Understanding the Aggressive and Manipulative Personality

A wolf baring its teeth, a gorilla pounding its chest, or a bird puffing its feathers are all highly sophisticated negotiation tactics. They are biological posturing designed to establish boundaries, secure resources, and protect offspring before physical confrontation.

In a sense, aggression is transactional: A risky, expensive strategy to gain a survival advantage.

In humans, this biological heritage remains intact. Our brains fire up when our territory, family, or psychological safety is threatened.

When a mother fiercely protects her child, or a community rallies against an outside threat, we are witnessing the healthy, ancient mechanism of protective aggression. It is a natural, necessary response meant to restore balance and preserve life.

The problem, however, arises when this primal survival and occasional mechanism gets distorted. Unlike animals, who flip the aggression switch off the moment the threat subsides or the boundary is established, certain human personalities get trapped in a perpetual state of exploitation. Aggression becomes then a personality trait which inspired many studies aimed at understanding the psychology of human aggression.

The Aggressive Personality: A Feature of the Human Struggle

Aggression is a tendency intrinsic to the struggle to survive. Biologically speaking, aggressive behaviors support the needs of species to predate, defend themselves, and compete for resources.

However, when tracking this behavior in human society, a different framework is required.

Aggression is a highly adaptive but easily amplified human drive, compounded by social relations: it is reactive when a goal-directed behavior is frustrated by an obstacle (Dollard & Miller, 1939), learned through social modeling (Bandura, 1961), hierarchical when fueled by a surrender of personal conscience to authority (Milgram, 1961), and situational when triggered by toxic environments and systemic power structures (Zimbardo, 1971).

From Geopolitics to the Workplace: Asymmetrical Dominance

While mainstream psychological studies demonstrate how easily aggression can be triggered by external systems and social constraints, it is when these learned behaviors solidify over time into an internal blueprint that a stable, pathological character seeking for dominance emerges.

Certain sectors of our society reward these personalities with the roles of winners, leaders, and sometimes even heroes. In certain times of crisis, a strong, aggressive character can make a vital difference. But in times of peace and cooperation, these same personalities become the defectors, the exploiters of our desire for collaboration, and the saboteurs of collective well-being.

These characters can highjack social structures and become leaders, influencing for the worse the lives of many others, as vividly illustrated by recent international events. Human aggression is a continuous feature of life, despite historical attempts towards its management by the creation of codified laws, structural hierarchies, rituals, and internalized moral frameworks designed to penalize, redirect, and neutralize raw aggression.

While this reading of human behavior applies seamlessly to the current geopolitical scenario, these dynamics are not limited to massive organizations or global nations.

On a smaller scale, it is highly likely that you have dealt with an unfair colleague or a manager who exploits cooperative people for personal gain. Wherever human relations exist, there is a risk that aggressive personalities will exert asymmetrical dominance through open hostility or subtle manipulation.

Of the many books available on this topic, I highly recommend “In Sheep’s Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People” by Dr. George K. Simon. In the past, this book gave me invaluable tools to navigate complex relationships in the workplace. Later, it provided excellent optics for my work with clients facing similar struggles.

The book is highly accessible and describes what Dr. Simon calls the “disturbed character.” By this term, he refers to an individual who lacks the willingness or ability to constructively civilize their own aggressive behavior.

Why We Excuse the Inexcusable

Simon argues that the majority of people tend to excuse or underestimate disturbed characters. After all, some of them are our loved ones, our leaders, or the celebrities we admire. This majority are coincidentally the victims, the exploited in this relationship of dominance.

If you observe someone who always pushes to have their way, who always has to “win,” who constantly demands the upper hand, and refuses to take “no” for an answer, you can safely assume you are dealing with a predominantly aggressive individual.

Yet it is highly probable that people will mistakenly view the behavior of such actors as involuntary, originating from a background of past suffering, driven by an unmet emotional need, or entirely justified by an unconscious blind spot. Because you don’t think like them, it doesn’t mean that they think like you.

7 Thinking Patterns of the Disturbed Character

Dr. Simon warns that being able to read the disturbed character is the vital first step toward protecting yourself. Whether their intent is openly aggressive or covertly aggressive (manipulative), they routinely adopt some or all of the following destructive cognitive patterns:

• Self-Focused (Self-Centered) Thinking: They do not think about what others need or how their behavior might impact those around them.
• Possessive Thinking: They fail to see others as individuals with intrinsic dignity, worth, or rights. Instead, they view people as possessions to be used as they please.
• Extreme (All-or-None) Thinking: If they cannot have everything, they will accept nothing. If they are not on top, they see themselves at the bottom. This uncompromised stance completely disregards balance or moderation.
• Egomaniacal Thinking: The disordered character so overvalues themselves that they feel entitled to whatever they want. They believe the world owes them, rather than accepting that they must earn what they desire.
• Shameless Thinking: A healthy sense of shame is entirely lacking. They simply do not care how their behavior reflects on their character.
• Quick and Easy Thinking: They hate putting forth honest effort or accepting mutual obligation. They get far more joy out of “conning” people, harboring a deep disdain for legitimate labor.
• Guiltless Thinking: They will take whatever they want, no matter what societal norm is violated. If they are stopped, they immediately pivot to a self-pity discourse, acting as if they are the actual victims.

“The various aggressive personalities have certain characteristics in common. They are all excessively prone to seek a position of power and dominance over others. They are all relatively uninhibited by the threat of punishment or pangs of conscience. They also tend to view things and to think in ways that distort reality of circumstances, prevent them from accepting and exercising responsibility over their behavior, and ‘justify’ their overly aggressive stance.”

— Dr. George K. Simon

In an increasingly interconnected and cooperative society, our laws, rules, and morals emerged precisely as a defensive response to the destructive power of aggression. Yet, this tendency survives, and some might say thrives, because our culture often mistakes the drive for dominance as a desirable leadership quality.

How to Deal with Aggressive People: Shifting the Terms of Engagement

In the past, despite my studies and training that should have equipped me with defenses, I fell for these types of characters. I bought into their excuses and hesitated to attribute selfish, ruthless intentions to their behavior. I spent far too much energy trying to understand their point of view, sacrificing vital psychological resources that I should have been using to protect and empower myself. This is a sign of how entrenched this behavior is in society, and of how difficult it is to spot it, especially if you are dealing with a skilled manipulator.

I learned a lot of lessons on how to spot the wolf hiding in sheep’s clothing  from my clients’ cases. Feeling how helpless people feel in this type of relationships with a colleague or a family member opened my eyes on the severity of such situations. Learning more about aggressive personalities offered me a critical perspective shift in steering my behavior away from danger.

To guard against victimization, Dr. Simon offers a powerful blueprint:

“There are several things a person must do to ensure that the frequent contests of life are played on a level field. To guard against victimization, you must: be free of potentially harmful misconceptions about human nature and behavior; know how to correctly assess the character of others; have high self-awareness, especially regarding those aspects of your own character that might increase your vulnerability to manipulation; recognize and correctly label the tactics of manipulation and respond to them appropriately; and avoid fighting losing battles.”

Carving Your Safe Niche

A small handful of individuals, who often claws their way to the top of strict hierarchical organizations, possess a mindset radically different from the rest of the population. The impact of their behavior affects us all, and it is easy to feel completely powerless against it.

But as always, our true power lies within. We can exert control over our own behavior.

Our actions toward disturbed characters decide the course of the interaction. We fundamentally reframe the terms of engagement the moment we refuse to buy into their lies and choose to speak our own truth directly.

We must carve out a safe niche for ourselves to withstand the merciless attacks of aggressive people. This requires us to change our behavior. If we wait for the disturbed character to change, we will remain stuck in a psychological headlock forever.

The micro-interactions of our everyday lives are what ultimately create the macro-scale effects of international relations. It is in these everyday choices, refusing manipulation and standing firm in our boundaries, that we truly become the guardians of world peace.

What are your thoughts? Have you encountered these patterns in your own life? Let’s discuss in the comments below. If you found comfort or clarity in this perspective, consider sharing this post with someone who needs to understand how human aggression works (openly and covertly) and to steer clear from the reach of aggressive personalities.