There’s a growing consensus in the social sciences that women swoon uncontrollably for men who possess the suite of psychological traits known colloquially as the Dark Triad. But now a new study has come out which throws an additional psychological trait into the mix of (mostly) male pathologies that cause women to cream their pretty pantaloons:
Behavioral confirmation of everyday sadism.
Past research on socially aversive personalities has focused on subclinical psychopathy, subclinical narcissism, and Machiavellianism-the “Dark Triad” of personality. In the research reported here, we evaluated whether an everyday form of sadism should be added to that list. Acts of apparent cruelty were captured using two laboratory procedures, and we showed that such behavior could be predicted with two measures of sadistic personality. Study 1 featured a bug-killing paradigm. As expected, sadists volunteered to kill bugs at greater rates than did nonsadists. Study 2 examined willingness…
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