Dark personality traits and anti-natalist beliefs: The mediating roles of primal world beliefs

ABSTRACT

The literature regarding the Dark Triad of personality (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) has expanded rapidly during recent years with researchers evaluating the connections that these personality traits have with a variety of phenomena including philosophical beliefs and moral decision-making. The goal of the present study was to replicate and extend recent research concerning the associations that the Dark Triad had with anti-natalist beliefs (i.e., that it is morally wrong to procreate) by using multidimensional conceptualizations of these dark personality traits and examining whether primal world beliefs mediate the associations that these dark personality traits have with anti-natalist beliefs. The results indicate that, as expected, specific dark personality traits (i.e., antagonistic narcissism, psychopathic meanness, psychopathic disinhibition, and antagonistic Machiavellianism) were positively associated with certain anti-natalist beliefs. In addition, the associations that these dark personality traits had with anti-natalist beliefs were sometimes mediated by the safe primal world belief (i.e., perceiving the world to be non-threatening and cooperative) and the enticing primal world belief (i.e., perceiving the world to be irresistibly fascinating). Discussion focuses on the implications of these results for the role that primal world beliefs play in the connections between dark personality traits and anti-natalist beliefs.

KEYWORDS:

• Dark Triad
• narcissism
• psychopathy
• Machiavellianism
• anti-natalism

Acknowledgement

We would like to acknowledge David Benatar for his extremely helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. We replicated our analyses with the excluded participants in order to determine whether excluding these participants impacted our results in a substantial manner. The results of these additional analyses were quite similar to those reported in the primary text. Despite the overall similarities in the results, there were some differences. For example, the direct associations that extraverted narcissism, antagonistic narcissism, and antagonistic Machiavellianism had with local anti-natalism were statistically significant in the analyses that included the excluded participants even though these associations did not reach conventional levels of significance in the primary analyses.

2. Gender differences have often been found for dark personality traits (e.g. Jonason & Zeigler-Hill, 2018) and gender has been shown to moderate the associations that dark personality traits have with certain outcomes (e.g. Sauls et al., 2019). This led us to conduct exploratory analyses that included gender as a potential moderator of the mediational associations that dark personality traits had with anti-natalism attitudes through the primal world beliefs. However, gender did not moderate the results reported. That is, there was no evidence of moderated mediation. Further, including gender in these analyses did not significantly alter the reported results. In the interest of parsimony, we decided not to include gender in the final analyses nor do we discuss gender differences.