-report like, yeah, I am all of those things.

So they're quite aware of their personality.

What they...

do not see as the problem with that because generally they perceive the problem to be like your problem, Mike.

It's your problem or my problem and their behavior doesn't affect them so much.

So they don't necessarily see much of a reason to change.

That's a great question, and it's a bit complicated.

One, because...

People with these personality traits, by virtue of being callous and manipulative, right, that manipulative part comes with a lot of deception.

And we are terrible lie detectors.

And so even though we might think that we're very good at it, if you actually give people a whole bunch of truths and lies and ask them to sort out which is which, they tend to perform around chance, like 54% accuracy, which is not much better than flipping a coin.

And usually when we're talking to another person just in a conversation, we aren't even really on the lookout for lies.

And so sometimes we see things like what psychologists call love bombing at the start, particularly of a romantic relationship.

you know, they come across as like the perfect partner.

They're saying all of the things that you want to hear.

Now, some large proportion of those might be lies that we're just not catching.

Similarly in the workplace, you might hear someone with these traits talk about all the great ideas that they've had, all the successes that they had, how they're such a wonderful leader.

But if you ask other people on their team, you might get a very different story.

So