Subclinical Primary Psychopathy, but Not Physical Formidability or Attractiveness, Predicts Conversational Dominance in a Zero-Acquaintance Situation

Abstract

The determinants of conversational dominance are not well understood. We used videotaped triadic interactions among unacquainted same-sex American college students to test predictions drawn from the theoretical distinction between dominance and prestige as modes of human status competition. Specifically, we investigated the effects of physical formidability, facial attractiveness, social status, and self-reported subclinical psychopathy on quantitative (proportion of words produced), participatory (interruptions produced and sustained), and sequential (topic control) dominance. No measure of physical formidability or attractiveness was associated with any form of conversational dominance, suggesting that the characteristics of our study population or experimental frame may have moderated their role in dominance dynamics. Primary psychopathy was positively associated with quantitative dominance and (marginally) overall triad talkativeness, and negatively associated (in men) with affect word use, whereas secondary psychopathy was unrelated to conversational dominance. The two psychopathy factors had significant opposing effects on quantitative dominance in a multivariate model. These latter findings suggest that glibness in primary psychopathy may function to elicit exploitable information from others in a relationally mobile society.

Malicious mouths? The Dark Triad and motivations for gossip

“…Previous research has suggested that psychopathy and narcissism (but not Machiavellianism) are associated with strive for dominance (Rauthmann & Kolar, 2013), which could be a reason why these traits linked with gossip (McAndrew et al, 2007). Interestingly, a recent study found that individuals high in primary psychopathy had high levels of conversational dominance (i.e., greater number of words during a conversation; Manson, Gervais, Fessler, & Kline, 2014). It is possible that having multiple conversation topics facilitates the agentic, competitive inter-personal orientation typical to individuals high in psychopathy and narcissism (Rauthmann & Kolar, 2013), explaining why these traits were associated with more diverse gossip motivations.…”

On the dynamics of social hierarchy: A longitudinal investigation of the rise and fall of prestige, dominance, and social rank in naturalistic task groups

“…Those high in dominance are also likely to cue social formidability and are more inclined to speak and attempt to forcefully direct group-related tasks. For example, dominant individuals are prone to deepen their voice during initial interaction, speak with force and subtly tease or ostracize others to produce fear (Bendersky & Hays, 2011;Brass & Burkhardt, 1993;Case & Maner, 2014;Cheng, Tracy, Ho, & Henrich, 2016;Keltner, Young, Heerey, Oemig, & Monarch, 1998;Manson, Gervais, Fessler, & Kline, 2014). Through these behaviors, the individuals who become more conversationally domineering and interrupt during task-related conversations are perceived higher in dominance and, in turn, higher in social rank in groups of unacquainted individuals (Cheng, Tracy, Foulsham, Kingstone, & Henrich, 2013;Farley, 2008).…”

General trust impedes perception of self-reported primary psychopathy in thin slices of social interaction

“…Because shallow emotions comprise one aspect of psychopathy [ 1 , 2 ], it is possible that individuals high in psychopathic traits do not provide enough behavioral material to give highly empathetic individuals an advantage in judging their psychopathy levels based on thin slices. As tentative support for this speculation, among our target individuals, analysis using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count application [ 59 ] showed that F1 LSRP was negatively associated with the use of affect words, after controlling for sex [ 34 ]. Perhaps the negative effect of EQ on judgment accuracy in the silent video condition occurred because of the condition’s induced focus on non-verbal emotional cues.…”

“…Second, our theoretical framework relied on the distinction between psychopathy’s underlying propensity toward exploitative behavior and its superficial “mask of sanity” [ 1 ], but the LSRP-LORP, unlike the Psychopathic Personality Inventory [ 61 ], does not distinguish between these sub-traits. However, target individuals higher in LSRP F1 tended to dominate triadic conversations [ 34 ], suggesting that LSRP F1 captures some of the same variation captured by the PPI’s Fearless Dominance scale, which is hypothesized to represent the “mask” ([ 62 ] but see [ 63 ]). Third, we did not collect information on judges’ ages or ethnicities, limiting our ability to test adaptive error management hypotheses of psychopathy detection, particularly in view of our findings regarding the effects of targets’ ethnicity.…”

“…We also included a video condition in which targets’ speech was low-pass filtered, which eliminates linguistic content by removing all frequencies above a specified cut-off point while retaining prosodic characteristics, including pitch, loudness, and speech rate dynamics. In the zero-acquaintance triadic conversations from which we drew our video stimulus materials (see Methods ), self-reported primary psychopathy (but not secondary psychopathy) was positively correlated with the proportion of a triad’s words uttered [ 34 ]. The low-pass filtered video condition afforded the opportunity to test whether conversational dominance per se, irrespective of speech content, influenced judges’ assessments of targets’ psychopathy levels.…”