By the Journal of Research in Personality, Volume 118, October 2024

Highlights

• •Conservative political ideology represented by symbolic and operational ideology and positive view of Trump
• •Psychopathic traits and malevolent disposition predicted increased conservative political ideology
• •Benevolent disposition predicted decreased conservative ideology–i.e., more liberal ideology
• •Those viewing Trump favorably reported elevated malevolent and reduced benevolent dispositions, and less empathy

Introduction

Autocrats manifest socially aversive personality, including malevolent traits in the Dark Triad: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism (Nai & Toros, 2020), and the same has been found for Trump (Hyatt et al., 2018, Nai et al., 2019). Similar results have been found for authoritarians’ loyal foot soldiers (Hare et al., 2022). Thus, it is not surprising perhaps that voters with aversive traits tend to prefer aversive political figures (Hart et al., 2018, Nai et al., 2021). As such, we expected those in favor of Trump to display a malevolent (aversive) disposition.²

A malevolent disposition reflects wishing ill will or doing harm to others, while a benevolent disposition involves intending or showing goodwill or kindness to others. A malevolent disposition is measured via aversive features of Machiavellian manipulativeness, psychopathic callousness, and narcissistic self-absorption, all negatively associated with empathy and positively associated with antisocial behavior (Muris et al., 2017, Neumann et al., 2020, Neumann et al., 2021). A benevolent disposition is assessed in terms of whether one sees the goodness of others, values the dignity and worth of humans and treats people as they are rather than as means to an end, all positively associated with empathy and prosocial behavior (Kaufman et al., 2019, Neumann et al., 2020).

A political candidate who boasts about being able to shoot someone can be understood in terms of a malevolent disposition (Nai et al., 2019). We seek to understand the voters who embrace such a politician and propose that insight may be gained by examining the links between malevolent dispositions and political ideology (Blais et al., 2021, Blais et al., 2024).

Taken together, we propose that more extreme (malevolent) dispositions are necessary for understanding today’s modern incarnation of conservatism that includes a positive view of Trump.

Longitudinal research suggests that race/ethnicity may moderate the associations of RWA and SDO with conservative political behavior (Duckitt & Sibley, 2016) and gender might moderate the association between personality and conservatism with a stronger association for males than females (Kivikangas et al., 2021). These moderation effects may be due in part to the fact that RWA and SDO are linked with racism and sexism

For the complete report, go to: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0092656625000704

(Courtesy of Thom Hartmann)