A multi-study investigation assessing the potential redundancy among the Dark Tetrad using a narrowband trait approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We investigated the putative redundancy of the Dark Tetrad (specifically, Machiavellianism-psychopathy and sadism-psychopathy) through an examination of the differences between correlations with self-reported narrowband personality traits. In addition to measures of the Dark Tetrad, participants in four studies completed measures of various narrowband traits assessing general personality, aggression, impulsivity, Mimicry Deception Theory, and Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory. Results generally supported empirical distinctions between Machiavellianism and psychopathy, and between sadism and psychopathy. Machiavellianism significantly differed from psychopathy across correlations for nine of 10 traits (Study 1), 8 of 25 facets (Study 2), aggression (Study 3), 12 of 25 facets (Study 3), four of five facets (Study 4), impulsivity (Study 4), and five of six facets (Study 4). Sadism significantly differed from psychopathy across correlations with five of 10 traits (Study 1), eight of 25 facets (Study 2), reactive aggression (Study 3), 10 of 25 facets (Study 3), three of six facets (Study 4), impulsivity (Study 4), and three of six facets (Study 4). Our findings challenge the claims that Machiavellianism and psychopathy, as well as sadism and psychopathy, as currently measured, are redundant.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".