lpetrich
Contributor
Scientists Have Identified The Driving Force Behind All Your Darkest Impulses
Psychologists recognize the dark triad: psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. Some psychologists in Germany and Denmark have gone further, looking at other such traits and and finding a correlation between them -- a combined factor that they call D.
From the dark-factor site,
Reading the authors' paper, I find that they compare D and related factors to the Big Five and HEXACO models of personality. They find that D is strongly negatively correlated with Honesty-Humility (H), negatively correlated with both Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, and weakly negatively correlated with Extroversion and weakly positively correlated with Neuroticism. But D is more than negative H, it seems.
There is an obvious practical application of this dark-factor work: working out how to recognize when someone is strong in them and to try to keep them away from anything where dark-factor tendencies can cause a lot of trouble. Psychological testing may be difficult, because someone high in D may be careful to give low-D answers.
Consider the case of someone who firmly believes that the end justifies the means, that one has to break eggs to make an omelet. That someone might feel suspicious about a psychological test and lie about their beliefs, claiming to believe that the end does not justify the means. For them, that lying would be perfectly justified, since the end justifies the means.
Psychologists recognize the dark triad: psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. Some psychologists in Germany and Denmark have gone further, looking at other such traits and and finding a correlation between them -- a combined factor that they call D.
They have published their results as The dark core of personality (Morten Moshagen and Benjamin E. Hilbig in Germany, Ingo Zettler in Denmark). They also have a site where one can take a personality quiz which will give one's D strength. The full-length quiz also finds estimates of several more specific dark traits. Here is the complete list, along with a "light" trait: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".
- The combined factor D is the tendency to maximize one's individual utility — disregarding, accepting, or malevolently provoking disutility for others — accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications.
- Egoism is the excessive concern with one’s own pleasure or advantage at the expense of community well-being.
- Greed is the dissatisfaction of not having enough, combined with the desire to acquire more, i.e. an insatiable desire for more resources, monetary or other.
- Machiavellianism is characterized by a cynical world view, manipulativeness, strategic-calculating orientation, and callous affect.
- Moral Disengagement describes a set of cognitive processing styles of decisions and behavior (e.g., dehumanization, misattribution of responsibility and blame) that allows to behave unethically without feeling distress.
- In Narcissists, ego-reinforcement is the all-consuming motive, leading to the tendencies to approach social admiration by means of self-promotion and to prevent social failure by means of self-defense.
- Psychological Entitlement describes a stable and pervasive sense that one deserves more and is entitled to more than others.
- Psychopathy is characterized by deficits in affect (i.e., callousness, lack of remorse or concern for others) and lack of self-control (i.e., impulsivity).
- Sadism is the tendency to engage in cruel, demeaning, or aggressive behaviors for one's own pleasure and/or dominance.
- Self-Centeredness is the indifference or insensitiveness to the suffering and needs of others.
- Spitefulness is the tendency to harm others for pleasure, even if this entails harm to oneself.
- Honesty-Humility describes the tendency to avoid manipulating others for personal gain, feel little temptation to break rules, be uninterested in lavish wealth and luxuries, and to feel no special entitlement to elevated social status.
From the dark-factor site,
The Content of D
Individuals with high levels in D will generally aim to maximize their individual utility at the expense of the utility of others. Utility is understood in terms of the extent of goal achievement, which includes different (more or less) visible gains such as excitement, joy, money, pleasure, power, status, and psychological need fulfillment in general. Thus, individuals high in D will pursue behaviors that unilaterally benefit themselves at the cost of others and, in the extreme, will even derive immediate utility for themselves (e.g., pleasure) from disutility inflicted on other people (e.g., pain). Vice versa, individuals high in D will generally not be motivated to promote other’s utility (e.g., helping someone) and will not derive utility from other’s utility as such (e.g., being happy for someone).
Further, those with high levels in D will hold beliefs that serve to justify their corresponding actions (for example, to maintain a positive self-image despite malevolent behavior). There are a variety of beliefs that may serve as justification, including that high-D individuals consider themselves (or their group) as superior, see others (or other groups) as inferior, endorse ideologies favoring dominance, adopt a cynical world view, consider the world as a competitive jungle, and so on.
Reading the authors' paper, I find that they compare D and related factors to the Big Five and HEXACO models of personality. They find that D is strongly negatively correlated with Honesty-Humility (H), negatively correlated with both Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, and weakly negatively correlated with Extroversion and weakly positively correlated with Neuroticism. But D is more than negative H, it seems.
There is an obvious practical application of this dark-factor work: working out how to recognize when someone is strong in them and to try to keep them away from anything where dark-factor tendencies can cause a lot of trouble. Psychological testing may be difficult, because someone high in D may be careful to give low-D answers.
Consider the case of someone who firmly believes that the end justifies the means, that one has to break eggs to make an omelet. That someone might feel suspicious about a psychological test and lie about their beliefs, claiming to believe that the end does not justify the means. For them, that lying would be perfectly justified, since the end justifies the means.