Paraphrased:
The narcissist’s smirk is a subtle but telling expression that occurs when a narcissist experiences pleasure from manipulating or deceiving someone.
For narcissists, the smirk usually reflects contempt, which is a deep-seated disdain or lack of respect towards others. For narcissists contempt is tied to their belief in their own superiority. They view others who do not serve their needs as worthless or beneath them, showing a complete disregard for how their actions impact those around them.
Narcissism is a somewhat multidimensional trait with gradients of intensity. Who told you that it’s a binary classification?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346546680_Untangling_the_associations_that_narcissistic_admiration_and_narcissistic_rivalry_have_with_agency_communion_and_romantic_commitment/figures?lo=1
a lifetime of dealing with narcissists
Autism is a spectrum as swell but again, there is no such thing as a half autist
I don’t think you know what “spectrum” means
There’s a conceivable reality where you have a spectrum of autistic traits, but whether someone is autistic is a strict binary. Imagine a lamp that can have any color, but that is either turned on or off. This would be quite funky, because there’d have to be some sort of mechanism that causes strict grouping - something you see in psychology maybe sometimes in sequence learning research and some types of reasoning research, but otherwise is quite rare.
However, this is obviously not reality.
That’s a bad example. It would be like a lamp with a dimmer switch, and at some point you have to decide how bright the lamp has to be for it to count as “on”. The lamp can have different colors too, but there is an overall brightness that can be measured.
That’s a more realistic analogy, but my point here isn’t that autism is not a multidimensional and continuously distributed trait. My point is only that a spectrum and dichotomized group membership are technically conceivable, even if substantively absurd.
Yeah that’s valid, makes sense
I don’t think you think.
There’s people with more pronounced autistic traits and those with less pronounced ones. There isn’t half an autist, but there can be someone whose autistic traits’ intensities are near the middle of those of a person who clearly is autistic and those of a person who clearly isn’t.
The categorical nature of diagnoses does not reflect the underlying phenomena, it reflects arguments about healthcare resource allocation. The actual phenomena are more nuanced