Do Juvenile Offenders Have Different Morals than Kids Who Don’t Get Into Trouble?

Kiyran Earnshaw, 18, and Luke Gaukroger, 16, were charged with first-degree murder of a factory supervisor, Robert Wilson, after stabbing him more than 100 times. How can teenagers like Earnshaw and Gaukroger commit such a horrendous crime? What separates them from other 16-year-olds?

We know that some violent individuals have elevated levels of psychopathic traits such as egocentricity, impulsivity, callousness, and a lack of warmth toward other people. These individuals also exhibit antisocial behavior, lack of guilt and remorse, deceptiveness, and a tendency to manipulate other people. But how do such traits affect these teenagers’ moral values?

Most people think of moral values as norms that are implicit and universally accepted. For example, most people would agree that it is morally wrong to kill an innocent person. But the question of which moral norms should take precedence over others often leads to major disagreements. For instance, some people believe that it is not morally wrong to harm animals for the sake of medical progress that might benefit millions of people, whereas other people strongly disagree, saying that harming animals is always wrong no matter what the benefits to human beings might be.

Richard Shweder and, later, Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues promoted a view of morality suggesting that our moral judgments are strongly influenced by our emotions and moral intuitions (here, intuitions refer to quick, automatic judgments), as well as by people’s cultural context. Haidt and his colleagues proposed that there are five moral values that are universal but vary in importance depending on a person’s culture and political orientation. These values involve care for others, fairness, loyalty, respecting authority, and sanctity.

For example, people who strongly endorse caring for others would want, above all else, to reduce someone else’s suffering. In contrast, people who rate fairness as an important moral value are more likely to value reciprocity and justice and to punish cheaters. Individuals who value loyalty believe in cooperating with their ingroup and in staying away from or behaving in hostile ways toward outgroups. People who rate the moral value of respecting authority as very important tend to value obedience, deference, and respect toward authority figures in a hierarchal social system. Last, individuals who morally value sanctity are more likely to adhere to social and religious taboos, feel disgust when they are exposed to behaviors that they consider impure, and care about chastity, cleanliness, and purity of the mind, body, and soul.

But what about juvenile offenders with elevated psychopathic traits? Do they have moral intuitions that guide moral behavior, and if so, which ones?

In one test of morality, known as the Moral/Conventional Transgressions task, researchers study whether people can perceive differences between social norms and moral norms. Social norms  are presumably amoral rules that depend on the specific situation that one is in, such as norms about not talking in class.  In contrast, moral norms are assumed to be universal rules that must be followed regardless of the situation, such as not stealing someone else’s property.

Researchers found that juvenile offenders with psychopathic traits were able to accurately identify which behaviors were merely violations of social rules and which ones were moral violations, suggesting that they can tell the difference between right and wrong and are not “morally blind.” Importantly, however, juvenile offenders rated moral violations as less serious than adolescents of the same age who were not delinquents and did not have psychopathic traits, suggesting that offenders lack a full understanding of moral situations.

Because having abnormal moral values—or perhaps no moral values  at all—may lead to immoral behavior, including committing crimes, my colleagues and I wanted to know whether the moral values of incarcerated adolescents with psychopathic personality traits differ from those of incarcerated adolescents who are low in psychopathic traits. We found that juvenile offenders who were callous and unemotional and who lacked empathy rated all five primary moral values—caring for others, fairness, loyalty, respecting authority, and sanctity/purity—as less important than incarcerated adolescents who scored lower in psychopathic characteristics. Incarcerated adolescents with psychopathic personality traits seemed to regard all fundamental moral values as less important.

Other studies have found that, among adults who are imprisoned, psychopathic personality traits were related to low endorsement of behaviors related to the moral values of care and fairness, but there was no relationship between psychopathic traits and endorsing loyalty, respecting authority, or sanctity/purity. However, our research found that juvenile offenders with high psychopathy endorsed all five moral values less than those with low psychopathy. Given that moral values and intuitions are fundamental motivators of moral behavior, low endorsement of these moral foundations might explain why incarcerated adolescents with high psychopathy are more likely to harm others, cheat, defy authority, violate group norms and expectations, and experience lower disgust when watching or engaging in violence.

It remains unclear why adults with psychopathic traits don’t exhibit the same breadth of moral reasoning abnormalities that we found in juveniles. Perhaps their moral reasoning abilities mature with age or maybe they simply get better at presenting themselves in socially desirable ways. In any case, the fact that juvenile offenders show such a broad array of abnormalities in moral reasoning suggests that the combination of high psychopathy and poor moral reasoning may increase the risk of adolescents committing violent crimes.


For Further Reading

Aharoni, E., Sinnott-Armstrong, W., & Kiehl, K. A. (2014). What’s wrong? Moral understanding in psychopathic offenders. Journal of Research in Personality, 53, 175–181. https://doi.org/10/gfzcrs

Cima, M., Korebrits, A., Stams, G. J., & Bleumer, P. (2017). Moral cognition, emotion, and behavior in male youth with varying levels of psychopathic traits. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 54, 155–162. https://doi.org/10/gfkhj7

Fernandes, S., Aharoni, E., Harenski, C. L., Caldwell, M., & Kiehl, K. A. (2020). Anomalous moral intuitions in juvenile offenders with psychopathic traits. Journal of Research in Personality, 103962. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2020.103962

Haidt, Jonathan, & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20(1), 98–116. https://doi.org/10/b8bt4c
 

Sharlene Fernandes is a Ph.D. student in Psychology (Cognitive Sciences) at Georgia State University: The Cooperation, Conflict, and Cognition Lab.

Eyal Aharoni is an Associate Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neuroscience at Georgia State University where he serves as the director of the Cooperation, Conflict, and Cognition Lab.

 

Envy Hurts Not Only Us but Also Those Around Us

Feeling envious is not a pleasant experience: we feel as though we are lacking something, and this can often make us feel inferior to other people. But the negative effects of envy may extend beyond how we feel to have an impact on our relationships with other people. In fact, there’s reason to think that the negative experience of envy can lower people’s willingness to help others and maybe even make people more likely to harm others.

My colleagues and I conducted two studies in which we had people recall a specific memory from their life and write about it. Some of the people were told to write about a time they felt envious, and some of the people were told to write about a time they felt grateful. We chose gratitude as a comparison emotion because it is the opposite of envy; whereas we feel envious when we don’t have something we want, we feel grateful for something we have, and that positive emotion often extends to others. We also had some people write about a neutral topic such as a trip to the grocery store or what was in the room around them so that we could also compare the negative and positive emotions of envy and gratitude to a neutral experience.

In the first study, we found that participants who were feeling envious were less likely to help a stranger. We set up situation where a researcher posing as another participant dropped a canister of pencils near our participant so we could record how much the participant helped pick up the pencils, if at all. Despite the fact that that the pencils were dropped right next to our participants, envious people were less likely to help and also picked up fewer pencils even when they did!

In the second study, we set up a situation where participants had the opportunity to assign puzzle tasks to another person, believing that the other person had to complete the task in a short amount of time to earn a reward. Thus, we could measure participants’ tendency to harm other people by the difficulty of the puzzles they assigned to the other person; harder puzzles would reduce the other person’s chance to perform well and get a reward. It turned out that envious participants were more likely to assign difficult puzzles to the other person. They were even more likely to admit to doing it because they wanted to hurt the person’s chances of earning the reward.

Our research was among the first to experimentally examine the behavioral effects of envy and highlighted the effects of this negative emotion not only for the person who feels envious but also for those around them. Envy can negatively affect how we feel toward others and how we treat them, suggesting that this emotion has far more impact than previously thought.


For Further Reading

Behler, A.M.C., Wall, C.S.J., Bos, A., & Green, J.D. (2020). To help or not to help?: Assessing the impact of envy on prosocial and antisocial behaviors. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 46(7), 1156-1168.

 

Anna Maria C. Behler is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University. She studies how emotions like envy, nostalgia, and empathy influence our relationships and behaviors.

 

Foodie Calls: Who Dates for Free Food?

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Not many research studies start with a copy of Maxim magazine, but this one did. We leafed through an article about the cost of dating and then stopped to ask each other, “Do you know what a foodie call is?”

In case you don’t know, a foodie call occurs when a person, despite their lack of romantic attraction to someone, agrees to go on a date just to get a free meal. So, after we awkwardly read the definition of a foodie call from Urban Dictionary and the testimonies of women in Maxim, we were left asking two questions. “How often do foodie calls happen, and who would do that?”

And that’s the thing about Maxim: their articles are a bit light on population estimates, research methodology, and theoretical frameworks. So, as research psychologists, we narrowed the scope of our questions and tested them ourselves. Anybody can agree to date someone for free food, but we decided to survey heterosexual women because traditional dating scripts suggest that men typically pick up the tab on a first date.

Then in two online studies, we asked women a series of questions. Had they ever agreed to go on a date with someone they weren’t attracted to for a free meal? If they answered “yes,” then we asked them how often they had done so and how acceptable they thought foodie calls are.

We found that 33% of women had engaged in a foodie call at least once. About a quarter of these women indicated that they did so occasionally, and about half said they did so only rarely or very rarely.  These women admitted to engaging in an average of about 5 foodie calls each, although one woman said that she had done it 55 times! Most of the women thought foodie calls were moderately unacceptable, but those who engaged in foodie calls more often thought they were more acceptable.

So, to all those single people out there looking for love … yikes. About a third of women have, at least once, used the norm that men cover the cost of a first date to their advantage. They dated for food rather than the possibility of love.

If this sounds dark, we agree. But who are these women? We suspected that foodie calls might be more common among women who score high on a constellation of three self-centered, manipulative, and antisocial personality traits known as the dark triad—Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and subclinical psychopathy. Narcissists tend to believe they’re superior to other people and that they’re better romantic catches than the rest of us. Machiavellians are cunning and manipulative people who often deceive and exploit others for their own benefit. Subclinical psychopathy refers to people who don’t have much empathy and who tend not to feel much guilt or remorse when they hurt others.  

As we expected, foodie calls were significantly more common among women who scored high in the dark triad. Women who scored high in narcissism likely thought that the wonderfulness of their company on a date justified the cost of the man paying for the meal.  Women who scored high in Machiavellianism exploited traditional gender roles to their advantage. And women who scored high in psychopathy probably didn’t register how bad it may have felt for their date to be used or “led on.” Or maybe they knew it and just didn’t care.

Unsurprisingly, foodie calls were more common among women who believed strongly in traditional gender roles—for example, that men should open doors and pay the tab at dinner.

Before anyone gets too critical of the women who admitted to foodie calls, keep in mind that men generally score higher on the dark triad than women. And men also have a longer track record of manipulative and abusive dating behavior than women.

At times, dating someone you aren’t immediately attracted to may not be a bad thing. After all, you may find love when you least expect it—maybe even during a foodie call.


For Further Reading

Collisson, B., Harig, T., & Howell, J. L. (2020). Foodie calls: When women date men for a free meal (rather than a relationship). Social Psychological and Personality Science, 11(3), 425-432. DOI: 10.1177/1948550619856308

Jonason, P. K., Webster, G. D., Schmitt, D. P., Li, N. P., & Crysel, L. (2012). The antihero in popular culture: Life history theory and the dark triad personality traits. Review of General Psychology, 16, 192–199.

 

Trista Harig received her Bachelor’s degree in psychology from Azusa Pacific University in 2019 and is currently pursuing her Master’s in Psychology at Rutgers University, Camden. Her research interests lie in intergroup dynamics, multiculturalism, and prejudice.

Brian Collisson, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Azusa Pacific University. His research interests are at the interface of social perception, prejudice, and romantic relationships.

 

Psychopathic CEOs: Fact or Fiction?

What’s your impression of the average CEO? Is he (and it’s usually a he) a good person? Or is he greedy, ruthless, and deceitful? Maybe even a psychopath? If you follow media accounts of fallen or disgraced corporate leaders, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that many, if not most, CEOs are either psychopaths or are, at the very least, prone to serious moral lapses.  

But simply engaging in bad behavior does not necessarily mean that the label “psychopath” is appropriate. What exactly do we mean by that term? Are we talking about sadistic, violent people we love to hate, like Joffrey from Game of Thrones? Although Joffrey is a great example of classical conceptions of psychopathy in the clinical literature, psychopathy in business is often much more subtle and much less violent. Psychopathy among business leaders combines negative characteristics, such as impulsivity and a lack of caring or empathy for others, that make people toxic to be around, with positive characteristics, such as boldness, that can make leaders highly attractive to others nonetheless.  Think of television characters such as Dr. Gregory House (House) or Frank Underwood (House of Cards).

But are these insidious individuals really taking over corporate leadership? To find out, we compiled all research studies on this topic to conduct a meta-analysis—a summary study that combines data from many different studies on a specific topic to draw general conclusions.

We found that, although people with psychopathic tendencies are slightly more likely to become business leaders, this modest tendency was nowhere near the level suggested by the media. We also found that leaders with psychopathic tendencies were slightly less effective at their jobs in terms of fostering productivity. When leaders did have psychopathic tendencies, their employees really, really disliked them. Of course, the fact that people hate working for mean and impulsive bosses shouldn’t come as a surprise!

However, further analysis of the many studies we examined suggested that there may be an optimal level of psychopathic tendencies for leadership effectiveness. That is, too much is obviously a bad thing, because recklessness and nastiness are likely to produce fear rather than motivation, productivity, and business success. But too little is apparently also a drawback. The boldness associated with psychopathic tendencies may manifest in a leader who is able to make difficult decisions or act in times of uncertainty—when other people are more constrained by fear.

Our work uncovered one final element of interest. When we split the results by leader gender, men with psychopathic tendencies were more likely to become leaders. On the other hand, women with psychopathic tendencies were less likely to be rated as effective leaders. So at least when it comes to leadership, men are sometimes rewarded for displaying psychopathic tendencies, but women are punished for the same behaviors.

What does this tell us? The gender double standard is alive and well. Stereotypically “bad” behavior isn’t just tolerated in men. It may even be encouraged. Men are “just boys being boys,” and many people seem to chuckle and look the other way when men are mean-spirited. Women, however, are often advised to emulate the behavior of men in order to get ahead. Yet, our results suggest that this is a bad idea. As has been the case for decades, women acting in stereotypically “male” ways are actually penalized for it.

Back to the original question: Is the average CEO a good person? There’s no way to know for sure, but it’s unlikely that he or she is truly a psychopath. That said, our results suggest that we aren’t doing a very good job of screening out potentially dangerous and destructive individuals with psychopathic tendencies when selecting leaders.  In fact, we are failing to do so at all, at least when it comes to male leaders. And given the amount of power that is invested in corporate and political leaders, that is a real concern.


For Further Reading

Landay, K., Harms, P. D., & Credé, M. (2019). Shall we serve the dark lords? A meta-analytic review of psychopathy and leadership. Journal of Applied Psychology, 104(1), 183-196. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/apl0000357
 

Karen Landay is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alabama. P. D. Harms is an Associate Professor of Management and the Morrissette Faculty Fellow in Leadership and Ethics at the University of Alabama.

Look Who’s Talking! Entitled Individuals Break the Rules but Also Enforce Them

We have all witnessed this scene: People stand in a line in front of a desk patiently waiting to buy a ticket, when Person X jumps the queue and goes straight to the front. Some people let it pass, others give an angry stare, but Person Y steps forward and says: ‘If you want to get tickets, you will have to join the queue!’ What kind of personality does Person Y have, and what triggered her reaction?

Norms, such as joining a queue, help keep anarchy at bay. Well-functioning groups depend not only on people’s willingness to follow the norms, but also on people’s readiness to reinforce the norms when someone violates them. To understand what makes people reinforce the rules by reacting negatively to norm violators, my colleagues and I at the University of Amsterdam examined people’s feelings of entitlement.

Entitlement refers to an inflated view of self-worth and the accompanying sense of deserving to be treated better than other people. This sense of deserving more than other people propels entitled individuals to violate social norms that stand in the way of obtaining desired outcomes. For example, entitled individuals are more likely to misbehave in the classroom, cheat on their romantic partners, commit research misconduct, and play politics at work. Importantly, entitled people often break rules to improve their social status, because status fuels their sense of self-worth.

Given the strong link between feeling entitled and breaking rules, one might expect that entitled individuals would react less negatively to other people who also break rules.  After all, entitled people are rule-breakers themselves.  On the other hand, because entitlement involves the desire to advance one’s own interests, one might expect that entitled individuals would react more negatively to other people’s norm violations. After all, those other people are moving ahead of them without deserving it!

We tested these competing expectations about the role of entitlement in a series of experiments where we increased people’s feelings of entitlement by having them complete a writing task. Specifically, we instructed one group of research participants to write down a few reasons why they should demand the best in life, deserve more than others, and should get their way in life (high entitlement).  We instructed another group of participants to write down reasons why they should not demand the best in life, do not deserve more than other people, and should not always get their way (low entitlement).

After writing reasons why they should or should not be entitled to get what they want in life, participants were asked to imagine a political debate in which a candidate running for president was asked to express his core values. Some participants read that the candidate stated that he strongly believes that rules are there to be broken and that he is ready to break all rules that prevent the nation from achieving its goals, showing that the candidate is willing to violate social norms. Other participants read that the candidate stated that rules should be followed at all times and he is ready to follow all the rules that allow the nation to achieve its goals, indicating that this candidate believes that norms should be followed.  

Next, participants rated their willingness to support the political candidate as leader and their willingness to punish him for his political views. Both reduced leader support and increased punishment are negative reactions that would indicate that participants rejected the candidate. The results of our research showed that high-entitlement individuals have the most negative reactions to norm violators: Highly entitled people are both less inclined to support candidates who advocated violating norms as leaders and more willing to punish them.

We also asked participants how threatened they felt about their own status. After reading about a norm-violating political candidate, high-entitlement participants felt most threatened about their status. Further analyses showed that high-entitlement participants reacted more negatively toward the violator because they experienced greater status threat.

To get back to jumping queues, Person Y—the woman who challenged Person X’s effort to get to the front of the line—may have felt more entitled than average and more threatened about her status, which explains why she revolted against Person X.

Now you may wonder: “Isn’t it hypocritical for entitled individuals to break rules themselves and at the same time tell other rule breakers off?” Probably so, but one has to also acknowledge that, despite their selfish motives to protect their own status and to get as much as they can, entitled people’s insistence that other people follow norms helps to sustain social order.

The finding that entitlement may have a positive effect on norm enforcement is intriguing because entitlement is often associated with negative, maladaptive, and antisocial effects. However, here is a caveat: Before one starts thinking about how one can instigate feelings of entitlement to curb rule-breaking in schools, the workplace, and politics, one has to consider that entitlement has two distinct aspects: an antisocial aspect that involves exploiting others for one’s own benefit and an aspect that reflects individuals’ evaluation of their self-worth. My research suggests that it is the latter variant of entitlement that makes people sensitive to their status and willing to enforce the norms.

So how can this research improve your ability to call out someone who is hurting you—or other people—by breaking a rule? The next time someone jumps the queue, think of what you are rightfully entitled to and you may find yourself more likely to speak up. And enforcing the social rules that society depends on will be to everyone’s benefit.


For Further Reading:

Stamkou, E., Van Kleef, G. A., & Homan, A. C. (2019). Feeling entitled to rules: Entitled individuals prevent norm violators from rising up the ranks. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 84, 103790. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2019.03.001

Stamkou, E., Van Kleef, G. A., Homan, A. C., Gelfand, M. J., Van de Vijver, F., van Egmond, M. C., et al. (2019). Cultural collectivism and tightness moderate responses to norm violators: Effects on power perception, moral emotions, and leader support. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45, 947-964. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167218802832

Stamkou, E., Van Kleef, G. A., & Homan, A. C. (2018). The art of influence: When and why deviant artists gain impact. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115, 276-303. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000131


Eftychia Stamkou is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam and a Fulbright scholar at University of California, Berkeley. She studies how the sociocultural context influences reactions to norm violations at work, in politics, and in the art world.

Good Reads: How Marsh’s Fear Factor Will Calm Your Worst Fears - Review of Abigail Marsh‘s The Fear Factor

What do psychopaths and altruists have in common? According to Abigail Marsh’s eye-opening book, The Fear Factor, one answer is that they both have highly unusual brains – at least in one small but very important area. Deep in the human brain, a couple of inches behind the right eye in most people, is an almond-shaped, evolutionarily-ancient structure that is highly responsive to expressions of fear in other people. This structure is the amygdala. (It has a counterpart in the left hemisphere, by the way, but the right amygdala is the star of Marsh’s show).

Heroes, true humanitarians, and live kidney donors have highly-developed amygdalae, and people with psychopathic tendencies have very poorly developed amygdalae. One consequence of this fact is that psychopaths barely experience fear. More important, they don’t understand why other people do, and they have little or no empathy for people who are afraid.  With little ability to perceive fear in others or to experience it themselves, what’s to stop them from deceiving, abusing, or even torturing others to get what they want?  

At the other extreme, true altruists -- such as living kidney donors who’ve given one of their kidneys to a complete stranger – are great at detecting fear in others, and the empathy they feel when they see another person suffering makes it very hard for them to sit by and do nothing. Whether this means giving up one of their kidneys or overcoming their own terror to save a stranger in distress, people with highly developed fear-detection systems do these kinds of things as if they had no other choice.  We know this, by the way, because of cutting-edge research in behavioral neuroscience, much of which Marsh has conducted herself. If you want to know what those super-magnets called fMRI scanners can tell us about human cruelty and compassion, this book is a good place to find out.   

But the main reason you should read The Fear Factor is not that it explains neuroscience in an accessible way (which it does). Rather, it is that this book offers deep insights – some of them cultural as well as cranial – into the nature of being human. Marsh explains both why all of us can be so selfish and why all of us (well, almost all of us) are capable of acts of great compassion and self-sacrifice.  And Marsh tells this psychological and neuroscientific story in a highly engaging and accessible way. Perhaps just as important, she carefully addresses tricky questions, such as personal responsibility for our good and bad deeds, in ways that reflect her own common sense and empathy.  

To provide just one example of where her book differs from other books on human nature, Marsh reviews research in behavioral neuroscience as well as research in evolutionary psychology that suggest that most human beings are not nearly as selfish as most laypeople – and many psychologists – seem to think. From stories of heroically devoted mother rats and lionesses to stories of families who root for sea turtles making their perilous journey to the sea, this new book will take you on a journey that will make you both smarter and more compassionate. How good is this book? If Mahatma Gandhi and Agatha Christie both got their PhDs in behavioral neuroscience, spent 15 years doing cutting-edge research together, and then jointly wrote a popular science book about it, this is the kind of book they’d be shooting for.       


Brett Pelham is professor of psychology at Montgomery College, MD and author of books such as Evolutionary Psychology: Genes, Environments, and Time (2018). He is also an associate editor at Character and Context.  

Reference

Marsh, A. (2017). The fear factor: How one emotion connects altruists, psychopaths, & everyone in between. New York: Basic Books.   

The Heart of Darkness: The Dark Factor of Personality

It takes no more than a glance at the daily news to realize that unethical, immoral, and  harmful behavior seems to be literally everywhere. We all experience people lying, cheating, or abusing others, and we are also well aware of reports of downright evil acts such as sexual assault and murder.

Dark Personality Traits

Psychologists who study the human personality have long been interested in  identifying and describing  the personality characteristics that shape these kinds of harmful behaviors. Over the past few decades, psychologists have distinguished among several such “dark” personality traits based on the observation that people who engage  in malevolent acts do so for different reasons and out of different motivations.

For example, whereas some people act aggressively because they have  poor impulse control, others may use aggression strategically to achieve their goals, and still others may use violence for sheer enjoyment, sometimes even at some personal cost to themselves. Because malevolent actions may be based on different motives, psychologists have identified a plethora of dark personality traits over the years, including greed, Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, sadism, spitefulness, and many more.

Given that human malevolence is associated with so many dark traits, we wondered whether there might be some general psychological characteristic that binds all of these specific traits together: Could there be a single theme, something like a common dark core, that describes the basic features underlying all dark traits?  Based on a series of studies with more than 2,000 participants, we were able to identify the key characteristics that are common to all dark traits. We call this common core of all dark traits the Dark Factor of Personality, or just D for short.

What is the Dark Factor of Personality?

D is (rather technically) defined in terms of two components. The first involves the tendency to maximize one's individual utility while disregarding, accepting, or malevolently provoking disutility for others.  Utility maximization refers to people’s attempts to maximize their own positive outcomes, such as money, power, excitement, pleasure, and other desired goals. Of course, all of us behave according to our own interests. However, people who are high on the D Factor cause others to suffer various costs while pursuing their own goals.

In the language of economics, these adverse or harmful effects are often called disutility. Disutility refers to anything that hinders people’s ability to fulfill their needs and desires.  For example, stealing something causes financial disutility, bullying someone causes psychological disutility, and hurting someone causes physical disutility. So, the first ingredient in D is the tendency to pursue one’s own interests in ways that ruthlessly cause harm to others people.  Indeed, sometimes the primary intention of the high-D person is to harm others.

The second ingredient is that high-D individuals hold beliefs that, in their minds, justify their anti-social behavior. For example, they may believe that they, or their group, is superior, thereby entitling them to dominate other people. Or, they may view the world as a dangerous place or competitive jungle, justifying their antisocial actions. Or, they may believe that other people are stupid or somehow losers and therefore deserve to be exploited, and so on. These patterns of beliefs allow people who are high in D to act in ways that hurt others with little, if any, guilt or remorse.  

In sum, D – the tendency to maximize one's own outcomes at a cost to others, while holding beliefs that justify those harmful behaviors – underlies all dark traits and represents their common psychological core. Thus, instead of saying that someone is an amoral, egoistic, narcissistic psychopath who selfishly acts according to her or his own interests and, in doing so, engages in sadistic and spiteful behaviors, we may just say that this person is at a high D level.

What is more, every specific dark trait – narcissism, psychopathy, spitefulness, greed, and so on -- is essentially a flavored variant of D. Dark traits largely differ with respect to the emphasis they place on the main characteristics of D. For example, some high-D individuals might hardly notice that they harm others (as in psychopathy), others might notice that they hurt others without caring (as in Machiavellianism), and other might even experience pleasure from the very act of harming others (as in sadism). So, although there are differences between various dark traits, they all share the same two features: others are harmed through self-interested behaviors that are, in the high-D person’s mind, justified in one way or another.  

Now that the common core underlying dark personality has been identified, an important next step is to determine why some people develop high levels in D and whether something can be done to lower the number of people with these dark characteristics.   

If you are curious to learn your level of D, you can take an online questionnaire at qst.darkfactor.org.


For Further Reading:

Moshagen, M., Hilbig, B. E., & Zettler, I. (2018). The dark core of personality. Psychological Review, 125, 656–688. doi: 10.1037/rev0000111

Morten Moshagen is Professor of Psychology at Ulm University, Germany; Benjamin E. Hilbig is Professor of Psychology at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany; and Ingo Zettler is Professor of Psychology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

“I Won’t Hurt You, but I Don’t Have to Save You”: Re-examining Passive Aggressive Behavior

You hear a pernicious rumor about Rebecca—that she is cheating on her boyfriend. You know it to be false, but rather than confront the people spreading the false rumor and reveal the truth, you let it spread. Because, after all, Rebecca did not invite you to her party.

Jonathan carries a heavy stack of books that obscures his vision. You see that he is about to step on a sharp object. Rather than warn him, you let him step on a nail, injuring his foot and causing him to drop all of his books. But… you think it was pretty funny to see.

These are examples—albeit fictionalized—of what was once called passive aggression. Although this phrase has evolved over the years to mean hostility, social exclusion, or backhanded comments, passive aggression originally meant the deliberate withholding of behaviors to ensure that another person is harmed.

We decided to go back to the original conceptualization of passive aggression, renaming it "aggression by omission," to more precisely identify this type of aggression. We wanted to compare aggression by omission to its more commonly studied cousin, active aggression—or what we call "aggression by commission." In our research, we wanted to vary whether harm to another person was by omission or commission, while keeping everything else the same.

In two laboratory studies, a total of 416 U.S. college students delivered pictures to another person (who didn't actually exist). Participants could send either neutral pictures of architecture and landscapes or aversive pictures of gore, dead animals, and rotting meat. In some versions participants could actively send the pictures; in others they could passively decline to stop those images from being sent.

This resulted in four different versions of the task, which all participants completed. Two versions involved aggression: aversive images with active action (aggression by commission), and aversive images with passive action (aggression by omission). The remaining two versions did not involve aggression: neutral images with active action and neutral images with passive action.

In addition, to investigate whether participants commit more aggression by omission or commission against someone who had provoked them, in Study 2, participants wrote a brief essay about an emotional memory, and then received either negative feedback or positive feedback from their partner on that essay before completing the picture task.  Negative feedback served as the provocation.

We found that participants were about equally likely to commit aggression by commission and omission. Furthermore, provocation had similar effects on both kinds of aggression.

Aggression by omission was not due to a general reluctance to act. Participants were much less likely to allow an aversive picture to be sent than a neutral picture. By passively declining to stop aversive pictures from being sent, participants deliberately allowed another individual to be harmed.

Previous research on moral psychology found that harm caused by inaction is judged as less harmful and less immoral than harm caused by direct action. Therefore, we expected that our participants would judge aggression by omission as less harmful than aggression by commission—even though we kept the objective level of harm the same.  Contrary to our expectations, participants viewed their aggression by commission and aggression by omission as equally harmful. Indeed, although they viewed both kinds of aggression as equally harmful, we suspect that participants who aggressed by omission felt disconnected from the harm they caused, which could further increase aggression by omission.

In sum, our research showed that people are equally willing to passively aggress by omitting actions that could prevent harm as they are to actively aggress by committing harmful acts.  Furthermore, both types of aggression—by commission and by omission—happen more when people are provoked, and people believe that their aggression by omission is just as harmful as their aggression by commission.  These findings suggest that aggression by omission is an important type of aggression that should not be discounted or minimized as less harmful.

Although aggression by omission may be easier to excuse or hide, aggression by omission is an important type of aggressive behavior that researchers and practitioners should be careful not to overlook. Many scales that measure aggression and programs to reduce aggression focus solely on active aggression—to the detriment of their efficacy. Giving equal attention to aggression by omission can help ameliorate real-world violence.


For Further Reading

Parton, D. M., & Chester, D. S. (2023). Aggression by omission: Redefining and measuring an understudied construct. Aggressive Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.22123


Drew Parton is a Ph.D. candidate in social psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University studying the antecedents and outlets of aggression.

Consumed by Creed?

Violent extremism can take many forms. From coup attempts to violent uprisings, ethnic cleansing and acts of terrorism, current global events painfully remind us that political violence is still prevalent and remains a threat to global peace and democratic existence. For more than a century, psychologists have sought to understand what drives people to participate in collective violence. In the search for causes and potential remedies to the social ill that is political violence, the role of mental health has been a hotly debated topic.

Initially, psychologists drew on the idea of "dysfunctional" personality traits to explain the rise of fascism, communism, and other violent ideologies. For instance, Theodor Adorno proposed that people with authoritarian personalities are attracted to violent extremist ideologies and commit horrible acts in the service of those ideologies. Other researchers emphasized the ordinariness of people who engaged in extremely violent actions. This view was seemingly vindicated by the infamous Obedience Experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, which showed that a substantial majority of law-abiding citizens could be led to inflict deadly torture on random strangers if the context was favorable.

This debate around the (non)pathological nature of violent extremists has continued for the past 50 years. The search for a "terroristic personality" has failed. Incarcerated terrorists and former terrorists have rates of psychiatric diagnoses similar to non-terrorists. Likewise, the association between radical attitudes and mental health symptoms like depression or anxiety remains inconsistent. Psychologists have concluded from this research that pretty much anyone could be radicalized into violent action, given the "right" set of circumstances.

However, recent research has identified new personality characteristics, such as the tendency to seek social status and significance (a sense of social worth, dignity, and mattering) that predict violent extremism.

Recent meta-analyses, which combine the results of many previous studies to provide a more accurate sense of what the literature shows, have revived the idea that some individuals are more prone to violent extremism. Indeed, the largest predictor of violent ideological intentions is a form of ideological obsession. 

People with ideological obsession have a dysfunctional relationship to their ideology. Whereas a functional relationship with religion or politics predicts "healthy" forms of engagement such as legal demonstrations and peaceful activism, obsessive involvement with religion and politics leads to a withdrawal from family and friends, and engagement in violent forms of action, such as looting during riots. Although ideological obsession is not a pathology in itself, it shares striking features with symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): spending a lot of time thinking ideological thoughts and feeling that ideological involvement is compulsive.

These findings led us to hypothesize that ideological obsession is linked with OCD symptoms, and that OCD symptoms are therefore linked with political violence.

To test this idea, we distributed an online survey to 1,114 people from various ideological and religious groups in the United States, including environmental activists, Republicans, Democrats, and Muslims. We measured OCD symptoms, ideological obsession, intentions to act violently for one's ideology, and a host of other factors.

In line with our hypothesis, OCD symptoms consistently predicted ideological obsession and violent intentions. This link was robust even when we accounted for demographic characteristics such as age, gender, other mental health issues such as substance abuse, and other personality characteristics.   Some (but far from all) people with OCD symptoms may direct their symptoms to their ideology, and this may, in turn, foster violent intentions.

These findings demonstrate for the first time that mental health symptoms may contribute to violent extremism. We think they are important because, unlike personality traits or environmental factors, psychologists know how to treat OCD symptoms with cognitive behavioral therapy. Our results suggest promising avenues for the development of psychological interventions against radicalization that do not target ideology directly (which is very hard to change).

On a final note, we urge caution when interpreting our findings. OCD symptoms are at most a risk factor for radical intentions. Our findings do not mean that people with a diagnosis of OCD are more violent than others. Furthermore, the link between OCD symptoms and violent intentions is nowhere near strong enough to suggest that terrorists cannot be held legally responsible for their actions.  


For Further Reading

Adam-Troian, J., Bélanger, J. J. (2023). "Consumed by creed": Obsessive-compulsive symptoms underpin ideological obsession and support for political violence. Aggressive Behavior, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.22124


Jais Adam-Troian is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Heriot-Watt University Dubai. His research investigates the psychology of (de)radicalization, violent extremism, and conspiracy beliefs.

How Do Violent Extremists Persuade People to Join Their Causes?

Violent extremists killed more than 20,000 people in 2019 alone. Although most people are horrified when they hear about these groups' heinous atrocities, at least a few are inspired instead, and they seek out ways to join these violent groups and act on their behalf.

According to the Global Terrorism Database, more than 900,000 perpetrators were responsible for directly carrying out over 200,000 terrorist attacks between 1970-2019. That's not even counting people who indirectly or anonymously helped the groups plan their attacks. What these groups do is wrong, so how can they be so successful at recruiting people to their cause? My colleagues and I designed a study to try to find out.

Morally Motivated Terrorists

When you hear news of violent extremist groups killing and injuring people, you might just assume that the members of these groups lack a moral compass. After all, they seem to have a clear disregard for what most people think is right or wrong. However, a growing body of research suggests that violent extremists actually believe their harmful actions are morally righteous. That is, they believe their violent means serve some virtuous end.

What moral ends could be so important that perpetrators are willing to harm others in pursuit of them? The short answer is that the moral priorities driving terrorists appear to be the same moral values that drive everyone else. That is, people around the world are concerned about caring for vulnerable others, fairness and justice, loyalty to one's community, respect for authorities and tradition, and desires for purity or sanctity.

Given research suggesting that violent groups think what they are doing is morally right, we wondered whether this moral justification process was key to understanding how they recruit others to their causes, too. After all, I might have an easier time convincing you to join my cause if you believe what I am doing is morally good. And, if I can attach my cause to moral attitudes you already hold, you might be more willing to act on behalf of my cause.

How Terror Groups Exploit People's Moral Values

To find out how violent groups leverage people's moral concerns, we investigated propaganda that was created by known terrorist organizations. In total, we collected 873 propaganda items created between 1920–2018 by 73 terrorist groups that have committed violence in the United States. We carefully analyzed their propaganda, looking for themes and patterns that relate to common moral values. Then, we tried to link those moral themes in terrorist propaganda to how many violent attacks and casualties the terror groups were responsible for.

First, we found that propaganda items often conveyed moral themes—95.88% of them emphasized at least one moral value. But which moral values terrorists emphasized in their propaganda largely matched the moral concerns most important to non-extremists of the same ideologies. For instance, just as left-wing non-extremists tend to prioritize fairness in their morality, left-wing terrorist groups also tend to emphasize fairness concerns in their propaganda. And just as politically right-wing non-extremists tend to prioritize loyalty in their morality, right-wing terrorist groups also emphasize loyalty. So, if we know the terror group's ideology, we can predict with some accuracy how they will attempt to recruit outsiders to their cause. Nevertheless, we also found that appeals to loyalty and fairness were emphasized across all propaganda, regardless of terrorists' ideologies.

Finally, one moral theme was especially revealing of a terrorist group's violent activity. The more a group emphasized purity as a moral virtue in their propaganda, the more that group tended to attack others and the greater the number of casualties they caused globally and in the U.S. To a lesser extent, the more a terror group emphasized loyalty to the group in their propaganda, the more U.S. casualties they caused as well.

Big Picture

We tried to be comprehensive, but we can't claim to have the final word on terrorist propaganda. First, we only examined terror groups who have acted violently in the U.S. We can't easily assume that groups acting in other parts of the world use the same recruitment strategies. Second, even though we could tie moral themes in a group's propaganda to their violent activity, we can't say for sure what's causing what. These violent attacks are the product of a complicated slew of factors that go beyond simple moral principles.

Nevertheless, our study highlights that violent extremists attempt to persuade otherwise decent people to join and fight on behalf of their cause by exploiting their moral values. The scary thing is that these are pretty much the same tactics used in more mundane sorts of persuasion. Moral arguments show up in all kinds of messages that can sway people's views. Although the effects of violent extremism are horrendous, their origins might be more familiar than you realize.


For Further Reading

Hahn, L., Schibler, K., Lattimer, T., Toh, Z., Vuich, A., Velho, R., Kryston, K., O'Leary, J., & Chen, S. (2023). Why we fight: Investigating the moral appeals in terrorist propaganda, their predictors, and their association with attack severity. Journal of Communication, Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqad029

Fiske, A. P., & Rai, T. S. (2015). Virtuous violence: Hurting and killing to create, sustain, end, and honor social relationships. Cambridge University Press.

Kruglanski, A. W., Szumowska, E., Kopetz, C. H., Vallerand, R. J., & Pierro, A. (2021). On the psychology of extremism: How motivational imbalance breeds intemperance. Psychological Review, 128(2), 264–289. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000260

Skitka, L. J., & Morgan, G. S. (2014). The social and political implications of moral conviction. Political Psychology, 35, 95–110. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12166


Lindsay Hahn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Center for Cognitive Science at the University at Buffalo, SUNY where she directs the Media Psychology and Morality Lab. Her research investigates morally laden media, its uses, and its effects on audiences across the lifespan.