As a side note, the study don't take bisexual or trans folks into account.
And anyway, why Batman and Superman?? To be frank, both dudes seem deeply unattractive as they enforce their own laws with brutality. One is dressed like a bat, the other one with national colours. Honestly both are good for the tinfoil hats lol.
But more seriously, there is a lot of psychoanalytic lingo when it comes to narcissism and borderline, that isn't the same as the clinical one. With people like Otto Kernberg. I did read Kernberg because D (my ex who had borderline) was trying to make sense of himself reading that guy and he got super aggravated by it. So I did read it too and I found it was full of sweeping, heteronormative statements about couples, attachment and childhood. The idea that you reproduce the model you had with the parent of the opposite sex, with series of case studies with people who seem quite dissociated and in terrible situations. His presentations were long, confusing and, to my experience, of little therapeutic use. At best, it's a bunch of theories with little rooting in cognitive reality. At worst, it's an avenue to guilt tripping and finding you're incomplete as an adult because you can't fill the heteronormative frame (both of us are bisexual by the way, so we didn't have a chance to begin with) of a couple, and anything that doesn't fill that dyadic frame is deemed as being some kind of developmental retardation or childish behaviour. I tend to find that for us faced with real traumatic challenges, some of us being cluster b of lining around it, starting to dive in The Past big P and creating a mythology is
exactly what can result in a sense of aggravated victimhood, obsession and resentment. Past the knowledge to know okay, this happened to me and it was this and that and not my fault, you don't need to dive into the details and think you reproduce stuff your parents or caretakers or whatever was next to you, did. Sometimes you do, but what I find is that we reproduce sort of "inverse prints" of what they were, in a complementary way of what we experienced. And trying to force that into a psychoanalytic narrative, I don't think it makes much sense, at least for me. And also, I really have the impression that "the narcissist" isn't the same as "someone with NPD". The former being less aggravated than the latter. But I don't know if we're going anywhere by giving these labels outside of a clinical frame. For us, it's the behaviour that was harmful, not the way they understood things for themselves.
I know I might pass for a horrible behaviourist. But I really think it's about that, habits and mechanisms and parts of yourself that aren't necessarily very well jointed. And I don't believe
full integration is necessary neither. We can have a
degree of contradiction and cognitive or emotional dissonance. And you can suffer big time and still be okay and caring with other people. Being self centered can be annoying but it's not necessarily harmful. I do distinguish hurtful from harmful. My self centeredness has been hurtful many times. But harmful? No. I think this is important to be able to see of ourselves. And that in the case we've been harmful, then correct from there.
And as
@Movingforward10 said, if it's helping you, that's fine. But I think we should take care into examining studies that are prejudiced, even if you're not the object of the prejudice. Because many assumptions about gender and dynamics will be distorted for heterosexual perspectives too. Like a self reinforced myth. In fact, reality is much more fluid and strange than what is presented here.
But overall, I think that what is the worst in this study is the repeated assertion that "our Western society" is sensitive to virtue signalling. They don't say anything about non Western places, letting think that it might not be the case there. But also, the article suggests that this sensitivity might be something bad, a kind of perversion of our own values. Which I find incorrect, and very dangerous. Rape victims still are ashamed, domestic violence and incest victims still are massively dismissed, the legal frame to prevent and repress this is incredibly badly equipped, and people still don't get that the statistics of abuse, rape, incest and sex trafficking leave you dizzy and don't match current social mythology where it's rare. Victims still mostly are blamed, even when they went to court and won their case.
And also the article manages to go even further in that deformation and sweeping statement, more than the original study. Which I find is a dangerous interpretation to make the findings more sensational than they are, and presenting it as hard science while the sample they picked is frankly bad. MTurk really shouldn't be used for anything of that, the structure itself already is totally unethical and exploitative, it's a horrible place to be and work.
And I really find that there is a sweep towards invalidating movements such as metoo and the general voicing up that people have been doing about abuse since recently. Like, true victims don't signal. And the virtue is to shut the f*ck up. This is what the article seems to conclude between the lines and this is what really annoys me, on the top of the study and the article playing with concepts as vague and judging as "dark triad".
