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The Dispositional Essence of Proactive Social Preferences: The Dark Core of Personality vis-à-vis 58 Traits

Benjamin E. Hilbig¹; Isabel Thielmann²; Ingo Zettler^3,4; Morten Moshagen⁵

¹ Cognitive Psychology Lab, University of Koblenz-Landau · ² Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law, Freiburg, Germany · ³ Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen · ⁴ Copenhagen Personality and Social Psychology (CoPSY) Research Group, and Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science (SODAS) · ⁵ Institute of Psychology and Education, Ulm University

Individuals differ in how they weigh their own utility versus others’. This tendency codefines the dark factor of personality (D), which is conceptualized as the underlying disposition from which all socially and ethically aversive (dark) traits arise as specific, flavored manifestations. We scrutinize this unique theoretical notion by testing, for a broad set of 58 different traits and related constructs, whether any predict how individuals weigh their own versus others’ utility in proactive allocation decisions (i.e., social value orientations) beyond D. These traits and constructs range from broad dimensions (e.g., agreeableness), to aversive traits (e.g., sadism) and beliefs (e.g., normlessness), to prosocial tendencies (e.g., compassion). In a large-scale longitudinal study involving the assessment of consequential choices (median N = 2,270; a heterogeneous adult community sample from Germany), results from several hundred latent model comparisons revealed that no meaningful incremental variance was explained beyond D. Thus, D alone is sufficient to represent the social preferences inherent in socially and ethically aversive personality traits.

DOI

10.1177/09567976221116893

Volume

34 (2)

Pages

201-220

Language

en

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