See also: It’s Official! Young White Leftist Females Are Nuts. and IT’S OFFICIAL (AGAIN): Leftists, Particularly Leftist Women, Are Nuts and   It’s Official (Again): Social Justice Warriors ARE Mentally Ill—AND THEY’RE CONTAGIOUS

White Black Lives Matter protestors are notoriously defined by “virtue-signaling.” They are attempting, without actually doing anything genuinely virtuous, to stress how moral and caring they are. Hence the virtue-signaling “arms race”—a competition to outdo each other that culminates in lying prostrate on the ground or kissing the boots of blacks. A fascinating recent study has now revealed the malevolent personality traits that predict virtue-signaling are those known in psychology as the Dark Triad:  narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. So white BLMers really are nasty, self-righteous types who think they are superior and hold most people in contempt…just as you thought.

The study, “Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities” by Ekin Ok et. al., was published in July 2020 in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. [PDF]

The authors approach virtue-signaling from the perspective of evolutionary competition. They argue that it can be reduced down to an attempt to persuade others to transfer their resources to you. Western societies have become extremely focused on egalitarian values—on equality and on the alleviation of suffering—to such an extent that they trump all other values.

This is a fertile environment for “victim-signalers,” who openly and intentionally express how oppressed, disadvantaged and otherwise limited they are to showcase the extent to which they are “victims” and so elicit guilt-ridden resource transfers in their direction. This would seem to be a particular motive in the case of wealthy blacks, who insist they are “victims” because they are black.

This will often be allied with virtue-signaling. Virtue signalers symbolically indicate their solidarity with these supposed victims so that favorable moral judgements are made about the virtue-signalers as well as the victim-signalers, and resources are transferred towards them too.

The virtue-signalers are thus parasitic on both the victim-signalers and upon normal people who are adapted to be impressed by displays of morality.

Ultimately, both the victim-signalers and the virtue-signalers are self-interested liars who are taking advantage of peoples’ once-adaptive desires to create a relatively equal, and thus harmonious, society and to favor those who appear to be moral.

Accordingly, the authors hypothesized that both activities would be associated with Dark Triad personality traits. These traits, to quote the authors, lead to “self-promotion, emotional callousness, duplicity, and [the] tendency to take advantage of others.”

According to the authors,

…these traits can also be evolutionarily adaptive when accompanied by the ability to display superficial charm and highly developed impression management skills.

Such people combine a Machiavellian obsession with power, a Narcissistic self-grandiosity and a psychopathic absence of guilt about their manipulative behavior. Thus, the authors hypothesized, it is exactly these kinds of people that would be prepared to pursue strategies to attain non-reciprocal benefits from others via victim-signaling and virtue-signaling.

The authors tested their theories using a number of different samples, drawn from students and from the general population.

• In one study, they found that people were more likely to want to help somebody if they believed that the person had previously engaged in “virtuous” activity, specifically helping out at a sports event organized to raise money for the disabled, than if that person had not.
• In a second study, the authors found that people were more likely to donate money to a GoFundMe page if a person made a point of stressing their difficult life and emphasizing their virtue.
• A third study found that these same tactics—stressing victimhood and virtuousness—help to extract resources even from people we know personally, raising the question of what kind of people would pursue such a strategy. ­

The authors then organized a series of studies that explored the extent to which subjects virtue-signaled or victim-signaled and the extent to which they displayed Dark Triad traits, such as a propensity to cheat, to be self-entitled, and to manipulate others.

Victim-signaling was tapped into by asking participants to rate the frequency with which they did things like “expressed how people like me are under-represented in the media and leadership.” Virtue-signaling was tapped into simply by asking about the frequency with which people signal their virtuous character.

The results of these investigations were just as the authors predicted. In one study, Dark Triad traits correlated with victim-signaling at 0.35. In another study, the propensity to cheat correlated with victim-signaling at 0.42, while virtue-signaling correlated with a sense of entitlement at 0.28.

And in all of the various studies, it was clear that both virtue-signaling and victim-signaling are associated with Dark Triad traits.

In other words, as is obvious just from observing a BLM march, Whites who scream that “Black Lives Matter” are power-obsessed, psychopathic Narcissists, and a series of experiments, published in a reputable journal, has just proven this.

I have recently reported (here and here and here) a growing body of evidence that self-identified extreme liberals are both extremely unhappy and very high in mental illness, especially depression, while those who self-identify as extremely conservative are the most mentally stable.

So, if we take these findings on mental illness together with the findings on virtue-signaling and Dark Triad traits, it is reasonable to conclude that the BLM mob is substantially composed of seriously mentally unstable Narcissists, psychopaths and power-obsessed manipulators.

To put it another way, Western culture is being dictated to by a mob that in previous generations would have been confined to psychiatric institutions.