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Episode 183: Do rewards improve motivation, Can parents toughen up their kids
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a question came up and the question was was had to do with motivation and it was what's the psychology behind not wanting to perform a task of after being told to do it even if you were going to do it anyway and so I remembered watching some some kids TV show and years ago and I had heard this line and I'd laughed pretty hard at it this was the line we please okay but not because you told me to and then I also as I was looking up this clip so obviously the villainess in this clip says kill me please and the main antagonist says okay fine but not because he told me to and then I was looking up this clip so I can put it on the show and it's funny because I found a clip from Larry King Live when he was interviewing somebody from 30 rock and the same exact joke comes up hang up hang up boredom lab' I'm going to but not because you told me so it has a because yeah I can sometimes remember when the same jokes are used across different social mediums and so there must be something there and I figured who else to ask then dr. Doug Lyall and so in researching some of this I found that there was apparently there's some famous study done that kids actually spend less time drawing if you tell them that they'll they'll get some award for doing a good picture and if we can just take a few minutes and I'll kind of go over this study and then dr. Lao you can explain it to us so this was two psychologists mark leper and David Greene from Stanford University and the University of Michigan and they were interested in testing what was known as the over justification hypothesis and so since parents they use these rewards as motivators for children they recruited 51 preschoolers between three and four years old all the children selected for the study were interested in drawing and it was really crucial that they actually already liked drawing because they wanted to see the effects what effect rewards would have on children that were already fond of doing the activity so they were randomly assigned to one of three possible conditions one is an expected reward so they were told they would get some certificate with the gold ribbon if they took part the second condition was they they actually received the same reward as the the first one but they weren't told about it until after they finished drawing and then the third condition was they had no reward at all so they expected no reward and they didn't get one at all and so they were invited to into a separate room to draw for six minutes and then they afterwards they were given their reward or not reward depending on the condition and then over the next few days they were watched through one-way mirrors to see how much they would continue drawing on their own accord and so what happened was the the kids in the condition of no reward or surprise reward they spent about you know sixteen fifteen percent fifteen to twenty percent of their time drawing and the kids who who actually got the expected reward spent half that percentage of half the time drawing and so it was pretty pretty interesting to watch that that they were less motivated once they expected to be rewarded for the activity and so you know the authors of the study say that this had to do with intrinsic motivation and they also cite that it's not only children who display this kind of reactions and besides Larry King and the cartoon I just played apparently studies have shown a similar effect in all sorts of different populations like adults for example one study smokers who were rewarded for their efforts to quit did better at first but after three months they did worse than those given no rewards and no feedback and so and even those that were given rewards even lied more about the amount that they were smoking and so this this effect concluded that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation even when tangible rewards are offered as indicators of good performance and so they found that make people less creative worse at problem-solving etc so dr. Lau would you please hit us with the truth on this yeah so it's a it's a very good question I have not thought about this I haven't thought about it so I'm just thinking of it for the first time this is uh this is an old fact I knew mark Leppert he was he was the head of the department Stanford I was teaching there he's a famous experimental social psychologist true-blue right out of the sort of kurt lewin you know family tree so leopard leopard is uh is one of the greats now this this is this you know this over justification effect is is you know it's kind of a curious effect so it's like if you if you reward people for something then for some reason the the thinking is I believe mostly in social psychology has been this is it's as if the person looks at themselves and says hmm why am I doing this if I I must have been partially doing this for the reward and therefore um if you know so therefore I must not like it that much and so now I'm going to do a less is there's no as the reward is now not evident and so that's the that's the effect that I I believe that's kind of what what leper and colleagues are thinking that this is sort of a there's a whole there's a whole bunch of guys famous guys in that in that arena in 1970s 1980s looking at things like this Daryl BEM I believe was also involved there the now I've never really I don't think here's one reason why I haven't one reason I haven't thought that much about the effects is I think that they're going to be short-term and I think that that there may be funny little things that happen like this this sort essentially the CB operations inside the person's mind can be a little confused about what why it is that something was valuable to do and it could actually be temporarily slightly confused about how to assign coefficients to the different motives potentially and so particularly in a kid like this and so as a result maybe it holds on for a short period of time the next time a you know the next few times they draw and then I would be extremely interested which I'm sure they did not do about following this up a month later so my guess is that you know if they looked at it a week later and a week after that we pre soon find this effect going down now however that doesn't mean that it's not a curious effect and so so that the sort of the notion that that you might have an internal calculus trying to discern why it is that you're doing something and that that it could that it could sniff out that if I'm being rewarded for it maybe I don't really like it that much that that it seems like a possible thing now just as I was thinking this through it occurred to me that that there's another possible explanation and I don't know and I doubt if the the leper or genre of social psychologists ever thought about this I don't know maybe they did they're pretty sophisticated people but they might not have ever considered the following concept and that is that the person might be thinking hmmm if I'm if I'm a have a reward then then this thing may be valuable to the village and if it's valuable to the village maybe I had to keep it scarce now the that could potentially explain an expected reward but remember an expected reward has been announced and so the person is now getting clear that you know why would anybody reward me it's because they because it's valuable to them and if it's valuable to them then maybe I want to make this a scarce resource the on the other hand you could also say well they got rewarded for it but they didn't see it coming and that did not undermine their their intrinsic motivation so they learned that it was it was valuable to village not necessarily so it's hard to know what inferences the person might make in those circumstances where the reward is a surprise and whereas words when it's expected in advance and is meant to be an inducement it's a little bit clearer that the village finds it valuable so I could see that possibility operating on this system but it's a nice like I said I have to tell you Nathan these are these are some of these things are curious funny little findings that they find for example in cognitive dissonance theory this is this is a looks like it's associated with that to some degree and the so there are curious little neat demonstrations of experimental social psychology I've I'm not sure exactly what to make of it I do believe that in in most cases little things like this little effects like this usually fall away pretty quickly in other words they're tenuous little effects I don't think they have a lot to do with significant human decision-making and motivation at all but nevertheless they're interesting alright do you think this has any hope oh do you think this has any hallmarks of any potential ego trap going on ie there might be an inference of the kid of whoever's doing this that if they're getting a reward that means they're their actual performance is being judged and therefore they should you know give up a little bit or not try as hard lest they lose some status i I'm I'm not sure what to make of that I don't think so I don't I don't know I think it's more I like the idea better that I mean I think the standard explanation if we're go back and read leper I think I think they're thinking that there's a that there's this inference that I must not like it that much because being rewarded must have been part of my motivation so therefore I'm going to do it less say curious reasoning that it certainly it fits the data but I'm not sure it's right an alternative explanation would be okay this is appears to be valuable to the village therefore make it a scarce resource don't give it away and so that's that's a I think that's a I think what I've just come up with is is a pretty potent explanation for for this that that may be superior explanation or explain more of what's going on than the original and I'm not sure I'm telling the real that they may have thought this through as well but there's a good chance they didn't so I think they were they're pretty excited about this notion that human beings don't know why they're doing what they're doing and that that's one of the great hallmarks of of experimental social psychology in the 1960s 70s and 80s sort of looking for these curious little effects where the person's walking around you know we know why they sort of did something that they don't know why they did it and of course it's exciting and interesting but I think that generally when that's the case the effects are very tenuous very tenuous little effects and the notion that people don't know you know sort of don't know their motivations for things even certainly evolutionary psychology is going to point and say listen they don't know that distal reasons for those motivations but they know the proximal reasons so you know they they they know they're they're peeking around the corner to watch Suzy dance they can't tell you that the reason why they're watching her dance because she looks like she's a very fertile specimen with low mutation loads back they can tell you well enough the UH though anyway but I wouldn't get a lot of that be more thought Angela what I wouldn't give to be at the junior high school dance with you and junior high and just have you elbow me in the sides that hey check out her little mutation loads over there my experience would be so much better in high school I split I explained this to my dad you'd always put out 50 and he was 80 and we went into some restaurant some guy walked by and he goes low mutation loads so apparently his detector was still working quite well at 80 years old all right so so so enough of this topic but but as you're explaining us I realized that the clips that I played of I'll do it but not because you told me to actually don't have that much to do with this particular topic so so maybe we can recover a little bit and maybe yeah blame to us what would this that phenomenas which is I'll do it but not that's also yeah actually that sort of thing that also that notion in that that concept is it was known in social psychology as reactance and as I recall there was a character named I think will teach and I can't remember exactly I've got that right but I think that I'm not going to remember this study right that there was that I think there was a number of demonstrations basically telling people for example don't write on the back bathroom wall and when you put that on there on the wall then everybody wrote all over the wall and so I think there was different studies like that that they did demonstrating this reactance and I don't think that that we had a very good very good explanation for that in social psychology I don't think they did actually because I think that what you're seeing is human resistance to being to do sending a signal that one is under somebody else's dominance and so that's that's not in it that's not in social psychological theory and so this is the notion that that I'm not going to do something at your direction because that would signal to the village that you are in fact in a dominant position over me and I can't afford that and I reject I reject the fact that I'm going to do anything that is going to indicate to the village that that is in fact the case because that would be expensive particularly to my reproductive prospects so that that now explains the quote reactance phenomena phenomena of all those types of demonstrations that were done the I think that I think that pretty wil settles it so Larry King is basically telling the sky yeah I'm going to do that because it's reasonable but I'm going to make sure that everybody knows that the reason I'm doing it is not because you're in a dominant position over me because you are not so that's that's why it is that someone might say something like that now would that be a similar reason like you know I actually felt this emotion a lot growing up my parents would tell me yeah or I was already going to do something to gain some Stone Age money like I got the trash when I wasn't asked to or you know clean up petitioners like that where it wasn't expected of me but I wanted to like get some credit for it and then my mom goes up by the way you please clean up the kitchen I'm like dang it like I was I was going to do that already and now now it looks like you told me to do it not that I was going to do it on my own yeah I think I think that probably still holds the yeah I think that I think that thread is still in there then if you're if you've got a little disagreeable streak mm and you're particularly I would say also very clearly that this is going to happen between mothers and sons the particularly it's going to happen a lot if the son is the sons get large enough that they could start looking mom in the eye and you're going to start getting some dominance hierarchy challenges that way so eventually maybe get you you'll probably get them between father and son so my dad finally my dad and I finally had you know a dominance hierarchy challenge or two yeah edit wait others like 35 that uh good yeah I mean it those things can can finally happen where if you're you feel like it's expensive to demonstrate submission and you run a CB and you say no I'm not going to signal it I'm going to defy that signal em and make it clear that I'm not picturing myself in that slot so I think that's largely what you're seeing there fascinating fascinating all right well we've got a few questions today so I might get right thumb to them so dear dr. Lyle with regards to the ego and pleasure traps if one wants to instill a sense of motivation do we set goals and fundamentals that solicit a stress response as opposed to soliciting an anxious or depressive response how do you decide on a goal or the fundamentals that can begin the process of getting you out of this trap ego or pleasure trap is it a matter of deciding what is ten percent better than you are currently doing or something else good question and the I would say the way to look at this is is look at it the way that you would if you're if you're in an ego trap think a good way to think about an ego trap would be that your your peers think that you can jump over the high jump you know that's three and a half feet because you're a pretty good athlete and they can jump over and they've done it and you walk up to that thing and it's intimidating and so that's a good time to say that you got to pull muscle in your cap and you'll try it tomorrow in other words you don't want to do it so so what we want to do in principle is to lower the bar that's how we're going to get out of the ego trap we're going to lower the bar down to a level that is that is very very low looks like it's very doable so there's a some level where the person looks at that bar might be two feet and they think I know I can get over that good so now that's what we do that's where we set we set the fundamental down pretty close to where it is that they've got very high confidence that they can do it and what we're going to do is we're going to say okay we're going to begin there and we may and we may move pretty quickly but we're going to find out you know we don't know we're not really sure what this is going to look like so we set the bar there and then if it's easy then we move it up and then if it's still easy we move it up a little bit more so and for some of these things the depending upon what the goal is again so it's hard to give a general answer to a question because there's going to be specific issues that are involved so let's suppose it's you know eating healthy food well eating healthy food isn't conceptually difficult it's more an issue of sort of determination consistency than it is ability so that's a different issue and so so then we we want to web we want to set the bar at a level that the person internal audience feels like that they have actually accomplished something at the end of some cycle where we're going to be putting down some kind of data sometimes records or can be a really useful thing so not not for everybody but sometimes records of any kind of thing like for for weight loss for example I use a thing called starch targets where I have a little sheet that I have people check off on a daily basis what it is that they did today and in doing so they they can get a sense that they did a pretty good job because that's I'm setting the bar at a level that is doable for everybody but the the goal is to do this at 80% level which is very reasonable but not trivial and so the so that that's actually how we're trying to go about these things is set the bar at a reasonable level but not trivial that would be true the high jump as well so we might immediately set the high jump quite low as the person easily goes over it then we set it up at a reasonable level but not trivial where they can they're going to feel a little bit of stress so it's going to feel like a modest challenge but they can do it and then we you know if I was trying to teach the kid a high jump I would have them at that level for a while so let's suppose it was you know we started and they were intimidated by three and a half feet and so we started it back at two feet and that was too easy and then we went to two feet and four inches and that was still too easy and then we went to two feet and 8 inches it was the got over it but it was a little tense and they might have dinged the ding the bar with their foot a little bit maybe they even kicked it off at the end but they came out of their thing you know I can definitely do that I just got to get my foot over the bar so now when we do it again at 2 to 8 and they're all again successful we might sit right there for a while so you know for the rest of practice we might be at 2 8 and we might be focusing on the little fundamentals that are associated with that trying to get our you know trying to get our run up you know in a certain number of paces etc and we're just going to work those fundamentals and we're not going to raise the bar any that's how we might do it and so then once it it feels like downright boring and not challenging now we're going to raise the bar maybe the two feet 10 and just a little up and the person feels a little bit of stress but they feel high-percentage perceived probability of success and now we raise it up and they are probably successful but they feel the tension and the uncertainty and then we do the same thing and we just work those fundamentals again ok and so this is how it is that we this is how motivation works is it works behind essentially you know an inner woven matrix of several considerations and that is you know what whether people think I can do what do I think I can do and and what is my internal audience observing with respect to the dynamic between those two things and so by by starting low we make sure that the individual is has a very high perceived probability of success very high and now we we slightly cinch that to where it feels a little bit more stressful and a little bit you know a little bit more challenging and we cinch it up and cinch it up until we're at a place where where they feel like they have to work very hard and be focused in order to be consistently successful so that's that's how we do it and that's how we do it really in principle whether we're teaching somebody to write essays or we're teaching somebody to throw a football or we're trying to teach your math problems it's it's all works according to the same basic formula that you know it is that's the way out of the ego trap and it's also the way to continue continues cycle of motivation and increase confidence with increased accomplishment fascinating as long as we don't pay them to practice it'll be fine according to the yeah very good yeah just kidding just go all right okay our next question dr. Lyle compare its toughen up their children including infants so that they don't cry as much by pampering them less in other words is negative or whiny Oh bi yeah but I lost reproduce a second now go ahead and read it again from the top for me okay dear dr. Lao can parents toughen up their children including infants so that they don't cry as much by pampering them less in other words is there evidence that you can make infants cry less or make young children less sensitive or whiny by letting them have to deal with a little discomfort rather than helping them out all the time ah good question and I have to say that I don't have enough experience with kids to tell the answer now there's two different levels of answer so with respect to one of the questions the long-term question I can give you the answer the short-term question is sort of the manipulation of childhood whining and crying I'm sure that there's some short term techniques that are potentially useful I know about some of them because I invented one all right so the big question is so it can you toughen up your kids and make them less inherently sensitive and sort of a tougher animal etc no you cannot that is not possible so the reason why I say that definitively is the extensive research that it's been done on personality and genetics so we now know that there's going to be no known process by which any environmental input is going to have a predictable systematic influence on personality development so good question reasonable question and you can see why people would think that the answer would be sure you can toughen up your kids you know gosh if you got a bunch of softies from Beverly Hills go put them in the ghetto and abandon them for a year let's toughen them up okay so we answer it know they'll be the same soft kid basically in a year personality is quite immutable now the now the question is whether or not what's going to go along with the crying and the whining that is going to change depending upon the circumstances and so if you change your behavior it could very well change the behavior of the child so I didn't do any crying and whining around my father because my father wasn't going to put up with it wasn't interesting and it became clear that whatever was you know if I'm crying because I'm physically hurt he wouldn't say shut up you wouldn't hear you be perfectly reasonable but what my dad was was reasonable and stable and he wasn't particularly sympathetic if my what was frustrating me was sort of the normal vicissitudes of childhood life so therefore it didn't exactly encourage a bunch of whining and crying my mother similarly you know softer than my dad but not particularly soft about that issue so nicer so I'm probably cried more to my mother but I don't remember doing a lot of crying quite frankly but I'd have to mean well you can't remember anything before you're three years old anyway so I have no idea what was going on was one and a half the I'm probably did plenty of crying now so another thing so therefore what I'm essentially saying is is that parental behavior or caregiver behavior could certainly reinforce reinforce or punish these kinds of displays and so those would change according to the movies this is operant conditioning so this is essentially what or you could you get if you are a modern cognitive theorists you'd say well doesn't that necessarily have to be operant conditioning it can actually be top-down analysis of the cost-benefit analysis of the behavior so you could figure out what the contingencies were it wouldn't have to be an operant or unconscious process so the so the the deal is is that that with kids that I will with kids that are probably a little bit older than this I will do some sharp angling so if they're whining I'll say hey that's too bad you'll you'll you'll be fine he'll live without it whatever it is whining about the situation that something got taken for them unfairly or whatever the deal was it seems perfectly reasonable to me I don't mind at all shrugging my shoulders and saying hey does it sound like anything that you can't handle and this is essentially deflecting them out of a strategy where crying and whining or manipulative instincts that are activated under conditions where the cost/benefit looks like it's going to be worth it so if you can think that you can get resources by whining and crying then you're likely to do so and if it if it looks like that's not going to work then you're probably going to shut down that strategy now with with infants I would be very resistant about trying to be sharp angling an infant for god sakes an infant if they're crying they're uncomfortable and so we're trying to discern what the nature of that discomfort is and we want to put them in their comfortable circumstances so I'm not you know there's probably people that deal with infants all day long and probably have their their little magic about what they think is a good thing to do etc but but generally my attitude would be to indulge that infinite a way to try to knock down that crying you know if you can figure out what to do but when kids gets a little older the kid is now a more clever I'm a nipple ative device and if the the crying and whining that they're doing looks you know essentially like you can understand what they're saying and understand what they're upsetting what's upsetting them and this is clearly part of a strategic manipulative package to try to get you to intervene maybe maybe it's worth intervening maybe it's not but if it doesn't look like it if it looks like it's something that they can settle themselves then my attitude would be hey you know you're just going to have to choke it down that's all right you'll live through it there's still be dinnertime at dinnertime and by doing this they they will figure out a it's not worth it it's not going to fly whereas when if they have a legitimate beef then we you know pay attention to it and and or essentially or or if we're impressed with the logic and the injustice of the situation then that's something else again so that's that's how I look look at this it's essentially just like if you're if you're running a carwash where you're running a prison you have to have rules and expectations and the people will behave according to what they think the payoff matrix looks like so if they think that they can show up late and not punch in and so get paid because they said that they were there that's what they're likely to do if they better show up before the thing before the shift goes on and make sure they're punched in they'll make sure that that happens too and so and the same thing with kids they're not going to be generally doing an awful lot of whining and crying unless it is that unless it's working so sometimes it's working a little too well and the however we will we will not incidentally kids being uncomfortable under situations are frustrated or or mad or feeling like they've been treated unjustly this isn't hurting them it's not doing any damage it's also the case that if we if we do things a little tougher it's also not going to toughen them up in the long run it will not change their personality 1% so if you've got a little whiner crier on your hand and it continues on even though you may knock it down in your own house by being a little tougher to manipulate leave me this is going to be going on for the rest of these are this is endemic to the personality structure and so therefore nothing that you're going to do is going to influence that that personality trajectory as they go throughout the course of their lives yeah when I was a when I was a kid I was in the patio and playing on a swing that my dad had built for me my sisters and I fell down her my hermite I hurt my knee I'm on the concrete I remember like crying a little bit and I was like looking up at my mom to see if she would react and either coming again happening and and she because we end up here so she she would look at me and then kind of go back to doing her thing and then later when I grew up we were talking about this exact thing a you know toughen up your kids and seeing if you know she had believed and we we talked about this this she thought that psychologically that kids need to be taught to not whine to their parents that much and so she brought that up and I remember that moment it was funny because she said yeah I know I saw you you weren't in dire straits you weren't you weren't bleeding weird I just you know I just was paying attention to your sister's help my homework and so you know 20 years later my knee hurts every once in a while and I still blame her [Laughter] well well shed Nathan you going to hold that grudge for a while longer oh yeah I love you mono mud all right yeah all right let's go on okay so dr. Lyle you brought up what a sharp angle can you explain to us what that means yeah yeah sharp angle is a is a description of a clinical strategy that I developed you know 25 years ago and so it's when I would hear whenever whenever I hear complaining out of adults and um I'm sort of unconsciously I'm processing that their complaint is not reasonable and so now there are complaints that are reasonable and there's complaints that aren't reasonable and and when they're not reasonable what I do is probably somewhat different than a typical clinical psychologists because I'm not necessarily that warm and fuzzy if you want warm and fun with evolutionary psychology you need to talk to dr. Jen Hawk but careful when when you bring complaints to me you might hit a sharp bang so here's a sharp angle so I had a young lady come to me and she had her fiancee and they came from we both came from well-to-do families and her family was they were young and they had decided by by George that they were going to get married at this young age and the her parents had a very beautiful lovely home that with a gorgeous yard that could have been I guess that was going to be the site of the wedding and she was bent out of shape about the limited financial resources that her dad was willing to pony up for this whole thing knowing full well that he was very well-to-do and so I'm looking at this highly attractive young lady super well-educated I won't delineate what that is and her super attractive super well-educated soon-to-be young spouse I'm thinking you've got to be kidding me like you're whining to me about how you can't have $250 floral arrangements that they're going to you know they're limiting what they're going to pay so you can only have 125 150 people like hey I don't remember what the complaints were but they were ridiculous yeah this was a rich kids complaint and so we're about oh I don't know seven and nine minutes into our therapy session and I just said your parents don't owe you anything like where you get to shop yeah that's not a typical psycho angry yeah yeah so that's a sharp angle in other words it's I'm not pussyfooting around here it's like you come with a bogus whining complaint and you're going to get called on it right in your face and yeah it was obviously not the response that she got from her other therapist so and that that young lady wrote me a letter a year later I still have it and she said you know like dear dr. Lisle I just want to tell you from our session you know it completely transformed the relationship between myself and my parents she said you know it's uncomfortable to hear what you had to say but you know I just I'd never had seen it from that perspective and now I do I just see things completely differently ie they don't owe me anything and so yeah that's sharp angle so that that kid just needed a little tap on the head and suddenly her brain was able to clear out I actually didn't expect that I expected that I actually had a whiny entitled disagreeable you know manipulative princess that's what I thought I had and I wasn't going to sit there and let the princess whine because that's me if you're a princess and you want to whine talk to Jen ha ha she'll be she'll be very very sweet and very gentle and it'll you might get the same message but it'll come with such smooth edges Lydia I'm going to get a ball-peen hammer I'm dr. Jen hawk then dr. Lau I'm a princess and I feel like that is it yeah we feel like whining you know where to go now yeah how do we get not Jenn Marquez she actually I think she's now on my website so I think that's true I haven't checked but I was I was given a rumor that they've almost got their act together so she might be there now but if not she's going to be on that website very very shortly excellent all right don't know why what's going on all right what else we do dr. Lisle when you talk about narcissists you usually discuss those who Macross as highly disagreeable but it seemed some of these narcissists can actually be very charming can you explain the charming nurse how to spot one a charming nurse's could be could be a very extroverted and have a great sense of humor be physically attractive with a big smile big expressive smile and be low enough conscientiousness to be deceptive and manipulative as hell so the the thing to look for is to look for the streak and disagreeable and you know and look for when it's substantial and the and also another place to look is for the lower conscientiousness in other words the willingness to be very deceptive the narcissist is what that really is is that disagreeable and that's what you know we start to call it narcissism when we start reaching you know the 90th percentile disagreeable be and so what what's happening there is that somebody that's up at that level for disagreeable really feels like the world's pretty damn unfair they really feel like their name ought to be in lights they ought to be in charge they ought to be able to get what they what they want and the whole that did this doesn't mean that they aren't very hard-working and productive and talented and successful they might be of all those things or they might be none of them but if they are they they may have a great deal of of wealth and social capital and everything else under the Sun however beneath the charming veneer you are going to see evidence of the disagreeable streak and it will usually come in flashes of anger that will surprise you in their aggressiveness um and that's what that is so yeah so the veneer that you're seeing can be extraversion inherent sense of humor a lot of times good looks and particularly the lower in conscientiousness they don't have to be low they're just not high and if they're average and conscientiousness and they're very disagreeable those two dimensions together lay the groundwork for the justification of being deceptive remember if you feel like the world is really not giving you your do then you are far more willing to be deceiving other people into giving you your due okay it just seems like it's reasonable here's a great example of a narcissist with no charm in my judgment but operating along this same the same dimension of two things which is at Lance Armstrong so Lance Armstrong on you know they're extremely disagreeable so what we're talking 100 percent oh and so is he conscientious well super hard-working guy a lot of conscientiousness but but you can see the willingness to be deceptive as hell and it feels justified to a flaming narcissistic person like Armstrong that it was reasonable that he was cheating and deceiving everybody like crazy why because everybody else is doing it yeah well not everybody talked to Greg LeMond the so this is but that that's what the person is seeing here Lance Armstrong with the personality could look like you know a very charming individual and it could look like that they were quote not narcissistic but you're going to see some ruthless behavior along this dimension and usually you're going to see flashes of anger that are pretty intense and they're more intense than you would normally see out of a normal person when a normal person has something happen to them it seems unfair it's a they don't have the blazing rage that you will often see you know out of a highly disagreeable person that I would describe as narcissistic and so that no matter how charming and pleasant when when the switch flips and you see that see that rage in there you know that the rest of it is just a fancy veneer fascinating yeah we've we've all had some experiences with these flaming narcissists and you're absolutely right at least from what I understand my experience is like that that veneer comes off I was I mean I've had a fuse and it's shocking like oh okay that would bury me there right right there was suddenly you're looking at you're looking at a reptile and essentially a very low empathy animal that is really feeling justified at aggression because they feel like things are just outrageously unfair now in a way that normal people rarely feel about about anything other than their sports team if their sports team has been if they've had a call gets get their guys then you know and that's that's cause for it but usually not about themselves hitter assuming them all right what else we got real anything else oh yeah we've got a woman one yeah we do a quick one do doctor lie what happened someone is acting playful childish or even sometimes a little annoying or bratty like teasing and saying outrageous things are they trying to evoke some sort of parental instincts are they being self-deprecating or something else hmm an interesting description and I'm trying to try to read between the lines here because some of those things they don't necessarily all hang together but they might hang together the closest thing that I'm hearing in that is flirtatiousness so people will do teasing they will act playful they'll act childish they'll be banned Ling and bratty they'll say outrageous things this so I would have to question that the person who wrote this as to who they had in mind and what the circumstances were but what you're describing there sounds like sounds like you know seventeen-year-old girl or boy trying to signal to somebody that they're interested so those are all all sort of flirtatious strategies and sometimes older people too yeah hey what about a react like this yeah this is uh this is yeah this is sort of flirtation 101 and this is a these are ways that that people go about trying to signal that they're interested in a partner is by doing these kinds of things this uh started Tom Sawyer comes to mind you know the kind of goofy things that people will do but they're signaling like crazy so I think that's more what this person is observing now when they're signalling what are what are they signaling I mean obviously they're signaling flirtatious behavior and sexual interest right are they saying that they're willing to be submissive through their childish behavior or that the other person has fewer gene mutation loads or or yeah we're still think about that yeah let's uh let's talk about this so sometimes by these can be testing mechanisms to see if the person is interested in us so we might say provocative things and then I mean actually this is a really good question because I think that these are instinctual strategies so I don't I don't recall I don't remember the reading these in David buses act what he calls act psychology or act thus was was very interesting in the way he he did research he he he did exhaustive work looking at the different kinds of things that people do and summarizing and categorizing acts that people use as strategies for flirtation and these aren't coming to mind but they're probably in there because as I recall he would come up with like a hundred and eighteen different acts that that people have been known to use to try to signal interest and so I'm sure they're in there so I but yeah we have to think through and I don't know that any more thought has gone into this I'm trying to think being playful that's playful is possibly there's a bet that goes oh a wide variety of behaviors but that just looks flirtatious like crazy to me and so this is these are roundabout ways of testing about whether or not the other person is interested so there's less status at risk than just going right up to somebody and talking to them these are you know this is the wimps way of doing things this is the way I would have done things and Alan Goldhamer never would have thought disarmed or or I guess get people to lower their guard if you're more childish in the same way that presented on iTunes versus PowerPoint slides with you know wrote texts on them right yeah I remember back in my undergrad days I was flirting with the young lady that would that I have married and I would I can remember at one point I put little little rap pieces of candy down at intervals in the hallway that led to my led to my office we worked in the same lab with a cognitive psychologist George Mandler and so yeah that was a playful playful thing to do that's sort of that's what this is kind of child child why and goofy way to signal nowadays we would do it with like picked a toes right yeah that's right yeah wouldn't wouldn't work so yeah why bother I think I think I used a candy
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