Dr. Leanne Tenbrinke

When you're around these people for long enough, you know, you start to see that what they're saying and the reality does not line up.

But deception can be quite convincing at the outset.

And we also confuse

confidence, which they have in spades, with competence.

And so we sometimes perceive they really strongly think they know what they're doing, and we're like, oh, they know what they're doing, not recognizing that there's a difference between confidence and competence.

I think that really depends on you, the nature of the relationship, what you want or need to get out of that relationship.

I mean, I think what I hope people start to learn is how to

detect these personality traits earlier and then recognize some kind of hard truths about these personalities and be kind of armed with that knowledge to make a clear-eyed, informed decision about whether you want to continue on in that relationship or avoid that person.

And if you do decide to continue on in that relationship, you're not...

You know, we often jump to language like that person's a psychopath or that person's a narcissist.

And that implies that you either are one or you aren't one.

When, in fact, these are personality traits just like us.

just like extroversion, just like how open you are, in that they exist on a continuum.

So you can land anywhere from very low to very high on these traits.

When it comes to self-report measures, you can ask people, you know, to what extent does this

behavior this callous behavior characterize you do you agree that this is how you act when it comes to manipulation of other people and if people consistently say yep that sounds like me like that i'm impulsive like that i am callous like that i'm manipulative like that then you might be able to say okay it seems like they're agreeing that they you know have these personality traits

And research suggests that that's about 10 or so percent of the population.

Similarly, you could look at the extent to which people endorse having these kinds of dark personality traits relative to lighter personality traits like care and concern for other people.

And

research suggests that about anywhere between like seven and 20% of people have higher dark than light traits.