The winner takes it all: The mediating role of competitive orientations in the Dark Triad and sport task performance relationship

Abstract

The Dark Triad traits (Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy) are prevalent in athletes. However, currently, we do not know whether the Dark Triad confers any competitive advantages in sport. To address this issue, the present study had two aims. First, to examine whether the Dark Triad predicted task performance in a basketball free throw task. Second, to examine whether competitive orientations explained (i.e. mediated) this relationship. A sample of 189 athletes (mean age = 19.11 years) completed measures of the Dark Triad, competitive orientations, and task performance (basketball free throw task). Regression analyses indicated that the Dark Triad predicted better task performance. In addition, mediation analyses indicated that the Dark Triad-performance relationship was explained by both hypercompetitive and self-developmental competitive orientations. The present study provides the first evidence that the Dark Triad may lead to better task performance in sport, and that this effect may be driven by athletes’ competitive orientations.

Keywords:

• Personality
• Machiavellianism
• narcissism
• psychopathy
• competition orientation
• basketball free throw performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It should be noted that the psychometric properties of the Mental Toughness Questionnaire have been subject to criticism with athletes (Vaughan, Hanna, & Breslin 2018).

2 The model by Orosz et al. (2018) proposes four orientations, however, because the Dark Triad does not align well with avoidant or amotivated competitive behaviours from a theoretical perspective such as those common with the broader Achievement Goal Theory (Nicholls, 1989) or existing empirical work (Lochbaum et al., 2017) these were not the focus of the present study.

3 We also calculated an alternative score based only on successful shots which awarded one point for scoring without the ball touching the rim and any other variation or miss received a score of 0 resulting in a range of 0 to 20.