The Effect of Gender and Age on the Dark Triad in Helping Professions – the Comparison with the General Population

Abstract

Due to the factorial approach to personality traits, helping professionals, similarly to all humans, resp. other workers in any area, dispose whole range of personality traits – adaptive and maladaptive. Since helping professionals are supposed to help others, the aim of the present study was the exploration of three maladaptive personality traits-Machiavellianism, subclinical narcissism, and subclinical psychopathy on this specific sample considering gender differences comparing them to the general population. 312 participants from different sectors of the helping professions-pedagogical workers, healthcare workers, rescue workers, social workers, and the general population have participated. Short Dark Triad-SD3 has been administered (Jones & Paulhus 2014; Čopková & Šafár, 2021). The main result showed that helping professionals scored significantly higher than the general population in psychopathy. The testing of between-subject variability while controlling the effect of gender and age indicated that healthcare workers and rescue workers scored significantly higher than the general population in psychopathy. There were also gender differences detected, men in both samples (general and helping) scored higher in Dark Triad traits. The results support the assumption that even among helping professionals, who are usually expected to be selfless and prosocial, there are individuals who are attracted by the other side of pursuing this type of profession-the power they have over the person they provide help to. Based on several limitations the study is considered as a pilot one that might focus the attention on this understudied topic.