The Dark Triad traits—narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy—have been found to be associated with intra- or interpersonal deception production frequency. This cross-sectional study (N = 207) investigated if the Dark Triad traits are also associated with deception detection accuracy, as implicated by the recent conception of a deception-general ability. To investigate associations between maladaptive personality space and deception, the PID-5 maladaptive personality traits were included to investigate if besides Machiavellianism, Detachment is negatively associated with response bias. Finally, associations between the Dark Triad traits, Antagonism, Negative Affectivity and confidence judgments were investigated. Participants watched videos of lying vs. truth-telling senders and judged the truthfulness of the statements. None of the Dark Triad traits was found to be associated with the ability to detect deception. Detachment was negatively associated with response bias. Psychopathy was associated with global confidence judgments. The results provide additional support that dark and maladaptive personality traits are associated with judgmental biases but not with accuracy in deception detection. The internal consistencies of 4 of the 8 subscales of the used personality short scales were only low and nearly sufficient (αs =0.65–0.69).

The present cross-sectional study ( N = 205) tested the hypothesis that the Dark Triad traits – narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy – and the PID-5 maladaptive personality traits – Negative Affectivity, Detachment, Antagonism, Disinhibition, and Psychoticism – are associated with specific deception-related perceptions: perceived cue-based deception detectability, perceived deception production ability, and perceived deception detection ability. Participants completed personality and deception measures in an online setting. All three Dark Triad traits and Antagonism were associated with perceived deception production ability, but not (substantially) with perceived deception detection ability and cue-based deception detectability. The results provide a more fine-grained picture of biases associated with the Dark Triad traits in the context of deception and further support the relevance of Antagonism and Detachment as deception-relevant personality traits.

Abstract. This cross-sectional study (N = 325) investigated the relationship between the Dark Triad personality traits and the perception of artificial intelligence (AI) risk. Narrow AI risk perception was measured based on recently identified perceived risks in the public. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) risk perception was operationalized in terms of plausibility ratings and subjective probability estimates on deceptive AI scenarios developed by Bostrom (2014) , in which AI-sided deception is described as a function of intelligence. Machiavellianism and psychopathy predicted narrow AI risk perception above the shared variance of the Dark Triad and above the Big Five. In individuals with self-reported knowledge of machine learning, the Dark Triad traits were associated with AGI risk perception. This study provides evidence for the existence of substantial individual differences in the risk perception of AI.