Virtuous Victimhood

Notes

Adam Grant @AdamMGrant

Constantly claiming to be a victim is not a sign of virtue. It's a strategy for narcissists and psychopaths to get ahead. Data: people who regularly signal victimhood are more willing to lie, cheat, and steal. Beware those who air personal grievances like every day is Festivus.

"Dark" Personalities Are More Likely to Signal Victimhood

Research suggests a link between dark triad traits and victim signaling.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/202008/dark-personalities-are-more-likely-signal-victimhood

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.

Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities

https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/personality/2020-ok.pdf

• Being a victim can be a highly aversive experience resulting in serious outcomes like posttraumatic stress disorder (Boudreaux, Kilpatrick, Resnick,

  Best, & Saunders, 1998), psychological distress, fear, and anxiety (Barling, 1996; Janoff-Bulman & Frieze, 1983), loss of esteem, heightened perceptions of vulnerability and diminished sense of power (Janoff-Bulman, 1979; Kachanoff, Taylor, Caouette, Khul￾lar, & Wohl, 2019; Perloff, 1983), and an invalidation of one’s sense of security, trust, and optimism (Fohring, 2018; Janoff￾Bulman, 1992)

• Claiming one is a victim has become increasingly advantageous

  and even fashionable (Cole, 2007; Sullivan, Landau, Branscombe,

  & Rothschild, 2012)

• What might explain why people would be willing to publicly

  claim victimhood and seek to be labeled by others as victims? One

  possibility is that sharing their experience helps them cope with the

  negative consequences of victimization and take proactive steps

  toward psychological healing

• Resource extraction - resources are transferred from either individuals or larger institutions (e.g., the state, organization) to the person who signals victimhood.

• Contemporary Western democracies have become particularly hospitable environments for victim signalers to execute a strategy of nonreciprocal resource extraction because several features of these societies make victimhood potentially advantageous

• Victim signaling is maximally effective at initiating resource transfers when it is coupled with virtue signaling, defined as symbolic demonstrations that can lead observers to make favorable inferences about the signaler’s moral character

• Presentation of a dual signal of virtuous victimhood can induce those who perceive the signal to offer more social and economic resources to the signaler than the presentation of only one of the signals

• People willing and able to use deception and manipulation for attaining personal goals—people possessing “Dark Triad” traits (Paulhus & Williams,

  2002)—will more frequently emit virtuous victim signals compared with people lacking Dark Triad traits