Another strategy is to become a "grey rock." This means, showing little or no response to anything people do or say. This is a decent strategy for surviving a psychopath in the room. Yet Bob and Alice don’t like this and will avoid you. Grey rocks tend to be lonely, which is not a good thing.
You may ask, would it help to act more like a psychopath? It is a common question. There is this notion that psychopaths are successful, with their charm and social fluency. They do not suffer the bruises of emotions. They seem strong, even invincible. Does acting like Mallory give us immunity? The answer is "yes, except it’s not that simple."
So then we ask: can we just identify the psychopaths, and avoid them? After all, we have checklists and personality tests. In theory, yes. I’ll explore this in Hunting Mallory. In practice, the answer is "most often, no". Mallory has been fooling people since she was a toddler. She fools professionals: psychologists, law enforcement, judges. She fools people who see her every day for years: partners, children, close friends. What makes you special?
Where does this leave us? We cannot distrust everyone, or we become isolated and more vulnerable. We cannot extend blind trust to everyone, or we suffer wound after wound. We cannot tell who we can trust, and who we cannot. It seems like a paradox.
Yet what looks like a paradox is actually a set of false assumptions. First, that we can trust Alice and Bob, and we must distrust Mallory. Second, that we must decide alone, in our own minds. Third is that we must judge each case afresh, on its own merits. When we break down these assumptions, we solve the paradox.
The Theory of Trust
The psychopath manipulates trust. From the first seconds of a meeting to years later, Mallory insists: "trust me!"
So it’s worth looking at trust. Trust is a hypothesis about a person’s future acts towards us. "I trust her" is shorthand for, "my hypothesis is that she will not harm me." Like any hypothesis we cannot prove it is true. We can only try to falsify it, and fail.
To establish any depth of trust, we need opportunity and time. We need chances for the other person to break their trust. We need safe spaces where failures are not harmful. We need time for many such experiments. You need an unbiased observer to collect the data.
Mallory specializes in distorting this process. He expands experimental space far beyond what is safe. He forces conclusions based on too little data. He influences others to accept lies as truth. Mallory’s logic is: you trust me, thus you must invest in our relationship, now.
As I explained, Mallory distorts our social accounting to make us trust him. Despite ourselves, we evolved to want to trust people. The more we work to establish trust with a psychopath, the worse our conclusions. This means that trust is a poor tool for predicting others' actions. It becomes a form of gambling. Most of the time we are lucky. We come to believe we are born lucky. Now and then we have horrid accidents. Then, we believe fate wants us to lose.
Consider this: you can create deep and loving relationships without depending on trust. Not that trust is absent. Rather, that it is not the basis for the relationship. Correlation is not causation. Trust is like happiness. It is a social emotion that you feel to show the other person how much you like them. Like happiness, it can come from real reasons, or fake ones, and we cannot tell.
Motivational Awareness
If we cannot use our feelings of trust to predict another’s actions, what do we use?
The answer is motivational awareness. That is, to develop an awareness of others' motivations and intentions. As part of that, we must also be honest about our own motivations. It is our own lies that trap us.
Why are we in this place at all? What are we looking for? Most often we disguise our own motivations. We do this for ourselves first, and for others thereafter. There is a social process. To put our needs on the table shortcuts this process, and invites rejection. One does not ask an unknown person, "are you single?" or "how much do you earn?"
Thus we often hide our desires and needs. Yet this does not hide them from Mallory. When we push our motivations out of sight, we create denial. When someone sees that denial and pushes the trigger, our response is higher.
So instead, we look for our motivations, with honesty. We accept them, and we then resolve them. There are not a huge number of possible motivations. Indeed the set is small and depends on our age, gender, and circumstances:
❂ We look for people to trade our knowledge and skills with, to learn from, and work with.
❂ We look for people to play with, be it mutual fun, or more sinister bullying.
❂ We look for partners for casual affection, exploratory sex, and possible long term relationships.
❂ We look for people to look after us, with advice, resources, affection, shelter.
❂ We look for people to invest in, with our knowledge, resources, and affection.
❂ We look for people to share experiences with, to make us feel safe and meaningful.
❂ We look for people to like us, follow us, and listen to us, so we feel more important.
That is about it. It comes down to sharing knowledge, power, money, sex, security, attention, love, and care. We can not stop ourselves needing these at times in our lives. Yet how we respond to a trigger undergoes a dramatic change, when we accept our needs. Accept and embrace them, and they are no longer a vulnerability.
Let me illustrate. Imagine a homosexual man dealing with his sexual attraction to other men:
❂ He may deny it, to conform to social expectations. This makes him vulnerable to predators, as he will ignore weak cues. He will respond only to the exaggerated cues that psychopaths are good at projecting.
❂ He may accept and embrace it. This lets him recognize weak cues, and project them in turn. When someone projects exaggerated cues, he can now see these as a red flag.
Mallory picks up on the first case, to flip into a super-stimulus response. When you have hidden dreams and desires, you are vulnerable. Anyone with the talent can guess those dreams. And if they then promise to make them come true, they carve a hole into your mind. Yet if you embrace your desires and carry them in the open, it changes. You will find small, real comforts in most of the people you meet every day. It adds up to much more than any dream.
Normally, hiding our deepest desires, we see a crowd and feel, "most of these people are uninteresting." We narrow our vision and become passive, waiting for others to provoke a response in us. We appear bland, uninterested, perhaps shy and quiet. Every encounter feels risky, and if someone does break through our shields, we treat this as a special event.
When we understand, and accept our motivations, we can shift our perspective to "everyone here is interesting in some way." We broaden our vision and become active, trying to provoke a response in everyone we meet. We become playful, and outgoing. We have no shields to break. We’re like a song bird sitting happily on every round object it sees, blue or not.
It is also healthy to understand the motivations of others around us. You can of course ask out loud, and get an answer. The answer will often be wrong in all the most important places. You have to go past spoken words and borrow one of Mallory’s tricks.
When you are among strangers, practice cold reading them. Every person you see or meet is a story. Something happened to bring them to that exact place and time. What is their story? What are they hoping for, afraid of, dreaming of? Sometimes it is explicit, or obvious. Even then you will see layers. There is the story we show to others. There is the story we tell to ourselves. And there is the hidden truth.