Moral Foundations Partially Explain the Associations of Machiavellianism, Grandiose Narcissism, and Psychopathy With Homonegativity and Transnegativity

ABSTRACT

People with antagonistic (or “dark”) personality traits (e.g., Machiavellianism, grandiose narcissism, and psychopathy) are reportedly more racist, sexist, and xenophobic than their non-antagonistic counterparts. In the present studies (N₁ = 709; N₂ = 267), we examined whether people with antagonistic personality traits are also more likely to express homonegative and transnegative attitudes, and, if so, whether this can be explained by their endorsement of the moral foundations. We found that people high in Machiavellianism, grandiose narcissism, and psychopathy are more likely to endorse homonegative and transnegative views. The associations of Machiavellianism and psychopathy with homonegativity and transnegativity were primarily explained by low endorsement of individualizing moral foundations (i.e., care and fairness), while the association of narcissism with these beliefs was primarily explained by high endorsement of the binding moral foundations (i.e., loyalty, authority, and purity). These findings provide insight into the types of people who harbor homonegative and transnegative attitudes, and how differences in moral foundations contribute to these associations.

KEYWORDS:

• Dark Triad
• Machiavellianism
• narcissism
• psychopathy
• moral foundations
• homonegativity
• transnegativity
• sexual prejudice
• transprejudice

Acknowledgments

We thank the University of Oregon’s Committee for an Inclusive Community for funding data collection for Study 2.

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2022.2132576

Notes

1. Study 1 (09072010.006) and Study 2 (STUDY00000097) were both approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Oregon. Participants provided informed consent prior to starting all surveys relevant to the present studies.

2. In this case, failing the attention check involved responding (a) “slightly agree” to “strongly agree” to the item stating that math ability is relevant to one’s judgment of right from right and wrong and (b) “slightly disagree” to “strongly disagree” to the item stating that it is better to do good than bad.

3. For the zero-order correlation power analysis, we set the number of observations to 709, the correlation coefficient to .20, and the alpha level to .05 (two-tailed).

4. For the parallel mediation power analysis, we set the number of observations to 709, the correlations between the predictor and the mediators to .20, the correlations between the mediators and the outcome variable to .20, the residual correlation between the mediators to .00, and the standard deviation for each variable to 1.00. A 95% confidence interval based on 10,000 Monte Carlo resamples was used to determine whether the indirect effects were significant for each of 25,000 replications.

5. The lavaan package (Rosseel, 2012) in R (R Core Team, 2020) was used to fit all models.

6. The results of models using the facets of Machiavellianism, grandiose narcissism, and psychopathy instead of the composite variables can be found in the Supplementary Material.

7. These hypotheses differ somewhat from those specified in our preregistration. As noted in the Results and Materials sections for Study 2, our current models depart from those specified in our preregistration in three ways. First, we (a) collapsed traditional homonegativity toward lesbian women and gay men into a single variable because the measures appeared to be assessing the same construct and (b) collapsed modern homonegativity toward lesbian women and gay men into a single variable because, again, the measures appeared to be assessing the same construct. Second, we modeled each of the three antagonistic traits separately so as to avoid the partialling issues common to these traits (see C.E. Vize et al., 2018). Third, at the request of an anonymous reviewer and to streamline the results, we modeled the four outcome variables together instead of specifying one model with the homonegativity outcome variables and a second model with the transnegativity outcome variables. For consistency between Study 1 and Study 2, we went back and updated the models used in Study 1 to align with the models used in Study 2. This, however, caused a disconnect, whereby our general approach to generating the hypotheses for Study 2 was the assumption that the pattern of results would be the same in Study 2 as in Study 1, but the preregistered hypotheses were suggesting that the pattern of results would be different between Study 2 and Study 1. Although we feel that the current hypotheses align with the general spirit of the hypotheses specified in the preregistration (i.e., that the results from Study 2 would replicate the results from Study 1), we would encourage readers to compare and contrast the current hypotheses with the preregistered hypotheses to make their own determination.

8. For the zero-order correlation power analysis, we set the number of observations to 267, the correlation coefficient to .20, and the alpha level to .05 (two-tailed).

9. For the parallel mediation power analysis, we set the number of observations to 267, the correlations between the predictor and the mediators to .20, the correlations between the mediators and the outcome variable to .20, the residual correlation between the mediators to .00, and the standard deviation for each variable to 1.00. A 95% confidence interval based on 10,000 Monte Carlo resamples was used to determine whether the indirect effects were significant for each of 25,000 replications.

10. The results of models using the facets of Machiavellianism, grandiose narcissism, and psychopathy instead of the composite variables can be found in the Supplementary Material.

Additional information

Funding

The University of Oregon’s Committee for an Inclusive Community funded data collection for Study 2.