The Dirty Dozen: a Concise Measure of the Dark Triad
Psychological Assessment © 2010 American Psychological Association 2010, Vol. 22, No. 2, 420–432 1040-3590/10/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0019265 The Dirty Dozen: A Concise Measure of the Dark Triad Peter K. Jonason Gregory D. Webster University of West Florida University of Florida There has been an exponential increase of interest in the dark side of human nature during the last decade. To better understand this dark side, the authors developed and validated a concise, 12-item measure of the Dark Triad: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism. In 4 studies involving 1,085 participants, they examined its structural reliability, convergent and discriminant validity (Studies 1, 2, and 4), and test–retest reliability (Study 3). Their measure retained the flexibility needed to measure these 3 independent-yet-related constructs while improving its efficiency by reducing its item count by 87% (from 91 to 12 items). The measure retained its core of disagreeableness, short-term mating, and aggressiveness. They call this measure the Dirty Dozen, but it cleanly measures the Dark Triad. Keywords: Dark Triad, narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, measurement The Dark Triad is a term used to describe a constellation of quiring scores on each measure to be standardized (Jonason, Li, three socially undesirable personality traits: narcissism, psychop- Webster, & Schmitt, 2009). athy, and Machiavellianism (Paulhus & Williams, 2002). Research Second, assessing the Dark Triad’s 91 items is inefficient, on the Dark Triad has increased exponentially over the last decade. time-consuming, and may cause response fatigue in some partic- An analysis of Google Scholar hit counts for “Dark Triad” in ipants. When studying the Dark Triad and one or more other scientific works reveals an explosive increase from one in 2002 to measures of interest (e.g., self-esteem, Big Five personality traits), at least 38 in 2009.
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