What Lies Beneath the Dark Triad Dirty Dozen: Varied Relations with the Big Five

By P. Jonason, Scott Barry Kaufman, Gregory D. Webster, Glenn Geher. Individual Differences Research, 2013

99 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Dirty Dozen is a recently developed, concise measure of the Dark Triad (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, & Machiavellianism). However, recent evidence has questioned the validity of this scale. In two studies we provide details about this measure in as much as it relates to the Big Five (i.e., Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness) whilst controlling for the shared variance amongst the three (Study 1: N = 123) and examining meta-traits and aspects of the Big Five (Study 2; N = 290). The Dirty Dozen subscales share an unstable core, which was localized to limited emotional stability, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. Each of the Dark Triad traits, however, was associated with unique aspects of the Big Five providing evidence that each trait measures something slightly different. For instance, psychopathy was linked to agreeableness through limited compassion but Machiavellianism was linked through limited politeness. In a series of factor analyses the scale is best explained by a bifactor model. Results provide multifaceted definitions of each of the aspects of the Dirty Dozen and evidence of its structural properties.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c114d608fbc3641a4d6e714477fc0ac5d1f56988

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Resources, Harshness, and Unpredictability (2016, methodology): “We replicated sex differences in the Dark Triad traits (Jonason et al., 2013), and effects were present in both measures of the Dark Triad traits (Table 4).”