The Dark Triad, the Dark Factor/D-Factor (psychology)

Cypress said:
I had a friend who went to an Ivy League school and had the chops to land himself a career in the hyper-capitalist cutthroat world of Wall Street investment banking. He eventually got so offended at the amount of avarice and narcissism that money and material possession bred in those people, and he quit his lucrative career to attend seminary school and devote his life to the message of Christ.
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It's a career that never interested me.

On a related note, I rewatched "Wall Street" a couple days ago. It was disgusting to see that amount of greed it took to deliberately fuck over people in order to line one's own pockets. Now we effectively have Gordon Gekko, albeit a demented and stupid one, in the WH. Sad.

I tried to search if anyone had done an analysis of the character's Dark Triad. No luck on a score, but clearly Gekko displayed all the traits of a Dark personality who was ruthless, lacking empathy and excessively greedy.

The first link discusses how Gekko is a composite of real people, the second link is how viewers rate onscreen villains in terms of the Dark Triad since such characters attract moviegoers. The third link is a study if a person with strong Dark Triad traits really does succeed better in life.

en.wikipedia.org

Gordon Gekko - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Co-written by Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser, Gekko is said to be based loosely on several real-life financiers, including Stone's own father Louis Stone,[6] Wall Street broker Owen Morrisey, an old friend of Stone's[7] who was involved in a $20 million insider trading scandal in 1985, investment banker Dennis Levine, arbitrageur Ivan Boesky,[8] corporate raider Carl Icahn, investor and art collector Asher Edelman,[9] agent Michael Ovitz, and Stone himself.[10] For example, Gekko's line "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good" was adapted from a remark by Boesky, who himself was later convicted on insider trading charges.[11][12] Delivering the 1986 commencement address to the School of Business Administration at the University of California, Berkeley, Boesky said, "Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.

www.psychologytoday.com

Do We Really Love Villains?

What makes male villains so much more appealing than female ones? New research explores how gender expectations may shape how we view Dark Triad traits in the media.
www.psychologytoday.com www.psychologytoday.com
Still, research studies like this one do seem fairly consistent in showing significant differences in how movie and television viewers view male and female characters showing Dark Triad traits. Not only do non-Dark Triad females tend to be viewed much more positively than equivalent male characters, but their Dark Triad counterparts are seen as much more negative than Dark Triad males.
www.bbc.com

Do ruthless people really get ahead?

Does a dark personality actually help you get to the top of business? The truth is more complex.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
“Individuals high in narcissism have good impression management, so they can convince their colleagues or supervisors that they are worth special advantages,” Spurk says. Or as Gordon Gekko put it, there’s the belief that “What's worth doing is worth doing for money.”

Narcissists may seem charismatic to begin with, but they can become wearing with their constant need for attention
But before you consider cultivating a darker streak to further your career, Spurk points out that these people may lose out in other ways. Narcissists may seem charismatic to begin with, but they can become wearing with their constant need for attention. “Although people who don’t know them very well think they are charismatic, in the mid-to-long term there might be situations where people are no longer fascinated by their behaviour.” So even though they may be earning more money, they might suffer socially. And Machiavellian manipulators may come undone if their particularly ruthless or dishonest machinations are exposed.

If that’s not enough to persuade you, there is now an abundance of evidence showing that kindness may not make you money but it pays in other ways: more generous and honest individuals tend to be happier in life, and even have better physical health.

Steely ambition will help get you so far in life, but it alone can’t take the place real talent. For every real-life Gekko, Draper or Priestly you may come across, there will be others lurking in the shadows, without a job – or a friend.
 
On the lighter side is the Light Triad; Kantianism, humanism, and faith in humanity. This contrasts with the Dark Triad of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.


The light triad refers to three positive personality traits – faith in humanity, humanism, and Kantianism – that prioritize the dignity and worth of others, focus on empathy and ethical treatment, and believe that people are inherently good...

...Scott et al. evaluated these personality traits with twelve different questions on a scale from "totally disagree" to "totally agree." Kaufman et al. (2019) concluded that those who score highly on the light triad personality scale tend to score high on other traits, such as:
  • Intellectual curiosity
  • Attachment to others
  • Tolerance towards others
  • Having a low need to exert power over others
  • Humility
  • Agreeability.


The Kantian movement comprises a loose assemblage of rather diverse philosophies that share Kant's concern with exploring the nature, and especially the limits, of human knowledge in the hope of raising philosophy to the level of a science in some sense similar to mathematics and physics. Participating in the critical spirit and method of Kant, these philosophies are thus opposed to dogmatism, to expansive speculative naturalism (such as that of Benedict de Spinoza, the Dutch Jewish rationalist), and, usually, to irrationalism. The various submovements of Kantianism are characterized by their sharing of certain "family resemblances"—i.e., by the preoccupation of each with its own selection of concerns from among the many developments of Kant's philosophy: a concern, for example, with the nature of empirical knowledge; with the way in which the mind imposes its own categorial structure upon experience, and, in particular, with the nature of the structure that renders human knowledge and moral action possible, a structure considered to be a priori (logically independent of experience); with the status of the Ding an sich ("thing-in-itself"), that more ultimate reality that presumably lurks behind the apprehension of an object; or with the relationship between knowledge and morality.
 
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