Still waters run deep: self-control as a moderator of dark personality traits for antisocial conduct and violent attitudes

ABSTRACT

Although self-control is frequently comorbid with other antisocial features, some individuals who exhibit psychological risk factors for antisocial conduct nevertheless have relatively high self-control. With this complexity in mind, the current study examined self-control as a potential moderator of antisociality/criminality features and violent attitudes using a community sample of 354 adult participants from Portugal. We found significant evidence that self-control moderates the dark core of personality when predicting antisociality/criminality, but not when predicting violent attitudes. We also found self-control moderates psychopathy when predicting antisocialty/criminality, but self-control had more robust moderation effects for violent attitudes. Specifically, self-control moderated narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism. Self-control did not moderate Machiavellianism in either model. Findings corroborate the notion that self-control plays an important role in moderating some dark traits of personality that are significant predictors for antisocial/criminal behaviors.

KEYWORDS:

• Antisociality
• criminality
• dark core of personality
• Dark Tetrad
• self-control
• violent attitudes

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The dataset analyzed during the current study is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Ethical statement

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Coimbra, Portugal.

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Additional information

Funding

This study was partly conducted at the CINEICC [UIDB/00730/2020, UIDP/00730/2020], Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação, Universidade de Coimbra, and the second author was supported by the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology [FCT 2022.07928.CEECIND].