The Relations between Life History Strategy and Dark Personality Traits among Young Adults

Abstract

Personality traits can coalesce with other characteristics to guide the use of tactics to increase fitness, termed life history strategies (LHSs). A “fast” LHS broadly refers to a strategy of maturing and reproducing early, favoring offspring quantity over quality, and immediate over delayed benefits. A “slow” strategy describes the opposite pattern. Researchers have examined the Dark Triad of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy to better understand the adaptive trade-offs of varying LHSs; however, clarity is needed regarding whether the traits of the triad differentially relate to LHS and how other “dark” personality characteristics may correspond to life history. In the current study, 366 young adults completed self-report questionnaires on LHS, the Dark Triad, everyday sadism, and status-driven risk taking. When the shared variance between several dark personality traits was controlled for, Dark Triad narcissism predicted a slow strategy, whereas psychopathy and status-driven risk taking predicted a fast strategy. Machiavellianism and everyday sadism did not emerge as significant multivariate predictors of LHS. Exploratory analyses revealed that Machiavellianism and psychopathy were not redundant in predicting a fast strategy and that narcissism and psychopathy cooperatively suppressed one another in predicting LHS. In addition, everyday sadism and psychopathy may have redundantly predicted a fast strategy. In line with previous work, these results suggest that Dark Triad psychopathy is the strongest multivariate predictor of a fast strategy, whereas narcissism is slower in terms of its life history “speed.” We consider that both Machiavellianism and narcissism contain a melange of fast and slow components that become evident when their shared variance with the other dark personality traits is taken into account.