Narcissism, aggression and Troopergate

OK, so the Troopergate stuff. The wonderful hard workers here at Ivan Moore Research are scheduled to go into the field this weekend with our final Anchorage Press, Frontiersman, KTUU and KENI statewide survey, and that’ll give us a look at what impact the Branchflower Report has had on the popularity of the governor, as well as getting an update on the U.S. Senate and House races. We’ll have the results for you next week.

In the meantime, a lot of us have been sitting around, scratching our heads, wondering what the heck the bottom line of the Troopergate affair is. I’ve done a lot of it the last few days, and these are the conclusions I’ve come to.

Todd Palin spent a lot of effort trying to get Trooper Wooten fired. A lot of effort. In fact, a thoroughly troubling, markedly abnormal, almost pathological amount of effort. There, I said it. It needed saying, to be honest.

Now, I don’t know Trooper Wooten. I’m not sure if he’s a good guy or a bad guy. He shot a moose when his wife had the permit, he drank in his patrol car, and he tasered an 11-year old, but the Palins knew about most of these things long ago and didn’t say a word about any of it until the divorce got nasty. As usual, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle … he’s probably a guy with a few self-control issues, but is also probably not as bad as he’s been made out to be.

One thing I don’t believe is that the Palins felt directly and physically threatened by him. Branchflower made the argument in his report that if they did then why did Sarah Palin cut her security detail in half? You’d have thought she’d have doubled it.

And anyway, let’s face it, if there’s a guy out there with a gun that you think is unhinged and has you in his sights, then I’d have thought the last thing you’d want to do is mess with him. Yeah, that’s a really good idea, let’s screw him to the wall and see how angry he gets. So, I’m sorry, this “we felt threatened” stuff is horsepucky. The only logical, rational, reasonably sane conclusion I can reach is that they were out to settle a personal score. To get him fired because they wanted to.

The next question is … what kind of person does that? What kind of psychological characteristics does someone have to have to make them respond in that way, with that kind of aggression, particularly when the behavior comes at huge risk to themselves? Don’t healthy people say to themselves “Hey, look, we’re Governor and First Dude. He’s nothing. Let’s just let it go.” Well, don’t they?

(DISCLAIMER: I’m not a psychologist, and have no education in the field beyond a subsidiary psychology course in college. I’m not endeavoring to make any kind of clinical diagnosis here, just looking for some kind of layperson understanding. And sharing it with you.)

I started thinking about ego and self-esteem, in an attempt to understand what kind of people react aggressively to threats. Is it people with big egos or small ones? (Oh, stop it …) Is it people with high self-esteem or low? What is an ego anyway?

Historically, psychologists have considered “high self-esteem” to be a positive human characteristic, and subscribed to the notion that low self-esteem underlies most aggressive behavior. This thinking has changed in recent years, through nothing more than the observations that people who are aggressive oftentimes display seemingly high levels of self-esteem, and people who have low self-esteem are often quite meek and unthreatening.

Then I came across this fascinating experiment. It was done in 1998 by a couple of psychologists called Bushman and Baumeister and sought to test the links between “self-views,” notably self-esteem and narcissism, and hostile aggressive behavior in response to what they term an “ego threat.”

They got 270 willing graduate students to complete questionnaire tests. The first one was the Rosenberg Self-Esteem test, which asks subjects to agree or disagree with statements like “I feel that I have a number of good qualities” and “I wish I could have more respect for myself.” The second was the Narcissism Personality Inventory, which tests forced-choice pairs of statements like “I really like to be the center of attention” and “It makes me uncomfortable to be the center of attention.”

The researchers then sat the subjects down one by one and asked them to write a one paragraph essay in support of their favored position on abortion. When they were done, it was explained to them that there was another student in an adjoining room who was also writing one, and they would swap papers and comment on each other’s work.

But there was no other student. The subject’s essay was taken out of the room, and the psychologists themselves scrawled in red pen all over the subject’s essay things, no doubt, like “This is complete crap. You must be a total butthead to believe this stuff.” They then took the essay back to the subject.

Once they’d absorbed the humiliation of the comments on their work, the third phase was a timed reaction test. The subject was given headphones and was led to believe that the other person in the next room also had some on. On a signal, the first person to hit a big button in front of them launched an unpleasant noise in the earphones of their competitor. The further they pushed the button down, the louder they were told the noise would sound, and the longer they held it down, the longer the noise went on. A combination of the length and decibels became a proxy for the “aggressiveness” of their response.

Here’s what they found. First, men reacted more aggressively than women. Go figure. Second, self-esteem played no significant part. Aggressive response to ego threat was just as likely to come from people with high self-esteem as it was from people who thought less of themselves. But narcissism showed a very significant relationship to aggression. Those that scored high on the Narcissism inventory leaned long and hard on their buttons, no doubt muttering “sonofabitch, that’ll teach ya” to themselves under their breath.

The conclusions of the study read, in part, as follows: “It is not so much the people who regard themselves as superior beings who are the most dangerous, but rather those who have a strong desire to regard themselves as superior beings. Some people may be able to brush off criticism easily, just as others may view it as valid and well-deserved, and neither response may produce aggression. In contrast, people who are preoccupied with validating a grandiose self-image apparently find criticism highly upsetting and lash out against the source of it.”

So is Todd Palin a narcissist? Not necessarily. Just because this research showed a link between aggressiveness in response to an ego threat and narcissism, doesn’t mean that any person who responds to an ego threat with aggression is ergo, a narcissist. All I can say for sure is that Todd Palin’s relentless and unilateral pursuit of Wooten was, in my thoroughly layman view, characteristically narcissistic behavior.

And even then, I’ll admit it might not even be him we should be considering. He might, after 20 years of marriage, have realized the benefits of carrying water for his wife.

Ivan Moore is an independent pollster from Anchorage.