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Example of psychological analysis: A woman from Nigeria, studying to be a doctor (psychopath)

I want to change society, certain people should have no influence over others, I want to make people think about what others do and say, such that manipulation becomes largely a thing of the past. This requires changes in society, that I will all mention in a later publication. But in the mean time, I will tell you the following as an example, with examples of questions and answers that you can use to exercise your thinking to simulate situations, and to analyse people (more about how to do it with many more exercises from simple to complicated are to come in another publication):

In Sept.-Oct. 2017 I was in Zaporizhya, where in a hostel I asked a woman, where she was from. She said Nigeria... When you hear the name of this country, likely you think of scams. Last year I met a guy from Nigeria there too, and he was quite interesting and likeable, a doctor who studied in Ukraine, religious and wanting to improve his country. Of course he could have made all that up about wanting to improve his country etc., but I believed him, because of the expression on his face, the way he dressed, the way he talked etc.

Now to this woman. I didn't like her from the start, she had almost no facial expression and that means something, it was hint nr. 0 to her personality. But I was curious, to know a bit more about Nigeria from the perspective of people living there.

First thing that was clear is that she was reticent talking to me, but I just pushed on...

She said she studied in Ukraine because of the duration of the study for doctor. It seemed odd to only (or mainly) take that into account into one's decision of where to go study. What she said about it didn't give me any feeling of 'yes that makes sense'...

using the duration of a study as a big factor in deciding which country to study was a hint to her personality, as I just realised when writing this down. And that is: Practicality, which is about doing what makes sense within a given set of constraints for e.g. the most efficient way to spend your time, instead of to choose what is most interesting or useful in some way in the future...
- Question: So what does this mean in terms of personality and how does it relate to hint 0?

- Answer: It means emotions, feelings, are hardly of influence, or rather, they are likely not present...

We talked about life in Nigeria and Ukraine, she liked it more there, and remarked that e.g. children in Ukraine would point at her. She remarked "That is not polite".

The use of the word 'polite' jumped out at me, and it made me think of rules. Politeness is about rules in society, and sure, children are taught not to point at other people, but also I thought: "How to explain that this is normal? Why doesn't she understand why this happens? What example can I give to explain it to her? Why do I need to explain it at all?". If you see an elephant in your city you may point because it's so unusual. Seeing someone very different in any country, likely the same will happen! Why was she surprised, and if she was annoyed, why did she not express annoyance? But no, she said it was 'not polite'. But the conversation went on and I decided to let this point go. Already from this I had a feeling what she was like, so:
** Using the word 'polite' to comment on something that she didn't like was hint no. 1 to her personality **
And a very strong hint!

From my questioning and her moving out of the kitchen, it was even more clear she didn't want the conversation, but I continued anyway :) She asked if I was a psychologist because of my questions, no, I'm not, I'm better than any psychologist. I told her some of what I'm working on and that I consider most psychologists as completely inept. I gave some examples from e.g. the book by Cialdini "Influence, science and practice", showing his ineptitude. I saw almost no view of recognition nor of understanding what I talked about. I asked if she had read that book and she said "No, because of my studies I haven't read many books in years, but before that I read a lot. My parents have a big library".

Mentioning ** having read a lot of books, was hint no. 2 to her personality ** , but also interesting was her mention of the library, which was a hint to her upbringing and her situation in life in Nigeria.

By this time my psychological analysis was complete, in as far as it was necessary to understand her essence. She likely didn't want to be analysed but it was too late :) What happened further added not much though it made everything even more clear.

Now think about this:

- Question: Why did she tell about the many books that she read before her studies, and the 'large library of books' that her parents have?

- Answer: What she told was an indication of not wanting to feel less. When someone asks me if I read a certain book I would not answer "No, I have not read that book, but my parents do have a large library that I read a lot from when I was younger"!! That would be absolutely insane, and quite irrelevant to the topic, except to give a feeling of security to myself that I am least as good as the person I'm talking with... Also note that Nigeria is not a rich country, and her statement about the large library means she was brought up in wealthy conditions, definitely not what the average person in Nigeria would experience. She said that she likes life in Nigeria more than in Ukraine, for example because of weather, but also because of the people. However, she clearly does not understand why people in Ukraine behave as they do, and she definitely doesn't understand what life is like for the average person in Nigeria. I know this latter fact from her not understanding of some situations in life (i.e. hint 1), but also, otherwise she would tell of problems in life there in Nigeria...

I asked her on the topic of her annoyance of how she felt she is treated in Ukraine, about Nigeria: "Suppose a huge number of Dutch people come to Nigeria, what would happen? Would they just accept it or feel annoyed?", She said "People would not mind it at all". Oh really? Well then I have a question for you. Try to answer by really thinking about it, by reasoning and brainstorming on what could be causes, before reading my analysis, as doing that will give you some experience in analysis of people. So this is the question:

- Question: Suppose that it is true that people in Nigerie would welcome a large number of people from any other country, what does it signify of the people in Nigeria and its society?

- Answer: Nigeria is not a wealthy country, and it has problems such as that many people have a predatory outlook on life: Get wealth from someone else (by conning him/her) instead of working together, i.e. this puts into action the assumption that life is as what is known as a zero sum game (which it is obviously not), instead of where working together the total worth of and for all people increases (which is obviously the truth as in general life for people all around the world is better than several hundred years ago, for example together you can create technology, alone not). This attitude towards life and thus towards other people is why Nigeria is known for its scams. Some people say that this is not about the Nigerian people at all, as it's only a small percentage of them who are involved in e.g. the well known internet scams. From various sources the 'scam someone else before they scam you' mentality seems common there, but even if all these sources are wrong, the fact remains that no such percentage of people in NL or western Europe, nor in many other poor countries, do such amount of internet scams, so that argument is not a real argument.

In the article https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/nigerian-characteristics about Nigeria, this fact of society in Nigeria being predatory is mentioned, as well as that Nigeria is a 'powerhouse', but this is only based on economic achievements by some Nigerians in business in various countries in Africa incl. Nigeria itself. Obviously the failure of Nigeria as a power in the sense of a strong country, as mentioned in that article, is not related to economic power but the difference of why this is so is completely logical from analysing the issues of Nigerian society and esp. the attitude of 'get them before they get you'. Trying to find the best thing from any situation, for yourself, is in some sense similar to the trade mentality in NL, which is why NL became very wealthy hundreds of years ago and still is one of the wealthiest countries. When you think of 'taking advantage' as 'find the way to get the most out of a situation for yourself' and that this mentality in Nigerian society will have thus trained many people there in strategising for their own success, it is unsurprising to me that many Nigerian businessmen are very succesful: They know how and when to take advantage of a situation, thus doing legally what many others do in a illegal or at least immoral way (but note that morals are mostly set aside in business!). Note that there are other ways than a trading spirit to achieve wealth of course, as you can see in Germany and Switzerland for example: Excellence in engineering...

Now suppose many Dutchman (or Germans, or Swedes, etc.) go live in Nigeria. Why would they not mind? "Birds of a feather flock together" is a well known saying and this indicates a deep essence in life, that people like to be around similar people. It can be about about how you look, definitely, this is just built in, as you can experience yourself by analysing your own brain action when seeing different people... (More on this topic to come elsewhere).

But it's not just about appearance, you can see personalities of people are very different in different countries. If you don't fit in, and don't want to fit in, this gives troubles, it makes people not feel at home in their own countries any more, 'home is no longer a home', and it results even in the original people then getting blamed for everything not going peachy for those others. This gets to be more and more of an issue in western Europe as is clear from the 'news'... That a huge influx of people not fitting with appearance, not fitting into the life style nor fitting with the personality of that country would not be a problem for Nigeria, can only be because of a combination of:

You may counter with another option, that Nigerians are really advanced and only look at the people themselves, not heritage nor personality. This however is not the case as you can see from the problems in Nigeria. But to exercise your ability to analyse, think about this question, imagine what could happen in this situation and what outcomes there could be by thinking ahead like in a chess game:

- Question: Suppose Nigerians were tolerant of everyone, what would happen then?

- Answer: They would, as Dutchmen don't fit in with their own personality, try to teach them the way of Nigeria, and if it doesn't work, a 2 part society would be the result. And that will in the end be problematic because in life people rarely change and in general changes in personality of people in society from the change in society, takes a long time. Then what you get is the only interaction between the 2 groups is business-like. That can work but only gives no conflicts in case of limitless resources (or at least resources such that both groups are prosperous)... What will likely happen instead is that one group is more succesful, then gets blamed by the other group for their own non-success... Note that this was my analysis, based simply on thinking ahead, not based on what I have seen around me now or what has happened in the past. But after I reached that conclusion, I was sure my reasoning is correct as this sort of thing has happened and still happens, you can see it in action in lots of places now, and in history there are many cases... And thinking about cases where very different groups live side by side without problems, well, I can think of only 1 here in NL...

By this time as I said, all was already clear. I will summarise:

This woman was from a wealthy family, who does not experience the real problems of life in Nigeria nor sees the real personality of many people in Nigeria as she is shielded from all that. Her use of the word 'polite' about children pointing to her, jumped out at me, it was strange, but it was in fact a very strong hint to someone who has no or almost no emotions, and it points to rules being very important to her, and that all fits together perfectly. From the start I had a feeling of what she was like, because she had almost no facial expression (that is incidentally also a strong hint to someone being a psychopath), and the conversation was a confirmation. So the conversation was more for myself than for her, to see what makes her tick and to find out a bit more of such a person's perspective on life...

The way she talked and the topic of people's behaviour, made me think about autists and psychopaths during the conversation, i.e. people who don't understand emotions, especially of others (though they do have them for themselves, which is why such people act as egotists), but who want life to be organised so they want rules and order in their life (autists), and/or who abuse rules (psychopaths).

This topic is related to my research, so unsurprisingly that in the end that's where the conversation went.

I mentioned the problems psychopaths cause in society, but also autists in esp. forums, and then she mentioned that "many autists can barely function in society and can't express themselves properly and many of those are 'very sweet'". Oh, really? If they can't express themselves, then how do you know that they are sweet? Saying that they are sweet is nonsensical if they can't express themselves! Also I didn't believe for a second that this woman, who expressed no emotion during the conversation, has any kind of feeling for anyone. What happened is that during her study she was put into various situations and had to deal with lots of people and learned to mimic what others think/feel/do and of course not understanding people means not being able to understand why what she says makes no sense! Also she didn't understand that if I mention the problems on forums caused by autists, this obviously is not about those whose affliction is so severe that they can't express themselves! Thus there is no need for me to differentiate between all forms, but she just didn't understand it. Then we come to psychopaths and here it gets really interesting. I said Putin is a psychopath and she disagreed, she said he is a narcisistic sociopath. Aha, I said "So you don't know that sociopath and psychopath are used interchangeably, and even swapped by various psychologists in meaning?". No response to that... So I said, "So you apply sociopath as I do psychopath, and I make no distinction anyway as it's not needed for the topic that I'm working on". No response. I disagreed about her insistance that the way sociopaths are, comes from situations in their life. Not true as can be seen by people in the same situations growing up, behaving quite differently. What matters is their personality, to which events can give a nudge but really, the essence is already there. [ I'm not taking into account here the rare and extreme situations such as depriving a child of normal stimuli, as can happen with some nutcase partents or harsh environments, which hinder (normal) brain development. ]

Again no showing of any comprehension of what I said...

I further said that psychopaths should be disallowed from being in any position of power (this is because these people are the ones that cause the most destruction in society, from business practices to politicians who start wars). She disagreed. WTF?! Then I thought "This woman is insane!". Later I realised an amusing reason why she might have disagreed with me: Try to think of it!

- Question: Why would this woman, disagree with not letting psychopaths be in politics?

- Hint: hardly any facial expression, rules and order are important to her.

- Answer: In various psychology classes there are usually self-tests given/taken. This is quite likely in general classes as would be taught for future medical doctors. So, possibly she took some test to analyse whether people are psychopaths, and discovered that she is one herself. Then clearly she would disagree with any rule that would disallow such people anything...

Another point, talking about how to know someone, I said that from postings/messages you can analyse someone very quickly. She disagreed and said that you can't analyse anyone from just what he/she writes on the internet. Ah, she really knows nothing... Her ignorance is just astounding!

Almost nobody can hide themselves unless they are true experts... From what someone writes I can do the following: An analysis of the words used and structure of sentences, which shows the eduction and whether it's someone's native tongue, sentence length is related to intelligence, I can use the times at which the messages are sent as information, and the topics written about (and what parts may or may not be responded to) will tell me something, and the arguing (which direction and type of arguments used) of course tell me even more. The more messages, the more I will know.

If someone were trying to hide himself, by using someone else's writings, then this can usually be spotted by inconsistencies... It is very difficult to paint a fake picture!

Example: I once got a very brief email with silly statements about my site about airport Schiphol. My site is a complete critique of the psychopathic and incompetent behaviour of people working in or for Schiphol and related agencies within the Dutch government. The person sending the message used an email anonimiser, and from the message and that fact, I deduced that this was an infantile person, likely a son of someone who has affiliations with companies related to Schiphol, possibly his father is a VVD voter (VVD = is a political party full of anti social nutters who care only about the welfare of rich people who own businesses). I then searched a bit on usenet and found troll postings from him, listing incorrect facts clearly designed to rouse people. I will not give the full analysis here, but my estimate from just 1 message of the personality of this person was confirmed, and the rest (after all, he must respond for some reason so there must be a reason why he doesn't like criticism of Schiphol and the people there...) is without doubt correct too. Now it could have been a "Mission impossible" type cover that this person made, but it wasn't. It almost never is, because most people simply do not hide themselves in any way... And in fact most people are not able to do that... What you see is, what you get: This is almost always true. And the more sources you have, the more messages, the more likely that what you deduce is what is correct, at least if you know how to analyse people, of course!

After that she really wanted to go away and said that I should read up on psychology, and "it was an interesting conversation" along with a condescending laugh. Ah yes, she has had a few short courses on psychology (of which the teacher was one who considers psychopaths the ones who can't form plans, and sociopaths who can do that, instead of the reverse) and considers that "the truth and the facts" not knowing that this terminology is not fixed in psychology, and she thinks "I am a doctor, I know it better". Arrogance from education [ but not just from education, it happens usually only with an inherent anti-social personality, and in this case that is a strong factor in everything she said/did ]. I've experienced this before, e.g. with some guy in a organisation that's there to check on noise output of Schiphol, who thought he knew more than I because "he had taken a course in sound". Ah, yes, sure! I proved him immediately wrong on one of his statements, that he wouldn't have made if he had ever taken a course in complex analysis, but he hadn't as he only has a school diploma and took some "course on sound". So he didn't understand it but of course he doesn't want to feel lesser than I, so he said "you need to go back to school". Typical behaviour of antisocial people... No, I have a proper education in physics, and I am right. I mentioned this to his supervisor who agreed with me but he also had no decency as he laughed about it. Unusurprising really, as "Birds of a feather flock together"...

I saw this 'doctor' briefly the following day and she saw me if she wasn't blind. I considered telling her that I checked the facts and that all that I told was correct, but I didn't bother, it's pointless. If she had any competency she would have checked her facts and realised I was correct and apologised, but of course no such thing. Typical... Here is an example that shows that what I said is correct:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy. You can further search the internet and you will quickly find pages where one psychologist uses the reverse definition compared to another psychologist. I had encountered this swap of meaning long ago already, when I wrote my pages on Schiphol (people working for Schiphol are a good source of examples of behaviour that you can analyse, showing psychopathic behaviour)...

This 'doctor' is the type of person that I am exactly going after, who think they know it all when they actually know nothing. This woman should not be a doctor, because she doesn't understand people! All the signs tell me that she is a psychopath (emotion-poor, telling me I should do something which she should do herself, arrogant and incompetent) though I have the feeling she is not quite that. Well, even if she isn't, it's so close that it doesn't matter.

I hope you enjoyed reading this and that you understood it. Don't let anyone ever tell you "I had a course in xyz, I know it better"... Most doctors do not understand people, most psychologists, also do not understand people... Even in technical fields a lot of people are bullshitters and are unable to properly reason, but more on this will come in another publication of mine.