Abstract

     Two studies examined how individual differences relate to prejudiced attitudes toward asylum seekers. Results consistently showed that prejudiced people had relatively low scores on Honesty-Humility and relatively high scores on the Dark Tetrad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism) and ideological beliefs (social dominance orientation, patriotism, and nationalism). More importantly, multiple regression analyses revealed that the Dark Tetrad (in particular, Machiavellianism) provided incremental validity beyond Honesty–Humility in predicting explicit prejudice, but both the Dark Tetrad and Honesty-Humility were outpredicted by ideological beliefs. These findings suggest that the narrower Dark Tetrad personality traits provide additional useful information for explaining intergroup attitudes beyond the broader Honesty-Humility personality trait. However, the Dark Tetrad traits (and Honesty-Humility) are only distal determinants of explicit prejudice, while ideological beliefs are the proximal determinant. Study 2 also included a measure of implicit prejudice toward asylum seekers. Overall, Honesty-Humility, the Dark Tetrad, and ideological beliefs were much less predictive of implicit (compared to explicit) prejudiced attitudes.

Introduction

     Although explicitly negative views of out-groups and their individual members have diminished over time (Charlesworth & Banaji, 2019), members of marginalized groups are still perceived less favorably than members of non-marginalized groups (Esses, 2021). For example, in recent years, a large number of people were forcibly evicted from their homes, which has led to negative attitudes toward migrants in many Western countries (Walter, 2021). It should be noted, however, that self-reported intergroup attitudes tend to be positive (Charlesworth & Banaji, 2019) and only a relatively small minority treat members of marginalized groups more negatively than members of non-marginalized groups (Campbell & Brauer, 2021). Likewise, many people do not have negative attitudes toward asylum seekers (Hartley & Pedersen, 2015). Overall, it appears that negative attitudes toward out-group members compared to in-group members are due to a numerical minority of individuals scoring relatively high on explicit bias, rather than most individuals being mildly biased (cf. Campbell & Brauer, 2021). Who is this numerical minority expressing negative views of out-group members in general and asylum seekers in particular?

General discussion

     The present research had two main aims, namely whether dark personality traits are associated with explicit prejudice beyond basic personality and whether ideological beliefs outpredict basic and dark personality traits. With regard to the first, both studies provided consistent evidence that the relationship between the Dark Tetrad and explicit prejudice remains significant when controlling for the impact of Honesty-Humility. This finding contributes to the debate about whether the Dark Tetrad subscales are fully represented by the Honesty-Humility dimension of the HEXACO model (Book et al., 2016; Hodson et al., 2018). The Dark Tetrad subscales were indeed strongly negatively correlated with Honesty-Humility, indicating that Honesty-Humility accounts for variance in the Dark Tetrad. However, although there was overlap between the Dark Tetrad and Honesty-Humility, the Dark Tetrad traits explained unique variance in explicit prejudice beyond Honesty-Humility, suggesting that the Dark Tetrad traits are not just the opposite pole of the Honesty-Humility factor. Regarding the bandwidth-fidelity dilemma, it appears that the more narrow Dark Tetrad personality traits provide additional useful information in explaining intergroup attitudes beyond the broad Honesty–Humility personality trait.