What’s up with anti-natalists? An observational study on the relationship between dark triad personality traits and anti-natalist views

Abstract

In the past decade, research on the dark triad of personality (Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy) has demonstrated a strong relationship to a number of socially aversive moral judgments such as sacrificial utilitarian decisions in moral dilemmas. This study widens the scope of this research program and investigates the association between dark triad personality traits and anti-natalist views, i.e., views holding that procreation is morally wrong. The results of this study indicate that the dark triad personality traits of Machiavellianism and psychopathy are strongly associated with anti-natalist views. Further, depression is found to be both standing independently in a relationship with anti-natalist views as well as functioning as a mediator in the relationships between Machiavellianism/psychopathy and anti-natalist views. This pattern was replicated in a follow-up study. These findings add to the literature on dark triad personality traits and their relationship to moral judgments, suggesting that personality and mood play a substantive part in variation in anti-natalist views in a lay population.

Introduction and Validation of the Short Antinatalism Scale (S-ANS)

“…We were agnostic as to which direction the effect would run with either type of empathy. On the one hand, previous research found a positive relationship of antinatalism to dark triad traits (and as such low empathy; Schönegger, 2021), though there is also a plausible explanation of expecting antinatalists to be exceptionally high in empathy which plays out in their concern for the unborn generation. Because we failed to find a significant relationship to cognitive empathy but did find a statistically significant negative relationship to affective empathy, we take these data to speak in favor of the former possibility.…”

“…First, those high in empathy may be more sensitive to the risks of causing suffering by bringing life into this world, thus standing in a positive relationship to antinatalism. Second, this relationship may also be negative, as it has been previously found that that those low on empathy (i.e., high in dark triad traits) are more likely to hold antinatalist views (Schönegger, 2021). Therefore, we aimed to investigate which of these two potential relationships of antinatalism and empathy was empirically better supported and did not make a directional prediction.…”

“…This type of reasoning is particularly easily biased in cases where one’s own life might be especially difficult, perhaps due to depression. Moore and Fresco (2012) reviewed the literature on depressive realism, i.e., the view that those who are higher in depressive attitudes perceive some aspects of reality more clearly and find that while both depressed and nondepressed individuals exhibit positivity bias, depressed individuals exhibited it to a significantly lower extent; the relationship between antinatalist views and depression has also been established before (Schönegger, 2021). Second, as Caviola et al (2022) pointed out, reasoning regarding population ethics (and by extension antinatalism) may also be influenced by negativity bias (Rozin & Royzman, 2001), the bias that negative events are judged as outweighing positive events of same magnitude.…”

“…Furthermore, we also found strong evidence for construct validity as we have observed negative relationships of antinatalist views to variables where one would expect such a relationship. Specifically, we study the relationships to life satisfaction (Margolis et al, 2019) – because those lower in life satisfaction may have a more negative outlook on life and on procreation, conservatism (Everett, 2013) – because standard conservative values of the family are pronatalist, and empathy (Carré et al, 2013) – as there has been previous research showing a negative relationship between dark triad traits and as such low empathy on the one hand and antinatalism on the other (Schönegger, 2021). Studying a community of self-described antinatalists in our fourth study ( N = 99), we found that self-described antinatalists also scored substantially higher on the S-ANS than the general population.…”

“…For example, Brown (2020) recently investigated the relationship between optimism and support for antinatalism, finding that optimism about future children reduces support for antinatalism. Furthermore, Schönegger (2021) showed that antinatalist views stand in a strong relationship to dark triad personality traits and depressive attitudes. Importantly though, all these studies that investigate antinatalism have used ad hoc measures of antinatalism which had no accompanied tests regarding their reliability and validity.…”