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The Exploitive Mating Strategy of the Dark Triad Traits: Tests of Rape-Enabling Attitudes

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Abstract

The Dark Triad traits have been repeatedly labeled as facilitating an exploitive mating strategy. However, various researchers have repeatedly conflated short-term mating or casual sex with an exploitive mating strategy. In this study using Mechanical Turk participants (N = 252; 142 men, 110 women), we provided a better test of just how sexually exploitive those high on the Dark Triad traits might be by examining how the traits related to rape-enabling attitudes. We examined how each trait may facilitate rape, whether these associations were robust to partialing the variance associated with the Big Five traits and similar in men and women, and showed that one reason why men may be more likely to rape than women is they are characterized by the Dark Triad traits more than women are. In so doing, we test the confluence model of rape that asserts that personality traits similar to the Dark Triad traits act as one pathway to rape.

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Notes

  1. So long as one accepts the premise that rape is a mating strategy as opposed to an aberration (Palmer, 1991). Evolutionary psychologists and biologists have identified that in some instances and in some species forced copulation can have reproductive returns (Bondar, 2015). Pregnancy from rape hovers around 5% (Holmes, Resnick, Kilpatrick, & Best, 1996).

  2. We do not make moderation-by-participant’s sex predictions because downstream outcomes like rape-enabling attitudes should be predicted by the same traits as in men as the core personality features remain the same. The lacking empathy, callousness, and cruelty found in these traits should be associated with the same outcomes in men and women.

  3. While low, it is understandable given that the IPIP measure of Big Five traits assesses broadband traits with only four indicators. Given that this is only included to test for incremental validity above the Big Five traits by the Dark Triad traits, this should not be a major concern.

  4. Full details are available upon request.

  5. We suspect that the individual traits will have more predictive utility when examining nonadaptive tasks because selection pressures are likely to line coordinated systems up in a way that evolutionary novel/irrelevant tasks may not.

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Acknowledgements

This study represents a heavily modified version of the second author’s honors thesis at the University of Western Sydney (2015). The authors thank Phil Kavanagh for statistical consultation and Claire Lehman for reviewing the article prior to submission.

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  1. School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, 2751, Australia

    Peter K. Jonason & Josephine Milne-Home

  2. School of Psychology, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2000, Australia

    Mary Girgis

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  1. Peter K. Jonason
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Correspondence to Peter K. Jonason.

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This project was funded by an internal grant for the second author when she was a Honors student at Western Sydney University. It is at this university where ethical approval was sought and granted and this ethical treatment of participants included both informed consent and debriefing.

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Jonason, P.K., Girgis, M. & Milne-Home, J. The Exploitive Mating Strategy of the Dark Triad Traits: Tests of Rape-Enabling Attitudes. Arch Sex Behav 46, 697–706 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-017-0937-1

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