Everyday sadism, the Dark Triad, personality, and disgust sensitivity

- Everyday sadism is manifest in the pleasure taken at another person's distress.
- Sadism has been proposed as an addition to the Dark Triad, making a Dark Tetrad.
- As disgust underlies moral sense, those with darker traits should be less disgusted.
- Sadism involves more psychopathy/Machiavellianism, lower extraversion/disgust.
- Disgust and everyday sadism are useful ways to research antagonistic traits.

Research into dark personalities has advocated for the addition of sadism due to its close relationship with other dark traits (Book et al., 2016). Lower disgust for atavistic and animalistic tendencies may provide an objective marker of the greater predatory tendencies and desire for power represented by everyday sadism. In the present study, we explored self-reported personality and disgust traits underlying non-sexual 'everyday' sadism (Buckels, Jones, & Paulhus, 2013). In line with previous research, it was predicted sadism would be negatively correlated with the honesty-humility, agreeableness and emotionality dimensions of the HEXACO, and positively correlated with psychopathy and Machiavellianism from the Dark Triad. As an added dimension, the study also investigated disgust sensitivity's relationship to sadism. A total of 235 participants (66.4% female, 31.1% male; mean age 31.35 years (SD = 13.97 years)) completed an online survey comprising a series of psychometric measures. Results indicated that extraversion, psychopathy, Machiavellianism and animal reminder disgust were significant predictors of sadism scores. Future studies may want to include a measure of disgust sensitivity (including behavioural indices) to investigate its relationship with sadism and the DT.