Differential Reproductive Behavior Patterns Among the Dark Triad

Abstract

The traits that the Dark Triad of personality (psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism) are overlapping but distinctive. Although some have assumed that all three are universally associated with unrestricted sociosexuality, proper statistics on adult samples have not confirmed these assumptions. Latent variable techniques examined the relationships among Dark Triad and different aspects of sociosexuality across two adult samples (N = 1116). With the original Dark Triad measures, a common path model was a marginal fit to the data. However, adding theoretically based additional paths (most especially a negative link between Machiavellianism and short-term sexual behavior behavior) increased the model fit beyond chance, and these additions replicated in a new sample with different measures. The findings support the notion that the Dark Triad are not universally short-term. In particular, Machiavellianism is negatively associated with short-term sexual behavior, underscoring the cautious nature of the trait.