Themes of the dark core of personality.

Abstract

Enduring patterns of socially aversive behavior are ascribed to stable personality disorders (such as narcissistic or antisocial tendencies) in clinical psychology or to so called "dark" traits in personality psychology. As recently shown, the substantial overlap among the latter constructs is attributable to a single underlying disposition, called the Dark Factor of Personality (D). Whereas evidence supports the conceptualization of D as the core of aversive traits, the structure of the specific factors of D received less empirical attention so far. To this end, this study further scrutinizes the internal structure of D with items stemming from 12 different aversive traits assessed in three large and heterogeneous samples (total N > 160,000). Specifically, we (a) explored the bifactor structure of D using a modified "bass-ackwards" approach, (b) cross-validated the identified factor solutions via confirmatory factor analyses, and (c) examined the empirical relation of D and the specific factors to five criterion measures. Results indicate that a bifactor structure modeling D along with five specific factors-or themeslabeled Callousness, Deceitfulness, Narcissistic Entitlement, Sadism, and Vindictiveness, best describes the internal structure of D. Public Significance StatementThe present study further explores the internal structure of the common core of socially and ethically aversive traits, the Dark Factor of Personality (D). Findings suggest that five specific factors labeled Callousness, Deceitfulness, Narcissistic Entitlement, Sadism, and Vindictiveness best describe the themes of D.

Making rights from wrongs: The crucial role of beliefs and justifications for the expression of aversive personality.

“…In studies relying on the full set of 70 items to indicate D, a bifactor structure (Reise, 2012) was specified such that all items loaded both on the general factor representing D and on one of five specific factors representing themes within D (which simply constitutes a superior measurement model for D, Bader, Hartung, et al, 2021). The general and specific factors were constrained to mutual orthogonality.…”

Beyond (low) Agreeableness: Toward a more comprehensive understanding of antagonistic psychopathology

“…For D, we chose the bi‐factor model as suggested by Bader et al. (2021). Here, D constitutes the general factor subsuming most of the variance of all items.…”

Assessing the fitting propensity of factor models.

“…A particularly popular technique is structural equation modeling (SEM), allowing to express complex sets of hypotheses via relations among manifest and latent variables (MacCallum & Austin, 2000). SEM is applied across various disciplines to address research questions such as the classification of psychopathology (e.g., Kotov et al, 2011; Sharp et al, 2015), the latent structure of cognitive abilities (e.g., Karr et al, 2018; Laureys et al, 2022) and personality traits (e.g., Mann et al, 2021; Moshagen et al, 2018), or the psychometric properties of assessment instruments (e.g., Bader et al, 2021; Olderbak et al, 2021).…”