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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Gareth RichardsORCiD, Hannah Proctor, Emily Jackson
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
The ‘dark triad’ represents the socially aversive personality traits of Machiavellianism, subclinical narcissism (henceforth, ’narcissim’), and subclinical psychopathy (henceforth, ’psychopathy’). There is evidence of assortative mating suggesting romantic partners are more similar than chance for these traits at the start of relationships (initial assortment) and not becoming alike with time (convergence), that people seek out partners to whom they are similar (active assortment), and that partner resemblance is not explained by social stratification processes (social homogamy). As the literature relates primarily to Eastern European and North American populations, we present studies from the UK (N = 104 couples) and Fiji (N = 99 couples). These showed significant positive assortment for each dark triad trait (other than psychopathy in the Fijian sample), and suggest the effects are explained by initial and active assortment and not by convergence or social homogamy. We also submitted the literature to meta-analytic review (Machiavellianism: k = 10, N = 1302; narcissism: k = 14, N = 1645; psychopathy: k = 13, N = 1989) and observed positive within-couple correlations of small (narcissism, psychopathy) to medium (Machiavellianism) effect size for each of the dark triad traits.
Author(s): Richards G, Proctor H, Lee E, Swann O, Jackson E, Galvin J, Dunbar RIM, Baron-Cohen S, Luo S
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Personality and Individual Differences
Year: 2024
Volume: 231
Print publication date: 01/12/2024
Online publication date: 16/08/2024
Acceptance date: 04/06/2024
Date deposited: 05/08/2024
ISSN (print): 0191-8869
ISSN (electronic): 1873-3549
Publisher: Elsevier Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2024.112754
DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2024.112754
ePrints DOI: 10.57711/dh62-m084
Data Access Statement: Data and R code for Study 1 and the meta-analysis are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/bk5c3/?view_only=44024f62c93f413cad829b5e8953638e).
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