No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Purpose. Bandura's theory of moral disengagement explains how otherwise ethical persons can behave immorally. We examined whether a trait model of general personality and the "dark triad" underlay moral disengagement, the relationship these constructs have to unethical consumer attitudes, and whether moral disengagement provided incremental validity in the prediction of antisocial behaviour. Methods. Self-report data were obtained from a community sample of 380 adults via an online survey that administered all measures. Results. Correlations between unethical consumer attitudes, lower Agreeableness, lower Conscientiousness, higher moral disengagement, higher psychopathy, and higher Machiavellianism were captured by a single factor. When this broad factor was examined using regression, demographic, personality and the dark triad traits all predicted moral disengagement, specific influences being age, education, Intellect, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. A similar model examining predictors of unethical consumer attitudes again found all blocks contributed to the outcome, with specific influence provided by age, Intellect, and moral disengagement, the latter showing incremental validity as a predictor of unethical consumer attitudes.Conclusions. Moral disengagement is based on low Agreeableness, Machiavellianism and psychopathic-type traits, but provides incremental validity in predicting antisocial attitudes to a trait model alone. Narcissism is neither related to moral disengagement, nor unethical consumer attitudes.Moral Disengagement, the dark triad, and unethical consumer attitudes. ATTITUDES.While people generally know right from wrong, some find it easier to disengage from their ethical principles than others. This behaviour is called moral disengagement. A common example of moral disengagement is consumer dishonesty, which is defined as: "the moral principles and standards that guide behavior of individuals or groups as they obtain, use, and dispose of goods and services" (Muncy & Vitell, 1992, pp. 298). Apparent petty dishonesty (Egan & Taylor, 2010) harms UK businesses to the cost of at least £294 million pounds per annum (National Fraud Authority, 2011). The current study examined general and darker personality traits underpinning moral disengagement, using unethical consumer attitudes as a specific criminological outcome.Moral disengagement (Bandura, 1986) provides a specific model to explain how persons breach their personal ethics. Individuals generally seek consistency in held moral beliefs to avoid a discrepancy between what they believe to be right, and how they actually behave. This is because conflicts between inconsistent behaviours and beliefs classically produce feelings of psychological discomfort known as cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957). If one can disengage from personal moral standards, it becomes easier to justify engaging in behaviours normally considered immoral. Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara and Pastorelli (1996) described eight mechanisms by which disengageme...

Narcissism can be expressed in grandiose or vulnerable forms. We examined whether positive psychological states (defined by the Oxford Happiness Inventory (OHI) and the Diener Satisfaction With Life (SWL) scales) assisted differentiation relative to general personality traits and the ''the Dark Triad'' (psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism, measured by the D12 and Short Dark Triad (SD3) indices) for 840 persons primarily from the UK, USA and Canada. The best fitting structural equation model comprised two latent variables, one of positive mood (comprising total scores on the OHI and SWL scales), and another forming a ''dark dyad'' of Machiavellianism and psychopathy (predicted by low agreeableness and lower positive mood), with narcissism regarded as a separate construct correlated with the dark dyad. Latent positive mood was primarily predicted by higher emotional stability and extraversion. Narcissism was predicted by lower emotional stability, lower agreeableness, and higher extraversion. Latent profile analysis identified four groups in the data: ''unhappy but not narcissistic'', ''vulnerable narcissism'', ''happy non-narcissism'' and ''grandiose narcissism''. Our results suggest more problematic narcissism can be identified by reference to measures indexing positive mood states and general personality traits.

No abstract

Psychological abuse within Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is poorly researched. We investigated the impact of Dark Triad (DT) traits and personality on psychological, physical and sexual abuse, and whether DT traits have incremental validity over general personality dimensions in the prediction of IPV expressed psychologically, physically, and sexually. IPV was measured via the Multidimensional Measure of Emotional Abuse (MMEA) and the short form of the revised Conflict Tactics Scale, version 2 (CTS2S) in a general community sample (N=128). Correlation and regression analysis indicated that low agreeableness and psychopathy had the strongest associations and most predictive relationships with both psychological abuse and physical/sexual abuse. Low agreeableness was predictive of both the participants' and their partners' perpetration of physical/sexual abuse. A significant positive relationship was also found between high scores on the MMEA and high scores on the CTS2S.A significant positive relationship was found between participants' high psychopathy scores and perpetration of psychological abuse, but this had a smaller effect than a measure of agreeableness alone. We did not find that the DT provides incremental validity for the prediction of either psychological abuse or physical/sexual abuse over basic low Agreeableness.