Cognitive Biases due to a Narcissistic Parent, Illustrated by HPMOR Quotations

It's an interesting observation. Clearly Eliezer has some narcissistic traits and Harry is modeled after a part of him, so, in retrospect, it is not very surprising, but only in retrospect. However, Harry is very different from a stereotypical narcissistic genius like Sheldon Cooper. How do you tell if someone off-the-scale smart is unreasonably narcissistic or simply aware of their own strengths (and weaknesses)? Your average narcissistic personality tests assume an average person as a test-taker, and so cannot tell whether one's overly inflated ego is justified or not.

I enjoy thinking about this, but I find find the unquantifiedness of your terms hard to stomach. You treat narcissism as a binary trait, while psychoanalysts would say everyone has more or less of that particular set of behaviors.

And it is easy to find evidence for any pattern of behaviors in someone you know enough about (and that especially includes youself).

Try to look for narcissism in other characters in HPMOR, and see if your observed frequency doesn't directly correlate with how much the book talks about them. I bet it does, and that says more about your narcissism detection mechanism than it says about the book.

For example, it is obviously easy to find examples where Harry does recognize what other people are feeling, where he does not become furious where criticized, etc. ...but you have chosen to quote examples that fit the pattern Alice Miller taught you to see everywhere.

I suggest you find out what is evidence against narcissism, and look for that, too.

One interpretation of LessWrong is that it is a defense against a parent’s relentless criticism and neediness by building an impenetrable edifice of logical truth.

Specifically, there is a strong bias toward either narcissistic or people-pleasing habits, and a difficulty with recognizing and following one’s own desires (because the Universe, unlike a parent, never tells people what to do).

Parents who acquiesce to their child's resolution to withdraw from school do not sound domineering or unduly impressed by education.

The important information seems to be in the last paragraph of the article (the rest is analysing a fictional evidence; yeah, I see how it is related, but it distracts from the message). I thought about it, and it feels to me you may be right about something.

When I think about my family, mother was never impressed by anything I did. For example, the day I returned home after winning a gold medal in international mathematical olympiad, she reminded me that a person shouldn't consider themselves educated unless they can play a musical instrument well (my weakness; I don't have an ear for music). My father spent a lot of time away, for job-related reasons, and he died when I was 11. My mother greatly values education, but it's more about "memorizing passwords" and signalling.

I can see how a part of my motivation, deep inside, can be a desire to do something so awesome that even my mother would have no other choice than to admit that I really am smart. Nothing I do is good enough, therefore "tsuyoku naritai" resonates with me strongly. Also the whole idea that "rationality" is the skill to win in all aspects of life, not just in some specialized area; because I feel I need to be fixed in many aspects.

But as I said (about Harry, but it can also apply to me), in a lawful universe everything has to be caused by something, so the mere fact of causation doesn't make it wrong. I may have good desires for bad reasons. On the other hand, if I have good desires for bad reasons, it is likely that they will be miscalibrated. If I could change myself, would I? I would prefer to be calibrated better. I would prefer not to be driven by fear or by disappointment. But I still wish to keep the spirit of "tsuyoku naritai"; just in a happier way.

Realizing all this can be useful for me personally; it can explain why I do some mistakes, and then perhaps I can improve. For example, I am constantly frustrated when "parent figures" at my job don't respect my expertise. Yes, this feeling has a rational aspect (if they'd respect me more, I could probably get better position in the company hierarchy, get more money, maybe other privileges), but there is also the irrational emotional component. (Hypothetically speaking, if there would be an opportunity to somehow get more money or other advantage, but disappoint some "parent figure", it could be rationally better for me, but my emotions could prevent me from even noticing this possibility.) Also, someone could easily manipulate me by giving me the kind of attention I desire, so I'd like to not be blinded by that.

Realising this -- if it applies to significant part of the LW membership; which is a question that yet has to be answered -- could also be useful for our community. I believe that rationality is useful for everyone, but maybe the specific way it is presented on this website or how I present it to other people, is attractive only to some kind of people, and may repel others. It could help explain why some smart and rational people are not interested in LW. We could use this knowledge to find another way to cooperate with them.

This community is so dear to me because it fulfills those emotional needs. I get love (karma, positive replies) just for writing something sane. (And hugs for going to meetup!) For example, I predict 10 karma points for writing this comment; some people will relate to this, others will admire my openness. But looking from a different angle, I merely again spent a lot of time debating on the web, when I originally planned to do something else; and most likely, I will forget all these insights soon. Here I am rewarded for merely trying, not for actual success. But I need it because, well, success only comes once in a time, but the emotions are always here.

So, what next? I guess we could try to find out how many people here are trying to "please an unsatisfiable parent figure", and then compare it with the general population. (Easier said than done; we can have a poll here, but how to make the general population take the poll. Perhaps we could try to find a correlation between this answer and karma, assuming that karma correlates with that which is specific for this website.) If the hypothesis is confirmed, then we can debate how to overcome this bias, while not losing our desire to improve ourselves and the world. (Meanwhile, or if the hypothesis is not confirmed, I can still think about how deal with this myself.)

Good! I'm pleased to see an example of LW going meta on itself in this vein.

As an extension, note that there's a well-established pattern by which people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder tend to attract (and be attracted to) people with Borderline Personality Disorder. An evocative line from The Last Psychiatrist:

The narcissist creates an identity, then tries to force everyone else to buy into it. The borderline waits to meet someone, and then constructs a personality suitable to that person....

The narcissist thrives with the borderline because she provides for him the validation that he is, in fact, the lead; the borderline thrives with the narcissist because he defines her. And, as she will tell you every single time, without fail: "you don't know him like I do." Everyone else judges his behavior; but the borderline is judging his version of himself that she has accepted."

I'd invite folks to consider what it would look like if a few "intellectual narcissists" attracted a following of "intellectual borderlines," in particular what the individuals' personalities would look like in Near, and what the memetics of that community would look like.

Connotationally: In a lawful universe, everything has to be caused by something. That includes Harry's exceptional behavior. Even if this analysis is correct, it does not reduce the meaning of Harry's goals. They had to be caused by something anyway; either by this, or by something else.

To make this more clear, let's take a larger view, and analyze Harry as a member of homo sapiens. We could consider "being homo sapiens" as a diagnosis, a genetically transferred condition, which influences thinking and behavior. Having been born to homo sapiens parents, Harry is driven to care about people around him, and to use his brain to invent solutions. Et cetera.

I see you stuffing Harry into a box you've made, and stuffing his parents into caricatures of their traits.

He studies to impress Mommy? No, he studies because he wants to know.

He avoids average students because he has little in common with them.

Harry’s efforts to save Hermione are also selfish

Let's see. He gave up his fortune and went into debt to an enemy to protect her. He was fully ready and willing to risk his own life and dreams to save her.

On hearing the suffering of people in Azkaban, criminals, the lowest status of all that no one cares about, that other people approve of torturing, he almost kills himself with his desire to save them.

Is that what we're calling selfish these days? I could do with more of such selfishness in the world.

As for visions of grandiose self importance - they aren't visions if they're real. That's just the story. He is that important and special. He's a child prodigy. He's a wizard. He's making independent and significant discoveries in transfiguration. He can destroy dementors. He broke someone out of the unbreachable Azkaban. And he's doing this a nine years old, in less than a year from his first exposure to magic. Oh, and somehow at 1 year old he seems to have defeated the Dark Lord against whom the whole of the wizarding world was helpless.

Envious or believes they are envied? Check.

And the proof of this you give is an instance of someone actually envying him? Would he be more psychologically healthy if he was delusional and couldn't see the envy? And even in that case, my recollection is that he wasn't focused on the envy at all, but more on the great white shark who passed up making a snack of him. Fear, relief, and relative inferiority and powerlessness seemed the emotions of the moment.

Do you see how this example just didn't fit your model? There's a lot of that going on here.

Is his dad particularly narcissistic? No. You could make a better argument about his mom, who was considering suicide because of the consequences of her poor looks. Yet she seems perfectly well adjusted now that she is pretty and people are nice to her. And wanting to have your husband trust you and take your word for something you know to be true is not narcissism.

the narcissistic parent seeks validation from the child's accomplishments

Neither of them particularly plays stage mom, pushing Harry, or putting him forward publicly to get attention for themselves. They're supportive in what he wants to do.

I am sharing this because it reveals a pattern of cognitive biases that many people (like me) who enjoyed HPMOR, and their parents, probably have.

This post is the clearest example of generalizing from fictional evidence that I've seen in quite a while. Harry and his parents don't have the personality traits they do because they mesh together coherently, but because they make for a more entertaining story and give the characters the tools to carry out the plot. To use the characters as evidence of the author's mindstate (or the mindstate of the readers) does not follow.

First, a minor point: The unusual font of this post (presumably because you wrote it in that font in a text editor and then copy-pasted here) take a lot of effort for me, at least, to read, and as a result I had to expend a moderate conscious effort to start reading, and found it nearly impossible not to skim or skip some sections. I imagine at least some other people experienced a similar effect.

Object-level, a very interesting post. One of my parents, who is quite similar to me psychologically, seems to have some narcissistic traits as described. They (sing.) make a conscious and explicit effort to avoid, e.g., excessive vicarious pride in their children or withholding praise except for highly exceptional achievements, and I think this has been pretty successful. But I have definitely noticed, in myself, unusually low empathy, high self-expectations and very excessive envy of exceptionality, to take a few. I predict that your recommended reading will probably improve my self-model substantially.

While I enjoyed reading this, amused and intrigued, I am somewhat hesitant to accept it, lacking a search for traits that are anti-correlated and without exploring alternative theories explaining these traits. I'm also a little confused by

I predicted that if my theory is correct then Harry would have a narcissistic personality. To test this, I found a list of personality traits that describe a narcissist (by Googling “children of narcissistic parents” and clicking the first link),

wouldn't this be a list of traits of children of narcissistic parents? If it's not, why did you use a different list to determine if Petunia was narcissistic?

On the topic of the specific traits, we could use a lot more information about which traits are useful and which aren't. I understand there are a number of folks around here who have worked to acquire some traits, self-awareness and mindfulness (which are very clearly useful) come to mind, but they appear (very roughly) to be on a different level than, say, need for praise. With that, thank you for inspiring me to look more into them.

“Always Harry had been encouraged to study whatever caught his attention, bought all the books that caught his fancy...given anything reasonable that he wanted, except, maybe, the slightest shred of respect”

This is rather odd-- I imagine narcissistic parents as having very definite ideas of what their children should be studying. I also think letting a child study what they want is a sign of respect, though (it's been a while since I've read the book), I suppose it's possible to want a child to learn without wanting them to have any real-world impact.

Narcissism and narcissistic parenting are very real (and hard-to-detect) problems, with potentially serious long-term consequences, so I think it's good that you brought this up.

You might also want to see http://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/

(as stated in another comment, though - I really don't see Harry as being narcissistic)

Interesting analysis. I'd agree, except that we just learned that Harry got a big chunk of Voldemort's personality downloaded into him as a baby, and Voldemort is a narcissistic, amoral, manipulative trainwreck of a human being. Petunia might have played a role, but I think the author's intent is that these are Voldemort's traits making themselves known.

One wonders, though, if perhaps Tom Riddle had a narcissistic caretaker in the orphanage that raised him. Unlike canon!Riddle, the MoR version doesn't seem to have been born a sociopath, but rather made one.

Random thoughts while reading:

1. I wonder how many psychological pathologies occur in the population at large. Could we benefit from some kind of psychological screening similar to how we screen for cancers after certain age? I assume that even sub-clinical syndromes cause quite high economic and/or utilitarian harm.

2. Can this kind of analysis be carried out for any major work of fiction? I enjoyed reading the analysis and would read a similar one for other works of fiction such as A Song of Ice and Fire.

3. Can we get any information about the state of mind the author is in or the reader is in from the way the characters are written and what characters are enjoyed?

I think a part of the observations are better explained by Harry (any a few other characters) being at Kegan stage 5. Without going into the rest of the theory (which I think messed up stages "3" and "4"), consider three concepts of property:

• "Stewardship" concept: the village holds pretty much everything in common. Saying "This is Bob's X" is equivalent to "Bob takes care of this X on behalf of everyone in the village, and is rewarded in status". Expressed in formal legal language, everyone in the village has usufruct. (As a side note, this view of "property" explains a lot of leftist complaints about "the rich". If you start from the premise that they are supposed to act as stewards over the wealth implicitly entrusted to them by The Community, then the way they spend it is subject to popular review, including the possibility that The Community revokes its trust and gives the wealth to others.) Stuff can be destroyed if the village moot decides so. (I suspect people in this headspace equate fairness with their estimate of what the village moot's decision would be, if convened.)
• "Platonic label" concept: each villager owns a plot of land with a fence around it. Legal systems run on this view, which assumes that each object has an invisible label hanging on it, saying who its owner is. (Cue "but is this X really Bob's?" arguments.) If you own it, you are allowed to destroy it, i.e. nobody has a right to complain (if you still fulfill all contractual obligations you have toward them). (People in this headspace equate fairness with impartial, procedural justice.)
• "Politician" concept: you are the feudal lord of the village, 10% of all the crops grown are yours, no matter whose land it is growing on. You take an active interest in the villagers' lives, because even if you aren't benevolent at all, resolving problems that hold up production are still beneficial to you. If you are benevolent, then you get people to do things that they will endorse in retrospect. (Relate to concept of extrapolated volition. Do not try this at home.) If you are the only one in the village who thinks in this manner, you might as well say to yourself that you own the village, and entrust parts of it to (unwitting) stewards, since you can predict what they are going to do with it. Playing normal is useful in the presence of other politicians (e.g. you can draw on accumulated social status; and they might not notice you are a politician).

Harry, Quirrell, Dumbledore, and some other characters are very clearly thinking in the last mode. This mostly explains points:

• 2: Harry is interested in other people who think in a similar way, which is correlated with power.
• 4: Harry is very unsubtle about thinking in this way. Others (Dumbledore, Snape) put on some facade that passes for normal. Quirrell is unsubtle to Harry, and doesn't act normal but mysterious to others. For Draco (and Lucius), it is socially acceptable that they think in this way, because Lucius is an actual politician, and it is common knowledge that Draco plays the role of a politician (even at the times when he doesn't think like one).
• 7: Harry is correct in that very few students (any not many professors) think like this. Note that Draco gave him the advice to control his interaction with others in chapter 7.
• 10: As in point 7, Harry did things that the characters later agree were right. Do not try this at home.
• 3 & 13: Harry is explicit that people living in the first two headspaces are NPCs relative to those who live in the third. Saying this out loud is extremely offensive. (It offends their feeling of having a free will. Speculation: people sort-of identify with what they estimate they have control over. A demonstration that they have less control over their car than they expected (i.e. an accident), or that in a fight another person can move their limbs, is mildly traumatizing. Pointing out that they are poor drivers or (implicitly) threatening to control them runs headfirst into an ego defense.) Nonetheless it is true that interacting with "NPCs" is boring. If you already know what they are going to say, why listen? This causes Harry's sense of being alone except for Quirrell (IIRC he didn't yet see through Dumbledore's facade, and Snape said he doesn't want company).

Harry's parents aren't perfect, and neither is Harry's reasoning unassailable, but to the extent that the diagnostic criteria for having one's values warped by a narcissistic parent can be applied to Harry, I think that this mainly demonstrates that it's simply too easy to fit those diagnostic criteria to situations where they don't apply, much like a technique for determining if mythological figures are solar deities, which can be applied equally well to the professor who devised it.

You confuse cognitive biases with utility functions. Being selfish isn't a bias.

HPMOR does make an argument that more people should see themselves as a mission to change the world for the better. Do you think that's a bad thing, because it involves a narcissistic self view of one's own self importance?

Hmm this is odd. I identify with most of these traits, which probably explains why I liked HPMOR, and was subsequently linked to Less Wrong.

1 not anymore

2 probably?

3 yes yes

4 check

5 no I seek criticism

6 check

7 probably check; I don't know any high-status people, but I suspect I would want to be around them

8-10 dunno; haven't achieved that level of introspection

11 I am pretty sure this is the case; I can't remember any instances of others feeling, except I can usually tell when someone is feeling down because they will not talk to me

12, 13, dunno

Ok so 5/13-11/13.

[Large edit]

I display many of the traits here, but my parents did not exactly encourage me to learn. They did not hinder me. I did go to Summer camps like ID Tech Camp or Center for Bright Kids. edit: both of these offer classes in things like video game development, cryptology, game AI, et cetera.

Let's say that child-prodigy Harry was in the top 0.01% of demonstrated intelligence. There was a kid of comparable aptitude per every 10,000 children. If anything, this measure is setting the bar for "child prodigy" too low. He is smarter, and thus in some sense superior to other children. This is especially true since intelligence is the axis that he has been taught to value and to measure people by.

You say he has trouble with normal relationships, but I feel like that just sort of happens when you're out in the tails of the distribution. Harry's emotional life is tied up in different values and different problems that the emotional life of his peers. He is from a different culture and has a fundamentally different worldview. I wasn't a child-prodigy by any stretch of the imagination, but I know exactly what it's like to be reading Feynman at 12 years old and wanting to share it with someone and realizing just how impossible that would be. And so Harry gravitates towards the adult world, who may have higher status, but are also more his peers in some sense than many of the people in his age group.

Additionally, Harry is essentially home-schooled. His tutors and parents, most of his social group is older. It's not really surprising he doesn't quite know how to relate to large groups of 12 year-olds. And he's still an awkward 12 year old himself. “Er, can I take it from this that you have been through puberty?" is in my mind more a symptom of Harry being an awkward teenage boy than it is some condemnation of his long-term ability to feel empathy for others. I can think of similarly cringe-inducing statements from my own personal history, especially when trying to talk to girls. Reread the whole scene with the idea that Harry is a 12 year old boy terrified of girls and romance and afraid that in entering the brave new world of love and romance he's going to lose this one childhood friend that he feels like he can actually talk to. That is the interpretive lens I get out of statements such as:

Harry Potter's breathing was starting to scale up toward hyperventilation. "Very good friends! Extra-special friends, even! Best friends forever, possibly! But not that kind of friends!"

This whole bit about love hormones and everything is just Harry making things up. Little kids have crushes all the time. They fall in love have their 3rd grade boyfriends and girlfriends and it's cute to us, but it's pretty serious business to them. I'm not aware of any science that says that children aren't capable of love or strong affection, or that some hormone produced in adolescence enables people to love.

I'm really not sure that parental narcissism plays a role in this. I think that Harry's eclectic education doesn't sound particularly satisfying to a narcissistic parent. Harry is just another home-schooled spelling bee champion in the eyes of most of the world. There's far more opportunity for vicarious achievement and the sort of educational attainment valued by the not particularly bright if Harry stays enrolled in school and aces all the tests and finishes at the top of the class in everything. If Petunia wants to see her son be better than everyone else, it seems weird she wouldn't put him in a classroom situation where he could demonstrate that. I don't see Petunia imposing goals on Harry in the book at all.

Nope.

Some of Harry's traits that strike me as strongly non-narcissistic:
high self-awareness - which appears genuine
capable of (correctly) understanding others' feelings and motivations - does not label or vilify people with very different values
desire to see all things as they really are, even if it's painful (while narcissists typically have delusions)

After reading through the article and your response to comments, I would wager that Harry and Petunia's narcissism is also permeable to flour.