The Dark Triad and the PID-5 Maladaptive Personality Traits: Accuracy, Confidence and Response Bias in Judgments of Veracity

Abstract

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).

Veracity is in the eye of the beholder: A lens model examination of consistency and deception

“…No notable correlations were found between individuals' personalities and their judgement accuracy. These findings are in line with Wissing and Reinhard (2017), who found no relationship between dark and maladaptive personality traits and lie detection accuracy. Future research would benefit from establishing which individual differences influence veracity judgements, and how accurate judges differ from inaccurate judges.…”

“…The majority of past research has used samples of N ≤ 75, however, correlations required to determine meaningful relationships stabilise at N > 250 (Schönbrodt & Perugini, 2013). A recent study with a sample of 207 participants found that dark and maladaptive personality traits (captured in the honesty‐humility domain) were associated with judgemental biases, however, did not relate to the ability to detect deception (Wissing & Reinhard, 2017). Honesty‐humility traits (e.g., sincerity, fairness) may influence someone to be more likely to consider statements as truthful, whereas social skills may make a person more socially discerning.…”

Correlates of narcissism, self‐reported lies, and self‐assessed abilities to tell and detect lies, tell truths, and believe others

“…Relevant research on narcissism and deception has been frequently performed in the context of studying the dark triad and using the short‐D3 measure (e.g., Azizli et al, ; Giammarco et al, ). No relation of the dark triad traits with actual ability to detect deception was found (Wissing & Reinhard, ; Wright, Berry, Catmur, & Bird, ). However, total dark triad scores were positively associated with confidence in deception detection ability.…”

“…However, total dark triad scores were positively associated with confidence in deception detection ability. Specifically, high dark triad scorers judged their success in detection deception task to be better than their actual performance (Wissing & Reinhard, ).…”

Frequent Countermeasure Usage by Narcissistic Examinees in the Concealed Information Test

“…Nevertheless, no effort to demonstrate such a link has ever been made. When narcissism was studied as part of the Dark triad (Narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism), no association with the ability to deceive others or to detect lies in others was found (e.g., Wright et al, 2015; Wissing and Reinhard, 2017).…”