Bill Eddy's 5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life: Trust (A1)
Bill Eddy's 5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life is a practical guide to a small slice of humanity that causes an outsized share of the damage. Eddy, a lawyer and mediator who founded the High Conflict Institute, calls them high-conflict people, and their signature is a pattern rather than a diagnosis: a fixed habit of blaming others, usually aimed at a rotating target. They can be charming on the way in, which is how they get close before you see it. On his blog he offers a tell: "When you see them viciously attack someone else, be aware that sooner or later they may attack you too." In the Big Five, the trait that decides how easily you get pulled in is one facet.
Calibrated trust is the Trust facet
The facet is Trust (A1), under Agreeableness, how readily you assume other people mean well. High A1 gives people the benefit of the doubt, which is lovely and, around a high-conflict person, dangerous. Eddy's whole method is a course in calibrating that dial: learning the specific behavioral cues that a particular person has not earned your good faith, without swinging to a cynicism that poisons every ordinary relationship. A trusting person tends to explain away the first ten red flags. Eddy is teaching you to count them.
What keeps the book from being a paranoia manual is its focus on behavior over labels. Eddy is careful that most people are not high-conflict, and he warns against slapping a diagnosis on anyone who annoys you; the skill is spotting a durable pattern of blame and aggression, not armchair-labeling a personality. And he takes the shame off the target. As he writes, "It's very important to learn this pattern so that when you are someone's target of blame, you can understand what is happening to you and that it is not something you caused." Being fooled by a practiced manipulator is what high A1 costs when it meets someone willing to exploit it, not a failure of your character.
We map the colder patterns across the model in the Dark Triad through OCEAN, and the specific tactic of making you doubt your own read in gaslighting. If your A1 runs high, Eddy's book is worth reading precisely because your instinct is to trust, a good instinct that a small number of people are built to abuse. The goal is not to trust less across the board, only to keep your default warmth (E1) for the many while learning to read the few, so the same openness that makes you a good friend stops making you an easy mark.
See Where You Fall
Where do you actually fall? The 30-facet OCEAN personality test takes about 15 minutes and scores all five domains and the facets underneath them. Take the test
Research Citations
Eddy, B. (2018). 5 types of people who can ruin your life: Identifying and dealing with narcissists, sociopaths, and other high-conflict personalities. TarcherPerigee.
Teunisse, A. K., Case, T. I., Fitness, J., & Sweller, N. (2020). I should have known better: Development of a self-report measure of gullibility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 46(3), 408-423.
Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89.
Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.