Zach Brown Help Received: Sean McKinney, Rory Groat, Ms. Smith
Ms. Smith Word Count of Document: 1642
ERH-101-05
November 8, 2019
One Piece Comprised of Many
People read many articles each day for varying purposes. They may read them for entertainment, knowledge, or for research for a paper they may be writing or discussing. The articles they read have ties to multiple pieces, which form the article presented to the reader for them to understand and learn from a piece created out of various studies. The differences in human actions from two opposing sides has been an entertaining topic and interesting source of discussion for a long time. Humans have always wanted to understand why people act the way they do. The article “The Light Triad vs. Dark Triad of Personality” by Scott Berry Kaufman is an intriguing and insightful piece into this topic, but it has many components of other papers that formed its research. The discussion of the main piece by Kaufman is created through other studies that he incorporated into his own piece to form a proper work even though the articles may have some differences. The two articles incorporated into Kaufman’s have similarities and differences with the main article in order to appeal to the different audiences that are reading them and to set them apart.
The first article that was incorporated into “The Light Triad vs. Dark Triad of Personality” was from a journal website that allows writers to explain their ideas and thoughts on topics. “The Malevolent Side of Human Nature: A Meta-Analysis and Critical Review of the Literature on the Dark Triad” was relatively short due to it being a journal and its main purpose was explaining the dark triad. The dark triad, as this article reviews it, is “the constellation of narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathy”(Muris et al). This may seem small but it defines the central concept for half of what the main article is trying to discuss and gives a definition to one of the sides of the two triads. It also discusses how this term has been discussed more as the years have gone on. This occurs in the main article as well as when it discusses the study of the two triads being researched and accepted more with time. This article then continues on to state more facts about the dark triad, all of which could be incorporated into our main article as they are similar.
These articles may correlate due to their similarity in topics but they have differences in them as well. These differences set them apart and also show the reader which one is the main article and which one is drawn from it. The first difference between these two works is the length. “The Light Triad vs. Dark Triad of Personality” takes the points introduced by the incorporated piece and stretches them out to explain them further. “The Malevolent Side of Human Nature: A Meta-Analysis and Critical Review of the Literature on the Dark Triad” is about one page when printed out, while the article we are focused on is about an eight page packet with information on both sides. The incorporated article is short and gives the key points necessary to understand the main discussion of the dark triad. These two pieces also differ in the complexity of the words used.
The shorter article uses words like “transgressive”, “antecedent”, and other word usage in sentences that make this article, not difficult to read, but somewhat difficult to understand. The main article fixes this by using sentence structure that is easy to understand as well as easy to read. It also incorporates a somewhat relaxed tone that speaks to the reader, unlike the incorporated piece. It says, “Socially aversive people certainly exist, but what about everyday saints?”, asking the reader a question and getting their mind thinking about the topic that the writer is about to explain (Kaufman). The main article does have a few words within it that are not commonly used but if one were to search for their definition they could find the sentence relatively well put together and understandable. “The Light Triad vs. Dark Triad of Personality” is also written from a first person point of view. While its predecessor also uses some of these similar traits for first person by saying “our findings” or “our purpose” it still differs in the way it speaks to the writer as it just explains its discoveries instead of connecting and drawing the reader in. These differences noticed when comparing the articles may seem like something that should not occur when the topics are cohesive but the differences are what make for the main article to be created. These differences show the different audiences each article is trying to reach by their approaches to writing the separate but similar works.
“Clinical Correlates of Vulnerable and Grandiose Narcissism: A Personality Perspective” is another study that was incorporated into this main piece. It was actually created by Kaufman and a group of his peers in an experimental study format. This article is quite extensive as it goes through the studies they conducted and the many ideas they have accumulated for the topic of the dark triad, the more researched of the two triads. It goes into in depth details of percentages and other factors that one may notice have some interaction in the main piece Kaufman created for the broader audience but in a less scientific calculation format. In “The Light Triad vs. Dark Triad of Personality” it says, “ While the two are negatively related to each other, the relationship is only moderate in size (a correlation of about .50), supporting the idea that there is at least a little bit of light and dark in each of us”, which gives a brief explanation of how each of these triads are within people without giving scientific studies seen in the other article created by Kaufman and his peers (Kaufman). These articles are linked by a common author which make for similarities due to Kaufman drawing some of his previous ideas and studies from his other work created for scientists and researchers. The studies from this stem piece were used in the main article brought to the reader. This was most likely a simple task for the author to do since he had already researched and helped create this original piece in which he could incorporate into his new work that would be presented to a much broader audience.
These works, however, have differences which set them apart and give them their defining aspects as separate articles. The stem article in this case is actually longer than the main piece. This means the author must have taken the extensive research made in the original and simplified it into an easier form to understand as well as a shorter version to keep the reader’s attention. The contributor article is also packed full with research and numbers while the main piece is more of summarizations of these studies which allow for the reader to understand what is going on without the hassle of reading pages of studies and research. For example is stated, “We examined which dimensions of narcissism are meaningfully related to a comprehensive array of clinically important psychopathological features…” which is an extremely difficult statement to understand if one does not know much about the topic (Kaufman et al). The main article also never uses the word “psychopathological” but instead explains these same ideas in the stem piece in a clearer view for a broader audience. This will also keep the reader drawn in to this more simplified version meant for knowledge, entertainment and not research like the contributory article. These differences, like with the first article implemented into the main piece, set these pieces apart from being identical but also give two separate compositions with different reasons for reading with the same key points as their backbones.
The similarities and differences within these articles are what made this study so intriguing. The similarities within the main article and these two articles are common as they both focus on the same topic and discuss similar properties of the discussion, but their differences are what really make these articles separate and differentiable. The differences in how the topics are displayed by difference of word choice and sentence structure separates these articles and permits the idea of how there are articles drawn into and used to form other articles for different audiences. The main article is the one used for the broadest audience and uses the best sentence structure to make it easy to read and understand the topic which the other two articles lack. This is how many other articles like this are created and many of the compositions one may read in a day are formed by articles they may never see but will understand the main discussion of since they read the main piece. “ The Light Triad vs. Dark Triad of Personality” is a piece created through other studies, discoveries, and ideas which has similarities with the articles used to create it, but also differences to create the new piece and give varying audiences the specific work that fits them.
Works Cited
Kaufman, Scott Barry. “The Light Triad vs. Dark Triad of Personality.” Scientific American Blog Network, 19 Mar. 2019, blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-light-triad-vs-dark-triad-of-personality/
.Muris, Peter, et al. “The Malevolent Side of Human Nature: A Meta-Analysis and Critical Review of the Literature on the Dark Triad” (Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy) – Peter Muris, Harald Merckelbach, Henry Otgaar, Ewout Meijer, 2017.” SAGE Journals, journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1745691616666070?casa_token=iSYJRGtXJ2QAAAAA%3AuOouOp4qB_5057sUIJSwmfC2sXuyabicVd11qwEJ8EXondYm7vw8aXFrX1VDw5hIBrLBNB9A17J4xQ&journalCode=ppsa.
Kaufman, Scott Barry, et al. “CLINICAL CORRELATES OF VULNERABLE AND GRANDIOSE NARCISSISM: A PERSONALITY PERSPECTIVE .” CLINICAL CORRELATES OF VULNERABLE AND GRANDIOSE NARCISSISM: A PERSONALITY PERSPECTIVE , 2018, scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Kaufman-Weiss-Miller-Campbell-2018-Clinical-Correlates-of-Vulnerable-and-Grandiose-Narcissism-A-Personality-Perspective.pdf.