What Is Pretentiousness?

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In MATLAB you can code the program to produce figures for you like graphs and things like that, and sometimes you make a coding error. And then we started talking about how people kind of like perceive art and what makes art art. Then we kind of got on to this idea of pretentiousness. That was the point in which I became really interested in this was this idea of quote unquote like a pretentious person who thinks they're better than other people.

In this episode we explore what narcissism is (and what is most-definitely is not).

There is a form of narcissism which has been, up until now, confused with psychopathy. But a new paper, the result of years of experiments, suggests narcissists are not psychopaths, and psychopaths are not narcissists.

In the psychological literature, narcissism comes in two varieties. Grandiose narcissists tend to really, truly love themselves and heavily manipulate their social environment for personal gain. Vulnerable narcissists don’t love themselves, not their true selves. Vulnerable narcissists love their image, and they are highly aware of the fact that it is an image and work very hard to prevent anyone else realizing that. According to the research explored in this episode, there is no such thing as a grandiose narcissist – that’s just another way to describe a psychopath.

Vulnerable narcissists like Don Draper in Mad Men cope with their insecurity by donning a mask, and then spend most of their lives protecting that mask out of a fear of what will happen if people ever see what it hides.