Structural Investigation of the Short Dark Triad Questionnaire in Polish Population

Abstract

Narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy are commonly referred to as the Dark Triad of personality. In the current study, we examined the structure of the Dark Triad measured by the Polish version of the Short Dark Triad (SD3). The study was conducted with 1012 individuals in Poland. The analyses were performed in four steps: (1) the external validity of the SD3 was tested to provide evidence that SD3 is a valid measure of the three dark traits; (2) the structural validity of the SD3 was tested using competing models in confirmatory factor analyses; (3) the structure of narcissism was tested; and (4) the combined bifactor model of Machiavellianism and psychopathy was tested. The results support the differentiation of the Dark Triad into a Dark Dyad (Machiavellianism and psychopathy) and narcissism, which can be used in further theoretical work and new operationalization of the Dark Triad.

An extension of the dark triad and five‐factor model to three Asian societies

“…Given this overlap, recent studies have begun to question the SD3's factor structure and divergent validity within DT traits. Rogoza and Cieciuch (2017) also investigated the SD3's structure on a Polish sample analyzing the measure's external and structural validity as well as testing the general structure of narcissism and a bifactor model of Machiavellianism and psychopathy. They suggested that the SD3 does not capture differences between the constructs of Machiavellianism and psychopathy, leading them to further advocate the use of a single SD3 composite score, replacing the traditional triad subscales (Persson et al, 2019).…”

“…Rogoza and Cieciuch (2017) also investigated the SD3's structure on a Polish sample analyzing the measure's external and structural validity as well as testing the general structure of narcissism and a bifactor model of Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Rogoza and Cieciuch (2017) suggested that "replicability is the purest goal, as the more replicable the results are, especially across different populations and languages, the more confident the researchers could be with them" (p. 2). Other researchers also have argued for a two-factor model of the DT (Egan, Chan, & Shorter, 2014;Kowalski, Vernon, & Schermer, 2016).…”

“…Our second limitation relates to our measure of choice, the SD3, which may have reduced some of the construct validity contained and previously established within the individual DT constructs. This leads us to encourage future extensions of the SD3 to foreign cultures to include the full independent DT measures (the MACH-IV, the NPI, the LSRP) and explore alternative factor structures, similar to Rogoza and Cieciuch's (2017) approach. The issue of DT measure as a moderator has been examined and mentioned in a recent meta-analysis (Vize et al, 2018) published after our data were gathered.…”

“…Nearly all research investigating the DT to date has used North American or Western European participants, and most participants have consisted of undergraduate students (see O'Boyle, Forsyth, Banks, Story, & White, 2015). Despite the DT's growing popularity in research, its structural framework has recently come under scrutiny, for example, as fitting more of a "dark dyad" with psychopathy being indistinguishable from Machiavellianism (Persson, Kajonius, & Garcia, 2019;Rogoza & Cieciuch, 2018;Vize, Lynam, Collison, & Miller, 2018), and has been criticized as having poor model fit(s) when replicated (Atari & Chegeni, 2016;Pabian, De Backer, & Vandebosch, 2015;Rogoza & Cieciuch, 2017). We are interested in investigating the external validity of the DT framework on foreign cultures to see what meaning, if any, can be drawn from extending Western-based personality measures to foreign societies.…”

“…We specifically extend the SD3 to Chinese and South Korean undergraduates, followed by Filipino working adults in hopes of providing a normative base for future DT studies in Asia. Given this scrutiny, calls have been made in the literature to further investigate the external validity of the DT framework on foreign samples, where cultural differences and language translation are required (see Rogoza & Cieciuch, 2017). Furthermore, our investigation of the SD3 in Asia is accompanied by a short measure of the big five framework (the BFF) to compare fit indices of a more recently developed measure (the SD3) with a well-established one (the BFF).…”