The dark core of personality.

Abstract

Many negatively connoted personality traits (often termed "dark traits") have been introduced to account for ethically, morally, and socially questionable behavior. Herein, we provide a unifying, comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding dark personality in terms of a general dispositional tendency of which dark traits arise as specific manifestations. That is, we theoretically specify the common core of dark traits, which we call the (). The fluid concept of D captures individual differences in the tendency to maximize one's individual utility-disregarding, accepting, or malevolently provoking disutility for others-accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications. To critically test D, we unify and extend prior work methodologically and empirically by considering a large number of dark traits simultaneously, using statistical approaches tailored to capture both the common core and the unique content of dark traits, and testing the predictive validity of both D and the unique content of dark traits with respect to diverse criteria including fully consequential and incentive-compatible behavior. In a series of four studies ( > 2,500), we provide evidence in support of the theoretical conceptualization of D, show that dark traits can be understood as specific manifestations of D, demonstrate that D predicts a multitude of criteria in the realm of ethically, morally, and socially questionable behavior, and illustrate that D does not depend on any particular indicator variable included. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Lead Us (Not) into Temptation: Testing the Motivational Mechanisms Linking Honesty–Humility to Cooperation

“…The link between low levels in Honesty–Humility and greedy, selfish or, more generally, antagonistic behaviour is also in line with this dimensions' negative relations with dark traits such as Machiavellianism, Narcissism and Psychopathy (Lee & Ashton, ; Muris, Merckelbach, Otgaar, & Meijer, ) and indeed the general dispositional tendency of which many different dark traits are specific manifestations, the ‘dark core of personality’ (Moshagen, Hilbig, & zettler, in press). Our findings are consistent with studies investigating the effects of dark traits in decision‐making processes.…”

Self–Compassion as A Facet of Neuroticism? A Reply to the Comments of Neff, TóTh–KiráLy, and Colosimo (2018)

“…We want to make it clear that self‐compassion is just a single example of the problematic practice of proposing new constructs while simultaneously making ambiguous construct definitions and ignoring psychometric standards ranging from item development to reasonable tests of different forms of validity (cf. Moshagen, Hilbig, & Zettler, in press). With our contributions, we highlighted problematic aspects of the definition and measurement of the construct self‐compassion.…”

An extension of the dark triad and five‐factor model to three Asian societies

“…In reviewing other research that extended the DT cross-culturally, we failed to observe any disclosure of structural invariance testing (see Jonason et al, 2013Jonason et al, , 2017, or those that did reported barely "acceptable" fits (Robertson et al, 2016). They tested their conceptualization of D as a fluid construct and provided both a test and theoretical framework for understanding dark personalities (Moshagen et al, 2018). The consistency of barely acceptable model fits reported in the literature may point toward an underpinning theoretical issue with the DT framework.…”

“…We echo these calls for better measurement and more rigorous methodology. Moshagen, Hilbig, and Zettler (2018) later provided a unifying, comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding dark personality. These previous findings along with those from the present study leave us skeptical as to the reliability of extending the DT framework cross-culturally.…”