Now we know:we (BTC/etc guys) are Machiavellian psychopaths with an inflated ego

[DdmrDdmr]

Here are some recent media headlines on this matter:

A study conducted by a team from Queensland University of Technology consisting of top professors and lecturers, have discovered that crypto investors commonly have a set of four negative personality traits referred to as “the dark tetrad.”

See: https://bitcoinist.com/dark-tetrad-study-shows-crypto-investors/

A study linked the purchase of cryptocurrencies to narcissism, machiavellianism and psychopathy

See: https://www.infobae.com/en/2022/04/12/a-study-linked-the-purchase-of-cryptocurrencies-to-narcissism-machiavellianism-and-psychopathy/

Dark Tetrad: Study Shows Crypto Investors Have The Worst Personality Traits

https://thecoin.news/articles/dark-tetrad-study-shows-crypto-investors-worst-personality-traits-1649801667663

Study Reveals The Average Cryptocurrency Investor Has Psychopathic Tendencies
 

https://www.ladbible.com/news/latest-the-average-cryptocurrency-investor-could-be-a-psychopath-20220413

Crypto Buyers Likely to Be Psychopaths, According to New Study

https://u.today/crypto-buyers-likely-to-be-psychopaths-according-to-new-study

Bitcoin fans are psychopaths who don’t care about anyone, study shows

https://www.newsbreak.com/news/2570285060537/bitcoin-fans-are-psychopaths-who-don-t-care-about-anyone-study-shows


I must admit that I felt identified with the above I took the headlines above for granted at first, as being the conclusions of the survey they reference. After all, if many such headlines echo the same, it must be right …

Not really …

A survey carried out by the Queensland University of Technology, based on a sample of 566 participants has led to the above headlines. However, headlines lacked to pick up on, in my opinion, one vital piece of information that is the key to interpreting the survey properly:

Studying cryptocurrency through the psychological lens of the dark tetrad offers insight into why people want to buy crypto. We are not suggesting that everyone interested in crypto displays dark tetrad traits.

 "We studied only a subset of people interested in crypto who do have these traits. If you happen to be a Bitcoin or other crypto holder, you may or may not exhibit them."

(these are the guys that conducted the survey)
See: https://theconversation.com/impulsive-psychopaths-like-crypto-research-shows-how-dark-personality-traits-affect-bitcoin-enthusiasm-180782

The above indicates, if I’m interpreting it correctly, that the focus group of the study were people who had the dark tetrad personality traits (Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy and sadism) per se. They studied this group and their relations to crypto, and derived their conclusions connecting personality traits to attitudes and believes, and later to crypto.

That is to say, the study sort of concluded that A (dark tetrad personality traits) ->B (attitude towards crypto), whilst many (not all) headlines are stating that B->A, which is not the same nor correct ...

See also:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886921008321
https://finbold.com/new-study-explains-why-narcissists-sadists-and-manipulators-are-attracted-to-crypto/

[1714188862]

1714188862

[1714188862]

1714188862

[Dunamisx]

They studied this group and their relations to crypto, and derived their conclusions connecting personality traits to attitudes and believes, and later to crypto.

Their research and assumptions could in one way or the other be true because if we are to take a look at the forum here as well, you'll discover many traits attributed to their claims especially on the English boards where there's total strictness and adherence to posting and ones real personality can not be easily concluded because everyone tend to be serious and up for business, other boards and local also give a similar view. I advise people on the best way with cryptocurrency is to "start making research all by yourself"


source

Under this categories of users, they make people people fear and run in bitcoin and crypto at large.
Here we can have ignored users, users with high numbers of smerit and don't give it out, those that have the knowledge but not ready to impact others and all manners of temperament except for colleric.


source

Those that fall under this category could be as follows:

Spammers, scammers account farmers, plagiarist, merit hunters and sh*t posters fall within this category. Everyone faces his business not minding others opinions and needs.

People that are actually seriously minded tend to fall on any of these categories because they tend not to create time for heresy.
In a concluding path, this place is one of the best to ever be while online because the excellent standard is maintained.

[pooya87]

This reminded me of an interesting example we had back in school about flawed scientific research leading to wrong conclusions.
It went like this, long time ago the "scientists" made an assumption that rats come from dirty rags so to experiment this they gathered some dirty rags and placed them all in a corner and went away. After some time they came back and saw some rats running around in the vicinity of those dirty rags so they concluded that their initial assumption (rats are born out of dirty rags) was true!

[Lucius]

I used to think that people at universities were doing some serious things, but I'm starting to believe that there are a lot of rotten apples in that system, and as a result, there are even more rotten apples coming out of the system in the form of so-called highly educated people. Given where the research comes from, I am not surprised by such an attitude and thinking towards anything that deviates from already well-established values and uniform attitudes in society. By that, I mean the incredible scenes of violence that came from Australia when they terrorized ordinary people walking in parks or when they didn’t have a mask in the open.

Furthermore, this kind of research is nothing more than a continuation of the agenda "Bitcoin is bad in every sense", from consuming too much electricity, polluting the environment, and being used only by criminals.

If some independent scientists did research on these researchers, it somehow seems to me that on many of them would find exactly the same characteristics that they labeled Bitcoin investors.

[franky1]

in short.. they crawled through twitter looking for people with bad attitudes and then collected names of over 500 of those and then said "we surveyed over 500 of them"

but that said, i have seen alot of idiots in my time. especially the altnetter crew who want to do anything they can to tarnish the bitcoin community just for their own personal financial gain of trying to sway people over to their silly networks, even if their networks dont actually work well.

i too recognise my personality is not the 'good scout' superman personality.. and i am pruod to wear the anti-hero(hero thats not a boyscout about it). and i prefer to be the loud mouth call it straight, being frank attitude. but i have far too many times seen the kiss ass method just used by scammers and idiots trying to use other people. like a cult recruiter

[Anonylz]

I used to think that people at universities were doing some serious things, but I'm starting to believe that there are a lot of rotten apples in that system, and as a result, there are even more rotten apples coming out of the system in the form of so-called highly educated people.

Am laughing so hard with tears in my eyes,  
Don't rule out all universities to produce nothing but rotten apples am sure there are many good apples among the rotten ones, it so happen that the rotten apples among the good ones came up with a nasty research to psychoanalyse crypto users, what a load of crap.
They are trying to tag bitcoin to human behaviour, more like when they see someone behaving in a particular way they will like ask 'is he a bitcoin user'  . Impressive.

[kryptqnick]

Op, thanks for breaking it down and for being attentive to research (certainly, more attentive than all those media you linked). Indeed, I understand the research the same way you did (that they targeted people with these traits in the first place, not found out that crypto investors normally display them). Also, 506 isn't a big sample, and I wonder how representative it is.
People at universities do all sorts of things, and sometimes it's legit research, while sometimes it's not. What's more important is to not misrepresent what the research was about, and not everyone is up to this task in the media, unfortunately.

[Lucius]

Am laughing so hard with tears in my eyes,  

I think that's the only good thing that can come out of this kind of research (if we can call it that at all), and some would agree that it's a lot harder to make someone laugh than to do this kind of research

Don't rule out all universities to produce nothing but rotten apples am sure there are many good apples among the rotten ones, it so happen that the rotten apples among the good ones came up with a nasty research to psychoanalyse crypto users, what a load of crap.
They are trying to tag bitcoin to human behaviour, more like when they see someone behaving in a particular way they will like ask 'is he a bitcoin user'  . Impressive.

It may have seemed like I was generalizing about universities, but this is not the first research coming from so-called highly educated people who should contribute to society in a positive way, and they are among those who poison society with various nonsense like claiming the world will remain dark because Bitcoin will consume all its energy - because it is difficult for them to calculate that it consumes a total of 0.14% of the world's total electricity production.

In addition, from my own experience, I can say that I had very big problems when I explained Bitcoin to highly educated people, from those who have never been to university. Perhaps we can look for an explanation in the fact that some use this period of life mainly for some other things under the pretext that they are actually studying. Too much alcohol, drugs, and various other things sometimes really create rotten apples in the end.

[acroman08]

Studying cryptocurrency through the psychological lens of the dark tetrad offers insight into why people want to buy crypto. We are not suggesting that everyone interested in crypto displays dark tetrad traits.

 "We studied only a subset of people interested in crypto who do have these traits. If you happen to be a Bitcoin or other crypto holder, you may or may not exhibit them."

so, let me get this straight, they chose/pick 566 people who are into crypto and are showing the tetrad trait? then how are they saying "the average" if they only studied a subset of people who already have the tetrad traits? this method of study is extremely concerning.

[Gyfts]

A lot of psychology is junk science, but I gave the paper a shot and briefly reviewed it here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886921008321

First of all, a rather small sample size. A bit over 500 (some would argue it's enough, I don't).

Machiavellianism was associated with buying intention which was mediated by conspiracy beliefs. Machiavellians were more distrustful of government which was associated with a greater desire to buy crypto.

So crypto investors/users really are just conspiracy nuts that distrust government based on false beliefs. The above statement is pulled directly from their abstract. The amount of times I've heard academia call ordinary people conspiracy theorists for not confining themselves to the dogmas of their ideology are too many to be counted. Not everything is a conspiracy.

[yazher]

These are lots of bad news about us and I can't believe they came from multiple sources as if they were planning to publish these kinds of news to infiltrate and cause doubts in the minds of the new investors and those people who aren't event into crypto yet. These guys may be just interviewed some dude on the sidewalk and concluded the whole research from him skipping to get some real opinions from the like of the OP and the other veteran members in this community. If they extend their research here, they can find what they were looking for but these guys are biased from the start, they don't want real positive commends about bitcoins, they just wanted to publish some bad news about it.

[DaveF]

So this is us?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5Pku48YPFo

And on a side note, crap I am old that was the 1st movie I drove myself to after I got my drivers license.

-Dave

[Fortify]

Here are some recent media headlines on this matter:

I must admit that I felt identified with the above I took the headlines above for granted at first, as being the conclusions of the survey they reference. After all, if many such headlines echo the same, it must be right …

Not really …

A survey carried out by the Queensland University of Technology, based on a sample of 566 participants has led to the above headlines. However, headlines lacked to pick up on, in my opinion, one vital piece of information that is the key to interpreting the survey properly:

Studying cryptocurrency through the psychological lens of the dark tetrad offers insight into why people want to buy crypto. We are not suggesting that everyone interested in crypto displays dark tetrad traits.

 "We studied only a subset of people interested in crypto who do have these traits. If you happen to be a Bitcoin or other crypto holder, you may or may not exhibit them."

(these are the guys that conducted the survey)
See: https://theconversation.com/impulsive-psychopaths-like-crypto-research-shows-how-dark-personality-traits-affect-bitcoin-enthusiasm-180782

The above indicates, if I’m interpreting it correctly, that the focus group of the study were people who had the dark tetrad personality traits (Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy and sadism) per se. They studied this group and their relations to crypto, and derived their conclusions connecting personality traits to attitudes and believes, and later to crypto.

That is to say, the study sort of concluded that A (dark tetrad personality traits) ->B (attitude towards crypto), whilst many (not all) headlines are stating that B->A, which is not the same nor correct ...

I think this ties into the "pump and dump" mentality that a small group of individuals push in the cryptocurrency space. If you make Bitcoin, or anything, into your religion then you start to condition your brain to look for only signals that reinforce your existing beliefs. Someone who is really interested in mastering financial well being will seek out a rounded view and diversify among many assets, sticking with a heavy weighting towards to those with the longest history (gold/bonds/shares). There is definitely a certain gambling mentality and unpredictability associated with these currencies that maybe chimes within someone who is unstable - like those with psychopathic tendencies.

[stompix]

And they are right for a lot of the users.

Let's be honest with ourselves, let's look at the topics here, the discussions, the memes, and how bitcoiners picture themselves.
Every damn thread is about how the economy will crash, how people will be driven to poverty and the only escape will be bitcoin, how everything that will not be backed by bitcoin will collapse, and so on and on.
Narcissism? When you have your kindergarten dropped out bounty hunter who claims Bill Gates or Warren Buffett are stupid and smart people are those like them who do bounty and trading, the average Joe who has problems installing his own wallet but claims everyone else is a moron and they don't see the benefits of blockchain technology what more can you say? All those meme about bitcoiners living in castles in 10 years once 1 BTC is 100 billion and all others living in sewers, what's that called? Narcissism, psychopathy, or sadism?  

Btw, how is that thing called when somebody tells you something, and without having any data of your own you claim otherwise and call them morons?    

So crypto investors/users really are just conspiracy nuts that distrust government based on false beliefs. The above statement is pulled directly from their abstract.

I think it's pulled directly from the P&S section, for somebody who spends that much time there don't you agree?  
Or should I start quoting Tom_Truong, KingScorpio, or BADecker, <insert another one hundred usernames here>.

[Welsh]

Jesus. You know when you thought the news couldn't get any more far fetched, and then they release this utter drab. It's a sensationalist clickbait title, that literally has zero substance at all. The fact that they've sourced this to a "team in Queensland University" I'd be absolutely embarrassed to even be associated with this. I'd like to know exactly how they determined it, the people they actually studied, because this is either shouting out absolute bullshit or they've fallen victim to correlation doesn't equal causation, because my question would be, if you selected 1000 people by random, wouldn't they show similar traits to at least some extent even if they wasn't crypto investors. I don't actually understand the significance of cryptocurrencies here, and I certainly don't understand how they've woken up one day, and thought screw it we'll see the common traits of Crypto investors.

And they are right for a lot of the users.

Let's be honest with ourselves, let's look at the topics here, the discussions, the memes, and how bitcoiners picture themselves.
Every damn thread is about how the economy will crash, how people will be driven to poverty and the only escape will be bitcoin, how everything that will not be backed by bitcoin will collapse, and so on and on.
Narcissism? When you have your kindergarten dropped out bounty hunter who claims Bill Gates or Warren Buffett are stupid and smart people are those like them who do bounty and trading, the average Joe who has problems installing his own wallet but claims everyone else is a moron and they don't see the benefits of blockchain technology what more can you say? All those meme about bitcoiners living in castles in 10 years once 1 BTC is 100 billion and all others living in sewers, what's that called? Narcissism, psychopathy, or sadism? 

This is people, not specifically cryptocurrency investors. Jesus, every day I see this sort of attitude in every topic you could think of. The thing is, most of us display a little bit of these traits, its the actual definition of it that matters. How much you actually demonstrate it i.e how far along the spectrum for each trait.

[hatshepsut93]

Let's be honest with ourselves, let's look at the topics here, the discussions, the memes, and how bitcoiners picture themselves.
Every damn thread is about how the economy will crash, how people will be driven to poverty and the only escape will be bitcoin, how everything that will not be backed by bitcoin will collapse, and so on and on.

It's something that I have noticed in Bitcoin community a long time ago is that many members are looking at the world through the prism of Bitcoin. They are ready to support any politician who makes some positive comments on Bitcoin, even if that politician is rotten to the core or is a criminal. And the knee-jerk "this is good for Bitcoin" reaction to any crisis in the world is a legitimate example of lack of empathy, which is by definition psychopathy.

And the love for vague conspiracy theories about "the global rich elites" is also a pretty negative trait, as it is often used to reject everything mainstream without any arguments.

And the tendency towards accelerationism that you have mentioned is also a negative and psychopatic trait, nothing good ever came out of accelerationism.

[hd49728]

There are opposite things in life, in crypto or in any market, in any industry of our society.

Researches and conclusions from them should be conducted with enough sample sizes and in two sides. If we draw conclusions just based on one side of study, A > B, we might miss some information that possibly contains the truth.

Researchers are not always neutral with their research questions, objectives and methods that are all probably biased by head researchers. If a researcher thinks Bitcoin is a bad one for properity, freedom, etc. they will highly conduct their researches with biased methods to find evidence for their belief (that likely inaccurate).

[DapanasFruit]

This can be another attempt to put all people who are into cryptocurrency under just one box or category...maybe with the intention of putting shame to us people and stopping those others who can be interested to get onboard just because they don't want to be associated with "Machiavellian psychopaths with an inflated ego" which of course can be disgusting in the first place. Now, looking at the so-called survey, it is easy to conclude that it is very flawed and therefore any derivative out of it is also the same. Or maybe the people behind this study are actually the real psychopaths...though I do not have a good study or survey for that. Or maybe this is just another manifestation of the expanding and very influential "cancel culture" we are in? But overall this is very funny and should not be taken seriously.

[DdmrDdmr]

The 566 size of the surveys sample may seem small, but depending on other factors, it could be statistically significant. Play around with https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/sample-size-calculator/ for example, providing a population size, confidence level (normally 95%) and margin of error (typically between 3% and 5%, although the lower the better). Besides size, important factors are sample heterogeneity, population group representation, the way the questions are formulated, the range of selectable answer options, and so forth.

Regardless, the key elements here are, in my opinion, twofold:

- The survey, although delimited in scope and subject to studying people that were allegedly dark tetrads from the beginning, looks for relations for people that are additionally into crypto.

The survey mentions that 26% of the participants reported having crypto, and 64% showed an interest in doing so. That leaves just 10% of the dark tetrad sample that are not keen on crypto. That 10% (just 57 people) seems like an under representation to contrast against by the overwhelming 90% of the sample that are into cypto. There could therefore, although I can’t be certain, be a bias in the selection of the dark tetrads themselves (towards crypto).
 
- The media have echoed the survey results, but largely not paying attention to the survey sample's deliberately chosen bias (dark tetrad). As a result, many of the articles actually confuse this premise with the conclusions, and are in fact concluding the premise.

Note: At the foot of this article there are links to taking the Triad personality Test and the Sadism Test online (the dark tetrad is a "sum" of both). I got bored half way through the first, and found it too obvious what to check on the second if you wants one outcome or another.

[stompix]

This is people, not specifically cryptocurrency investors. Jesus, every day I see this sort of attitude in every topic you could think of. The thing is, most of us display a little bit of these traits, its the actual definition of it that matters. How much you actually demonstrate it i.e how far along the spectrum for each trait.

I've never said that crypto investors are all like this, and I do hope that even the people who I randomly talk around are not disguising themselves and hiding some god knows what even uglier traits and just making themselves look normal.

As far as I understand the last line of this study might suggest that a lot of those exhibiting these traits might be interested in cryptocurrency, not that people interested in cryptocurrencies are exhibiting those and I don't think there is somebody who can clearly claim no this is not happening.
I've seen a lot of guys who are not that much into the crypto as they are looking at it as a tool for the destruction and rebuilding of the society they dislike, and new construction where they will not be sidelined but in the center of authority. What's even more disturbing is that there are some individuals who clearly are just using BTC for their interest, not caring about censorship or privacy or security but using it as a ramp for
their own interest and gains, even if those are not monetary crypto-related gains.

Like any good invention, it does attract the weirdos and whackos, just like bulletproof vests are carried by those who don't want to get killed when killing other.

The survey mentions that 26% of the participants reported having crypto, and 64% showed an interest in doing so. That leaves just 10% of the dark tetrad sample that are not keen on crypto. That 10% (just 57 people) seems like an under representation to contrast against by the overwhelming 90% of the sample that are into cypto. There could therefore, although I can’t be certain, be a bias in the selection of the dark tetrads themselves (towards crypto).

Is there a classification in that study for the remaining 10%?
It might be that the 10% are simply not understanding crypto or they would be lacking the means of becoming an investor, not that they show disinterest in it.