They choose violence. Dark personality traits drive support for politically motivated violence in five democracies

Abstract

The deep roots of support for politically driven violence remain under-investigated. In this article we propose what we believe is the first systematic multi-country examination of personality correlated support for political violence, with a particular focus on the dark side of personality (low honesty-humility, dark triad). Study 1 leverages survey data gathered in five countries – Argentina, Australia, Germany, Italy, and the USA (pooled N = 10,316) – whereas Study 2 focuses on the USA (N = 1845) but with a more nuanced measure of the dark traits. Both studies rely on a conservative design for the measure of support for political violence, based on vignettes depicting concrete violent acts perpetrated against members of the partisan out-group. Results across the two studies confirm the driving role of dark personality for support for political violence, in particular in Australia and the USA (Study 1), and especially psychopathy (Study 2). Data and materials are openly available for replication.