Honesty-Humility, the Dark Tetrad, and ideological beliefs: Their incremental validity in predicting explicit prejudice toward asylum seekers

Abstract

Two studies examined how individual differences relate to prejudiced attitudes toward asylum seekers. Results consistently showed that prejudiced people had relatively low scores on Honesty-Humility and relatively high scores on the Dark Tetrad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism) and ideological beliefs (social dominance orientation, patriotism, and nationalism). More importantly, multiple regression analyses revealed that the Dark Tetrad (in particular, Machiavellianism) provided incremental validity beyond Honesty–Humility in predicting explicit prejudice, but both the Dark Tetrad and Honesty-Humility were outpredicted by ideological beliefs. These findings suggest that the narrower Dark Tetrad personality traits provide additional useful information for explaining intergroup attitudes beyond the broader Honesty-Humility personality trait. However, the Dark Tetrad traits (and Honesty-Humility) are only distal determinants of explicit prejudice, while ideological beliefs are the proximal determinant. Study 2 also included a measure of implicit prejudice toward asylum seekers. Overall, Honesty-Humility, the Dark Tetrad, and ideological beliefs were much less predictive of implicit (compared to explicit) prejudiced attitudes.