Dark side of impulsivity — Associations between the Dark Triad, self-report and behavioral measures of impulsivity

• Associations between the Dark Triad with four measures of impulsivity were examined.
• Psychopathy, narcissism, and self-report impulsivity measures were correlated.
• Narcissism and psychopathy weakly correlated with behavioral tasks of impulsivity.
• Machiavellianism was unrelated to either type of impulsivity assessment.
• Self-report measures were not associated with behavioral-task measures.

Associations between the Dark Triad (psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism) with two self-report personality measures (i.e., BIS-11 and I7) and two behavioral tasks (i.e., Stop-Signal task and Delay-Discounting task) of impulsivity in 298 healthy adult volunteers were examined. The strong correlations between psychopathy, narcissism, and self-report measures of impulsivity were reported. Moreover, the variables of the Dark Triad mentioned above have shown weak correlations with behavioral tasks of impulsivity. Contrary, Machiavellianism was unrelated to either type of impulsivity assessment. When testing the association between the self-report and behavioral measures of impulsivity, analysis revealed only two significant correlations. There was a positive correlation between Motor Impulsivity of the BIS-11 and stop-reaction time on the Stop-Signal task, and the Impulsivity scale from I7 was negatively related to the AUC value from Delay-Discounting task. Reliably, these results support other recent findings suggesting that self-report and behavioral tasks probably measure different constructs, perhaps unrelated components of impulsive behavior.