Vengeance and the Dark Triad: The role of empathy and perspective taking in trait forgivingness

•Machiavellianism and psychopathy were positively associated with vengeance.•Dark Triad negatively associated with justice, forgiveness, and facets of empathy.•Facets of empathy partially mediated relations between Dark Triad and forgiveness.

Collectively referred to as the Dark Triad; Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy are subclinical personality traits that have been associated with a number of antisocial behaviours. The present study investigated the relation between each of these traits, vengefulness, empathy, and trait forgiveness. The sample consisted of 219 undergraduate students from Western University in Canada. It was found that Machiavellianism and psychopathy were positively correlated with emotional vengeance, but negatively correlated with justice-fairness and justice-legal decisions. Machiavellianism and psychopathy were also significantly negatively correlated with trait forgivingness, perspective taking, and empathic concern. Multiple regression analyses revealed that Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism, and empathy added significantly to the prediction of trait forgivingness. Empathic concern and perspective taking were each found to partially mediate the relation between Machiavellianism and forgivingness, and between psychopathy and forgivingness. However, when both mediators were entered at once, only empathic concern significantly mediated the relation between Machiavellianism and forgivingness. The implications of these findings are discussed.