AI, Narcissism: Crowdsourcing? (With Erica Hagen)

I think there is definitely a giant push with data.

And so understanding and trying as individuals we do the best that we can to minimize sending out personal data and all of that because it can be a very powerful tool.

In weapon, if we want to go that far, because I don't want to diminish what you're saying because everything that you're saying is true, the fact that at the end of the day, it has the potential to manipulate images. It can tell stories. It can tell a whole pictures that may not exist.

And so it is in the wild. It is one of those things where we can't, you know, basically get the cat back in the bag.

The question becomes, it's there. Is there a way to utilize it for the betterment of humanity?

And that was one of the things that I've been pondering tremendously because I noticed a potential with at least sentiment analysis.

I noticed a challenge when you had individuals that struggled, whether they were in trauma bonds or in struggling in situations in which they were unable to break free of the love or the situation or they were forced to communicate with someone that's potentially toxic.

And is there a way to utilize, like from a communication standpoint, you know, you recommend no contact. Best, easiest way to deal with that toxic person because at the end of the day, you're going to get manipulated. You're forced to communicate with them. How can you do it?

So I was trying to solve that with creating a application that would do sentiment analysis that would help educate people on the process with Grey Rock methodology to basically shut down future communication to stop basically the snowball effect where it will just turn into a giant avalanche where the conversation, everything kind of goes sideways.

And so AI, unfortunately, or fortunately, however you look at it, is here. Are there intelligent ways to apply this that can potentially help people?

And at the end of the day, that's how I'm trying to utilize it for the betterment of humanity.

As we said, AI would be good at analyzing especially linguistic patterns.

And it is through language that we can detect narcissists and psychopaths with high reliability and high validity very early on.

And so AI could provide alerts or be a kind of sensor, which would inform you early on that you're faced with a narcissist or a psychopath and could give you then full information.

What is a narcissist? Narcissistic behaviors, signs to look for, counter behaviors, your reactions, how to tailor the relationship or how to avoid the relationship altogether and so on so forth.

So AI can do both.

It could detect the person facing you early on and then you can provide you with all the information you need including tips and advice and tailor or customize your behavior according to the specific circumstances that you describe and so and so forth.

In short, it could be a kind of guide by your side. It could be.

So I guess the question I have for you is, in general, how do you view toxic, manipulative individuals? How do they respond to the gray rock method and basically being shut down in general communication?

Well, it depends.

Narcissists would usually lose interest.

If you demonstrate your lack of potential as a source of narcissistic supply, the narcissist walks away.

Narcissists are focused on one goal and one goal only, and that is to secure a regular, predictable, uninterrupted flow of attention that helps them to regulate their internal environment.

If there are disruptions in the flow of attention, regardless of the reason, by the way, doesn't have to be grey rock, if there are any disruptions in the flow of attention, they lose interest in the source of the supply.

So for example, if you are sick, if you happen to be sick, and because you're sick, you're unavailable, or you're in a hospital, and so therefore you cannot, so they would lose interest in you within days, even if you have spent 20 years together. They would lose interest in you.

Your utility, your value, rests exclusively on your ability to provide, not only supply, but also services, sex, and know, your very presence. I call these the four S's.

So if you provide two of the four S's, you're still valuable. If you provide three, you're very valuable. You provide four, you're a unicorn, you're amazing. But two would do, two are enough.

So any disruption and interruption to this flow render you useless. Immediately, immediately the narcissist devalues and discards you in his mind and moves on to the next potential source of supply. He starts to cultivate alternatives and so on.

So Grey Rock is a very powerful technique. Very powerful technique.

The problem is, of course, not so much in what to do once you have identified a narcissist. There are quite a few techniques. Grey Rock is only one of them. There is about eight techniques which are equally as powerful as Grey Rock.

But the problem is to identify a narcissist and to identify even more so to identify a psychopath.

Psychopaths act, they're great actors. And narcissists believe their own confabulations and fantasies and stories and promises.

So because narcissists believe what they're saying, it's very difficult to spot them. It appears to be real and genuine and authentic.

And because psychopaths are goal-oriented, highly manipulative, and very good at modifying other people's behaviors and expectations, psychopaths are also undetectable.

I think AI's main contribution would be detection, actually. Detection rather than, I mean, also maybe provide all kinds of techniques and so on, but the detection would be important.

Yeah, I think detection definitely has promise. I think we're some ways away from that without having true human insight and oversight into a lot of these things because you can even have true therapists that have been doing this for years get fooled.

So if we're going to have an unmitigated machine that's going to be looking at, you know, written communication as the only baseline to diagnose somebody, I think that becomes very dangerous and a slippery slope because, you know, you can look at all the studies where, you know, you drop people off at Stanford and then they get diagnosed with, you know, all kinds of diagnosis that didn't exist.

I think you alluded to it earlier. Like AI can be susceptible to biases. It can have hallucinations. It can. And that's why there needs to be responsible implementation of these technologies.

And so it's not a one-size-fits-all, and you can't just basically swing a hammer and say, we're going to solve everything with this.

But if we can start to take chunks of this, and I think through your decades of research, you're starting to piece together, like, techniques to understand help victims get to a place where they are able to identify, solve, and move forward from that.

And so if we can, I think, take little slivers of this and start to, you know, how do you eat an elephant?

It's one bite at a time.

If we can start to do that with just communication, I think there's tremendous potential, at least from an altruistic perspective, hopefully, in putting this technology to good use.

And so I guess the next question I have is, you know, in putting this technology to good use.

And so I guess the next question I have is, you know, you did mention, you know, using AI to identify these things, but then are individuals.

I don't know if we're quite there yet, but if we were to hypothesize if narcissists or these cluster B personalities have typical tracks or patterns in which they follow, is it possible we can start to identify where somebody is within the cycle? Like, are they going to be in the love bombing stage or are they in any other stage?

So I'd love your insights there.

The reason many diagnosticians and clinicians fail to properly identify narcissists and psychopaths is because they pay attention to too much information.

They pay attention to body language. They pay attention to words. They pay attention to expressions and micro-expressions. They pay attention to context. They pay attention to family members. They pay attention to the literature. They pay attention to videos by Sam Vaknin, maybe. And so on, that's too much information.

I think AI could be laser focused. And if I had to select a single thing which has excellent predictive value and high validity when it comes to diagnosing narcissists and psychopaths, it would be language.

I think we could pretty easily actually design a Turing test for psychopaths and narcissists, the same way there's a Turing test for computers.

Computers mislead you into believing that they're human beings by passing the Turing test. That's exactly what narcissists and psychopaths do. They mislead you into believing that they're human beings by imitating, emulating, pretending to be human beings.

But psychopaths and narcissists are not human beings because they miss critical modules. In the absence of these modules there's no humanity. When you miss when you don't have emotional affective empathy, when you don't have access to positive emotions like love, when you have no sense of self because the formation of yourself has been disrupted in early childhood, when you are callous and ruthless to the point that you objectify people, reduce them to props in your theater play, and so on and so forth, when you put all these together, what's left is not a human being. What's left is a great simulation of a human being.

And indeed, as you mentioned in our correspondence, there was this roboticist Masahiro Mori in Japan who suggested, appreciately, prophetically suggested in 1970 that the more computers, the more robots come to resemble human beings, the less comfortable we're going to feel around them.

This is known as the uncanny valley. That's what narcissists and psychopaths do. They imitate, they imitate, they simulate human beings, but they're not.

Now that's very helpful because the only way we judge the humanity or lack thereof of another person is via language. We rely on self-reporting.

I have no way to prove that you are a human being. No way whatsoever. I have to rely on your self-reporting. If you are telling me you have said, I have no machine or device or test or probe that can prove that you are said. I have to rely on your self-reporting. And either I trust you or not.

In other words, language is a great arbiter. Language is the infinite detector of internal states. It's a lie detector in many, many cases, because people lie, prevaricate, fantasize, their major disruptions to the communication of internal states.

But it's still the only tool we have.

Now, AI is vastly superior to human beings in analyzing language and language patterns, vastly superior.

And this is where detection of narcissists and psychopaths could be raised up to the next level.

Because psychologists and psychiatrists and other types of clinicians, they are not good at analyzing language.

And the reason they are not good at analyzing language is that language triggers in them associations.

When I talk to you and I would say the word mother, that's not an objective, neutral word. The minute I say mother, it triggers in you, memories, emotions, pain, love, I don't know what.

And this is noise. It obscures the signal.

This will never happen with an AI program. If I tell the AI program mother, that's it. There's lexical meaning. There's interconnectivity with other things, but it's all the time objective and neutral.

So there's not the level of noise in AI is much lower when it comes to verbal communication. Level of noise in AI is much lower than in human beings.

Therefore, AI would be better, in my view, at spotting narcissists and psychopaths.

So then you're saying we're clinicians and people that are diagnosing are getting too much data.

So you're saying we need to simplify it.

Not only too much data, but the data triggers noise. Triggers emotions, triggers memories, triggers, you know, they're not good machines. Clinicians are not good machines.

So then as a follow-up, then how can you differentiate if we're going to use psychopaths, someone that would actually manipulate for their own use versus confabulation, where you'd have a narcissist create and fill in all the gaps?

So that might be a challenge that machine or data scientists and actual programmers may have the challenge to understand, like, is this real? Is this lies or is this filling in the whole?

No, not really.

Because the conviction of the narcissist in the veracity of the fantasy or the confabulation shines through.

The narcissists, for example, is likely, much more likely to use words like believe, or I'm convinced, or true, or so it's likely to use words that uphold the truthfulness of what he's saying.

Whereas a psychopath is much more likely to use Machiavellian manipulative words, such as I would like you to or I want to.

So the psychopathy and the narcissism shine through the language.

I can read, which is the optimal way, I could read a text and tell you if this text has been written by a narcissist or a psychopath.

However, if I were to communicate with the narcissist or a psychopath face to face, even via Zoom, the noise would be much higher and I may get it wrong.

And what artificial intelligence does is, excuse me for a minute, the sound is ringing the bell.

What artificial intelligence does is it is exposed to the semiotiotics not always to the semantics and never to the noise.

If I tell artificial intelligence mother there's no memory, there's no association, there's no pain, there's no love, there's nothing. It's just mother.

That's a huge advantage. It's a huge advantage.

There is almost no other way to diagnose narcissists and psychopaths.

Clinicians rely on body language, for example.

But we know that the same body language is common to people with narcissistic style.

Clinicians rely on kind of displays of callousness and ruthlessness and one-track-mindedness as proof of psychopathy.

But that's not validated, that's not true. It's very common to, even to healthy people, under certain circumstances.

Only language exposes narcissists and psychopaths infallibly. Only language. And there, AI has advantage.

Okay.

So that's great to know. So I guess the question becomes then, is there, I understand you can have narcissistic tendencies and then you can have narcissistic actual diagnosis.

Okay.

So we need to distinguish the two.

Then we also need to look at the spectrum, if you want, of narcissism where you can have covert narcissism versus grandiose.

And so would you feel that there's going to be a difference between having, you know, the different types or flavors or however you want to describe it because the mechanisms, you know, the core wound is the same, but they're going to present differently.

Yes, of course they're going to present different. Yes, of course they're going to present different.

Essentially, you're talking about rendering AI a kind of personal therapist. The therapist constantly at your fingertips, available to you.

So what does the therapist do? Therapist's diagnosis, then therapists provide you with insights, especially insights about yourself, and then a therapist provides you with good techniques and tips and advice on how to behave in order to minimize harm and maximize utility. That's what good therapists do.

Artificial intelligence is capable of doing all three, given sufficient constraints and rigid control and so on. It is capable of doing all three with a pronounced advantage in the diagnosing stage because of its relationship with language, which clinicians don't have.

Clinicians may be better in the tips and advice phase, because clinicians can empathize, clinicians can understand clinicians. Clinicians are human.

So this gives an advantage when it comes to interacting with victims and telling them how to, for example, recover or how to modify behaviors in order to avoid similar situations in the future. And so on.

So there are clinicians with the advantage.

And I think the best solution is a combination of clinician and AI.

In other words, AI used by a clinician to interact with clients and patients and so on. AI as a tool, as an instrument at the disposal of a clinician.

Yes, each type of narcissism presents differently, but again, like everything else in human life, they're all mediated via language.

So, for example, the covert narcissist is likely to be passive aggressive. Passive aggression is usually mediated via language or via actions that are kind of sabotaging, intended to sabotage something, undermine something.

The overt narcissist, the grandiose narcissist is likely to be in your face, much more open about his beliefs, about himself, that he's, you know, perfect and omniscient and omnipotent and so on.

And all this can be reduced to a set of algorithms and analytic models that would spot the types pretty safely with a very high validity.

That's what we're trying to accomplish with psychological tests, essentially. And we keep failing.

The psychological tests rely on the goodwill of the participants.

If you refuse to, for example, if you refuse to respond honestly to a psychological test such as the narcissistic personality inventory or the PCLR, then they're useless. They rely critically on honest self-reporting.

So they don't analyze language. They analyze content.

And that's a common mistake, by the way. There's a common confusion or conflation of content and language.

Content isnot language. Content is message. Content is signal. But it's not language. While AI is focused on language, clinicians are focused on message or content. And narcissists and psychopaths are brilliant at manipulating messaging, manipulating messages and signals. But even they cannot overcome the inherent limitations and structure of language. So I wouldn't be to worried about the various presentations of narcissism. They're all reducible to the same set of relatively primitive and well-defined criteria, which is behavioral, but mediated via language.

That makes a lot of sense. And so we really need to break it down to its root, you know, the root of what's being said. And that's exactly why I think AI is definitely has an advantage because it breaks it down to the root of all the words of the sentiment of understanding what is being said. And so if you were forced to communicate with somebody and you've suggested multiple times, you've got a personality disorder that's stunted in development between the age of three and 11. And we're going to say 11's very generous, but they are stunted emotionally. How can one communicate with somebody that is of that developmental, you know, stunted growth? Is it something that, you know, you and I can have a communication and we're aiming for the same goal and it's to understand each other's viewpoint and talk about this? What if it's different? What if it's, you know, manipulation or what if it's other things and you're forced to communicate with them. How does the fact that they present at such a young age change how you need to communicate with them?

Have you ever communicated with the child?

All the time.

That's it. That's the answer. Children are manipulative. Children are egocentric. Children are disulative. Children are egocentric. Children are dysempathic. They lack emotional enough. I mean, at a certain age, up to a certain age, they lack emotional and effective empathy. Children are narcissists. Even Freud recognize it. He said there's primary narcissism and secondary narcissism. Children and then later on in life, adolescents, especially early adolescents, they are narcissists.

And so everyone who is ever communicated with a child is perfectly equipped to communicate with a narcissism. The problem is that unconsciously we make the erroneous assumption that narcissists are adults. Even when narcissists attend therapy, the vast majority of clinicians treat them as if they were adults. They try to strike a therapeutic alliance with the narcissists. They try to negotiate with the narcissists. They try to compromise with the narcissists. They try to reason with the narcissists. They try to show, demonstrate to the narcissists. They're insides. They treat the narcissists as an adult. Narcissists are not adults. The overwhelming vast majority of narcissists are between the ages of two and three, mentally and psychologically speaking. So people say, but wait a minute, then how would they be capable to run a big company or even a country? You know, there's nothing to do with it. This is nothing to. Psychological mental age has nothing to do with your skills or capacity to, for example, have semantic memory, memory of processes. Narcissists are children who are in charge of countries. They are children who are in charge of corporations. They are children in show business. They are children in law enforcement, but they are mentally children.

When they are confronted with situations which do not involve emotions, they are perfectly capable. They have at their disposal, all the skills and the kind of memory, known as semantic memory, the kind of memory that is very good, you know, doing things, accomplishing things. But whenever they are confronted with emotion, stress, anxiety, tension, crisis, demands, criticism, disagreement. Whenever they're confronted with these situations, they regress instantly and become immediately children. They throw temper tantrums. They're incapable of predicting the consequences of their actions. They have no perception of time. They're utterly children.

So if you want to communicate with the narcissist efficaciously, simply wrap your mind around the realization that it's a child.

It's very difficult to do because they look to be, they look grown-ups, you know, that they are children in adult bodies.

We tend to confuse chronological age with mental age. And that's a mistake. And that is the source of the frustration and the hurt and the prolonged grief of victims.

Because they have made the assumption that they were dealing with adults, and then suddenly a child hurt them. And it's difficult to take.

Whenever victims attach to narcissists, they attach to the child. It's a maternal attachment. People of both genders, male or female. Even if you're a male and you see a baby, you smile and you're cool and you are protective of the baby, yeah? Even men become maternal when they're faced with the baby.

So the narcissist treated as in all of us maternal instincts. Then to let go of this child is difficult. It's always difficult to let go of a child.

And so maybe we lie to ourselves that this is not a child, this is an adult, in order to avoid the grief and the hurt and the pain later on.

But it's not working. It's not working because the narcissists triggers our inner child. It's a child to child interaction, basically. It's a playmate kind of thing. It's a very complex dynamic.

But to your question, the answer is simple beyond belief. Simply assume that it's a child and proceed accordingly. End of story. You don't need complicated books and therapy sessions and interviews. That's it.

I think you're absolutely right. And I think one of the biggest issues is you do have someone that is stuck in grief.

So if someone has gotten to the point where they recognize that this is a toxic situation or a relationship and they're dealing with the cognitive dissidents where they can recognize, I love this person because they did X, Y, and Z thing that was good or they were kind during these times, but then they recognize there's a lot of negativity. There is multiple factors.

So it's like you're having somebody that needs to deal with those wounds, those core wounds, understanding and basically healing that aspect.

But then if you're forced to communicate with somebody and you're seeing the glimpse of the good, the bad, I think it can prolong the grieving process.

And if we're just looking at the linguistics aspect of it and say, okay, we're only going to worry about written communication or we're going to worry about that and we need to just basically separate out because a narcissist is going to want to have that supply. They're going to want to have that safety. They're going to want to drag you back in, the hoovering, as you coined the term.

And so having somebody be able to work with licensed therapists and professional to help them understand the trauma bond, get healthy, but also use a tool to help them separate out from this situation, I think has the potential to really help a lot of people.

Anything that puts a mirror to you, anything that allows you to look at yourself, to see yourself as you are, is always helpful. That's at the core of therapy.

Psychotherapy is about providing you with insight about yourself, that you're incapable of generating on your own.

So any instrument, AI instrument, software program, there was a software program called Eliza in the 60s. It did the same. It wasn't artificial intelligence, but it was a software program called Eliza in the 60s. It did the same. It wasn't artificial intelligence, but it was a simulation of a therapist, of a psychotherapist. It's called Eliza. It's very successful. To this very day, you could use Eliza. I think it's available online. It's stunning. It's like a therapist.

So the problem with when you team up with a narcissist one way or another, you interact or you react to the narcissist on so many levels that to extricate yourself later on becomes self-sacrificial. It becomes an act of self-immolation.

When you interact with a normal person, even if you fall in love with someone, there's an intimate partner, you have a relationship, and so on so forth, there is a part of you that is preserved in a pristine way. There's a part of you that is untouched by the partner, which is very healthy, very good. There's a part of you that remains you, never mind whathappens to the partner and what happens to the relationship.

It's not the case with narcissists. With narcissists, it's a takeover, and it's not always a hostile takeover.

The narcissist truly believes in the shared fantasy. He truly believes that he loves you. He truly believes in these promises to you. He truly wants this to work. He believes that you're enabling him to experience, for example, love.

So he's euphoric. Throughout this, he is euphoric. This is known as narcissistic elation. It's an oceanic feeling.

And you respond in kind. You react to the narcissist as a mother, the maternal part. You react to the narcissist as the realization of all your dreams. Your dreams come true. You react to the narcissists because of the fantasy.

The fantasy is an escape from reality, which is very tempting in today's world. You react to the narcissist as the one, finally found your soulmate or your twin flame, whatever you want to call it, your compliment, you know.

Everything in you responds to the narcissist and every single part of you interacts with every single part of the narcissist.

Ultimately you'll find yourself enmeshed. You find that you have become a single organism with the narcissist.

So to let go of the narcissists is to let go of you, is to self-amputate. It's extremely painful.

The grief is multifaceted. You grieve for the narcissist, of course. When you separate, when you break up, you grieve the narcissists, loss of the narcissists. You grieve the loss of the fantasy. You grieve the loss of yourself because you're no longer you. You grieve the loss of the child. As a mother, what could be worse? You've just lost your child. You grieve the loss of a parent because the narcissist plays a role of a parent in the relationship as well. This is the dual mothership thing.

And so all these layers of grief interact, reinforce each other. There's an amplification of grief, magnification of grief.

And the worst part is this. Following the breakup, your grief is the only thing that makes sense of your life. Your grief is the only thing that makes sense of your life. Your grief is the only thing that imbues your life with meaning. Gives you a reason to survive even.

Because the alternative is self-annihilating.

When you are immersed in grief, you're busy doing something. It keeps you alive.

And so grief becomes professional. It becomes a vocation and an avocation.

And that's why you see online, millions of victims mourning and grieving for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, I'm kidding you know. They can't stop this. Victimhood has become their identity.

And it's kind of identity politics if you're, they've become, they have become professional victims.

It also caters to some extent to grandiosity and so, but we'll leave that aside.

Also, don't forget that as long as you grieve the narcissist is somehow in your life. It's a way to stay in touch with the representation of the narcissist in your mind. It's like he's never gone away. You have never lost him because you're still grieving for him. He still occupies your mind in a way.