What Is The Dark Triad? The dark triad is made up of narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism. The triad is not a grouping of personality disorders, as is mistakenly assumed. It is simply a trait grouping. This trait grouping does porportedly have a relationship with antagonism, coming from the big 5 personality trait of disagreeableness (low … Read more
Psychology Of Guilt Trips And Shaming Others Guilt and shame are different things. Shame is more focused on a deeply held belief that we aren’t worthwhile or valuable as a person. Guilt on the other hand is focused more on a specific situation. It is a feeling we get when we go against something we … Read more
Being able to discredit someone is useful even if you aren’t an attorney. You might need to discredit a lie or false story they are telling. You might need to discredit bad evidence that makes people think a certain courses of action is right at work. Maybe you want to prove that someone is lying … Read more
What Is Brainwashing? Brainwashing is a manipulative set of action that seek to control the brain. The goal is typically to reduce independent, rational, and selfish thought, and instead to introduce new ideas that are beneficial to another party. Brainwashing techniques are best seen as a subset of manipulation. Brainwashing seems similar to persuasion but … Read more
What Are The Characteristics Of An Intimidating Person? Intimidation comes both from beliefs wired into us by evolution as well as beliefs that we create because of social experiences. Physical elements of intimidation often stem from beliefs wired into use by biology. For example, studies have shown that increasing various elements of size in a … Read more
What Are Compliance And Conformity? Compliance refers to a specific type of response to a request, namely submission. It is broken down in to compliance, in which people change how they act but not how they believe, identification, in which people change their public behavior and beliefs but not when they aren’t around the group, … Read more
Body language analysis, sometimes called Synergology, is a popular way to learn more about what is going on inside a person’s head. It is a proclaimed “scientific discipline for reading body language.” TSA and FBI agents, negotiation experts, and YouTubers all proclaim that they can decipher people reliably using a set of tells to answer … Read more
Why Do People Join Cults? There are three models that seek to explain why people join cults. First is the Deliberative Model which says people join cults because of what they think about the group. Under this model individuals join because they agree with the group’s theories and ideas. Second is the Psychodynamic Model which … Read more
Our goal here is to categorize insults for each feature a person could have, as well as generic insults for any situation. If you want to get better at insults, check out our post on the psychology of insults to understand the important difference between insults that hurt and those that don’t. Keep in mind … Read more
The Psychology Of Dominance Dominance hierarchies are formed by all primates and some other animals. A hierarchy is a way of ordering or grouping people in order to minimize the harsh effects of intense conflict. Higher up on the hierarchy the more you have access to resources and the more you can control or influence … Read more