Dark Personality:

Rolf Degen

@DegenRolf

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1 Std.

People with dark personality traits have a bleak view of the world, perceiving it as devoid of meaning, beauty and interest. Aversive (“dark”) personality traits are traditionally studied as predictors of harmful or manipulative behavior, yet their underlying cognitive-affective structures remain underexplored. This research investigates whether the Dark Core of personality (D)—the common aversive essence of all dark traits—is associated with primal world beliefs, which are deep-seated assumptions about the nature of the world. In sum, D was negatively associated with the beliefs that the world is safe and enticing, indicating that high-D individuals tend to perceive the world as uncooperative, unjust, unpleasurable, uninteresting, meaningless, and lacking beauty. The belief that most experiences and interactions in life are meaningless specifically introduces an all-encompassing bleakness Whereas it was anticipated and is not particularly surprising given prior findings that individuals high in D view the world as dangerous, competitive, or uncooperative, […] individuals high in D not only view the world as dangerous, competitive, and uncooperative, but also as less pleasurable, less stable, less regenerative, and less meaningful—extending well beyond prior findings. Primals such as Interesting and Meaningful seem to reflect a kind of meta-justificatory framework, in which anti-social actions appear legitimate not because others do the same, but due to an all-encompassing pointlessness. Indeed, what is the point in upholding any (injunctive) social norms if human interactions are generally meaningless or pointless?