Latest news with #Machiavellianism
New York Post
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Post
From booty call to ‘foodie call' — free dinner scammers flood dating apps as wallets tighten
Love might be off the menu — but the lobster sure isn't. With wallets tightening and a looming recession on the rise, some singles are turning first dates into free dinner scams. Countless TikTokkers are proudly documenting their foodie finesse, using Hinge and Bumble like Doordash — to score meals on someone else's dime. This is referred to as a 'foodie call' — where someone nabs a free meal with no plans to ever call, text or date the poor sap who picked up the check. 3 A 'foodie call' is when someone scores a free meal with zero intention of calling, texting or dating the poor sap who footed the bill. Nejron Photo – South Carolina graphic designer Katheryne Slack told MarketWatch in a recent interview that she realized she was out of coffee one Sunday and used a thirsty Hinge match to score a caffeine fix. Outta beans and full of schemes, Slack hit up her suitor for a free cup o' joe. The pair had exchanged flirty messages days earlier, but plans fizzled — until she pounced when the timing finally lined up. An hour later, they were sipping lattes at his expense at a café. 'As soon as I met him, I knew I wasn't into him. But I was already there and needed my coffee,' she told the outlet. 3 With wallets squeezed and recession fears bubbling up, some shameless singles are using first dates to dine and dash — minus the romance. motortion – @jocelynaleenaa no matter what state or country this is how it's starting to feel😂😂😂 ♬ original sound – 90dayfiance And she's far from the only one who sees things this way, TikTok is filled with cheeky clips of users bragging about 'dating for dinner' — a budgeting 'hack.' In one recent video, user @jocelynaleenaa can be seen at a restaurant table. In white text over the clip, she wrote, 'when you keep going on dates for the free food & drinks.' Another user commented beneath the TikTok, 'I did this for 2 weeks straight once I was never hungry.' One other added, 'Girl I feel you.' Some are joking that back-to-back dates are their version of meal prepping. User @alanarixonn filmed herself dancing last month with the caption, 'off on my 2nd date this week cos I cba to meal prep x.' One viewer wrote under the video, 'the fact that this isn't a joke.' Someone else replied, 'It's like a meal voucher because you are putting in the work. You deserve it queen.' An additional supporter chimed in, 'This is low key genius' as one other noted, 'Love doing this #thinksmarternotharder.' Dating with the intention of nabbing a free bite to eat isn't new. A 2019 study published in the 'Society for Personality and Social Psychology' journal dove deeper into 'foodie calls.' The study found up to 1 in 3 women admitted to going on dates for free grub. As per the researchers, anyone who thinks it's cool to dine and dash emotionally are more likely to show signs of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism — aka the 'dark triad.' 3 Mooching meals in the name of love ain't exactly breaking news — a 2019 study in the Society for 'Personality and Social Psychology' journal dug into so-called 'foodie calls.' Prostock-studio – With sky-high rents and an endless lineup of buzzy eateries, NYC could be seen as a foodie call free-for-all. East Village local Olivia Balsinger once scored a five-course feast at swanky seafood hotspot Catch in the Meatpacking District — all on someone else's dime. 'If I had been forced to pay,' she told The Post, 'I probably wouldn't have been able to eat for weeks afterward.' Overall, while 'dating for dinner' isn't entirely novel, it's hitting harder now as tariffs bite into wallets, recession jitters grow, and job security feels shakier than ever.
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists Found The Driving Force Behind Your Darkest Impulses
Psychologists call it the dark triad: an intersection of three of the most malevolent tendencies of human nature – psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. But the truth goes deeper, and darker. There's also egoism, sadism, spitefulness, and more. And behind this rogues gallery of all our worst inclinations on the surface, a central, common core of human darkness lies, researchers say. In a 2018 study, psychologists from Germany and Denmark mapped this driving force behind all our darkest impulses and gave it a name. Meet D, the newly identified Dark Factor of Personality. The theoretical framework of the D factor has its underpinnings in what's known as the g factor: a construct proposed by English psychologist Charles Spearman over a century ago when he observed that individuals who performed well on one kind of cognitive test were more likely to score well on other kinds of intelligence tests, too. In other words, a 'general intelligence factor' could be measured. But it turns out that's not all scientists are able to detect. "In the same way, the dark aspects of human personality also have a common denominator, which means that – similar to intelligence – one can say that they are all an expression of the same dispositional tendency," explained psychologist Ingo Zettler from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark back in September 2018. In a series of four separate studies involving over 2,500 participants, Zettler and fellow researchers surveyed participants with questions designed to measure their levels of nine distinct dark personality traits: egoism, Machiavellianism, moral disengagement, narcissism, psychological entitlement, psychopathy, sadism, self-interest, and spitefulness. To do so, participants were asked to disagree with a range of variable 'dark' statements, such as: "I know that I am special because everyone keeps telling me so", "I'll say anything to get what I want", "It is hard to get ahead without cutting corners here and there", and "Hurting people would be exciting". With all the responses in hand, researchers ran a statistical analysis, with the results suggesting that while these dark traits are all distinct, they all overlap to some extent, owing to the central core darkness factor, D, which reveals itself in different ways in different people. "In a given person, the D factor can mostly manifest itself as narcissism, psychopathy or one of the other dark traits, or a combination of these," Zettler said. "But with our mapping of the common denominator of the various dark personality traits, one can simply ascertain that the person has a high D factor. This is because the D factor indicates how likely a person is to engage in behavior associated with one or more of these dark traits." It's pretty provocative stuff, but you don't just have to take the researchers' word for it: You can take the D test yourself. The team set up an online portal where you can measure your own D score via a questionnaire. Why would people want to know? Well, apart from personal curiosity about how dark you really are, the researchers said their findings could one day lead to new discoveries in psychology and therapy, advancing our understanding of how we interpret people's malevolent actions. "We see it, for example, in cases of extreme violence, or rule-breaking, lying, and deception in the corporate or public sectors," Zettler said. "Here, knowledge about a person's D-factor may be a useful tool, for example, to assess the likelihood that the person will re-offend or engage in more harmful behavior." The findings were reported in Psychological Review. An earlier version of this article was published in September 2018. Men's Heights Grew Twice as Much as Women's Last Century, Says Study Airports Have a Strange Effect on Human Behavior. Here's Why. Our Ears Still Try to Swivel Around to Hear Better, Study Discovers
