By: Rob Henderson

Published: Aug 27, 2020

A new study led by Ekin Ok at the University of British Columbia has found people who signal virtue and victimhood are more likely to have dark triad personality traits.

The dark triad comprises narcissism (entitled self-importance), Machiavellianism (strategic exploitation and duplicity) and psychopathy (callousness and cynicism). People with dark triad traits can be seductive.

A study led by psychologists at the University of Durham found that women rated the same man as more attractive when he had dark triad traits. The dark triad man was about one standard deviation more attractive than an ordinary man.

In psychologist Justin Lehmiller’s book Tell Me What You Want, he reveals the most fantasized-about superhero among women is Batman. In contrast, gay men preferred Superman and Captain America. One possible reason that women like Batman is because he would score higher on dark triad traits compared with other superheroes.

Another study by researchers Carrie Haslam and V. Tamara Montrose found that although narcissistic males do not make good partners, women aged 18 to 28 desire them more than other men. The researchers asked women about their dating experience and desire for marriage. They wanted to see whether these factors influenced their attraction to narcissistic men.

They found that young women with more dating experience and a greater desire for marriage were more attracted to narcissistic men. They write, “Despite future long-term mating desires which are unlikely to be achieved with a narcissistic male and possession of substantial mate sampling experience, females view the narcissistic male as a suitable partner.”

Dark triad traits appear to be advantageous in some contexts.

In their recently published paper, Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities, the authors suggest that Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy might be beneficial for obtaining resources.

In their introduction, they acknowledge that being viewed as a victim can lead to a loss of esteem and respect. But, they continue, in modern Western societies being a victim doesn’t always lead to undesirable outcomes. Sometimes, being a victim can increase one’s social status. And justify one’s claim to material resources.

They argue that “contemporary Western democracies have become particularly hospitable environments for victim signalers to execute a strategy of nonreciprocal resource extraction.”

One reason: Strong egalitarian values lead many in the West to believe that any differences in outcomes are illegitimate.

Another is that one of our key values is the alleviation of human suffering. Saying that you don’t have as much as others and that you are suffering for it, can be a shrewd way to obtain material resources.

The researchers examine victim signaling, which they define as “a public and intentional expression of one’s disadvantages, suffering, oppression, or personal limitations.” They also examine virtue signaling, defined as “symbolic demonstrations that can lead observers to make favorable inferences about the signaler’s moral character.”

They argue that signaling both victimhood and virtue would maximize one’s ability to extract resources. People feel the most sympathy for a victim who is also a good person.

The researchers developed a Victim Signaling Scale, ranging from 1 = not at all to 5 = always. It asks how often people engage in certain activities. These include: “Disclosed that I don’t feel accepted in society because of my identity.” And “Expressed how people like me are underrepresented in the media and leadership.”

They found that Victim Signaling scores highly correlated with dark triad scores (r = .35). This association held after controlling for gender, ethnicity, income, and other factors that might make people vulnerable to mistreatment.

Participants also completed a questionnaire that measured Virtue Signaling. They rated the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with statements about moral traits like being fair, compassionate, and honest. A sample statement is “I often buy products that communicate the fact that I have these characteristics.”

They also found that Virtue Signaling was significantly correlated with dark triad scores (r = .18).

They replicated this association in a follow-up study. This time they used a different, more robust, dark triad scale. They then found a stronger correlation between the dark triad traits and victim signaling (r = .52).

The researchers also found that victim signaling negatively correlated (r = -.38) with Honesty-Humility. This is a personality measure of sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance, and modesty. This suggests that victim signalers may be greedier and less honest than those who do not signal victimhood.

Beyond measuring responses to questionnaires, they also had participants play a game. Basically, it was a coin flip game in which participants could win money if they won.

Researchers rigged the game so that participants could easily cheat. Participants could claim they won even if they didn’t, and thus obtain more money.

Victim signalers were more likely to cheat in this game. The researchers again found that these results held after controlling for ethnicity, gender, income, and other factors.

Regardless of personal characteristics, those who scored higher on dark triad traits were more likely to be victim signalers. And may be more likely to deceive others for material gain.

The researchers then ran a study testing whether people who score highly on victim signaling were more likely to exaggerate reports of mistreatment from a colleague to gain an advantage over them.

Participants were told to imagine they worked with another intern. And that they were competing to land a job. Participants were told, “You keep noticing little things about the way the intern talks to you. You get the feeling the other intern may have no respect for your suggestions at all. To your face, the intern is friendly, but something feels off to you.”

Then participants engaged in the feedback performance of the intern. Then they completed the Victim Signaling scale.

Victim signalers were more likely to exaggerate the negative qualities of their competitor.

They were more likely to agree that the intern “Made demeaning or derogatory remarks,” or “Put you down in front of coworkers.” Nothing in the description of their colleague indicated that they performed these actions. But victim signalers were more likely to report that they did.

As the authors note, real victims exist. And they have no intention of deceiving or taking advantage of others.

Still, alongside victims, there are social predators among us. In whatever milieu they find themselves in, they will enact the strategies that maximize the rewards of material resources, sex, or prestige.

People with dark triad traits will tailor their strategies to obtain these benefits, depending on their social environments.

Today, those with dark triad traits might find that the best way to extract rewards is by making a public spectacle of their victimhood and virtue.

--

Abstract

We investigate the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue. In our first three studies, we show that the virtuous victim signal can facilitate nonreciprocal resource transfer from others to the signaler. Next, we develop and validate a victim signaling scale that we combine with an established measure of virtue signaling to operationalize the virtuous victim construct. We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits-Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy-more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies. In Study 5, we show that a specific dimension of Machiavellianism-amoral manipulation-and a form of narcissism that reflects a person's belief in their superior prosociality predict more frequent virtuous victim signaling. Studies 3, 4, and 6 test our hypothesis that the frequency of emitting virtuous victim signal predicts a person's willingness to engage in and endorse ethically questionable behaviors, such as lying to earn a bonus, intention to purchase counterfeit products and moral judgments of counterfeiters, and making exaggerated claims about being harmed in an organizational context.

Full PDF: https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Ok-et-al.-2020.pdf

==

By: Rob Henderson

Published: Feb 6, 2026

This week, the Stanford junior Elsa Johnson revealed in The Times that many of her fellow students were claiming they were disabled to receive accommodations like extra time on tests, excused absences and the best housing on campus. Johnson admitted that she had used her own endometriosis diagnosis to secure housing and academic perks.

“The truth is, the system is there to be gamed,” she wrote, “and most students feel that if you are not gaming it, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage.”

The result? We are gradually teaching young people corruption under the guise of compassion.

Just look at the numbers. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 18 per cent of male and 22 per cent of female college undergraduates report having a disability. Among non-binary students the figure jumps to 54 per cent. The figures are especially striking at elite universities.

Writing in The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch reported that more than 20 per cent of undergrads at Brown University and Harvard University were registered as disabled. At Amherst College the figure exceeded 30 per cent. At Stanford it approached 40 per cent. The rise is sharpest at the most selective schools, with only 3 to 4 per cent of students receiving accommodations at community colleges.

In her piece, Johnson argued that anyone who did not cheat was putting themselves at a disadvantage. “Stanford has made gaming the system the logical choice,” she wrote. “The students are not exactly cheating and if they are, can you blame them?” Yes, you can.

Something has shifted about American attitudes towards rules, especially among members of Gen Z. A 2020 survey from the American Enterprise Institute found that relative to older adults, young people are less likely to agree with the statement: “It is more important to always follow the rules even if it means you may be less successful.” At the same time, young people are more likely to say it is acceptable to get ahead even if it requires bending or breaking the rules. The trend points towards a lower-trust society, where rules are seen less as shared guardrails and more as inconvenient obstacles to work around.

The Atlantic reported that some elite schools may soon have more students receiving disability accommodations than those who don’t. A decade ago this would have sounded absurd, but as students and parents have come to recognise the benefits of disability status — extended test time, flexible deadlines, priority housing — the numbers have surged.

Many educated elites have long excused rule-breaking among people in more disadvantaged communities, arguing that the system is stacked against them — so why wouldn’t they try to level the playing field? Now, bizarrely, they are extending that same moral leniency to themselves.

The irony is that students at America’s elite universities are among the most privileged people to have ever lived. Admission alone places them among the future leadership class. Yet once inside the gates their advantage-hunting continues, with many searching for new ways to climb higher.

And today victimhood can function as a strategy. It can open doors, unlock resources and confer moral authority.

A 2021 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology supports this theory, showing that victim status can elevate one’s social standing in modern Western societies, increasing sympathy, expanding influence and justifying claims for material support.

The study showed that people with “dark triad” traits such as narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy were more likely to attempt to acquire resources through victim claims. But beyond the scope of the study, it is also possible that habitually framing oneself as disadvantaged can cultivate narcissism, manipulativeness and disregard for others. Behaviour shapes mindset just as much as mindset shapes behaviour.

As a result America’s elite-education system is vulnerable to exploitation, especially among those who have the knowledge and resources to navigate it. A 2019 investigation found that many affluent parents had paid thousands of dollars for private psychological testing. These clinicians face a built-in incentive: families are customers, and a diagnosis of ADHD or anxiety can deliver academic advantages. A decade ago, as an undergraduate at Yale, I learnt that several students were claiming to be “dyslexic” to successfully skip compulsory language-course requirements. All were from well-off backgrounds.

The system offers perverse incentives that are difficult to resist — unless you are a person of immense character.

Years ago, a friend I served with the US Air Force was injured on the job. His injury was real but temporary. He knew, as many veterans do, that disability claims had been rising — such incentives are not confined to elite college students, but extend to former service members as well. He could easily have applied for long-term benefits upon discharge, but he chose not to. As soon as he recovered, he returned to work. He wanted to put the experience behind him rather than organise his life around it.

He went on to do well. But for hundreds of thousands of others the incentive to exaggerate one’s difficulties is too tempting — especially in a culture that offers excuses and asks: “How can you blame them?”

In the end, this all comes with a hidden cost. Institutions meant to cultivate excellence are training students to find advantage in fragility. And the habits and values learnt on the college campus rarely stay there. Eventually our culture will adopt these values, as we increasingly turn into a society of grift.

[ Via: https://archive.md/PkQNU ]

––

––

By: Elsa Johnson

Published: Feb 2, 2026

In 2023, one month into my freshman year at Stanford University, an upperclassman was showing me her dorm room — a prizedsingle in one of the nicest buildings on campus. As she took me around her space, which included a private bathroom, a walk-in shower and a great view of Hoover Tower, she casually mentioned that she had lived in a single all four years she had attended Stanford.

I was surprised. Most people don’t get the privilege of a single room until they reach their senior year.

That’s when my friend gave me a tip: Stanford had granted her “a disability accommodation”.

She, of course, didn’t have a disability. She knew it. I knew it. But she had figured out early what most Stanford students eventually learn: the Office of Accessible Education will give students a single room, extra time on tests and even exemptions from academic requirements if they qualify as “disabled”.

Everyone was doing it. I could do it, too, if I just knew how to ask.

A recent article in The Atlantic reported that an increasing number of students at elite universities were claiming they had disabilities to get benefits or exemptions, which can also include copies of lecture notes, excused absences and access to private testing rooms. Those who suffer from “social anxiety” can even get out of participating in class discussions.

But the most common disability accommodation students ask for — and receive — is the best housing on campus.

At Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where competition for the best dorm rooms is fierce, this practice is particularly rife. The Atlantic reported that 38 percent of undergraduates at my college were registered as having a disability — that’s 2,850 students out of a class of 7,500 — and 24 per cent of undergrads received academic or housing accommodations in the fall quarter.

At the Ivy League colleges Brown and Harvard, more than 20 per cent of undergrads are registered as disabled. Contrast these numbers with America’s community colleges, where only 3 to 4 per cent of students receive disability accommodations. Bizarrely, the schools that boast the most academically successful students are the ones with the largest number who claim disabilities — disabilities that you’d think would deter academic success.

The truth is, the system is there to be gamed, and most students feel that if you’re not gaming it, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage.

That’s why I decided to claim my legitimate illness — endometriosis — as a disability at Stanford.

When I arrived on campus two and a half years ago, I would have assumed that special allowances were made for a small number of students who genuinely needed them. But I quickly discovered that wasn’t true. Some diagnoses are real and serious, of course, such as epilepsy, anaphylactic allergies, sleep apnea or severe physical disabilities.

But most students, in my experience, claim less severe ailments, such as ADHD or anxiety. And some “disabilities” are just downright silly.Students claim “night terrors”; others say they “get easily distracted” or they “can’t live with others”. I know a guy who was granted a single room because he needs to wear contacts at night. I’ve heard of a girl who got a single because she was gluten intolerant.

That’s why I felt justified in claiming endometriosis as a disability. It is a painful condition in which cells from the uterus grow outside the womb. I’m often doubled over in agony from the problem, for which there is no known cure, so I decided to ask for a single room in a campus dorm where I could endure those moments in private.

The application process was very easy. I registered my condition on the Stanford Office of Accessible Education website and made an appointment to meet an adviser later that week. The system is staffed largely by empathetic women who want to help students.

As I explained my diagnosis and symptoms over Zoom to one woman, she listened, nodded sympathetically, related my problems to her own life and asked a few basic questions. Within 30 minutes, I was registered as a student with a disability, entitled to more accommodations than I asked for.

In addition to a single housing assignment, I was granted extra absences from class, some late days on assignments and a 15-minute tardiness allowance for all of my classes. I was met with so little scepticism or questioning, I probably didn’t even need a doctor’s note to get these exemptions. Had I been pushier, I am sure I could have received almost any accommodation I asked for.

While I feel entitled to my single room, I would feel guilty about some of the perks I have — except that so many of my fellow students have gamed the system. Take Callie, a recent Stanford grad with ADHD and Asperger’s who agreed to be quoted under a pseudonym. Callie was diagnosed with her conditions in elementary school; in return, Stanford granted her a single room for all four years, plus extra time on tests — and a few more perks.

“In college, I haven’t had that many ‘in real life’ tests as opposed to take-home essays,” Callie told me. “When I did use the extra time, I felt guilty, because I probably didn’t deserve the accommodations, given the fact I got into Stanford and could compete at a high academic level. Extra time on tests — some students even get double time — seems unfair to me.”

But at Stanford, almost no one talks about the system with shame. Rather, we openly discuss, strategise and even joke about it. At a university of savvy optimisers, the feeling is that if you aren’t getting accommodations, you haven’t tried hard enough.

Another student told me that special “accommodations are so prevalent that they effectively only punish the honest”. Academic accommodations, they added, help “students get ahead … which puts a huge proportion of the class on an unfair playing ground”.

The gaming even extends to our meals. Stanford requires most undergraduates living on campus to purchase a meal plan, which costs $7,944 for the 2025-26 academic year. But students can get exempted if they claim a religious dietary restriction that the college kitchens cannot accommodate.

And so, some students I know claim to be devout members of the Jain faith, which rejects any food that may cause harm to all living creatures — including small insects and root vegetables. The students I know who claim to be Jain (but aren’t) spend their meal money at Whole Foods instead and enjoy freshly made salads and other yummy dishes, while the rest of us are stuck with college meals, like burgers made partly from “mushroom mix”.

Administrators seem powerless to reform the system and frankly don’t seem to care. How do you prove someone doesn’t have anxiety? How do you verify they don’t need extra time on a test? How do you challenge a religious dietary claim without risking a discrimination lawsuit?

I often think back to that conversation with my upperclassman friend. She wasn’t proud of gaming the system and she wasn’t ashamed either. She was simply rational. The university had created a set of incentives and she had simply responded to them.

That’s what strikes me most about the accommodation explosion at Stanford and similar schools. The students aren’t exactly cheating and if they are, can you blame them? Stanford has made gaming the system the logical choice. When accommodations mean the difference between a cramped triple and your own room, when extra test time can boost your grade point average, opting out feels like self-sabotage. Who would make their lives harder when the easiest option is just a 30-minute Zoom call away?

[ Via: https://archive.md/tml92 ]

––

This is the study Rob is referring to:

Abstract

We investigate the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue. In our first three studies, we show that the virtuous victim signal can facilitate nonreciprocal resource transfer from others to the signaler. Next, we develop and validate a victim signaling scale that we combine with an established measure of virtue signaling to operationalize the virtuous victim construct. We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits-Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy-more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies. In Study 5, we show that a specific dimension of Machiavellianism-amoral manipulation-and a form of narcissism that reflects a person's belief in their superior prosociality predict more frequent virtuous victim signaling. Studies 3, 4, and 6 test our hypothesis that the frequency of emitting virtuous victim signal predicts a person's willingness to engage in and endorse ethically questionable behaviors, such as lying to earn a bonus, intention to purchase counterfeit products and moral judgments of counterfeiters, and making exaggerated claims about being harmed in an organizational context. 

==

Abstract

We investigate the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue. In our first three studies, we show that the virtuous victim signal can facilitate nonreciprocal resource transfer from others to the signaler. Next, we develop and validate a victim signaling scale that we combine with an established measure of virtue signaling to operationalize the virtuous victim construct. We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits-Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy-more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies. In Study 5, we show that a specific dimension of Machiavellianism-amoral manipulation-and a form of narcissism that reflects a person's belief in their superior prosociality predict more frequent virtuous victim signaling. Studies 3, 4, and 6 test our hypothesis that the frequency of emitting virtuous victim signal predicts a person's willingness to engage in and endorse ethically questionable behaviors, such as lying to earn a bonus, intention to purchase counterfeit products and moral judgments of counterfeiters, and making exaggerated claims about being harmed in an organizational context.

==

Your virtues are qualities you demonstrate, not a victimhood identity you claim.

Abstract

By: Yascha Mounk

Published: Dec 21, 2024

After Donald Trump won reelection, scores of Americans once again failed to make good on their loudly shared and oft-repeated plan of moving to Canada; but a good number of them did partake in a different, rather less cumbersome, exodus. Complaining that Twitter had been unrecognizably transformed under the ownership of Elon Musk—whom they also blame for supporting Trump—hundreds of thousands of progressives decamped to Bluesky.

Widely touted as a “kinder, gentler” alternative to X, Bluesky aims to emulate the up-to-date news and specialized information-sharing in which Twitter has traditionally excelled. It also promises to cut all the toxicity. In the past weeks, the platform announced plans to quadruple the number of moderators it employs. "We’re trying to go above what the legal requirements are, because we decided that we wanted to be a safe and welcoming space,” Aaron Rodericks, the head of the Trust and Safety Team at Bluesky Social, vowed.

The platform has some features that really do put the user in charge in appealing ways. In traditional social media networks, the executives of profit-driven companies control the algorithm that governs the content which is presented to individual users. Especially on micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, this feature—since well before Musk turned it into X—meant privileging controversial posts that elicit angry debate over milder, more consensual ones. On Bluesky, each user can choose between a great variety of open-source algorithms, which theoretically makes it possible to curate a less rage-inducing experience.

When Bluesky launched, I hoped that it would succeed. But the platform has quickly shown that it is hard for any social network to deliver on its promise of being the place for a kinder or gentler discourse. At its best, Bluesky has become a giant progressive echo chamber, with Blue MAGA accounts freely sharing “misinformation” such as the notion that the vote count in the 2024 election was fraudulent because millions of Democratic votes inexplicably went missing. At its worst, it openly revels in violence—so long as that violence can make a claim, however tenuous, to defend or avenge righteous victims.

In accordance with the platform’s policy of moderating content much more aggressively than X has done under Musk, Bluesky’s moderators have been quick to act when users flout the site’s ideological consensus. In the last weeks, both small accounts with few followers and well-known writers with an established audience have seemingly been banned for such trivial “infractions” as suggesting that the Democratic Party leaving X would be a counterproductive form of “purity politics.” And yet, it was on Bluesky that prominent journalists—including, but not limited to, the infamous Taylor Lorenz—openly rejoiced in the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. As long as progressives perceive the victim of a crime to be morally evil, the moderators on Bluesky appear to believe that threatening violence against them is justifiable.

More recently, Bluesky users with major followings reveled in the prospect of violence against Jesse Singal, a center-left journalist who has ended up in progressive crosshairs because of his reporting about detransitioners and involvement in other heated debates regarding trans issues. Some consisted in crude death threats: “I think Jesse Singal should be beat to death in the streets,” one wrote. But a surprising number explicitly justified calls for violence as being necessary to defend themselves against the ways in which he supposedly put them at risk. “Jesse Singal and assorted grifters want us dead so i similarly want him dead,” another user wrote.1

Though they blatantly violated Bluesky’s restrictive community guidelines, the platform hardly took action against such accounts. It even failed to ban users who shared what they believed to be Singal’s private address or made especially graphic threats against him. Evidently, the people making decisions for the kinder, gentler platform don’t mind actual death threats—as long as they are directed against those who, in their judgment, have it coming to them.

What can possibly explain the descent of a platform populated by progressives who claim to abhor all forms of violence into an echo chamber that revels in violence against anyone who defies its taboos or threatens its ideological conformity?

Some of the dynamic likely has to do with the nature of social media in general, and of microblogging platforms like Twitter and Bluesky in particular. There is also an ideological element—a justification of violence has been interwoven with far-left ideology for well over a century. But as I puzzled over the strange transformation of Bluesky, I was also reminded of a series of interesting social science papers published over the course of the last years. They suggest that the tendency to justify violence by the need to help virtuous victims serves a strategic purpose that is less than benign—and may even have worrying psychological roots.

-

Traditionally, most people have wanted to avoid being seen as a victim.

In “honor” societies, like the aristocratic milieus of early modern Europe, the impression that you could not defend yourself spelled dishonor and invited further attacks. When someone failed to pay you the respect to which you believed to be entitled, you did not claim to be a victim; you challenged them to a duel.

The same aversion to casting yourself as a victim persisted even after feudalism gave way to capitalism, and aristocratic “honor cultures” transformed into bourgeois “dignity cultures.” For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, people who were maltreated in some way would insist that such forms of disrespect did not have the power to undermine the dignity we all have as humans. If the duel is the canonical encapsulation of honor culture, the canonical encapsulations of dignity culture are an adult’s determination to keep a “stiff upper lip” in the face of adversity or a child’s resolve that “sticks and stones may break my bones but words shall never hurt me.”

But as Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning have argued in The Rise of Victimhood Culture, we are now entering a new era. Dignity culture is waning rapidly. In its place, we are witnessing the rise of victimhood culture. This new dispensation “differs from both honor and dignity cultures in highlighting rather than downplaying the complainants’ victimhood.” Under these circumstances, people who portray themselves as victims enjoy an elevated moral status. And that, Campbell and Manning write in one of their papers, “only increases the incentive to publicize grievances, and it means aggrieved parties are especially likely to highlight their identity as victims, emphasizing their own suffering and innocence.” (Anyone who has spent time on social media—whether it be Bluesky or Instagram or TikTok—in the decade since Campbell and Manning first wrote that line can’t help but feel that it has proven to be prophetic.)

Ekin Ok and three co-authors from the University of British Columbia pick up on this thread in a 2021 paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Because of the spread of egalitarian values and the paramount importance they give to alleviating suffering, Ok et al argue, contemporary Western democracies have become highly responsive to people who are perceived as victims. Under these circumstances, making a claim to victim status may allow a great variety of people “to pursue an environmental resource extraction strategy that helps them survive, flourish, and achieve their goals.” As a result, “claiming one is a victim has become increasingly advantageous and even fashionable.”

But being a victim may not be enough. Even in contemporary Western societies, the perceived moral status of the victim is likely to influence how much assistance they will receive. As Ok et al demonstrate, for example, respondents are more likely to offer financial assistance to a man who gets shot while volunteering at a charity softball game than they are to a man who gets shot while patronizing a strip club. For “victim-signalling” to have the desired effect, it needs to be accompanied by “virtue-signalling.”

Some people, of course, really are “virtuous victims.” They have suffered genuine injustice. But since managing to establish your status as a virtuous victim is potentially lucrative, it also stands to reason that others will falsely claim to fall into this category. As Ok et al write, some people “intentionally and repeatedly convey their victim status as a manipulative strategy with the explicit aim of altering the behavior of receivers to the signaler’s advantage.”

The authors of the study even have a hypothesis about who is most likely to do that. People with Dark Triad traits such as narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, they argue, are especially likely to engage in “self-promotion, emotional callousness, duplicity and [a] tendency to take advantage of others.” Narcissists seek the limelight. Machiavellians are obsessed with gaining and exercising power over others. Psychopaths don’t care about social norms and disregard others’ emotions. People with all three traits are thus likely to be hugely overrepresented in the “subset of the population both adept at and comfortable with using deception and manipulation to attain personal goals.”

In a succession of clever tests, Ok et al provide plausible evidence that their theory is borne out by reality. Their first striking empirical finding is that people with dark personality traits are also more likely to falsely portray themselves as victims. In one of their studies, they ask you to imagine that you are an intern who is asked to work closely on a project with a peer who is competing for the same full-time job. The other intern is friendly to your face but you get a bad vibe from him. He doesn’t take your suggestions seriously, and you suspect that he may be talking badly about you behind your back. How do you respond?

That seems to depend on who you are. Asked to report on the behavior of the other intern, most participants in the experiment shared some negative opinions but refrained from making false or exaggerated statements. Respondents who had scored high on the dark personality triad, by contrast, were more likely to falsely report that the other intern had engaged in discriminatory behaviour such as making “demeaning or derogatory comments.”

The paper’s second striking empirical finding shows that the tendency of people with dark personality traits to falsely claim being a virtuous victim may also give them cover for engaging in bad behavior. In another experiment, they asked respondents to play a simple coin flip game, which was manipulated in such a way that its participants could easily use deception to increase their monetary payoff. It turns out that people who have portrayed themselves as virtuous victims were far more likely than their peers to lie and to cheat.

This helps to explain some of the features about Bluesky and other social media platforms that might otherwise feel puzzling. The kinds of claims to virtuous victimhood that are so common on that forum don’t just create cover for manipulative people to serve their own ends; they also seem to create license for disregarding moral norms—whether these consist in a prohibition of lying about others to ostracize them or (apparently) even calling for them to be killed.

-

When the study by Ok et al first came out, it made some minor waves. My fellow Substacker and recent podcast guest Rob Henderson argued that people with dark personality traits do what they can in any particular social environment to obtain benefits like prestige or material wealth. In current circumstances, he concluded, “those with dark triad traits might find that the best way to extract rewards is by making a public spectacle of their victimhood and virtue.” The psychologist and podcaster Scott Barry Kaufman put a similar conclusion even more starkly: “Some people,” he wrote, just “aren't good-faith actors in this ‘victimhood space.’”

At the time, I found the paper by Ok et al to be intriguing. And I knew that both Henderson and Kaufman usually have a good nose for bullshit. And yet, I have refrained from writing about its findings until now. After all, social psychology suffers from a serious replication crisis. Time and again, findings that are a little too neat or pleasing—from the idea that a child’s ability to resist the temptation of eating a marshmallow predicts later life outcomes to the promise that striking a “power pose” can set you up for success in a job interview—turned out to be dubious or outright false. And isn’t there something a little too neat about the idea that all of those people attesting to their superior virtue are secretly just narcissists and psychopaths trying to manipulate you?

It also seemed to me that a piece of the puzzle was still missing. Some of the people who target others on social media really do portray themselves as virtuous victims. They claim that they are part of the group which the victim of their attacks has supposedly targeted. And many of them clearly have self-serving goals, ranging from increasing their social clout to asking followers to donate cold, hard cash. But others who gang up on, or even threaten violence against, anybody who breaks perceived community norms don’t claim to be victims themselves; rather, they invoke the existence of supposed victims as an excuse to engage in cruel behavior. For all of its strength, there is something about the phenomenon I’ve been trying to make sense of that Ok’s paper can’t quite explain.

But then my research assistant sent me a new paper about the same subject. In a major effort, Timothy C. Bates and five of his colleagues at the University of Edinburgh set out to test whether the finding by Ok et al would replicate. Based on a larger dataset and employing alternative ways to measure key concepts like virtuous victim signalling, they came to an unambiguous conclusion: virtuous victim signalling really does seem to be driven by what they call “narcissistic Machiavellianism.”

More importantly, the paper by Bates et al also adds the missing piece of the puzzle. The “willingness to assert victimhood,” they hypothesize, may also “be amplified by the motive of sadistic pleasure in the downfall of weakened opponents.” In other words, the people who invoke the need to defend victims in order to justify treating others poorly don’t necessarily have a concrete strategic goal in mind; some of them do so because they are looking for a socially sanctioned outlet for their sadistic instincts. In those cases, the cruelty is the point.

To demonstrate that this is indeed the case, Bates et al use a standard battery of questions to measure respondents’ tendencies towards sadism, asking them such questions as whether they would be willing to purposely hurt people if they didn’t like them. They then test whether people with such sadistic tendencies are also more likely to score high on what they call the “victimizer scale,” which asks them to report on such questions as whether they have recently “enjoyed helping cancel someone;” whether they have “joined in on the persecution and condemnation of an individual or group accused of victimizing others;” and whether they have “sought to hurt the reputation of someone accused by others of victimizing.”

Two things are especially notable about this. First, not all sadists claimed that they themselves were virtuous victims. But second, the claim that they were acting on behalf of such victims—whether themselves or others—was the crucial fig leaf they needed to get away with their behavior. This finding, Bates et al argue, supports

the suggestion that sadism may be adapted to exploit strategic opportunities, specifically the legitimization of punishing and inflicting harm on individuals or groups which is created by successful virtuous victim signalling. If individuals high on Machiavellianism and narcissism exploit the resource-release response of nonvictims, sadism appears, as predicted, to exploit the opportunity created by victims in the form of the moral license granted by non-victims, legitimizing attacks on the victimizer by removing moral protection from those accused.

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Many people really do suffer genuine injustices. It is on the whole a good thing that contemporary societies are much more likely to give people who claim to have suffered undeserved misfortune a respectful hearing than they might have gotten in the past. While trying to keep a “stiff upper lip” may have its uses, we certainly wouldn’t want people to fear advocating for a more just society, or coming forward about ways in which they have been maltreated, because doing so might undermine their dignity or bring shame upon them.

But to be sensible and sustainable, every social dispensation—whether it consists in an explicit set of rules or an implicit set of norms—must protect itself against bad actors. When a platform or political subculture allows anyone to portray themselves as victims without any real evidence, bad actors will recognize an opportunity to swoop in. And then these bad actors will quickly weaponize false claims to victimization as an excuse to harass or physically threaten people who supposedly have it coming to them. In a culture of victimhood that has no inbuilt defenses against bad actors, things will—as the recent blowup on Bluesky reminds us—always eventually get out of hand.

Every community, however noble its stated intentions and however progressive its purported values, needs a mechanism for defending itself against the small minority of people who are prone to exploit and manipulate their social environment. If yours doesn’t have one, it’s inviting the sadists, the narcissists and the psychopaths to run the show.

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1 Like many of the things that are said or written about Singal, this claim of course lacks any basis in objective reality.

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When victimhood is currency, expect counterfeiters.

‘Luxury Beliefs’ That Only the Privileged Can Afford

By: Rob Henderson

Published: Feb 9, 2024

In the same way that you don’t notice the specifics of your own culture until you travel elsewhere, you don’t really notice your social class until you enter another one. As an undergraduate at Yale a decade ago, I came to see that my peers had experienced a totally different social reality than me. I had grown up poor, a biracial product of family dysfunction, foster care and military service. Suddenly ensconced in affluence at an elite university—more Yale students come from families in the top 1% of income than from the bottom 60%—I found myself thinking a lot about class divides and social hierarchies.

I’d thought that by entering a place like Yale, we were being given a privilege as well as a duty to improve the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves. Instead, I often found among my fellow students what I call “luxury beliefs”—ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class but often inflict real costs on the lower classes. For example, a classmate told me “monogamy is kind of outdated” and not good for society. I asked her what her background was and if she planned to marry. She said she came from an affluent, stable, two-parent home—just like most of our classmates. She added that, yes, she personally planned to have a monogamous marriage, but quickly insisted that traditional families are old-fashioned and that society should “evolve” beyond them.

My classmate’s promotion of one ideal (“monogamy is outdated”) while living by another (“I plan to get married”) was echoed by other students in different ways. Some would, for instance, tell me about the admiration they had for the military, or how trade schools were just as respectable as college, or how college was not necessary to be successful. But when I asked them if they would encourage their own children to enlist or become a plumber or an electrician rather than apply to college, they would demur or change the subject.

In the past, people displayed their membership in the upper class with their material accouterments. As the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen famously observed in his 1899 book “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” status symbols must be difficult to obtain and costly to purchase. In Veblen’s day, people exhibited their status with delicate and restrictive clothing, such as top hats and evening gowns, or by partaking in time-consuming activities, such as golf or beagling. The value of these goods and activities, argued Veblen, was in the very fact that they were so pricey and wasteful that only the wealthy could afford them.

Today, when luxury goods are more accessible to ordinary people than ever before, the elite need other ways to broadcast their social position. This helps explain why so many are now decoupling class from material goods and attaching it to beliefs.

Take vocabulary. Your typical working-class American could not tell you what “heteronormative” or “cisgender” means. When someone uses the phrase “cultural appropriation,” what they are really saying is, “I was educated at a top college.” Only the affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary. Ordinary people have real problems to worry about.

When my classmates at Yale talked about abolishing the police or decriminalizing drugs, they seemed unaware of the attending costs because they were largely insulated from them. Reflecting on my own experiences with alcohol, if drugs had been legal and easily accessible when I was 15, you wouldn’t be reading this. My birth mother succumbed to drug addiction soon after I was born. I haven’t seen her since I was a child. All my foster siblings’ parents were addicts or had a mental health condition, often triggered by drug use.

A well-heeled student at an elite university can experiment with cocaine and will probably be just fine. A kid from a dysfunctional home with absentee parents is more likely to ride that first hit of meth to self-destruction. This may explain why a 2019 survey conducted by the Cato Institute found that more than 60% of Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree were in favor of legalizing drugs, while less than half of Americans without a college degree thought it was a good idea. Drugs may be a recreational pastime for the rich, but for the poor they are often a gateway to further pain.

Similarly, a 2020 Yahoo News/YouGov survey found that the richest Americans showed the strongest support for defunding the police, while the poorest Americans reported the lowest support. Consider that compared with Americans who earn more than $50,000 a year, the poorest Americans are three times more likely to be victims of robbery, aggravated assault and sexual assault, according to federal statistics. Yet it’s affluent people who are calling to abolish law enforcement. Perhaps the luxury belief class is simply ignorant of the realities of crime.

Most personal to me is the luxury belief that family is unimportant or that children are equally likely to thrive in all family structures. In 1960, the percentage of American children living with both biological parents was identical for affluent and working-class families—95%. By 2005, 85% of affluent families were still intact, but for working-class families the figure had plummeted to 30%. As the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam stated at a 2017 Senate hearing: “Rich kids and poor kids now grow up in separate Americas.”

In 2006, more than half of American adults without a college degree believed it was “very important” that couples with children should be married, according to Gallup. Fast-forward to 2020, and this number had plummeted to 31%. Among college graduates polled by Gallup, only 25% thought couples should be married before having kids. Their actions, though, contradict their luxury beliefs: Most American college graduates who have children are married. Despite their behavior, affluent people are the most likely to say marriage is unimportant. Their message has spread.

I noticed that many Yale students selectively concealed their opinions or facts about their lives. More than one quietly confessed to me that they were pretending to be poorer than they really were, because they didn’t want the stigma of being thought rich. Why would this stigma exist at a rich university full of rich students? It’s a class thing. For the upper class, indicating your social position by speaking about money is vulgar. Sharing your educational credentials is a classier shorthand, but broadcasting your seemingly altruistic and socially conscientious luxury beliefs is the best of all.

It is harder for wealthy people to claim the mantle of victimhood, which, among the affluent, is often a key ingredient of righteousness. Researchers at Harvard Business School and Northwestern University recently found evidence of a “virtuous victim” effect, in which victims are seen as more moral than nonvictims who behave in exactly the same way: If people think you have suffered, they will be more likely to excuse your behavior. Perhaps this is why prestigious universities encourage students to nurture their grievances. The peculiar effect is that many of the most advantaged people are the most adept at conveying their disadvantages.

Occasionally, I raised these critiques with fellow students or graduates of elite colleges. Sometimes they would reply by asking, “Well, aren’t you part of this group now?” implying that my appraisals were hollow because I moved within the same milieu. But they wouldn’t have listened to me back when I was a lowly enlisted man in the military or when I was washing dishes for minimum wage. If you ridicule the upper class as an outsider, they’ll ignore you. The requirements for the upper class to take you seriously—credentials, wealth, power—are also the grounds to brand you a hypocrite for daring to judge.

But negative social judgments often serve as guardrails to deter detrimental decisions that lead to unhappiness. To avoid misery, I believe we have to admit that certain actions and choices, including single parenthood, substance abuse and crime, are actually in and of themselves undesirable and not simply in need of normalization. Indeed, it’s cruel to validate decisions that inflict harm. And it’s a true luxury to be ignorant of these consequences.

Rob Henderson is the author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class,” which will be published on Feb. 20 by Gallery Books.