[I once again need to state that I am not responding any person or recent event. But remember the Law of the Subtweet: if you see yourself in some negative description but are not explicitly named, you can just keep that to yourself.]<\/p>\r\n
There is a long debate about the effects of birth order on stable personality traits. A recent article in PNAS1<\/sup><\/a> claims the effects are near null once proper controls are in place; the commentary it’s paired with<\/a> suggests the whole thing is a zombie theory. Anyways, one of the claims I remember hearing was that older siblings were more likely to exhibit subclinical “Dark Triad” (DT) traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. Alas, this probably isn’t true, but it is easy to tell a story about why this might be adaptive. Time for some game theory. In a zero-sum scenario, if you’re the most mature (and biggest) of your siblings, you probably have more to gain from non-cooperative behaviors, and DT traits ought to select for said behaviors. A concrete (if contrived example): you can either hog or share the toy, and the eldest is by more likely to get away with hogging.<\/p>\r\n I wonder whether the scarcity of faculty positions\u2014even if overstated (and it is)\u2014might also be adaptive for dark triad traits. I know plenty of evil Boomer professors, but not many that are actually DT, and if I had to guess, these traits (particularly the narcissism) are much more common in younger (Gen X and Millennial) cohorts. Then again, this could be age-grading, since anti-social behaviors peak in adolescence and decline afterwards.<\/p>\r\n [I once again need to state that I am not responding any person or recent event. But remember the Law of the Subtweet: if you see yourself in some negative description but are not explicitly named, you can just keep that to yourself.] There is a long debate about the effects of birth order on … Continue reading “The dark triad professoriate”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-presentation-of-self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2214"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2228,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214\/revisions\/2228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Endnotes<\/h1>\r\n
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