Untangling the concurrent influences of the Dark Triad, personality and mating effort on violence
Section snippets
Design
The current study was quantitative and correlational. The key outcome was self-reported violence, with the other measures being putative associates. A cross sectional method was adopted in order to gather participant's responses to the test scales in an online survey.
Participants
All participants were 18 and over. A power analysis conducted seeking a medium effect size with a significance level of 0.05. Faul, Erdfelder, Buchner and Lang (2009) suggested that a minimum of 160 participants were needed. In
Results
Initial analysis obtained descriptive statistics to assess the reliability and validity of the measures used. All scales demonstrated fair to excellent levels of reliability (Table 1). Verbal, throwing, and pushing violence were most common, but some individuals disclosed committing more sustained assaults and robbery, indicating that we were sampling the full range of violence, including more severe (but less common) expressions of the behaviour.
Preliminary analysis tested that data did not
Discussion
This current study examined the concurrent influence of personality, the DT and mating effort on self-reported violent behaviour as measured by the MCVSI. Although both personality and DT constructs correlated with violence, when these constructs are considered in relation to each other, the only measure with a direct influence on violence was self-reported psychopathy. The regression analysis rationalised this over-expansive nomological network, which otherwise suggested that most variables
Acknowledgements
We thank all participants in this study. The work was not funded by any research grant or stipend.
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