Gaslighting Expert: The One Phrase Narcissists Always Use To Control You! | Dr Leanne Ten Brinke

Why does it matter? Because the traits we worship in winners may be exactly what's holding them back.

Dr. Leanne Ten Brinke went searching for proof that psychopathic traits give people an edge in ruthless environments. She studied hedge funds. She studied government. She found the opposite in both — and spent the rest of her career mapping the gap between what people believe about dark personalities and what the data actually shows. This episode is that map.

• Psychopathy correlates with less influence in government and less money earned as a hedge fund manager — not more • The number-one lie-detection signal the world relies on (eye contact) has no scientific basis and actively harms autistic people • 'Tell me more about that' outperforms every body-language cue for detecting deception — and almost no one uses it • Moving a negotiation to text instantly strips a dark-personality individual of their primary advantage

The researcher who set out to prove psychopaths win in business ran the study — and found the opposite in both domains she tested

The cultural story about dark-trait success is specific and durable: fearlessness, callousness, and willingness to cut people down gives you an edge in the most competitive arenas. Dr. Leanne Ten Brinke believed it. After finishing a PhD studying people who went on television to plead for help finding missing loved ones they had actually killed, she moved into business research with a clear hypothesis — that psychopathic traits might finally pay off in hyper-competitive contexts. She partnered with psychologist Dacher Keltner and pointed their research at two domains: political influence in government and earnings in hedge fund management.

Keltner was skeptical. She was not.

'Consistently, we found that high levels of psychopathy was associated with less influence in government. It was also associated with making less money as a hedge fund manager.' Not a marginal effect — a consistent finding across both contexts.

The mechanism becomes clearer when you look at how these individuals actually function inside organizations. People with high psychopathic traits bully subordinates, generate outsized stress across their teams, and drive turnover. Team outcomes are worse. They present as strategic and decisive — and there is research confirming that narcissism in particular creates a strong first impression — but sustained performance lags substantially behind the appearance.

'I think one great lie we've all been told is that to be successful, you have to be in it for number one.' The person saying that is the one who designed the study to prove it was true.

Forget reading body language — the only lie detector that actually works is asking follow-up questions

Human beings are spectacularly bad at detecting lies. Thousands of studies confirm it: on average, people perform at about 54% accuracy. Given 12 videos — six liars, six truth-tellers — you would get maybe seven right. Training moves the needle slightly, but there is a far bigger gain available elsewhere.

'Learning how to ask better questions is actually a really kind of essential tool for detecting lies,' Ten Brinke explains.

Here is the asymmetry. A truth-teller only needs to remember what happened and say it. Ask them to go deeper and they keep going — the font that would not format correctly on the slide deck, the colleague who stayed late, the specific thing that annoyed them on the way out. They were there; the details are real and available. A liar faces a far harder task: fabricating on demand, avoiding contradictions with earlier versions of the story, tracking what you might already know, and filing the whole thing away for the next time they need to repeat it. 'We call this increased cognitive load.'

The result: liars tend to give fewer details, not more. Most people assume the opposite. And when liars do produce detail, it concentrates around the parts of the story that are actually true — what Ten Brinke calls 'embedded lies.' Rich detail about the Subway order, the tuna wrap, the manager in Australia — then vagueness precisely where the fabrication was.

'A great question to have in your back pocket is just tell me more about that.' No trap-setting required. At some point, the liar is going to have a lot more trouble coming up with additional details than the truth-teller. Ask, and count how much in the response is actually checkable. That gap tells you more than any expression could.

The world's most trusted lie-detection signal has no scientific support — and autistic people bear the cost of this myth

Go to any country and ask what the number-one sign of lying is. The answer is universal: eye contact. Shifty eyes, looking away, refusing to hold your gaze.

'There's no research to suggest that that is true,' Ten Brinke says flatly.

The logic of why this cue is useless becomes obvious once you trace it: everyone knows this stereotype. If you want someone to believe you are telling the truth, you will control your eye contact. The signal is so widely known that anyone motivated to beat it simply does. It does not detect dishonesty — it detects people who are not trying to deceive you.

The people who suffer most from this false assumption are those who struggle with eye contact for neurological reasons. Emerging research suggests that people on the autism spectrum are perceived as lying more when they are actually telling the truth — because observers are using eye contact as a proxy for honesty, and it correlates with nothing. Cultural assumptions compound the error: in some contexts, avoiding direct eye contact signals respect, not evasion.

Remove it entirely from your assessment. Replace the entire multi-cue algorithm with one question: how verifiable are the details in what this person just said? That is the discriminating signal. Focus on one cue that works rather than assembling a collection of cues that mostly do not.

White lies don't protect relationships — they create measurable distance in them, even when the other person never suspects a thing

Ten Brinke's lab set up a deceptively simple interaction: two strangers in conversation, one secretly instructed to lie about everything, the other entirely unaware. At the end, both rated how connected they felt to their partner.

The pairs with a liar in them reported less closeness — not because the honest participant became suspicious, but because something subtler had broken down.

Conversation builds intimacy through reciprocal disclosure: you share something about yourself, I share something about myself, and gradually we know each other. A liar gives less true information about themselves. The recipient walks away sensing distance without being able to explain it. 'I don't feel like I know you at the end of our conversation. Even though I'm not actively suspicious... it comes across because you gave me less information.'

The loneliness finding extends this further: the more lies people report telling in their everyday lives, the lonelier they report feeling overall.

Most everyday lies are protective in intent. 'Most of the lies that we tell are pro-social in nature. Like, I tell you a lie because I don't want to hurt your feelings, but we are finding that that actually creates this like social distance between us as opposed to bringing us closer together.' Those lies — the kind ones, the considerate ones — still erode closeness. They still leave the recipient feeling, without knowing why, that they could not quite reach you.

The cost-benefit math most people carry for white lies is built on a premise the research does not support.

Face-to-face, dark-personality negotiators win — move it to text, and their advantage collapses entirely

Researchers at the University of British Columbia had people with varying levels of dark personality traits negotiate over concert ticket prices. The only variable: whether the exchange happened face-to-face or over text.

Face-to-face, the high dark-trait individuals dominated. They were commanding, charming, and walked away with significantly better outcomes. Over text, the advantage disappeared.

'If you reduce them to words on the page, they lose some of that like charisma,' Ten Brinke explains. The manipulation relies on presence — on social pressure that operates in real time but does not survive the pause between messages. Take away the room, and the leverage shrinks substantially.

A second benefit compounds the first. Written exchanges create a record that cannot be rewritten. 'You can't gaslight me and tell me I'm misremembering what we agreed upon later. I've got a written version here.' For anyone who has navigated a dispute with a dark-personality individual, the creeping revision of what was said — the casual rewriting of shared history — is often the most destabilizing part of the experience. Text removes that weapon from the table.

Text also creates time. You can pause, think, and consult someone else before responding. You can show the exchange to a third party and ask whether the behavior seems normal. You can fact-check claims rather than responding under pressure.

Any high-stakes negotiation with someone whose behavior you suspect falls into dark-trait territory should happen in writing. Start there — before the in-person conversation, not after.

Gaslighting isn't lying — it's denying someone's subjective experience, and that specific distinction is what makes it clinically destructive

The word appears everywhere now, applied to any disagreement or denial. That overuse has a cost: it blurs the clinical precision that helps people recognize when the real thing is happening to them.

Ten Brinke draws the line carefully. 'It's a pattern of denying someone's version of reality.' That sounds adjacent to lying, but the particular harm is different. Facts can be disputed. Two people can disagree about what was said, what happened, what the timeline was — and those disagreements can be examined. Gaslighting targets something that cannot be externally verified in the same way: someone's own subjective experience.

'I could maybe argue with the facts, but it's when you start arguing with someone else's perception of reality. Of their own subjective experience. That's when you stray into this gaslighting.'

What makes it so destabilizing is the dependency it creates. When someone consistently tells you that what you felt did not happen, that your memory is wrong, that your own perception cannot be trusted — you begin to rely on their account of what is real. Isolation compounds this: cut off from friends or family who could confirm your experience, you lose the external reference points that would let you say 'no, that actually happened, I was there.'

Research confirms that people with high dark-personality traits endorse these tactics and see nothing wrong with using them in intimate relationships. It is not a communication failure. It is a deliberate strategy, and the data reflects that clearly.

An argument disputes what happened. Gaslighting tells you that what you felt did not happen. The second one has a clinical name for a reason.

'You're better than other kids' builds narcissism — 'you are loved' builds self-esteem — and parents are often doing one when they mean to do the other

The parenting behavior that predicts narcissism is not neglect or coldness. It is overvaluation.

A longitudinal study tracked parents who frequently told their children they were special, exceptional, better than other kids. 'The more the kids got that kind of feedback, the more likely they were to be more narcissistic later down the road. Like they thought they were exceptional. They thought they were entitled to things that other people were not entitled to.'

Ten Brinke draws the distinction carefully. 'That's different than self-esteem. We want our kids to have high self-esteem. We want them to know that they are cared for and worthy. That comes from something different. That comes from like a warm, responsive parenting style.'

Two things that look nearly identical from the outside — praising a child, making them feel important — point in opposite directions. 'You are exceptional and superior to others' creates an identity grounded in comparison, one that requires constant reaffirmation and responds badly to any threat to the ranking. 'You are loved and capable' builds something stable that does not require anyone else to be lesser.

The same warm responsiveness appears in treatment research for children showing early callous-unemotional traits. The effective intervention does not put the child in therapy alone — it trains parents to respond differently: reward kind behavior immediately with attention, and avoid creating dominance contests when conflict escalates. The direction of consistent attention shapes which behaviors grow.

The pathway into narcissism runs not only through coldness. It also runs through parents who wanted to raise confident children and communicated the wrong message.

Trying to punish dark-personality people into better behavior is exactly backwards — their brains do not process it the way yours does

People with high psychopathic traits are strongly reward-sensitive and remarkably insensitive to punishment. This is a neurological difference, not a behavioral preference.

The amygdala — the brain structure associated with fear response and the learned link between harmful behavior and future consequences — tends to be both smaller and less active in people with high levels of psychopathy. 'Literally their brains don't process punishment in the same way. They don't develop that kind of link between if I do this behavior then fear of punishment again.' You punish them; they are more likely to repeat the behavior, not less.

When someone with dark traits causes harm, the natural human response is to punish — to express that it hurt, to make them feel consequences, to appeal to guilt. For this population, none of those levers land where you intend. Guilt and empathy are precisely what they do not experience in the same way. Using them as your primary tools wastes your effort and, perversely, leaves the behavior unchanged.

The underused tool is reward. When a dark-personality person does something kind or honest or cooperative, respond to it immediately. 'If they do something kind or honest or helpful, oh my god, reward them. Reward them not with power over others, but maybe with like a bonus at work, with like a job title, because they really care about status.' Tie the reward to the behavior you want, and 'you are going to increase the likelihood that you get more of that behavior in the future.'

'It's not that they can't behave better. Is that they might do it for a different reason.' Stop making moral arguments to people who are not running that operating system.

The playing field only levels when you know what game is actually being played

The deepest implication of Ten Brinke's work may be institutional. If dark-personality traits make people earn less and gain less influence even in the most competitive environments, then the myth of the dark-trait edge is not just wrong — it is functioning as a cover story. One that lets underperformers exploit organizations and relationships precisely as long as the people around them keep believing it.

Exposure changes the calculation. Not for them — their traits are unlikely to shift. But for everyone trying to manage around them, negotiate with them, or raise children who will not become them.

The tools exist. Almost no one has been taught to use them. That is what changes when you do.

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Topics: psychology, dark personality traits, psychopathy, narcissism, deception, lie detection, gaslighting, manipulation, relationships, leadership, parenting, negotiation, behavioral science