Date of Award

7-2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Gary Burns

Second Advisor

Patrick D. Converse

Third Advisor

Marshall Jones

Fourth Advisor

Robert A. Taylor

Abstract

Dark or malevolent personality traits (e.g., The Dark Triad) have gained increasing attention in recent years which has led researchers to explore the existence of a common factor of dark personality traits (Vize et al., 2020; Moshagen et al., 2018). A Dark Core was extracted from existing Dark Triad measures using principal component analysis and was subsequently analyzed in relation to other personality traits that are commonly studied in conjunction with common cores of maladaptive personality traits (e.g., agreeableness and honesty-humility; Vize et al., 2020; Moshagen et al., 2020b). A General Factor of Personality (GFP) was also extracted for statistical analysis of its relationship to the Dark Core. Additionally, three different sets of items (9, 21, and 50) from the Dark Triad measures were correlated with the extracted Dark Core to develop direct measures. Results of the current study support past research on this topic in that the Dark Core negatively relates to agreeableness, honesty-humility, and the GFP. The results also extend past findings by suggesting that the Dark Core and GFP are not at polar opposite ends of a personality spectrum. The three direct measures of the Dark Core should be used in future research to validate the scale measure to help practitioners understand what types of employee behaviors the measures are capable of predicting (e.g., CWBs).

Download

Share

COinS