Abstract

     Dark personality traits describe amoral and antisocial behavioral dispositions and are often described by psychopathy (i.e., interpersonal, affective, lifestyle, and antisocial characteristics), narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sadism. These traits are related to various socially detrimental behavioral outcomes, including criminal behavior and delinquency. Furthermore, psychopathy is frequently related to homicide, both in scientific and in popular literature; however, the empirical data on the link between psychopathy and other dark traits with homicide is still scarce. We examined self-reported psychopathy, Machiavellianism, sadism, and the indicators of criminal recidivism (number of offences, number of lawful sentences and penal recidivism) in a sample of male homicide offenders (N = 46), other violent offenders (N = 82), and non-violent offenders (N = 119). The results showed that homicide offenders have less pronounced psychopathy, sadism, and criminal recidivism compared to the other two groups – the differences were particularly evident in comparison to the group of non-homicide violent offenders. There were no statistically significant differences in Machiavellianism. Our data cast a doubt on the widely acknowledged link between psychopathy and murder. The findings can be explained largely by the fact that homicide is a heterogeneous criminal offence; while it is possible that psychopathy and other dark traits may be linked to some types of homicide, this link cannot be established for homicide in general.

Introduction

     In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in personality dispositions toward amoral and antisocial behavior. A comprehensive model of these traits is labeled as the Dark Tetrad (Međedović & Petrović, ۲۰۱۵; Paulhus, 2014) and encompasses traits like narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy and sadism. Narcissism depicts entitlement, superiority and an inflated view of self (Raskin & Terry, 1988); Machiavellianism represents an attitude which rationalizes and justifies the use of other people for one’s self interest (Christie & Geis, 1970), while sadism is based on the aberration in emotional processes where one feels positive emotions (enjoyment) when hurting others or watching others in distress (O’Meara et al., 2011). The trait that has the longest history of scientific inquiry is psychopathy – it represents a behavioral syndrome itself that consists of several narrow traits. There are various models of psychopathy, one of the most prominent is proposed by Hare and collaborators and it defines psychopathy as a syndrome of interpersonal (egoistic and manipulative) behavior, affective characteristics (lack of emotional empathy, fear, and guilt), lifestyle characteristics (impulsiveness, lack of long-term plans, sensation seeking) and antisocial behavior (Hare & Neumann, 2008). The dark personality traits are related to various socially undesirable outcomes like cheating (Esteves et al., 2021), bullying (van Geel et al., 2017), violence (Pailing et al., 2014), and others.

Results

۳٫۱٫ Preliminary analyses: descriptive statistics, reliabilities, and the correlations between examined variables

     First, we showed the descriptive statistics (means and standard deviations), Cronbach’s α coefficients of internal consistency as the reliability estimate, and the correlations between the analyzed measures. These data are shown in Table 1. All scales had adequate reliabilities, but sadism scale showed somewhat lower coefficient of internal consistency compared to other measures. As we can see, there were high positive correlations between the dark traits – the highest effect sizes were obtained for the correlations between the psychopathy facets. Furthermore, there were positive associations between the dark traits and recidivism indicators: Lifestyle and Antisocial psychopathy traits, together with sadism showed systemic positive correlations with criminal relapse; this stand particularly for the Lifestyle and Antisocial psychopathic traits which were associated with all recidivism indicators while sadism was positively correlated with number of convictions and penal recidivism. Interpersonal psychopathy traits were associated only with the number of lawful sentences.