Milieu effects on the Dark Triad traits and their sex differences in 49 countries

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Highlights

  • Conducted a secondary analysis on details about the Dark Triad traits

  • Paired the traits with country-level indicators from three past time points

  • Adult narcissism/psychopathy linked to stable and harsh conditions in one's past.

  • Childhood modernity/stability linked to adult Machiavellianism.

  • Sex differences in the traits grew with unemployment and homicide rates.

Abstract

Most research on the development of personality traits like the Dark Triad (i.e., narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) focuses on local effects like parenting style or attachment, but people live in a larger society that may set the stage for any local effects. Here we paired nation-level data on the traits from 49 nations with several milieu indicators (e.g., life expectancy, homicide rates) from three timepoints (and change among them) where the average participant (≈ 22yo) would have been a child (≈ 6yo), a pre-teen (≈ 11yo), and a teenager (≈ 16yo). Congruent with previous research, variance in narcissism was far more sensitive to variance in milieu conditions in general and across all three time points than variance in Machiavellianism or psychopathy. The milieu conditions differentiated the traits somewhat with income and education revealing negative correlations with narcissism, positive correlations with Machiavellianism, and null correlations with psychopathy. Sex differences in Machiavellianism and narcissism were correlated with homicide rates across the three timepoints. The evidence that changes in milieu conditions in ones' past predicts the traits was erratic, but larger sex differences in the traits were associated with decreased life expectancies and homicide rates between childhood and pre-teens.

Section snippets

Method

The research is based on summary data reported previously (Jonason et al., 2020), which included 11,723 participants (66 % women, 34 % men; MAge = 21.53; SDAge = 3.17) from 49 countries from three W.E.I.R.D. (i.e., North America, Oceania, Western Europe) and five non-W.E.I.R.D. (i.e., Asia, Middle East, non-Western Europe, South America, sub-Saharan Africa). We used the means and sex differences (i.e., Cohen's d) for the Dark Triad traits in each country as data derived from the Dirty Dozen

Results

In Table 1, we report the correlations for the mean rates of the Dark Triad traits in young adulthood. Narcissism was the most sensitive to variance in milieu quality (e.g., lower life expectancies and income across all three timepoints), followed by Machiavellianism (e.g., more education across all three timepoints, less inequality across two timepoints), whereas psychopathy had no links. Collectively, changes in these conditions were erratically associated with mean-level rates of the Dark

Discussion

Granted, conditions during one's development are critical in understanding adult behavior. However, much of the relevant literature is limited by a reliance on retrospective reports of one's childhood, an omission of sex differences, and a focus on local, interpersonal indicators of conditions in childhood both in theoretical models and data. In contrast, we consider the role of distal features of one's country to test how milieu effects over one's childhoods predict the Dark Triad traits and

Limitations and conclusions

Although we provided the first account of the relationships between mean-level of the Dark Triad traits and sex differences therein across three timepoints in people's past, relying on robust estimates of each, our study has limitations. Our estimates of the Dark Triad traits relied on relatively WEIRD countries with mostly female participants. Also, in the absence of longitudinal data (Baker & Mednick, 1984; Chopik & Grimm, 2019), we can only establish temporal precedence. In addition, the

CRediT authorship contribution statement

PKJ conceptualized, advised on the analyses, and wrote the paper. SKC conducted the data analyses and assisted in the writing of the Results. FT created the database. MŻP and CS provided feedback on the paper prior to submission. All other authors were part of the team that collected the original data from which these secondary data analyses were derived.

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    The first and second authors were partially and fully funded, respectively, by a grant from the National Science Centre of Poland (2019/35/B/HS6/00682).

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