The Dark Tetrad of Personality: Relevance to Nefarious Groups

1. The Dark Tetrad of Personality: Relevance to Nefarious Groups Delroy L. Paulhus University of British Columbia

2. Outline • Dark Triad • Dark Tetrad • Application to groups

3. Positive personalities • Boring

4. Negative personalities • Fascinating • Exciting • Consequential

5. NARCISSIST MACHIAVELLIAN PSYCHOPATH The Dark Triad

6. Narcissist: egotistical attention-seeking • Machiavellian: planful manipulation • Psychopath: reckless and callous

7. CLINICAL LEVEL-serious problems-requires professional help SUBCLINICAL-mild version, allows person to manage in everyday society

8. What is the common factor? callousness

9. Machiavellianism

10. Niccolo Machiavelli

11. Machiavellianism • Advisor to the Medici family (ca. 1500) • To succeed in politics, you must manipulate others • E.g., flatter important people • Most people are ignorant and deserve to be manipulated Richard Christie created the Mach scale

12. Sun-Tzu: The Art of War(ca. 500 B.C.)

13. The Psychopath

14. Clinical version • key features: • Nasty & impulsive • Keeps committing crimes • Never learns • Most of life spent in prison

15. The Subclinical Version • Normal psychopath • Successful psychopath • Non-criminal psychopath • Businessman, lawyer, student

16. The Narcissist

17. Sense of superiority • Needs attention • Constant bragging • Feels entitled to superior treatment • Derogates others • In principle, they are secretly insecure • Raskin created the Narcissistic Personality Inventory

18. MODERN DAY EXAMPLES OF THE DARK TRIAD

19. Subclinical narcissism Donald Trump Paris Hilton

20. 3. Machiavellianism Bernie Madoff Machiavellian

21. Sub-clinical psychopath Sean Avery

22. SOME OF THE ISSUESQ: are they actually the same person?A: No, but positively correlatedQ: Are they mutually exclusive?A: No, they can be found in the same person.

23. OUR RESEARCH • Designed to differentiate the Dark Triad • Included an extensive program of correlational and experimental studies • Hoped to differentiate the three on the basis of predicting distinct outcomes • Required solid measurement instruments • Primarily student and Mechanical Turk samples

24. Paulhus & Williams (2002) • INTRODUCED THE RESEARCH • SRP III (Self-Report Psychopathy) • NPI (Narcissistic Personality Inventory) • Mach IV (Machiavellianism scale) • Short Dark Triad (Jones & Paulhus, 2010)

25. TO ANTICIPATE:The Dark Triad members show distinctive correlates across a wide range of unsavory behaviors

26. Williams & Paulhus 2003 Self-enhancement

27. Discrepancy measure • Departure from reality Objective measure • Over-Claiming Questionnaire • How familiar are you with these 100 things? • Some of them are not real

28. Results • Correlations with self-enhancement • Narcissism were moderate to large • Psychopathy were small • Machiavellianism were zero

29. CHEATING & FRAUD

30. Exam copying Study(Nathanson et al., 2006) • A. Administered battery of personality measures • B. Used Wesolowsky Program to detect cheaters on midterm and final exams • Examines wrong answers on multiple-choice tests • Compares all combinations of students • Statistical detection of error similarities • Identifies outlier pairs

31. RESULTS Narcissism r = .10 Machivellianism r = .11 Psychopathy r = .28

32. Plagiarism StudyWilliams et al. (2010) • 245 students • Term papers scored for plagiarism by Turn-It-In program • Both Psychopathy & Machiavellianism worked

33. Fraud Study • E-mail questionnaire study (N = 95) • Participation motivation was lottery • three $50.00 prizes for participating • Before awarding prizes, we sent another email • “Oops, we lost the list of winners”

34. Results • 12 of 63 students responders reported that they were a winner • Narcissism r = .04 • Machiavellianism r = .10 • Psychopathy r = .24 p < .03

35. Jones & Paulhus (2010) AGGRESSION

36. white noise paradigm • Advertised as Competitive Game Study

38. PROVOCATIONS BY ‘PARTNER’ • Actually there is no partner • She decides how to respond by setting the noise delivered to the partner • Aggression was measured by the noise setting administered to partner

39. Results • Narcissists increased aggression after an insult • Psychopaths increased aggression after a gratuitous escalation

40. Sexual deviance studies • We asked students about deviant sex fantasies and behavior (paraphilias, etc.) • RESULTS • Most people have some deviant fantasies • Link between fantasy and behavior was stronger among psychopaths

41. RESEARCH BY OTHERS

42. Behavior-Genetics Study Vernon et al. (2007) • N = 344 twins • Psychopathy & narcissism highly heritable • Machiavellianism shows a strong shared environmental effect

43. Big Six studies Ashton & Lee (2006) • They added Factor 6 called Honesty-Humility -- to the Big Five • All of the triad load on Factor 6, with few loadings on other factors

44. International Sex Survey Schmitt and colleagues (2005) • Psychopaths steal other people’s lovers • Same pattern in every one of 45 countries

45. REVENGE

46. Nathanson & Paulhus (in preparation) • On-line anonymous data collection • If you’re like most people, you have fantasized about getting back at someone for something they did you. • Tell us about an example of such a fantasy and and whether you actually got payback.

47. Results • Psychopathy and borderline personality predicted stalking • Neurotics fantasized but never acted on it • We also clarified the motivation for revenge

48. STALKING

49. Lau & Paulhus (under review) • Similar data collection to revenge studies • Have you ever been rejected but continued to pursue the person anyway? • Please give us the details • RESULTS : psychopaths were the most frequent stalkers

50. CONCLUSIONS