“Woman are drawn to toxic abusers”

That’s not true. Abusers are very capable at identifying and targeting vulnerable people. Abusers are drawn to vulnerable people.

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fc417fc802 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Both statements can be true. Although the first is better phrased as drawn to traits that correlate with toxic abusers.

You could similarly observe that social groups have a tendency to select toxic people for leadership roles. The explanations as to why are various but the end result is plain to see.

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andai an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I met a guy who was the creepiest dude I ever met in my life. Who intentionally was making me uncomfortable with personal questions (and admitted it when pressed! With a grin!). His job? Spending all day with mentally disabled children...

That's not evidence for any wrongdoing obviously, but it left me quite disturbed.

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brigandish 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I seem to remember a test (I believe I read it in the Kevin Dutton book on psychopaths) where psychopaths would be shown a video of people walking down a corridor, and they were more likely to choose vulnerable people than either chance or the norm.

Whichever it was, they could spot a vulnerable person just from their manner while they walk.

I wouldn't say they were drawn to vulnerable people, though. Like anyone else, they assess opportunity and effort, and these people are easier than others for getting what they want.

Edit: I found one of the studies -

> Key takeaways

> Higher Factor 1 psychopathy scores correlate with improved accuracy in assessing victim vulnerability based on gait.

> Inmates with elevated psychopathy scores consciously utilize gait cues to judge vulnerability more frequently.

> Psychopathy's Factor 1 traits, like manipulativeness, drive effective victim selection among violent offenders.

> Victims often display distinct gait characteristics that predict perceived vulnerability to assault.

> Understanding body language cues may inform victimization prevention strategies for at-risk individuals.

https://www.academia.edu/22213822/Psychopathy_and_Victim_Sel...

	▲	andai an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Remarkable. What does vulnerability mean in this context? Edit: They asked people how many times they had been victimized, which they defined as "worse than bullying". > Twelve video clips of unsuspecting targets walking from Wheeler et al. (2009) were used in the present study. The targets were undergraduate stu- dents, of whom 8 were women and 4 were men. As described in Wheeler et al., targets were unknowingly videotaped from behind as they walked from room A to B, to capture natural gaits. The targets indicated whether they had ever been victimized and how many times they had been victim- ized in the past (after the age of 18). The wording of the question was very broad, given the numerous types of victimization that can occur, and the effects of any victimization are relative. If participants asked for clarifica- tion, they were asked to think of victimization as being equal to or greater than bullying. Each target’s gait was coded by two independent judges according to the Grayson and Stein’s criteria (1981). As discussed in the original Wheeler et al. study, interjudge reliabilities were high for all gait characteristics (kappa = .77 to 1.00). Essential to the idea that body lan- guage cues indicate vulnerability, targets coded as displaying vulnerable body language in the Wheeler et al. were more likely to have self-identified as a victim, rho (11) = .68, p < .05. --- Edit 2: The study references a very similar study from 32 years earlier. > The original 1981 study by Grayson and Stein was incredibly simple. It involved setting up a video camera on a street in New York City, filming people (60 persons) as they walked by (between 10:00 AM and 12:00 pm over a three day period), and then showing the footage to convicted offenders (12 of them), whose crimes involved violence, and asking them to select those individuals who they would target/victimize (on a scale from 1 to 10), in order to discover if there were any identifiable non-verbal cues that were commonly picked up on/identified. https://www.bostonkravmaga.com/blog/criminology/that-grayson... So the 1st study focused purely on target selection and gait analysis, while the 2nd one interviewed the potential targets to see how that lined up with their actual history of being abused. Now the billion dollar question of correlation vs causation: seems to go both ways, as usual. Neurodivergent people walk differently (and have differences in motor areas of the brain), but also trauma changes your posture and movement...