Re:Thinking with Adam GrantHow to spot psychopaths and narcissists, with Leanne ten Brinke | ReThinking
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Recognizing dark personalities and managing them without losing yourself entirely
- Psychopathy involves reduced automatic emotional contagion (e.g., less contagious yawning) despite intact cognitive empathy, helping explain how some people can read emotions without feeling them.
- “Poisonous people” are framed as those scoring high on the dark tetrad—overlapping in callousness and manipulativeness but differing in impulsivity (psychopathy), strategy (Machiavellianism), entitlement (narcissism), and enjoyment of harm (sadism).
- Behavioral “tells” can include boundary-pushing, conversational domination, and mismatched verbal/nonverbal emotion (e.g., hostile words paired with a broad smile), and observers can make surprisingly accurate thin-slice judgments from seconds of behavior.
- Dark traits are somewhat overrepresented in high-power settings (e.g., CEOs) and attractive to status-seekers, but they do not reliably translate into success and can reduce collaboration and influence (as shown in congressional behavior coding).
- Rather than defaulting to “cut them off,” the discussion emphasizes practical skills: explicit boundaries, small common ground, feedback framed as questions, and negotiation based on the other person’s incentives—while avoiding manipulative counter-tactics that erode your integrity.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasPsychopathy can mean “knowing the words but not the music.”
People high in psychopathic traits may understand others’ mental states (cognitive empathy) while lacking automatic emotional resonance, visible in reflexes like reduced contagious yawning and weaker detection of fear/sadness.
“Poisonous” is a spectrum label, not a binary diagnosis.
Ten Brinke emphasizes these traits are continuous and only the extreme end is clinically diagnosable; she notes roughly ~10% may score high enough to create outsized interpersonal conflict without meeting disorder criteria.
Look for patterns of boundary-pushing and asymmetrical dominance in conversation.
Repeated interrupting while refusing interruption, ignoring stated topic limits, and testing personal/professional boundaries are presented as practical, observable cues that can warrant caution even without a formal assessment.
Emotional mismatch can be a useful red flag.
In coded “thin slice” clips, a notable cue was hostile or angry content delivered with an incongruently broad smile, suggesting a disconnect between stated emotion and embodied affect.
High-status environments may attract dark traits, but they can stagnate influence.
While clinical psychopathy was reported as ~3% among CEOs (vs ~1% general population), and dark traits may gravitate toward power, coding of U.S. Congress suggested higher dark-trait cues correlated with being less influential due to damaged collaboration.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesAnd so that's why there's this kind of famous quote about people with psychopathy kind of knowing the words but not the music of emotion.
— Leanne ten Brinke
They think of it more of like a you problem than a them problem.
— Leanne ten Brinke
Your commitment to them changing does not equal their improvement, right?
— Leanne ten Brinke
If you are w- unwilling to tolerate any level of those traits, then you can pretty quickly get to the point where you are, like, cutting out everybody.
— Leanne ten Brinke
Our personalities are relatively stable, but they're not cast in stone, so we can change them with time and effort.
— Leanne ten Brinke
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
