Crowd Salience Reduces Aversion to Facially Communicated Psychopathy but Not Narcissism

Abstract

Despite the adaptive advantages of social affiliation in humans, the benefits of interpersonal contact are nonetheless bounded. The experience of crowding can emerge from an oversaturation of social affiliation, fostering avoidant behaviors and heightening vigilance toward interpersonal threats. Among these features indicative of threat includes facial structures connoting dark personality traits associated with a proclivity toward exploitative behavior. Despite the potential costs imposed by those exhibiting these features, individuals could nonetheless enjoy coalitional benefits from exploitative humans (i.e., protection). Two studies investigated whether crowding would foster aversion or interest toward facial structures connoting psychopathy and narcissism. Although crowd salience heightened tolerance for psychopathy ( Study 1 ), providing evidence for a bodyguard hypothesis, narcissism was similarly aversive regardless of motivational state ( Study 2 ). We frame results from an evolutionary perspective and provide tentative explanations for discrepant signal values through psychopathy and narcissism that could elicit disparate findings.