The Mental Illness of the Hustler

In my last blog How the Humm Components were renamed I described how six of the seven Humm Components were each based on a mental illness.  A Mover is associated with mania, a Doublechecker with depression, Artists with autism, and Politicians with paranoia.  I then suggested that Engineers are associated with the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or OCD. 

In this blog I will discuss which mental illness is associated with the Hustler.  Originally it was associated with Hysteria.  Hysteria is undoubtedly the first mental disorder attributable to women.  The ancient Egyptians thought that Hysteria was caused by movements in the uterus and Hippocrates (5th century BC) was the first to use the term ‘hysteria’.  It was used to define patients who suffered from neurological symptoms, such as numbness, blindness, paralysis, or fits without a definable organic cause.  Hysteria  has now been redefined by DSM-V as a ‘conversion disorder’.

Humm and Wadsworth had a completely different interpretation.  According to them the Hysteroid Component is concerned primarily with self-preservation.  An individual with an excess of this component possesses a character defect with ethically inferior motivation, manifested by malingering, stealing, lying, cheating, and similar anti-social behaviour.  A moderate degree of hysteroid tendency underlies much of our prudence, shrewdness and diplomacy and may even contribute to social adjustment, since socially acceptable conduct often serves the ends of self interest.  About 14% of the population have a higher than average Hustler component.

A good example of combining these two views is the end of Act I of The Crucible.  Abigail is accused of witchery and then she turns on Tituba, who then turns on others in turn, supported by the girls. You were expected to turn others in as the means of saving yourself and this leads to the mass hysteria of the girls that climaxes Act I.  To not accuse others was tantamount to signing your own death warrant, as John Proctor discovers.

Psychologists have defined a Dark Triad of three personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy.  Narcissism is characterized by grandiosity, pride, egotism, and a lack of empathy. Machiavellianism is characterized by manipulation and exploitation of others; a cynical disregard for morality, and a focus on self-interest and deception.  Psychopathy is characterized by enduring antisocial behaviour, impulsivity, selfishness, callousness, and remorselessness.  Thus the Humm-Wadsworth definition of Hustler incorporates the Dark Triad.  Some Hustlers are more narcissistic, others more Machiavellian but Hustlers generally have all three Dark Triad personality traits. 

I blogged extensively about Hustlers:

The Emotional Intelligence of a Psychopath
How do you recognise a corporate psychopath? Part 1
Recognising the Corporate Psychopath (Part II)
How common are corporate psychopaths in politics?
Is Kevin Rudd a 'corporate psychopath'?

One of the real strengths of the Humm-Wadsworth is that you learn how to recognise and handle the Corporate Psychopath.  No other profiling system does this and that is one reason I recommend that people use it.

How the Humm Components were renamed

As readers of my works know I see myself as carrying the flame of the Humm-Wadsworth model of temperament.  Temperament is how your genetic make-up defines how you react emotionally.  Understand temperament and you can dramatically lift your emotional intelligence. 

It was an American psychologist, Rosanoff, who first proposed a paradigm shift in 1924.  Until the work of Rosanoff, doctors defined abnormal psychological conditions in black and white: people were either mad or not.  Rosanoff suggested that such a distinction between the normal and abnormal states was artificial and the difference was not one of kind but of degree.  Normality and abnormality are not black and white but as different shades of grey.  

Rosanoff further noted there were few mental illnesses and proposed a theory of personality based on the most common four mental illnesses:

- schizophrenia

- epilepsy

- hysteria

- cyclodia (what we now would call manic-depression)

and a fifth component called the Normal which is driven by the desire for order and is associated with behaviour such as social adjustment or integration with society.  The Normal is the gradual change that occurs to the personality as the human being matures—and then may fade away if the adult enters a second childhood. 

In 1935, Two Southern Californians, Humm, a statistician, and Wadsworth, a clinical psychologist, using the recently invented statistical technique of multi-variate factor analysis extended the Rosanoff hypothesis by sub-dividing both cyclodia and schizophrenia into two new components.  Cyclodia was divided into manic-depression and schizophrenia divided into autistic-paranoid.  When I learned about the Humm in the early 1970s the seven temperament factors were Normal, Manic, Depressive, Autistic, Paranoid, Epileptoid, and Hysteroid and I used these terms in the first draft of Empathy Selling.

However one of the first changes demanded by the publisher was develop terms for the seven components that were less pejorative.  Given that Humm proponents generally use the initial rather than the full term e.g. “You keep saying I-I-I, you are such a P.” I decided to invent new terms with the same initial.  Thus Normal, Mover, Doublechecker, Artist, Politician, Engineer, and Hustler were born and have now become generally used.

My problem now is whether the terms still have validity.  Normal still works, Manic and Doublechecker are the two poles of the Bipolar Disorder, ditto for Artist and Politician for schizophrenia.  However there are difficulties with the Engineer (Epilepsy) and Hustler (Hysteria).  Hustlers we will discuss in the next blog.

According to the Humm the person with a strong Engineer has a drive to complete projects. Process, detail and method are characteristics of the strong E. This person makes lists of lists! The great thing about the strong E is that they can form a plan as soon as look at something. And what’s more they can make it happen. They’ll need time of course, because they’ll want to follow the process, and this may be frustrating for some others who want to take a short-cut.  Strong Es are very conscientious indeed they can be obsessive about it and the projects they are working on.   

Modern psychology is debating whether there is an “epileptic” personality and it is a moot question.  However there is a mental illness which does encompass the Engineer component and that is the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or OCD.  OCD is an anxiety disorder characterized by uncontrollable, unwanted thoughts and repetitive, ritualized behaviours you feel compelled to perform. Like a needle getting stuck on an old record, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) causes the brain to get stuck on a particular thought or urge.  Obsessions are involuntary, seemingly uncontrollable thoughts, images, or impulses that occur over and over again.  Compulsions are behaviours or rituals that you feel driven to act out again and again. 

Is there a link between epilepsy and OCD?  Although it is unclear why OCD tends to occur with epilepsy, evidence of the association is quite convincing.  Early studies suggested that epilepsy caused certain personality characteristics to develop, including obsessional traits.  A number of studies published in the 1980s and 1990s reported a more specific association between OCD and epilepsy. However most of the evidence linking OCD with epilepsy has come from case studies and clinical observations, and not from studies of large groups.

My conclusion is that the Humm model still holds.  However the mental illness is not epilepsy but OCD.  However the Engineer component does exist in a person’s temperament and for some people it can be very strong (think of the characters in the Big Bang Theory).

How do you lift your emotional intelligence?

While there are many viewpoints expressed in the field of Emotional Intelligence, one area of common agreement is that EQ is a skill that can be learned.  This is not surprising as otherwise there would be no point in running workshops on how to improve it.  However where there is wide disagreement is on how to improve your emotional intelligence.

Take these three blogs:

4 Practical Ways to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence

This blog by Luminita Saviuc (aka the PurposeFairy) recommends that you do the following:

1.      Increase Self Awareness Through Journaling (I think she means keeping a diary.  Of course many people now do this on-line.  It is called Social Media.)

2.      Meditation (5 minutes a day – she supposedly does 90 minutes!!!)

3.      Avoid Emotional Hijacking by counting to 10.  This is a well known and highly recommended technique

4.      Use present language to live in the present and follow this maxim: With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Of course one could reply with the famous quote by Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" or “If you fail to plan you are planning to fail” by Benjamin Franklin.

3 Ways to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence

This blog by life coach, Amanda Abella, suggests the following:

1.      Strategically reduce your fear of rejection.

2.      Use your body when uncomfortable emotions arise.  Go for a run or focus on your breathing.

3.      Focus on your communication skills.  Avoid accusatory sentences, Let people know that you appreciate them, use positive eye contact and give people your full attention.

Signs That You Lack Emotional Intelligence

This article was written by Muriel Maignan Wilkins and published in December 2014 in the Harvard Business Review.  She suggest four strategies if you think you have low EQ:

1.      Get feedback.

2.      Beware of the gap between intent and impact.  People underestimate what a negative impact their words and actions have on others.

3.      Press the pause button.  Pause to listen to yourself and pause to listen to others.

4.      Wear both shoes.  Not on only should you put yourself in the other person’s shoes but you also must keep being aware of your own emotions when doing so.

All these 11 strategies have their place and of course some overlap.  All are based on the premise that people drive performance, and emotions drive people.  However they omit the key missing link that temperament drives emotions.  The key to emotional intelligence is understanding your core emotions compared to your transient emotions.  Your core emotions are driven by your temperament – what you are genetically born with.  Based on a study of 11,000 identical twins nature is around twice as important as nurture.  I have found the Humm-Wadsworth model of seven core emotions the most practical tool for people to use and once understood (takes a day) dramatically lifts their emotional intelligence.

Why the Forbes article Why Your Boss Lacks Emotional Intelligence is rubbish.

Forbes recently published on 6 January 2015 a blog by Travis Bradberry, author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0, Why Your Boss Lacks Emotional Intelligence. The key message in the article was the following graph.

According to Bradberry “the EQ scores descend faster than a snowboarder on a black diamond. CEOs, on average, have the lowest EQ scores in the workplace.”  And looking at the graph you would be hard pressed not to come to the same conclusion.  However if you have read that great book How to Lie with Statistics Daniel Huff you will realise that Bradberry has used one of the oldest tricks in the book, rescaling the Y axis of a graph.

Look at this graph which uses the same data but with axis rescaled 0-100%.

Now the graph looks relatively flat and indeed one could conclude that the EQ levels across the seven groups are roughly the same. 

The real problem is that EQ 2.0 is a self reporting test.  And like a sense of humour most of us will report that we are substantially better than average.  In addition you would expect on a self-reporting test that CEOs would be slightly lower as they would have be more likely to a more realistic self assessment.

Of course this result does suffer from an internal self contradiction.  One of the key messages of EQ proponents is that while IQ gets you the job, EQ gets you the promotion.  However if the group with the lowest EQ is the most highly promoted then what is going on? 

According to Bradberry the answer is that for every title in the graph above, the top performers are those with the highest EQ scores. Even though CEOs have the lowest EQ scores in the workplace, the best-performing CEOs are those with the highest EQs. You might get promoted with a low EQ, but you won’t outshine your high-EQ competition in your new role.  No evidence is presented for this argument but intuitively I would actually agree.

Bradberry then goes on to say there are five EQ boosting strategies leaders can follow:

1.      Acknowledge Other People’s Feelings

2.      When You Care, Show It

3.      Watch Your Emotions Like A Hawk

4.      Sleep

5.      Quash Negative Self-Talk

While this are all good motherhood statements these are not the most useful or practical strategies.

Emotional Intelligence is achieving self- and social mastery by being smart with core emotions.

Self-Mastery = Awareness + Management (Steps 1 & 2 as defined by Goleman)

Social Mastery = Empathy + Social Skills (Steps 3 &4 as defined by Goleman

However the key to emotional intelligence is understanding your core emotions compared to your transient emotions.  Your core emotions are driven by your temperament – what you are genetically born with.  Based on a study of 11,000 identical twins nature is around twice as important as nurture.  I have found the Humm-Wadsworth model of seven core emotions the most practical tool for people to use and once understood (takes a day) dramatically lifts their emotional intelligence.