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Neuroethics (2013) 6:307318 DOI 10.1007/s12152-011-9140-6
ORIGINAL PAPER
Bad News for Conservatives? Moral Judgments and the Dark Triad Personality Traits:A Correlational Study
Marcus Arvan
Received: 25 July 2011 /Accepted: 5 October 2011 /Published online: 25 October 2011 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract This study examined correlations between moral value judgments on a 17-item Moral Intuition Survey (MIS), and participant scores on the Short-D3 Dark Triad Personality Inventorya measure of three related dark and socially destructive personality traits: Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy. Five hundred sixty-seven participants (302 male, 257 female, 2 transgendered; median age 28) were recruited online through Amazon Mechanical Turk and Yale Experiment Month web advertisements. Different responses to MIS items were initially hypothesized to be conservative or liberal in line with traditional public divides. Our demographic data confirmed all of these hypothesized categorizations. We then tested two broad, exploratory hypotheses: (H1) the hypothesis that there would be many significant correlations between conservative MIS judgments and the Dark Triad, and (H2) the hypothesis that there would be no significant correlations between liberal MIS judgments and Machiavellianism or Psychopathy, but some significant correlations between liberal MIS judgments and Narcissism. Because our hypotheses were exploratory and we ran a large number of statistical tests (62 total), we utilized a
Bonferroni Correction to set a very high threshold for significance (p=.0008). Our results broadly supported our two hypotheses. We found eleven significant correlations between conservative MIS judgments and the Dark Triadall at significance level of p<.00001but no significant correlations between the Dark Triad and liberal MIS judgments. We believe that these results raise provocative moral questions about the personality bases of moral judgments. In particular, we propose that because the Short-D3 measures three dark and antisocial personality traits, our results raise some prima facie worries about the moral justification of some conservative moral judgments.
Keywords Personality. Morality. Psychopathy. Narcissism . Machiavellianism
Introduction
Commonsense suggests that there is a relationship between personality traits and moral value judgments. History is particularly suggestive in this regard. Consider, for example, the following historical figures, their personalities, and some of their more notable moral judgments:
& Adolf Hitler (mass murderer), notable personality trait(s): counteractive narcism, a type that is
M. Arvan (*)
Department of Philosophy & Religion, University of Tampa,Box R,...