Dr. Leanne Tenbrinke

So maybe somewhere around like 10 to 20% of people have higher levels of these traits.

That's what I would kind of classify as these poisonous people.

That sounds like a lot.

I think it's really helpful to think about the flip side, which is that that means that 80 to 90%

of the population are not like that.

And I think that helps to provide a little bit of optimism for the future and for our social interactions.

So personality traits are defined as consistent thoughts and feelings and behaviors across time and context.

And so that should be across interactions with different kinds of people.

Now, it's possible that, you know, you have something that a dark personality wants.

And so they might, you know, try to use flattery manipulation of some kind to get to that.

But on average, they're going to behave in these, you know, callous kinds of ways in response to almost everyone they meet.

No, I mean, there is some research.

There's this fantastic paper by Scott Lillenfeld and his colleagues where they did what psychologists call thin slicing.

So they take this like five-second, really short clip of these individuals, and we know their psychopathy scores, and they show these clips to people and they ask them, you know, to what extent do they appear to be callous, manipulative, impulsive, etc.

?

And what they found is that people did pretty well at detecting who was high on these traits after watching just a five second clip of them.

And so we can get a sense of someone's personality pretty quickly.

What I tell people is also really important is not to get too stuck on the first impression, especially if it was rooted in that kind of deceptive behavior early on.

Because personality is that...

you know, extended pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving across time and context.