The Dark Triad of personality and utilitarian moral judgment: The mediating role of Honesty/Humility and Harm/Care

Abstract

Recent research on moral judgment has highlighted that socially aversive personality styles are linked to a utilitarian inclination in sacrificial dilemmas. The present research aims at extending these findings by testing some potential mediating factors, namely Honesty/Humility and Harm/Care. Our results showed that the Dark Triad of personality was positively related to utilitarianism and Harm/Care and Honesty/Humility negatively mediated this relationship, revealing that utilitarian inclinations are expressed by a lower concern for the no-harm principle and for prosocial behaviors. Among the Dark Triad, psychopathy appeared to be the only independent predictor of Harm/Care and utilitarianism, suggesting a stronger predictive value of psychopathy in explaining utilitarian judgment. Taken together, the results suggest that utilitarian inclination could arise from an inhibition of moral deontism.