Psychology Links, 5/20/2025

Rob Henderson on kids these days; Carolyn D. Gorman on mental health awareness; Adam Mastroianni on cybernetic psychology; Scott Alexander on smart phones and kids

Rob Henderson writes,

people generally score the highest on Dark Triad personality traits when they are in their late teens and early twenties. In the realm of personality psychology, the Dark Triad encompasses three interrelated characteristics: psychopathy, characterized by callousness and a profound disregard for others; narcissism, marked by an inflated sense of self-importance and entitlement; and Machiavellianism, which involves strategic exploitation and duplicity for personal gain. The association between age and the Dark Triad is most pronounced for psychopathy, characterized as the “darkest” of the three traits.

By contrast, studies have found that older age coincides with the Light Triad personality traits, which encompass three factors: faith in humanity, reflecting the belief that others are generally good and worthy of trust; Kantianism, denoting the propensity to behave with integrity and honesty; and humanism, which involves a genuine appreciation for the successes of others.

Carolyn D. Gorman writes,

Paying less attention to mental health, it seems, reduces overmedicalisation and protects against actually feeling bad.

Treatment doesn’t help those who aren’t sick, so calling everyone with emotions “mentally unwell” only misdirects resources away from the people who are most in need.

Adam Mastroianni writes,

The science of control systems is called cybernetics, so let’s call this approach cybernetic psychology. It proposes that the mind is a stack of control systems, each responsible for monitoring one of these necessities. The units are the control systems themselves and their components, and the rules are the way those systems operate. Like a thermostat, they monitor some variable out in the world, compare it to the target level of that variable, and then act to reduce the difference between the two. For simplicity, we can refer to this error-reduction component as the “governor”. Unlike a simple thermostat, however, governors are both reactive and predictive—they try to reduce errors that have occurred, and they try to prevent those errors from occurring in the first place.

…If the mind is made out of control systems, and those control systems have different set points (that is, their target level) and sensitivities (that is, how hard they fight to maintain that target level), then “personality” is just how those set points and sensitivities differ from person to person. Someone who is more “extraverted”, for example, has a higher set point and/or greater sensitivity on their Sociality Control System (if such a thing exists). As in, they get an error if they don’t maintain a higher level of social interaction, or they respond to that error faster than other people do.

He offers this aside:

Cunningham’s Law states, “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.” Science works the same way, and the bolder we can make our wrong answers, the better our right answers will be.

Scott Alexander writes,

I feel about 75% sure there’s a trend towards recent intellectual decline which needs to be explained, I think phones are about 60% of the explanation, and I think it’s about 25% likely that early childhood phone use causes some damage beyond what would happen if you kept your kid away from phones until age 18 but then let him use them normally afterwards. When I multiply those all out, that’s an 11% chance that letting my kid use a phone will rot his brain.

He ends up deciding that hiring more human babysitters is better than giving your toddler phone time.

substacks referenced above:

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Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids

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New paradigm for psychology just dropped