Science Confirms It: There's a New Personality Disorder Creating Faux Victims in Need of Revenge

Here’s some news: As it turns out, there’s a bunch of people in the world who think of themselves as victims.

Even though they aren’t.

If you own a TV, you may have come to such a conclusion multiple times a day.

But now it’s been declared by people you can always trust: researchers.

As reported by the Washington Examiner, a brand spanking paper published in Personality and Individual Differences reveals a newly-defined type.

Wanna see if you qualify?

On a scale from 1 to 5, rate your level of agreement with the following:

It is important to me that people who hurt me acknowledge that an injustice has been done to me.

I think I am much more conscientious and moral in my relations with other people compared to their treatment of me.

When people who are close to me feel hurt by my actions, it is very important for me to clarify that justice is on my side.

It is very hard for me to stop thinking about the injustice others have done to me.

Researchers identify new personality construct, TIV, "Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood"

The compulsion to be a victim, which involves four dimensions: moral elitism, a lack of empathy, the need for recognition, and rumination.https://t.co/cCPDDdha1F

— Geoffrey Ingersoll (@GPIngersoll) December 10, 2020

Per Scientific American, “If you scored high (4 or 5) on all of these items, you may have what psychologists have identified as a ‘Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood.’”

Rahav Gabay — of Israel’s School of Psychological Sciences — and her colleagues have defined TIV as “an enduring feeling that the self is a victim across different kinds of interpersonal relationships.”

The Denver Gazette notes Rahav and team conducted eight studies of Israeli adults in order to explore the trait.

Conclusion: Those suffering from TIV possess four characteristics: moral elitism, a lack of empathy, rumination, and a need for recognition.

Those with the disorder don’t merely feel disadvantaged; victimhood is, per the paper, “a central part of the individual’s identity.”

And that’s not all — according to two other studies, those who are actTIVely feeling tormented also hold, as described by the Examiner, “intense negative emotions and entitlement to commit immoral behavior.”

In another words, “the desire for revenge.”

The authors summed it up:

The higher participants’ TIV, the more they experienced negative emotions and felt entitled to behave immorally. However, only the experience of negative emotions predicted behavioral revenge.”

I’ll add my own observation, though I’m no Dr. Fauci: We’re currently in the throes of a pandemic.

It seems hordes of people have developed the disorder, and I’m reminded of a recent, related Adam Carolla quote:

“We started…in earnest with this self-esteem movement, that it’d be really good if everyone had high self-esteem. And the way you get high self-esteem is through accomplishing things that are tough. But you can’t just hand people high self-esteem and tell them they’re the best and they don’t need to listen to anybody, and nothing they can do is wrong. And when you do that, you create a monster, essentially. You create horrible citizens.

…

“[W]hen people try to graft self-esteem onto you, you will be miserable eventually. And the reason you’ll have to be miserable is ’cause everyone’ll keep telling you, ‘Oh, you’re the best, you’re the coolest, you’re the greatest,’ and everything like that. But you start looking around, and five years [have] gone by, and clearly there’s nothing going on — like you’re not the best, you’re not rich, you don’t have a great job, you don’t have a cool car. So now you feel like the best person in the world driving a beat-up car and working at a Burger King, and…that then turns to anger. … If you’d earned that self-esteem — if you felt as good about yourself as you should feel about yourself based on your accomplishments — then you would have a completely different world view.”