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+--- Thread: How do selfish & marginally psychopathic personality traits persist thru time? + Fail (/thread-11879.html)
How do selfish & marginally psychopathic personality traits persist thru time? + Fail - C C - Mar 9, 2022
Women are more likely to blame themselves if they fail - while men tend to put their failures down to bad luck, study reveals
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10594845/Women-likely-blame-fail-men-failures-bad-luck.html
KEY POINTS: Scientists surveyed more than 500,000 15-year-old students in 72 countries. Questions were designed to measure competition, self-confidence, and careers. Females were more likely to point to lack of talent when they failed academically, Males were more likely to attribute failure to external factors, such as bad luck. (MORE - details)
How do selfish & even marginally psychopathic personality traits perpetuate in a society?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2022/03/09/how-do-selfish-and-even-marginally-psychopathic-personality-traits-perpetuate-in-a-society/?sh=5b3eb8abbafe
EXCERPTS: A new evolutionary psychology study published in the academic journal PLOS ONE explores the conditions under which selfish, risk-seeking, and other potentially problematic personality traits can exist in a society and even provide a benefit to groups and communities as a whole.
“Selfish and risk-seeking attitudes are widely observed in our everyday encounters,” says author Martina Testori from the University of Southampton. “While evolutionary theories usually favor an individualistic point of view — that is, the strongest survives while the weaker perishes — we were interested in a more collective point of view. We wanted to know whether selfish and risk-seeking traits can be beneficial not only to the individual but also to the community.”
To test this idea, the researchers created an agent-based model — a computer game of sorts — to simulate the actions and interactions of two personality types existing together in a simplified society...
[...] They found that, in certain cases, selfish risk-seekers would outperform generous risk-averse personality types. This tended to occur under conditions where group survival was not easy but moderately challenged (e.g., under conditions of greater environmental risk). “This supports the theory that selfish and risk-seeking traits combined are not dysfunctional but rather can be evolutionarily advantageous,” say the authors.
The benefit for societies as a whole is not as clear, but the authors point out that when generous personality types are unconditionally cooperative, communities with a greater percentage of selfish risk-seekers grow to a larger size — suggesting some advantage to the society overall. Under special circumstances, selfish risk-seekers can even comprise a majority of the population (without leading to its collapse).
The authors use this as a means to explain the existence of dark personality traits, such as psychopathy, callousness, and Machiavellianism... (MORE - missing details)