Your Dark Personality and Your Career

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1:00We're here because your heightened awareness deserves heightened entertainment. The last show with David Cooper. When people choose a career, is it about their passion, skills, maybe money, or maybe some advice a guidance counselor gave them? Well, new research suggests something darker might be steering your ship. Your personality's darker side might inform how you choose a job. Let's talk about it with someone who's researched just this. She is a psychologist and researcher at Oom University in Germany, and her name is Leah. DSL, Leah. Welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks, David. We're having me today. Before we talk about dark personality traits influencing your job decision in life, what are some of the dark sides of people's personality? How would we categorize that? Yes. I think personality itself is a term that everyone kind of knows. And it's sort of like how you would describe people. So in general, when we think of personality, I think we think of not necessarily the dark

2:03side, but rather the light side, like someone's very outgoing, very extroverted, or very open to other people. And when we talk about the dark side, we talk about more like manipulating others, disregarding others' interests, exploiting them, cheating on them, these kind of things. In research, we actually had for the past couple of years something called the dark triad, which are three big dark personality traits, and they are psychopathy, narcissism and machiavellianism, or subclinical. So please don't think of like psychopaths who are in jail because they did some crimes or anything, but rather just general tendencies that honestly everyone of us has, at least a little bit. And in my research or my colleagues' research, we don't actually use the dark triad, but more of the dark core of personality.

3:05That sounds like something out of Star Trek. What does that mean, the dark core of personality? Yes. So when you look at the dark traits I just described, they all correlate very highly, which means that if you score high on one trait, you also typically score high on another trait. Because this led us to the idea that there is some sort of like common core, common underlying construct there that influences all of these traits. And this is what my professor and his colleagues then called the de-factor. So just to this common underlying, yeah, disposition that makes people evil. All right. And so this curiosity that this dark factor or de-factor can draw you to a certain type of job, I've heard in like therapy this concept of sublimation, I don't want to get too much in the weeds here. But it's like, okay, the kid who's the bully and very violent maybe grows up and becomes

4:05a boxer or maybe the kid who gets no attention from his parents grows up and becomes a radio host. I'm just talking someone who isn't me. Is it kind of like that like these negative traits can then inform the job that you choose as an adult or as the mechanism a little different here? So I'm not 100% fully sure of what the mechanism is and honestly, I don't think anyone is. And just because job choices depend on a lot of things. So of course you have sort of a personality like if you're outgoing or you're very social or you're not social at all because you score higher on the dark traits and then there's also of course interests and they usually correlate or you know, a linked together. And this then sort of would of course also what opportunities you have then decides on your job choice or maybe in what's like way or direction you're in yourself. So let's get to the results.

5:05If someone is high in this dark factor of personality, what types of jobs might they be drawn to? And so actually what we found is they're not drawn to any particular jobs, but rather we found what they're not drawn to, which is maybe also interesting. Yeah. And there you have social jobs and that was across all our samples and we had six samples in total, like the most robust result we found. So we had three samples from Germany to from mainly the US and one from Denmark. And we found that these people, let's go higher on the dark traits, we're not interested in social jobs and also actually didn't work in social jobs. To me that sounds like a good thing. When you say social jobs, I'm thinking things like teachers or therapists or nurses. I wouldn't want to be in the hospital with a nurse, you know, needing help from them. And then they've got these dark factors in their personality.

6:05Maybe this is a good thing because these roles do require empathy, don't they? Yes, of course. And it was also something we actually expected to see because if you're more like concerned about yourself and your own personal gains, you're not going to help other people. So it's not surprising that they don't work in these occupations. And yeah, I think it's also not so nice as you said to have someone who should help you who is more focused on their own gains. Now what about artistic careers? Because you would think people who are high in like narcissism and stuff would be drawn to artistic careers. Is that something that you found or was artistic careers another bucket where there was less people with this dark factor? It was actually also our last people in those jobs. And they're also very interested in these jobs. And we actually didn't have any expectation on this relationship because just from theory

7:06we didn't know what to expect. And what we think could be an explanation for why they're not interested in these jobs and also don't work there is that artistic careers are also often a bit unstable. I would say or it's like unsure if you make a big and make big money and all of that and I can tell you it's a struggle. Yeah, right. And this is but money and like status is something that people high on the dark traits want. Yeah. I feel like to be a musician or something you need to be you need to love the craft because you're probably not going to be a rock star. You're probably just going to be a working musician with an unstable career. That's the average path for an artist. Yeah, right. But if you're like also very focused on making it big, then like it's kind of hard. You know what I mean? Yeah. To like do this in that career. Now were there any other findings about people's kind of negative personality traits that inform their careers that surprised you? Well, we thought that in very high on the dark traits would be interested in like manager

8:09jobs, leadership roles, that kind of stuff. And what was a bit surprising is we actually found that in our German samples, but not in the other samples. So there is sort of a difference between Germany, the US and also Denmark, because Denmark was where we looked at the actual jobs of people and not just the interest that we didn't find any relationship there. And at the moment, we don't really know why could be something to look at in a future study. Is there something that like high school guidance counselors or like career coaches at universities can take away from your study to help like figure out what's a good career path for kids or what's a bad career path for a certain young person? Yeah. So what I would say is of course, if you maybe assess personality in general and interest during career guidance, then you could also assess the course, but it shouldn't be the only deciding factor. It can just be like if someone's like maybe interested in social careers, but also,

9:11but also scores high on D, then maybe get them away from it. I don't know, or at least bring it up to talk about, but I don't think you should be just like, okay, that's your personality type. So choose this career over that because there's a lot of influences that are also a play here of the dark triad of personality traits. Narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Which one's your favorite? Mine's got to be Machiavellianism. I actually don't have a favorite. Fair enough. Because, to be honest, I usually look at just the dark core and not the single traits. Cool. Well, thanks so much for being on the show. Leah, I appreciate you sharing your research with me. It's been a joy chatting with you. Yeah. Thank you. Leah D. Hessell is a psychologist and researcher at Oom University in Germany. Monster Energy.

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