[Vision2020] Narcissism, Aggression and Troopergate
Tom Hansen
thansen at moscow.com
Sun Oct 19 08:50:47 PDT 2008
>From yesterday's (October 18, 2008) Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman (Wasilla,
Alaska) at:
http://tinyurl.com/5leoky
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Narcissism, aggression and Troopergate
By Ivan Moore
The Moore Report
OK, so the Troopergate stuff. The wonderful hard workers here at Ivan
Moore Research are scheduled to go into the field this weekend with our
final Anchorage Press, Frontiersman, KTUU and KENI statewide survey, and
thatll give us a look at what impact the Branchflower Report has had on
the popularity of the governor, as well as getting an update on the U.S.
Senate and House races. Well have the results for you next week.
In the meantime, a lot of us have been sitting around, scratching our
heads, wondering what the heck the bottom line of the Troopergate affair
is. Ive done a lot of it the last few days, and these are the conclusions
Ive come to.
Todd Palin spent a lot of effort trying to get Trooper Wooten fired. A lot
of effort. In fact, a thoroughly troubling, markedly abnormal, almost
pathological amount of effort. There, I said it. It needed saying, to be
honest.
Now, I dont know Trooper Wooten. Im not sure if hes a good guy or a bad
guy. He shot a moose when his wife had the permit, he drank in his patrol
car, and he tasered an 11-year old, but the Palins knew about most of
these things long ago and didnt say a word about any of it until the
divorce got nasty. As usual, the truth probably lies somewhere in the
middle ... hes probably a guy with a few self-control issues, but is also
probably not as bad as hes been made out to be.
One thing I dont believe is that the Palins felt directly and physically
threatened by him. Branchflower made the argument in his report that if
they did then why did Sarah Palin cut her security detail in half? Youd
have thought shed have doubled it.
And anyway, lets face it, if theres a guy out there with a gun that you
think is unhinged and has you in his sights, then Id have thought the
last thing youd want to do is mess with him. Yeah, thats a really good
idea, lets screw him to the wall and see how angry he gets. So, Im
sorry, this we felt threatened stuff is horsepucky. The only logical,
rational, reasonably sane conclusion I can reach is that they were out to
settle a personal score. To get him fired because they wanted to.
The next question is ... what kind of person does that? What kind of
psychological characteristics does someone have to have to make them
respond in that way, with that kind of aggression, particularly when the
behavior comes at huge risk to themselves? Dont healthy people say to
themselves Hey, look, were Governor and First Dude. Hes nothing. Lets
just let it go. Well, dont they?
(DISCLAIMER: Im not a psychologist, and have no education in the field
beyond a subsidiary psychology course in college. Im not endeavoring to
make any kind of clinical diagnosis here, just looking for some kind of
layperson understanding. And sharing it with you.)
I started thinking about ego and self-esteem, in an attempt to understand
what kind of people react aggressively to threats. Is it people with big
egos or small ones? (Oh, stop it ...) Is it people with high self-esteem
or low? What is an ego anyway?
Historically, psychologists have considered high self-esteem to be a
positive human characteristic, and subscribed to the notion that low self-
esteem underlies most aggressive behavior. This thinking has changed in
recent years, through nothing more than the observations that people who
are aggressive oftentimes display seemingly high levels of self-esteem,
and people who have low self-esteem are often quite meek and unthreatening.
Then I came across this fascinating experiment. It was done in 1998 by a
couple of psychologists called Bushman and Baumeister and sought to test
the links between self-views, notably self-esteem and narcissism, and
hostile aggressive behavior in response to what they term an ego threat.
They got 270 willing graduate students to complete questionnaire tests.
The first one was the Rosenberg Self-Esteem test, which asks subjects to
agree or disagree with statements like I feel that I have a number of
good qualities and I wish I could have more respect for myself. The
second was the Narcissism Personality Inventory, which tests forced-choice
pairs of statements like I really like to be the center of attention
and It makes me uncomfortable to be the center of attention.
The researchers then sat the subjects down one by one and asked them to
write a one paragraph essay in support of their favored position on
abortion. When they were done, it was explained to them that there was
another student in an adjoining room who was also writing one, and they
would swap papers and comment on each others work.
But there was no other student. The subjects essay was taken out of the
room, and the psychologists themselves scrawled in red pen all over the
subjects essay things, no doubt, like This is complete crap. You must be
a total butthead to believe this stuff. They then took the essay back to
the subject.
Once theyd absorbed the humiliation of the comments on their work, the
third phase was a timed reaction test. The subject was given headphones
and was led to believe that the other person in the next room also had
some on. On a signal, the first person to hit a big button in front of
them launched an unpleasant noise in the earphones of their competitor.
The further they pushed the button down, the louder they were told the
noise would sound, and the longer they held it down, the longer the noise
went on. A combination of the length and decibels became a proxy for
the aggressiveness of their response.
Heres what they found. First, men reacted more aggressively than women.
Go figure. Second, self-esteem played no significant part. Aggressive
response to ego threat was just as likely to come from people with high
self-esteem as it was from people who thought less of themselves. But
narcissism showed a very significant relationship to aggression. Those
that scored high on the Narcissism inventory leaned long and hard on their
buttons, no doubt muttering sonofabitch, thatll teach ya to themselves
under their breath.
The conclusions of the study read, in part, as follows: It is not so much
the people who regard themselves as superior beings who are the most
dangerous, but rather those who have a strong desire to regard themselves
as superior beings. Some people may be able to brush off criticism easily,
just as others may view it as valid and well-deserved, and neither
response may produce aggression. In contrast, people who are preoccupied
with validating a grandiose self-image apparently find criticism highly
upsetting and lash out against the source of it.
So is Todd Palin a narcissist? Not necessarily. Just because this research
showed a link between aggressiveness in response to an ego threat and
narcissism, doesnt mean that any person who responds to an ego threat
with aggression is ergo, a narcissist. All I can say for sure is that Todd
Palins relentless and unilateral pursuit of Wooten was, in my thoroughly
layman view, characteristically narcissistic behavior.
And even then, Ill admit it might not even be him we should be
considering. He might, after 20 years of marriage, have realized the
benefits of carrying water for his wife.
Ivan Moore is an independent pollster from Anchorage.
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Seeya round town, Moscow.
Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho
"We're a town of about 23,000 with 10,000 college students. The college
students are not very active in local elections (thank goodness!)."
- Dale Courtney (March 28, 2007)
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