Subclinical Sadism, The Dark Triad or The Dark Tetrad, and the Importance of Analyzing Greek Tragedies: How This Applies to Technology-Facilitated Violence
Updated: January 28, 2021 07:32 AM EST
Tags: Dark Triad, Dark Tetrad, Factor Analysis, Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy, Sadism, Verbal Sadism, Physical Sadism, Vicarious Sadism, Analyzing Greek Tragedy, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, Jocasta, Ancient Greek Tragedy
This paper draws on the research information provided in the paper cited at the end of this article, Subclinical Sadism and the Dark Triad.
Among the general population, individuals may take advantage of others without concern for how their actions may hurt them. The “Dark Triad” is a term that refers to a group of social malevolent traits known as Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. For clarity and for the purpose to provide a more proverbial understanding, Machiavellianism describes an exploitative interpersonal style, a cynical view of human nature, and an “ends justify the means” attitude. Narcissism is characterized by feelings of entitlement, superiority, and self-enhancing behaviors. Psychopathy is defined by shallow affect, impulsivity, risk-taking, and Physical aggression. Individuals who score high in the Dark Triad traits are callous, emotionally detached, and lack empathy for individuals they exploit. Other traits included in the triad is a willingness to engage in emotional manipulation and animal cruelty. At the heart of the Dark Triad is a “core” identified as callous manipulation, low honesty-humility, or low agreeableness.
Another term used, subclinical sadism, also referred to as “everyday sadism” has been linked to the Dark Triad. Sadism refers to the dispositional tendency to engage in cruel, demeaning, or antagonistic behaviors for pleasure or subjugation. Sadistic individuals take pleasure in causing or witnessing acts of cruelty, in which the suffering of others in itself is rewarding. Charbrol et al. (2009) observed that sadistic traits present in both the normal population as well as in clinical and criminal groups, suggesting that sadism is a dimensional personality trait that lies on a continuum. In their study, sadism and psychopathy independently predicted delinquent and antisocial behaviors in adolescent boys, and the authors suggested that the underlying aggressive and impulsive tendencies of the high-sadism individual explain its stronger link with delinquency. They subsequently proposed that the “Dark Triad” should be expanded to include sadism and renamed the “Dark Tetrad.” As such, the objective of this study was to investigate the dimensionality of the Dark Tetrad and evaluate whether sadism is a unique, yet conceptually related construct of the Dark Triad traits.
Subclinical sadism is a personality trait that exists on a continuum within the population. It is composed of three facets: verbal sadism, physical sadism, and vicarious sadism. For clarity and for the purpose to provide a more proverbial understanding, verbal sadism involves humiliating and mocking others. Whereas physical sadism involves sadism addresses the desire for subjugation and an enjoyment of hurting others, and vicarious sadism taps an indirect form of sadism where pleasure is obtained through observing or fantasizing about violence. While sadism, psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism are all positively associated with aggression, their situational determinants are different. Specifically, those high in sadism engage in violence for sheer enjoyment, whereas psychopathic individuals are aggressive for instrumental purposes or when physical provocation is present. Those high in narcissism are aggressive in reaction to ego threats, and individuals high in Machiavellianism are more cautious and are less likely to be aggressive unless it benefits them considerably. Correlations between the Dark Triad and sadism are often reported as small to moderate for narcissism and moderate to large for Machiavellianism and psychopath.
Of the Dark Triad traits, subclinical sadism is most closely related to psychopathy. For example, both traits are associated with engaging in unprovoked aggression. Additionally, psychopathy has a strong positive relationship with “schadenfreude”. Like sadism, schadenfreude involves deriving pleasure from another’s misfortune or suffering, though indirectly. Furthermore, they both engage in antisocial and delinquent behaviors (Chabrol et al., 2009), lack empathy for others (Pajevic et al., 2018), and display deficits in emotional recognition (Pajevic et al., 2018).
Conceptually, sadism is associated with deriving enjoyment from hurting other people and seeking out opportunities to do so. Although psychopathy is also associated with hurting others, aggressive behavior may result from boredom or occur for instrumental gain, as opposed to the enjoyment of cruelty. Buckels et al. (2013) reported that individuals high in psychopathy will only hurt others when it is easy and convenient, consistent with the tendency of high-psychopathy individuals to be impulsive and seek out short-term thrills despite long-term consequences.
The primary purpose of this study was to investigate how sadism correlates with relevant personality constructs and distinguish sadism from other “dark” constructs and examine its relationships with broader personality traits. We hypothesized that subclinical sadism would positively correlate with Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. We expected negative relationships for agreeableness, honesty-humility, and emotionality with psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and sadism. Based on Plouffe et al. (in press), we also expected negative relationships for extraversion and conscientiousness with the Dark Tetrad (excluding narcissism, for which Plouffe et al., in press) reported positive correlations. However, we did not expect any relationship with openness to experience.
An additional objective of the current study was to examine the factor structure of the Dark Triad (SD3) and the CAST. We expected that six factors would be extracted, representing the three factors of the SD3 (Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism) and the three factors of the CAST (verbal sadism, physical sadism, vicarious sadism).
Significant gender differences were observed between men and women on all variables except for agreeableness, honesty-humility, openness to experience, and extraversion.
We aimed to separate sadism from the Dark Triad and examine how sadism relates to traits of the HEXACO model. Conceptually, individuals high in sadism should be low in agreeableness, honesty-humility, and emotionality given their enjoyment of dominating and hurting others. These relationships would also follow the patterns of the Dark Triad traits observed in previous research. Low agreeableness reflects a tendency to be vindictive, critical, argumentative, and hostile, whereas low honesty-humility is observed in manipulative, greedy, egotistical, and unfair behavior, and low emotionality reflects toughness, lack of anxiety, and low empathy. Thus, construct validity for subclinical sadism was supported through negative correlations with agreeableness, honesty-humility, emotionality, and conscientiousness, which was consistent with findings by Plouffe et al. (in press). Of note, the negative correlations observed for sadism with openness to experience were marginal but significant. Furthermore, no significant relationships were observed for extraversion, excluding a small negative correlation with physical sadism.
To provide clarity, some of the questions asked on the questionnaire in the research study to research the factor matrix for the Dark Triad and subclinical sadism were questions like, “I like to get revenge on authorities” and “Payback needs to be quick and nasty” in addition to “People who mess with me always regret it” and “I enjoy tormenting people” as well as “I enjoy physically hurting people.” The questions were posed with a 5-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree). Past research supports the reliability and validity of the scale (Jones & Paulhus, 2014).
The Dark Triad traits were positively correlated with subclinical sadism, suggesting that sadism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism share common elements. Interestingly, each sadism subscale correlated most strongly with psychopathy, but these correlations were not high enough to suggest that psychopathy and sadism can be reduced to the same factor. In other words, the facets of sadism still carry sufficient unique variance.
Consistent with hypotheses, a six-factor solution best fit the data from the CAST and SD3, representing Machiavellianism, psychopathy, physical sadism, verbal sadism, narcissism, and vicarious sadism. Thus, despite the relatively strong correlations between sadism and psychopathy, psychopathy and each facet of the CAST loaded onto its own factor. Of these facets, physical sadism was most strongly related to psychopathy. Both psychopathy and physical sadism items assess hurting and dominating others (e.g., SD3: People who mess with me always regret it; CAST: I have dominated others using fear); however, on the factor level, only one physical sadism item loaded onto psychopathy. This is in keeping with research by Paulhus (2014), who distinguished between sadism and psychopathy, such that a feature of sadism is deriving pleasure from cruelty, whereas key features of psychopathy include impulsivity, manipulation, and erratic behaviors. Multiple studies have demonstrated that psychopathy is related to instrumental and reactive violence. That is, individuals high in psychopathy may hurt others in the pursuit of a separate goal, such as money (instrumental violence), or as an emotional response to provocation (reactive violence).
In contrast, for sadists, hurting others may be the goal itself, with cruelty being intrinsically enjoyable. In a study investigating unprovoked aggression, Buckels et al. (2013) found that while both high-psychopathy and high-sadism individuals were willing to engage in aggression against an innocent victim, only high-sadism individuals would do so when it required effort (i.e., completing a tedious letter-counting task). Verbal sadism focuses on the purposeful enjoyment of mocking and tormenting others, whereas vicarious sadism is more indirect, as the individual deriving sadistic pleasure from the violence does not actually cause the harm. Sadism has been previously linked to the vicarious enjoyment of others’ suffering, such as watching videos, depicting harmful pranks and accidents, and experiencing pleasure from partaking in virtual violence, such as violent video games. Because the verbal, physical, and vicarious sadism subscales loaded on their own factors in the current study, this provides evidence that sadism cannot entirely be subsumed by psychopathy. Furthermore, sadism is correlated with the other Dark Triad traits, its correlations are similar in magnitude to the correlations between narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Ultimately, the results of the current study suggest that sadism is generally distinct from, albeit related to the traits comprising the “Dark Tetrad.”
The current study investigated sadism in relation to the Dark Triad. The results distinguished vicarious, physical, and verbal sadism from psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism and also replicated past relationships between subclinical sadism and relevant personality traits. At the factor level, subclinical sadism can be distinguished from psychopathy by its facets, which loaded separately from psychopathy. The present study’s findings add support to the position of subclinical sadism in a revised “Dark Tetrad” of personality.
Subclinical sadism displays motivations for cruelty and aggression. While sadism, psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism are all positively associated with aggression, their situational determinants are different. Specifically, those high in sadism engage in violence for sheer enjoyment (Buckels et al., 2013), whereas psychopathic individuals are aggressive for instrumental purposes or when physically provoked (Jones & Paulhus, 2010). Those high in narcissism are aggressive in reaction to ego threats (Jones & Paulhus, 2010), and individuals high in Machiavellianism are more cautious and are less likely to be aggressive unless it benefits them considerably (Jones & Paulhus, 2011).
In a book entitle Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman written by Nicole Loraux, details that in ordinary life an Athenian woman was allowed no accomplishments beyond leading a quiet and exemplary existence as wife and mother. Her glory was to have no glory. In Greek tragedy, however, women die violently. “More precisely, it was in this violence that a woman mastered her death, a death that was not simply the end of an exemplary life as a spouse. It was a death that belonged to her totally, whether, like Sophocles’ Jocasta, she inflicted it “herself upon herself” or, more paradoxically, had it inflicted upon her. It was a brutal death, whose announcement was curt — thus for the wife-and-mother of Oedipus “one word is enough, as brief to utter as it is to hear: she is dead, that noble figure Jocasta”; but the manner of the death, painful or shocking, gave rise to a long recital. For the event, as soon as it was announced in its stark nakedness, evoked a question that was always the same: “How? Tell us, how?” So, the messenger gave an account, and it was thus that tragedy broke the silence that was widely observed in the Greek tradition on the manner of death (Loraux, 1991).” Greek tragedies are a genre of literature that delights in blurring the formal frontier between masculine and feminine. Through the subtlety of reading these powerful and ambiguous texts, Nicole Loraux elicits an array of insights into Greek attitudes toward death, sexuality, and gender.
It is interesting to discover and connect the puzzle pieces. Pieces that include the Dark Triad and subclinical sadism, technology-facilitated violence, and analyzing classical Greek tragedies we might be able to construct a picture, an understanding for the reasons behind the phenomena we know as the Targeted Individual, electronic targeting, and torture of U.S. American citizens, and put meaning and reason behind why it is occurring.
Source:
Johnson, L., Plouffe, R., & Saklofske, D. (2019). Subclinical Sadism and the Dark Triad. Journal of Individual Differences, 40(3), 127–133.
Chabrol, H., van Leeuwen, N., Rodgers, R., & Sejourne, N. (2009). Contributions of psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian, and sadistic personality traits to juvenile delinquency. Personality and Individual Differences, 47, 734–739. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2009.06.020
Pajevic, M., Vukosavljevic-Gvozden, T., Stevanovic, N., & Neumann, C.S. (2018). The relationship between the Dark Tetrad and a two-dimensional view of empathy. Personality and Individual Differences, 123, 125–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.11.009
Buckels, E.E., Jones, D. N., & Paulhus, D. L. (2013). Behavioral confirmation of everyday sadism. Psychological Science, 24, 2201–2209. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613490749
Jones, D. N., & Paulhus, D. L. (2014). Introducing the Short Dark Triad (SD3): A brief measure of dark personality traits. Assessment, 21, 28–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/1073191113514105
Jones, D. N., & Paulhus, D. L. (2010). Different provocations trigger aggression in narcissists and psychopaths. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 1, 12–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550609347591
Jones, D. N., & Paulhus, D. L. (2011). The role of impulsivity in the Dark Triad of personality. Personality and Individual Differences, 51, 679–682. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2011.04.011
Loraux, Nicole. (1991) Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman. Trans. Anthony Forester. Cambridge University Press.
Additional notes and information:
Discrimination Testing in Sensory Science: A Practical Handbook. (2017) Edited by Lauren Rogers. Woodhead Publishing. Copyright by Elsevier Ltd.
“The benefit of the tetrad test is that it has the ability to detect differences more often and it requires a smaller sample size; as long as the effect size (size of the difference between two groups) does not decrease by more than one third the effect size of the triangle test, the tetrad test is a more powerful discrimination test
The specified tetrad on the other hand is a more powerful test. There are six possible presentation orders, AABB, ABAB, ABBA, BBAA, BABA, and BAAB, but only the grouping AABB is the correct answer as the instructions for this test requires that the panelist selects the two stimuli with the largest sensory magnitude. The probability of guessing the correct answer in that scenario is 1/6.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/tetrad-test
