A theory I have—which is heavily inspired by some writings by a banana e.g. Survey Chicken or Ignorance: a skilled practice—is that a communication problem occurs along the way to describing the scales.
Like suppose some people are dealing with a narcissist. They need some words to describe the narcissist’s behavior, and the most significant thing that those words need to do is to pick out the narcissistic behaviors the person is engaging in from the non-narcissistic behaviors the person is engaging in. After all, if they just wanted to refer to the person, they could use the narcissist’s name.
Here it might not be necessary for the words to actually accurately describe the mental state or behavior of a person. “He thinks he is special” functions perfectly well to point towards someone controlling how others speak of him, even if his motivation is more subtle and nuanced than a feeling of superiority. After all, you know what I mean, because you’ve got your own experience with the narcissistic person, so you don’t need a perfect description. Plus, even if you don’t have your own experience, you can infer that there is an issue from other factors, e.g. the tone in which people react to him.
But if one is not careful, vague descriptions like this can become the primary way to think about a condition, and this only really works for people who have got experience with the condition so they can see what the condition is like. Even worse, if you then grab a handful of such vague descriptions and use them to construct a psychometric instrument, you’ll risk creating a measure of a very different variable than the one you intended.
The study indicated that scales meant for use in clinical contexts performed better than the Narcissistic Personality Inventory that is usually used in personality psychology. But even in clinical contexts I get the impression that the scales are often not designed well enough (and I suppose also the apparent validity of those scales might be inflated if they are directly used for diagnosis).
To what extent are the various Cluster B personality disorder diagnoses “carving nature at its joints”? Like, I wrote a thing about sociopathy a couple years ago, but when I looked into it again more recently, I was thinking that maybe the thing I wrote only applies to a subset of sociopaths, and meanwhile other sociopaths are really quite different—closer to an anger disorder. But that’s not based on any careful analysis. Anyway, in other contexts, you’ve written enlightening discussions about when personality traits are or aren’t mish-moshes of unrelated things. Anything along those lines for Cluster B would be extremely interesting to me.
I’ve been taking a closer look at BPD recently, so hopefully I can say something about that. Unfortunately I don’t know much about psychopathy.
There’s a bunch of factor analyses of personality disorder symptoms which mostly just finds 3-5 major dimensions, with cluster B tending to go into an “externalizing” dimension that splits into “antagonistic” factor, where most of cluster B is usually placed, and a “disinhibited” factor, where other disorders such as ADHD are placed.
I am… pretty skeptical of these factor analyses, and keep wondering if they are artifactual, mostly being driven by poor measurement? The strongest example of this is the “p factor”, which as far as I can read is literally just measurement bias. But more generally, is ADHD really related to externalizing disorders? Maybe if there’s a sort of “network” effect? (ADHD ⇒ struggle in school ⇒ disrespecting school) But I’d be inclined to think it’s also driven by poor measurement. (Defining ADHD as “kids who don’t do their homework and play video games all day”, which can be due to neurological factors but also due to disrespect of society, and the “externalizing” factor ends up capturing this disrespect factor but not the neurological component that I’d usually think of as more core to ADHD.)
There’s also other elements, e.g. the factor analyses I brought up are mostly about whether the different personality go together under Cluster B, but it sounds like you are more asking about whether the personality disorders hold up internally, i.e. whether psychopathy/sociopathy is “one thing” or multiple distinct things. I’m not aware of any informative factor analyses done on this, but also if the observations about Narcissistic Personality Inventory’s invalidity generalize, then traditional psychometric tools might not be informative for this. This is because one of my takeaways from the NPI thing is that narcissistic personality disorder isn’t really a general temperamental way of handling many distinct situations, which is what psychometrics is most able to test for. Instead it is something more subtle, whether that “more subtle” thing is my Boundary Placement Rebellion or Emma’s Validation-Based Success-Momentum Chasing. I think psychometrics has still given me a strong comparative advantage for being able to evaluate whether personality disorders carve nature at its joints, because deep understanding of what psychometrics does also gives me deep understanding of what it cannot do and what one needs other modelling techniques to do, which has also lead to me developing skills in those other modelling techiniques (though that is more recent than my psychometric skills, so perhaps not as polished yet).
A theory I have—which is heavily inspired by some writings by a banana e.g. Survey Chicken or Ignorance: a skilled practice—is that a communication problem occurs along the way to describing the scales.
Like suppose some people are dealing with a narcissist. They need some words to describe the narcissist’s behavior, and the most significant thing that those words need to do is to pick out the narcissistic behaviors the person is engaging in from the non-narcissistic behaviors the person is engaging in. After all, if they just wanted to refer to the person, they could use the narcissist’s name.
Here it might not be necessary for the words to actually accurately describe the mental state or behavior of a person. “He thinks he is special” functions perfectly well to point towards someone controlling how others speak of him, even if his motivation is more subtle and nuanced than a feeling of superiority. After all, you know what I mean, because you’ve got your own experience with the narcissistic person, so you don’t need a perfect description. Plus, even if you don’t have your own experience, you can infer that there is an issue from other factors, e.g. the tone in which people react to him.
But if one is not careful, vague descriptions like this can become the primary way to think about a condition, and this only really works for people who have got experience with the condition so they can see what the condition is like. Even worse, if you then grab a handful of such vague descriptions and use them to construct a psychometric instrument, you’ll risk creating a measure of a very different variable than the one you intended.
The study indicated that scales meant for use in clinical contexts performed better than the Narcissistic Personality Inventory that is usually used in personality psychology. But even in clinical contexts I get the impression that the scales are often not designed well enough (and I suppose also the apparent validity of those scales might be inflated if they are directly used for diagnosis).
I’ve been taking a closer look at BPD recently, so hopefully I can say something about that. Unfortunately I don’t know much about psychopathy.
There’s a bunch of factor analyses of personality disorder symptoms which mostly just finds 3-5 major dimensions, with cluster B tending to go into an “externalizing” dimension that splits into “antagonistic” factor, where most of cluster B is usually placed, and a “disinhibited” factor, where other disorders such as ADHD are placed.
I am… pretty skeptical of these factor analyses, and keep wondering if they are artifactual, mostly being driven by poor measurement? The strongest example of this is the “p factor”, which as far as I can read is literally just measurement bias. But more generally, is ADHD really related to externalizing disorders? Maybe if there’s a sort of “network” effect? (ADHD ⇒ struggle in school ⇒ disrespecting school) But I’d be inclined to think it’s also driven by poor measurement. (Defining ADHD as “kids who don’t do their homework and play video games all day”, which can be due to neurological factors but also due to disrespect of society, and the “externalizing” factor ends up capturing this disrespect factor but not the neurological component that I’d usually think of as more core to ADHD.)
There’s also other elements, e.g. the factor analyses I brought up are mostly about whether the different personality go together under Cluster B, but it sounds like you are more asking about whether the personality disorders hold up internally, i.e. whether psychopathy/sociopathy is “one thing” or multiple distinct things. I’m not aware of any informative factor analyses done on this, but also if the observations about Narcissistic Personality Inventory’s invalidity generalize, then traditional psychometric tools might not be informative for this. This is because one of my takeaways from the NPI thing is that narcissistic personality disorder isn’t really a general temperamental way of handling many distinct situations, which is what psychometrics is most able to test for. Instead it is something more subtle, whether that “more subtle” thing is my Boundary Placement Rebellion or Emma’s Validation-Based Success-Momentum Chasing. I think psychometrics has still given me a strong comparative advantage for being able to evaluate whether personality disorders carve nature at its joints, because deep understanding of what psychometrics does also gives me deep understanding of what it cannot do and what one needs other modelling techniques to do, which has also lead to me developing skills in those other modelling techiniques (though that is more recent than my psychometric skills, so perhaps not as polished yet).