Age and gender differences in socially aversive (“dark”) personality traits

Abstract

The strong overlap of personality traits discussed under the label of “dark personality” (e.g., psychopathy, spitefulness, moral disengagement) endorses a common framework for socially aversive traits over and beyond the dark triad. Despite the rapidly growing research on socially aversive traits, there is a lack of studies addressing age-associated differences in these traits. In the present study ( N = 12,501), we investigated the structure of the D Factor of Personality across age and gender using local structural equation modeling, thereby expressing the model parameters as a quasi-continuous, nonparametric function of age. Specifically, we evaluated loadings, reliabilities, factor (co-)variances, and means across 35 locally weighted age groups (from 20 to 54 years), separately for females and males. Results indicated that measurement models were highly stable, thereby supporting the conceptualization of the D factor independent of age and gender. Men exhibited uniformly higher latent means than females and all latent means decreased with increasing age. Overall, D and its themes were invariant across age and gender. Therefore, future studies can meaningfully pursue causes of mean differences across age and between genders.