The Cruel Instigator: Why Some People Are WIRED to Enjoy Your Pain | Dark Tetrad Ep.4

There's a reassuring lie we tell ourselves about human nature. We tell ourselves that when people do bad things, there's always a rational instrumental reason behind it. If someone steals, they need the money. If a colleague sabotages your presentation, they want the promotion. If a romantic partner gaslights you, they're trying to control you so they don't lose you.

We rationalise malevolence because it makes the world feel more predictable. It allows us to believe that if we just remove the incentive, if we share resources, offer reassurance, create a fair workplace, the bad behaviour will stop. But what if the cruelty isn't a means to an end? What if the cruelty is the end?

Welcome to the final episode of the Dark Tetrad Personality Traits. We've covered the grandiose self-promoter of narcissism. We've explored the cold, calculated manipulation of Machiavellianism. We've dissected the reckless predatory nature of psychopathy. But in 2013, psychologists realised that this so-called dark triad wasn't enough.

It couldn't explain the internet trolls who spent hours destroying the strangest reputation for no financial gain. It couldn't explain the boss who set impossible deadlines just to watch their employees panic. It couldn't explain the partner who picked a fight on your birthday not to gain anything, but simply because they enjoyed watching you cry.

Psychologists Buckles, Jones and Paulus realised that there was a fourth shadow. They named it everyday sadism. And today we're going to look at the psychology of the subclinical sadist. The person who walks amongst us, working in our offices, sitting in classrooms and sleeping in our beds. Who derives a deep, intrinsic and terrifying pleasure from inflicting pain on innocent people.

I'm Dr Nick Kecker and this is The Psychology Guy. Let's get into it. To understand everyday sadism, we need to start where the word itself begins. The term sadism is derived from the Marquis de Sade, an 18th century French aristocrat and writer whose novels were so explicitly devoted to the relationship between cruelty, power and sexual pleasure that his name became permanently embedded in our psychological vocabulary.

De Sade wasn't just writing fiction, he was describing a human impulse that had existed long before him, but that nobody had yet dared to name. For most of the 20th century, psychology treated sadism as a rare, extreme and almost exclusively criminal phenomenon. It appeared in the DSM as sadistic personality disorder in 1987, but just seven years later, in 1994, it was removed from the DSM-IV amid academic debate about whether it was truly distinct enough from antisocial personality disorder to warrant its own category.

That was a mistake and researchers were about to discover why. In 2013, psychological scientist Erinn Buchles, working with colleagues Daniel Jones and Delroy Paulhus at the University of British Columbia, published a landmark study in psychological science titled "Behavioural Confirmation of Everyday Sadism".

Their research established something radical, that sadism is not confined to prisons and psychiatric wards, it exists on the continuous spectrum within the general non-criminal population. They gave a group of students the choice of several tasks, cleaning toilets, putting their hand in ice-cold water or, in a deliberately uncomfortable third option, killing live bugs in a machine labelled the exterminator.

Some participants actually chose to kill the bugs and those who did, they scored significantly higher on sadistic personality measures. More striking still, when the task involved suffering, they were more motivated, they exerted more effort, they were, in the truest sense, energised by cruelty. That single experiment changed everyday cruelty and it opened the door to a body of research that has now synthesised over 85 studies and found sadism embedded in workplaces, romantic relationships and the architecture of the internet itself.

Before we go any further, I want to make one critical distinction. Because everyday sociadism is frequently confused with psychopathy, conflating them is one of the most serious mistakes you can make when trying to protect yourself. A corporate psychopath will absolutely devastate your career if it benefits them.

They'll take credit for your work, shift blame to save their own skin and eliminate you without the moment you become a liability, but the key phrase here is "if it benefits them". In the scientific literature this is called instrumental aggression. For the psychopath, the harm they cause you is an instrument, a tool they use to acquire money, power or status.

The psychopath doesn't necessarily want to hurt you, they simply don't care if they do. You're getting in the way of their progress and they're stepping over your life. Everyday sadism is entirely different. Sadism is driven by hedonic aggression, hedonic meaning relating to pleasure. For the sadist, the harm is not a tool to get a reward, the harm is the reward.

An everyday sadist possesses what researchers call an appetitive motivation for cruelty, an intrinsic self-sustaining desire to cause suffering. When a sadist observes someone in pain, being humiliated or in distress, the reward centres of their brain light up. They experience genuine excitement, amusement and satisfaction.

The neurological signature is consistent with how ordinary people respond when their favourite sports team scores a goal or when they receive unexpected good news. But it gets more disturbing. Researchers demonstrated that everyday sadists will expend their own time, energy and personal cost going out of their way even when there's zero tangible benefit just to cause suffering.

While a psychopath steps on you to get to the top of the stairs, a sadist will go out of their way to push you down them just to watch you fall. This is the defining truth of everyday sadism. When nothing is in it for them, they're still in it. That's what makes sadists uniquely dangerous and uniquely difficult to protect against.

Here's where the science gets fascinating and deeply uncomfortable. Research by Karla Harenske and colleagues at the Mind Research Network found that individuals with sadistic tendencies show increased frontotemporal brain activity when viewing images of others in distress. To put this simply, where a neurotypical person might feel discomfort or activate their empathy circuits when seeing someone in pain, the sadistic brain shows activity consistent with attention, engagement and critically reward processing.

In 2023, Erin Buckles, the same researcher who confirmed everyday sadism in 2013, published a study in Scientific Reports examining the startle response across dead rod traits. The startle response is one of the most primitive fear mechanisms in the human body, an involuntary flinch to sudden stimulus.

Individuals high in callous and sadistic traits showed a significantly blunted startle response. Their nervous systems were physiologically quieter in the face of potential threat. This diminished reactivity means the normal emotional breaks, anxiety, guilt, the inhibitory discomfort that stopped most people from cruelty as simply less active in sadists.

Perhaps most revealing of all, Dr. David Chester of Virginia Commonwealth University has proposed that sadistic behaviour operates through the same reinforcement loops as addiction. The pain of others becomes the drug. Each successful act of cruelty produces the brain's opioid reward system, creating an escalating appetite for more intense experiences.

Chester's theorised that tharmacological treatments targeting opioid receptors, specifically opioid antagonists, might one day be used to interrupt this reward loop, effectively removing the pleasurable hit that sustains sadistic behaviour. We don't have that treatment yet, but the fact that researchers are seriously proposing it tells you something important about the biological reality of what we're dealing with.

This is not a character flaw, it's not a lifestyle choice, this is brain architecture shaped by genetics, development history and reinforcement learning that produces a mind which finds the distress of others genuinely pleasurably rewarding. So, what does everyday sadism actually look like in practice?

The primary measurement tool in the literature is the CAST-12, developed by Buchholz and Paul Hus. It identifies three distinct dimensions of the trait. The first dimension is direct verbal sadism. This is a person who enjoys making jokes at your expense, not playful banter, but targeted and publicly expose them.

They enjoy the power of watching your face fall. They enjoy the audience. Every cut and remark is a calculated test to see how much they can get away with before you react. And your reaction? That's the prize. The second dimension is direct physical sadism. The more overt expression of the trait. In corporate and social contexts, this rarely manifests as physical violence, but it does manifest as deliberate, calculated interference with your well-being.

The boss who engineers impossible situations you're guaranteed to fail. The colleague who breaks your equipment the night before a critical demo. The partner who accidentally humiliates you physically in front of others. The third dimension is vicarious sadism. And this is one of the most culturally normalised, which makes it the most insidious.

Vicarious sadists derive pleasure from watching or consuming cruelty rather than directly inflicting it. This includes a spectrum of behaviour, from the individual who watches violent combat sports not for the athletic competition, but specifically for the moment of injury, to the person who obsessively follows public figures careers waiting for them to fail, to the keyboard warrior who shares videos of people being humiliated and laughs at the comments.

Research on self-report measures suggests that roughly 7% of student samples report subclinical sadistic traits at a meaningful level. Though actual prevalence is likely higher due to social desirability effects in self-reporting. Some researchers go further arguing that virtually all humans possess the latent capacity for sadistic responses under the right conditions.

What they call the pro-social sadism of cheering when a bully finally gets what they deserve. The difference, as always, is degree, context and most critically, control. Nowhere is the everyday sadist more destructive and more effectively hidden than in the modern corporate workplace. Organisations are built on hierarchies, power differentials and intense competition.

For an everyday sadist, this isn't just a place to earn a paycheck, it's a laboratory. Research from IE Business School's Organisational Behaviour Team has identified everyday sadism as one of the most powerful predictors of interpersonal counterproductive work behaviours, including targeted bullying, harassment and proactive incivility.

Here's what makes the workplace sadists uniquely destructive. Unlike Machiavellianism, which can be partially neutralised by an organisation with clear rules, strong governance and meaningful accountability, everyday sadists are not responsive to organisational justice. Research has shown that even in the workplace, perceived as fair and equitable, sadistic individuals continue their harmful behaviour regardless.

Because they're not doing it for strategic advantage, they're doing it for fun. You can't negotiate with someone who doesn't want anything from the negotiation except to watch you suffer. Let me paint you a portrait of the sadistic leader in practice. A Machiavellian boss might withhold information from you so they can take credit for a project.

A sadistic boss will give you the wrong information, encourage you to present it to the board and sit back with a smirk as you're humiliated in front of the executive team. They don't want your promotion, they want your degradation. Sadists weaponise radical candour and brutal honesty. We all know managers who say "I just tell it like it is" or "I don't sugarcoat things".

But pay attention to when and where they choose to deliver their feedback. The sadistic leader waits until the team meeting when the maximum number of people are present to deliver their critique. They don't want to improve your performance, they want an audience for your humiliation. They engage in what researchers call proactive incivility.

This is a deliberate strategic sabotage of a colleagues emotional state for no productive purpose. Imagine you have been working on a massive high stakes project, you've been pulling late nights, you're finally at the finish line. The everyday sadists will wait until the very last minute to remember a critical compliance form you forgot to fill out.

They'll subtly hint that the CEO is unhappy with your direction, offering no specifics, no actionable guidance. Just enough manufactured ambiguity to inject chronic anxiety into your nervous system. They don't get a bonus for this, there's no promotion for them in it. Their only compensation is the visible stress on your face, that's the transaction, that's their currency.

Another common tactic, fostering gladiatorial competition. The sadistic leader will pick two employees against each other for a single promotion, giving both conflicting instructions and vague simultaneous promises purely to watch them tear each other apart. They relish the power differential. The ability to manipulate another human beings emotional state gives them a profound, real-time sense of control and superiority.

Because they typically mask these behaviours behind high standards, accountability culture or corporate resilience, HR departments struggle to identify them. The sadist operates in the grey areas of the employee handbook. They don't explicitly break the rules, they just make the environment so psychologically toxic that their targets eventually leave, questioning their own competence and sanity on the way out.

If the corporate workplace is a playground for the everyday sadist, the internet is an all-you-can-eat buffet. In a landmark 2014 study, the now famous "Trolls just want to have fun". Buckles, Trappnall and Polos established a direct statistically robust link between internet trolling behaviours and the dark tetrad of personality.

Their findings were clear, while all four dark traits were associated with trolling, everyday sadism was by far the most powerful independent predictor. A subsequent meta-analysis published in Psychothema confirmed this relationship across multiple cultural contexts and methodologies, with sadism consistently emerging as the primary driver of online harmful behaviour.

Let's be clear about what trolling actually is, psychologically speaking. It's not frustration being vented. It's not a legitimate grievance poorly expressed. In its clinical definition, trolling is a deceptive, destructive and disruptive behaviour in an online social setting, with no apparent instrumental purpose.

The troll gains nothing material, they receive no payment, they acquire no power. What they do receive is sadistic glee, what the internet has called, in its peculiar vernacular, the lulz. The anonymity of the internet removes the two primary social consequences of cruelty, immediate physical retaliation and social ostracism.

A sadist can inflict real psychological damage on a real human being, without any of the normal costs. It's cruel with zero friction, and for a person whose brain reward system responds to the suffering of others, it's essentially a frictionless delivery mechanism for their dopamine. This is why the oldest rule of online culture, "don't feed the trolls", is not just good advice.

It's neurologically accurate. When you respond with anger, when you try to defend yourself, when you show that your words have penetrated your defences and caused genuine pain, you've just delivered their payoff. You've given them exactly what they came for. And this is also why cancel culture, at its most virulent, can become a vehicle for everyday sadism.

When the goal of a social media pylon shifts from seeking accountability to simply enjoying the obliteration of a person's reputation and livelihood, that's no longer justice, it's organised, collective, vicarious sadism. The mob isn't trying to correct a wrong, they're enjoying the spectacle of destruction.

Perhaps the most insidious expression of everyday sadism is relational sadism, because it happens in spaces we consider safe. The relational sadist is the partner who picks a massive escalating fight the night before your most important interview. Not because they've got genuine grievance, but because injecting anxiety into your system gives them a profound sense of power and superiority.

They want to walk into that next day knowing they're the disturbance at the centre of your attention. Your compromised performance is their victory. They're the friend who makes a subtle, perfectly aimed, humiliating dig at your appearance, your intelligence or your relationships, time for maximum audience impact, wrapped in the camouflage of a joke.

"I'm just messing with you. Can't you take a joke?" is the relational sadist's favourite punchline. It simultaneously delivers a sting and shifts the blame for any emotional fallout onto the victim's sensitivity. Research on the relationship between everyday sadism and intimate partner dynamics has identified a pattern researchers call the cruelty charm cycle.

The sadistic partner intermittently delivers moments of genuine warmth, affection and connection, just enough to maintain the attachment bond while continuing the underlying pattern of cruelty. This isn't the same as the Machiavellians' calculated intermittent reinforcement designed to maintain control.

The sadistic partner's warmth is real, but temporary. Their cruelty is also real and the pleasure it delivers reinforces their behaviour. And this is the final, most disorienting feature of the relational sadist. Unlike the psychopath, they may actually feel guilt, briefly, transiently, after an episode of cruelty.

Research suggests that everyday sadists at lower levels of the trait do experience post-act mere remorse, but that guilt is not strong enough to prevent the behaviour because the hedonic reward precedes the guilt and by the time the guilt arrives, the pleasure has already been collected. There's a concept that sits precisely at the cultural threshold of everyday sadism, and it's one most of us recognise without realising what it reveals about our own psychology.

It's a German word, schadenfreude. Schadenfreude is the experience of pleasure derived from the misfortune of others, and it's culturally ubiquitous. It's why reality television works, it's why you feel the tiny flicker of something, maybe it's relief, or amusement, when a famously arrogant public figure experiences a very public humiliation.

Here's what the research tells us. Schadenfreude and everyday sadism share significant psychological architecture. Both involve the reward processing of another's suffering, but the distinction, and it's an important one, is passivity versus actuality. The schadenfreude experiencer did not engineer the misfortune.

They're enjoying something that happened without their agency. The sadist engineers the suffering. They make it happen. What makes schadenfreude useful as a concept here, is that it reminds us that the pleasure pain connection is not an alien phenomenon confined to pathological minds. It exists on a spectrum that includes all of us, to varying degrees.

The question is always, how far along that spectrum do you sit, and crucially, do you act on it? So, you've identified an everyday sadist in your environment. How do you protect yourself against someone who wants nothing more than to watch you suffer? How do you negotiate with a person who doesn't want your resources, your compliance or your capitulation but simply wants your pain?

The answer is you starve them. Protocol 1 The Grey Rock Method The most evidence-informed psychological defence against an everyday sadist is a technique known as the Grey Rock Method, documented extensively in clinical and survivor communities and widely cited in therapeutic practice. The core principle is this the sadist is seeking an emotional response.

They want to see you flustered, hear your voice shake, watch you get angry, defensive or distressed. That response is their reward. It's the pellet that drops when they press the lever. If you give them the pellet, they will keep pressing. To use the Grey Rock Method, you must become as uninteresting and unresponsive and emotionally flat as a grey rock, mundane, inert, unremarkable.

When the sadistic boss delivers a humiliating message, you don't defend yourself, you don't show anger, you don't shrink, you look at them with a blank neutral expression and you say "noted" and you return to your notes, nothing more. When the sadistic ex part in the sense of vitriolic message designed to ruin your weekend, you don't write the five paragraph essay defending your character that's forming in your head, you respond with "okay" or you don't respond at all.

Strip all emotional resonance from your interactions, keep answers brief, factual and completely free of personal information. Please don't share your fears, hopes or stress levels. Every piece of emotional data you give a sadist is a weapon they'll catalogue and deploy against you later. By denying them the hedonic payoff, consistently, patiently, you become boring and a boring target they'll move on.

Protocol 2 The Yellow Rock Modification. In corporate environments where you cannot simply disengage, where the sadist is your manager, a key stakeholder or someone you're contractually bound to interact with, the grey rock method must be modified. This is what psychologists and coaches call the yellow rock method.

The yellow rock retains the emotional flatness of the grey rock but adds a thin professional veneer of warmth and courtesy. You remain brief, factual and undramatic but you're politely professional on the surface. This is a strategic camouflage. You protect your internal emotional state while avoiding the additional organisational risk of being perceived as disengaged, hostile or difficult.

Think of it as grey rock with a corporate mask. You give them nothing real but you give them nothing they can write you out for either. Protocol 3 Silent Systemic Documentation Because the everyday sadist operates in the grey areas of the employee handbook, below the threshold of obvious policy violation but above the threshold of mere interpersonal friction, your primary weapon in a professional context is a meticulous unemotional evidence trail.

Document every incident, time, date, location, witnesses, exact words used, your response. Do it clinically, like a researcher recording field observations. Store it somewhere the sadist cannot access. Don't threaten them with HR referral, that's an emotional response and it alerts them to change tactics.

Gather your evidence silently, systematically and patiently until you have an irrefutable pattern of counterproductive behaviour. In organisational psychology terms, you're building an empirical case, not a complaint. That distinction matters enormously when the case reaches a desk of someone who can act on it.

Narcissism, Machiavellianism, Psychopathy and Everyday Sadism. Across this series we've explored the four traits that make up the dark tetrad of personality, and as we now reach the end I want to give you one final insight that ties everything together. In 2018 researchers Moshegan, Hilbig and Zettler published a theory in the psychological review that proposed something radical.

They argued that all dark personality traits, every one of them, are expressions of a single underlying dispositional core. They called it the D-factor, the dark core of personality. The D-factor is defined as the general tendency to maximise one's own utility at the expense of others, accompanied by the beliefs and rationalisations required to sustain this tendency without cognitive dissonance.

In other words, the belief that my goals, my pleasure and my success are more important than your wellbeing, combined with the psychological architecture to sleep soundly while acting on that belief. Narcissism, Machiavellianism, Psychopathy and Sadism are not four separate disorders, they are four different flavoured expressions of the same dark root.

The Narcissist believes the world owes them admiration, the Machiavellian believes the world is to be manipulated, the Psychopath believes consequences don't apply to them and the Sadist believes your suffering is their entitlement. Four different costumes, one underlying character. The goal of this entire series was not to make you paranoid, the goal was something I call personality literacy.

When you lack personality literacy, you'll try to fix dark personalities with empathy, you'll try to reason with them, you'll question your own competence, your own sanity, your own worth, you'll blame yourself for their cruelty because cruelty without a comprehensible motive is almost impossible for a healthy mind to accept.

But when you can name the behaviour, when you can look across the table and recognise the hedonic cruelty of a rendezvous everyday sadist, you strip them of the greatest weapon, which is the darkness itself. When you can name the threat, you can neutralise it. If you want to go deeper, if you want to audit your own organisation for these behavioural patterns or explore the research underpinning everything we've covered in this series, visit us at kekka.co.uk.

The full article libraries there, including our Executive Performance Field Guide. Subscribe to the Personality Guide channel, share this video with somebody who needs to visit, and remember, if you want a different world, we have to start by looking in the mirror, even if we don't always like what we see.

I'm Dr Nick Kecker, I'll see you in the next one.