The dark triad and willingness to commit insurance fraud

Abstract

We evaluated how the dark triad (DT) personality traits (Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, Narcissism) influence willingness to claim for insurance in an online setting. In two mTurk studies (Ns 344 and 699) we created realistic online insurance claim tasks where participants could file claims for insured household items they had supposedly broken. We predicted “fibbing” (i.e., overclaiming the item values) in these tasks using the DT traits. However, within Study 2, we included monetary incentives and situational factors relating to claiming—that is, whether the items were broken in anger, while drunk, or by sheer accident. In both studies all DT traits predicted fibbing, but the results were weak for psychopathy in Study 1, while in Study 2 psychopathy was the strongest individual predictor of fibbing. Our results help understand why certain people are willing to commit insurance fraud, and provide an opening for further interdisciplinary research on insurance and personality science.

Keywords:

• dark triad
• deception
• Machiavellianism
• psychopathy
• narcissism
• insurance fraud

PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENT

Insurance fraud is highly common in the developed world; in the UK alone insurers uncovered over 350 fraudulent claims daily, amounting to weekly losses of about 18 million pounds. In our paper, we look into personality science and link the “dark triad” personality traits (Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism) to willingness to commit insurance fraud. We found that individuals high in dark triad traits, most notably psychopathy, are more likely to fib in realistic online insurance claim settings. Our results help understand why some people are more willing than others to commit insurance fraud, and highlight the need for further interdisciplinary research on insurance claiming and personality psychology.

Supplementary material

Supplemental material for this article can be accessed here https://doi.org/10.1080/23311908.2018.1469579.

Acknowledgements

We are thankful to professors Ross Anderson and Jeff Yan for valuable feedback during the design and preparation of our studies.

Competing interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. http://gideongoldin.github.io/TurkGate/.

2. The specifics of these measures are presented in the Supplementary Materials section. The results concerning these scales will be reported elsewhere.

3. Both studies included also an additional experimental manipulation that is not reported in this article. The manipulation was aimed at deterring the participants from “fibbing” in the claim forms. Details of these manipulations are presented in the supplementary materials. The main results presented in the current article were robust to adding these manipulations in the statistical models as fixed factors of no interest; there were also no significant interactions between the covariates of interest (demographics and the DT traits) and the deterrence manipulations.

4. Breaking insured items while intoxicated might also be accidental or unintentional, whereas breaking items in anger can be considered intentional. However, from the perspective of insurance companies, claims are typically honored only when the items are broken accidentally (or unintentinally) and while clearheaded.

5. If participants knew they could repurchase the item at a specific price (the purchase value), claiming more than that price from the insurance company is akin to fibbing.

6. However, we also performed a t-test (with bootstrapped confidence intervals, using the bias corrected accelerated method) comparing the overall DT scores of the 9 participants who claimed above the insurance company valuation (super-fibbers) to the rest of the sample. The “super-fibbers” group scored higher (M = 3.22, SD = 0.28) then the rest of the participants (M = 2.87, SD = 0.52): t(8.75) = −3.57, p = .006 (Levene’s test was violated and equal variances was not assumed).

Additional information

Funding

Preparation of this manuscript was supported by an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council grant titled The Deterrence of Deception in Socio-Technical Systems (EP/K033476/1).

Notes on contributors

Jussi Palomäki

The security group at the Computer Laboratory, Cambridge University is interested in the intersection of computers and security. I personally research human aspects of security, and online crime. My main research areas currently are: psychology of IT security (policy making, compliance with policies, effective intrusion deterrence techniques and individual differences across IT personnel, from unethical to ethical hackers, administrative and compliance officers, and others), and psychology of cyber crime (why do people comply with fraudulent requests, what behaviour modification techniques are used by scammers, how to improve resistance to crime). The present paper speaks to the issue of fraud deterrence, specifically to the deterrence of insurance fraud. To understand how to approach this question, we need to know a bit more about the potential offenders and their individual differences. At the same time, we need to be familiar with the approaches employed by the insurance industry.