The prosocial sadist? A comparison of BDSM sadism and everyday sadism

Abstract

Research has begun to investigate subclinical levels of sadism including “everyday sadism:” an enjoyment of cruelty in normal, everyday situations. Thus far, subclinical sadism has been conceptualized as inherently antisocial, as with Internet trolls. We examined a potentially prosocial manifestation of sadism: self-identified sadists in the BDSM (bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, and sadism/masochism) community who cause pain only to consenting partners. A total of 532 BDSM practitioners and non-practitioners completed measures of everyday sadism with consent explicit, non-consent explicit, or consent ambiguous, and known correlates of everyday sadism (empathy, HEXACO traits, and Dark Triad traits). Across both samples and all conditions, everyday sadism correlated negatively with affective empathy, agreeableness, and honesty-humility, and positively with Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism. These results support the validity of the measure of everyday sadism among BDSM practitioners. Psychopathy uniquely predicted everyday sadism among BDSM practitioners when non-consent was explicit. BDSM sadists differed significantly from non-sadistic BDSM tops only on the physical subscale of everyday sadism and only when consent was explicit. These findings suggest that most BDSM sadists are not everyday sadists, and that BDSM sadism might represent a prosocial manifestation of subclinical sadism, but that BDSM sadists with high levels of psychopathy might be everyday sadists.