Everyday sadism as a dark personality trait

Abstract

In recent decades there has been a growing interest in the "dark" aspects of personality. Initially three particularly socially harmful aspects were proposed, subclinical psychopathy, subclinical narcissism and Machiavellianism, the so-called "dark triad" (Paulhus and Williams, 2002). More recently, a possible fourth dark aspect, everyday sadism, has been included, forming the so-called "dark tetrad" (Buckels, et al., 2013). Such aspect has been related to aversive behaviors such as obtaining pleasure through suffering and/or dominance before others. This study aims to examine whether sadism differs structurally from the rest of the traits of the Dark tetrad, its pattern of associations with normal personality, and the ability to predict certain behaviors harmful to society, beyond the traits that make up the Dark triad. For this purpose, a survey was administered through a link to the google forms platform, in which participants voluntarily completed different questionnaires of the Dark tetrad SD4 (Ortet-Walker et al., 2022) and different scales that assess harmful behaviors such as antisocial behavior, animal abuse, bullying and cyberbullying. The exploratory factor analysis showed a four-factor structure, with most sadism items saturating in a single factor differentiated from Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy factors. Likewise, the daily sadism scale showed a moderate-high relationship with low agreeableness, and a low-medium relationship with low responsibility. Finally, multiple regression analyses showed that the most relevant variables in the prediction of these dissocial behaviors such as animal abuse and antisocial behavior were male sex, psychopathy and sadism. In reference to bullying and cyberbullying, the variables age (conversely) and machiavellianism were also found to be significant predictors. In short, our results suggest that everyday sadism explains a significant part of the variability of behaviors such as bullying and cyberbullying, antisocial behavior and animal abuse, beyond the other dark traits, suggesting that this new dark trait is relevant to explain behaviors that are harmful to society and, therefore, would justify the relevance of the so-called "Dark Tetrad".