- Cambridge, Massachusetts
- I'm Thomas Costello, PhD (Emory '22), a research psychologist and postdoctoral fellow at MIT. I study the nexus betwe... moreI'm Thomas Costello, PhD (Emory '22), a research psychologist and postdoctoral fellow at MIT. I study the nexus between personality and politics, and I've published research widely on topics spanning the psychology of authoritarianism, personality disorders, the cognitive causes and correlates of political ideology, psychopathy, intellectual humility and cognitive biases, financial decision-making, sexual objectification, beliefs in free will and determinism, conspiracy theories, machine learning for scale development, and more.edit
The rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis (RRH), which posits that cognitive, motivational, and ideological rigidity resonate with political conservatism, is an influential but controversial psychological account of political ideology. Here,... more
The rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis (RRH), which posits that cognitive, motivational, and ideological rigidity resonate with political conservatism, is an influential but controversial psychological account of political ideology. Here, we leverage several methodological and theoretical sources of this controversy to conduct an extensive quantitative review with the dual aims of probing the RRH's basic assumptions and parsing the RRH literature's heterogeneity. Using multilevel meta-analyses of relations between varieties of rigidity and ideology measures alongside a bevy of potential moderators (s = 329, k = 708, N = 187,612), we find that associations between conservatism and rigidity are tremendously heterogeneous, suggesting a complex-yet conceptually fertile-network of relations between these constructs. Most notably, whereas social conservatism was robustly associated with rigidity, associations between economic conservatism and rigidity indicators were inconsistent, small, and not statistically significant outside of the United States. Moderator analyses revealed that nonrepresentative sampling, criterion contamination, and disproportionate use of American samples have yielded overestimates of associations between rigidity-related constructs and conservatism in past research. We resolve that drilling into this complexity, thereby moving beyond the question of if conservatives are essentially rigid to when and why they might or might not be, will help provide a more realistic account of the psychological underpinnings of political ideology.
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A deeply heterogeneous set of ideological cohorts have shaped the course of history. From anarchists and authoritarians to Zionists and Zapatistas, the expansive alphabet of politics demands an equally expansive psychological vocabulary... more
A deeply heterogeneous set of ideological cohorts have shaped the course of history. From anarchists and authoritarians to Zionists and Zapatistas, the expansive alphabet of politics demands an equally expansive psychological vocabulary to describe political belief systems. We propose that constructing such a vocabulary is best facilitated by decentering familiar models that emphasize psychological differences between leftists and rightists. Synthesizing recent developments in the fields of personality, political science, and psychopathology, we characterize individual variation in politics as high-dimensional, heterarchical, intrapersonally eclectic, and contextually shaped and activated. Developing a data-driven taxonomic model of political-psychological phenomena will help create a foundational base of knowledge within political psychology that is more rigorous, more replicable, and certainly richer to investigate. Beyond left and right A tidal wave of research has documented an ocean of differences between leftists and rightists. From neural structures [1] to basic cognitive processes [2] and from moral intuitions [3] to entertainment preferences [4], the left-right divide dominates how we investigate and understand the political mind (i.e., the psychological processes and mechanisms that influence a person's political beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors).
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The extent to which individual differences in personality traits and cognitive styles diminish affective polarization (AP) is largely unknown. We address this gap by examining how one poorly understood but recently researched individual... more
The extent to which individual differences in personality traits and cognitive styles diminish affective polarization (AP) is largely unknown. We address this gap by examining how one poorly understood but recently researched individual difference variable, namely, intellectual humility (IH), may buffer against AP. We examined the associations between domain-general and domain-specific measures of IH, on the one hand, and AP, on the other, in two community samples. Measures of IH were robustly negatively associated with AP and political polarization. Moreover, IH significantly incremented measures of allied constructs, including general humility, in the statistical prediction of AP. There was little evidence to suggest that IH buffers the relationships between strong political belief and AP. Future research is needed to clarify whether and if IH is sufficient to protect against AP in the presence of ideological extremity.
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Although the causes and correlates of sexual objectification (i.e., perceiving others as reducible to their sexual attributes) almost certainly comprise a heterogeneous array of individual difference variables, little is known about... more
Although the causes and correlates of sexual objectification (i.e., perceiving others as reducible to their sexual attributes) almost certainly comprise a heterogeneous array of individual difference variables, little is known about sexual objectification perpetration’s nomological network. We hypothesized that the broad personality construct of psychopathy would afford a fruitful framework for understanding and statistically predicting sexual objectification and investigated the implications of a host of psychopathic and psychopathy-related traits, including (low) empathy, narcissism, impulsivity, and sadism, for interpersonal sexual objectification perpetration. We augmented an extant self-report instrument of behavioral sexual objectification, the Interpersonal Sexual Objectification Scale – Perpetrator Version (ISOS-P; Gervais, DiLillo, & McChargue, 2014), with attitudinal items. Two MTurk samples (Study 1: N = 401, 53% female, Mage = 36; Study 2: N = 419, 48% female, Mage = 37)...
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In recent years, an upsurge of polarization has been a salient feature of political discourse in America. A small but growing body of research has examined the potential relevance of intellectual humility (IH) to political polarization.... more
In recent years, an upsurge of polarization has been a salient feature of political discourse in America. A small but growing body of research has examined the potential relevance of intellectual humility (IH) to political polarization. In the present investigation, we extend this work to political myside bias, testing the hypothesis that IH is associated with less bias in two community samples ( N1 = 498; N2 = 477). In line with our expectations, measures of IH were negatively correlated with political myside bias across paradigms, political topics, and samples. These relations were robust to controlling for humility. We also examined ideological asymmetries in the relations between IH and political myside bias, finding that IH–bias relations were statistically equivalent in members of the political left and right. Notwithstanding important limitations and caveats, these data establish IH as one of a small handful psychological features known to predict less political myside bias.
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Objective: We sought to replicate and extend research on the personological correlates of conspiracy beliefs by examining their associations with abnormal- and normal-range personality domain-level traits and, for the first time,... more
Objective: We sought to replicate and extend research on the personological correlates of conspiracy beliefs by examining their associations with abnormal- and normal-range personality domain-level traits and, for the first time, lower-order personality facets; we also examined internalizing symptoms. Method: The study comprised four samples of community and student participants (Ntotal=1,927), and examined the cross-sectional relations between self-reported conspiratorial ideation and measures of (a) the six-factor model of general personality, (b) intellectual humility, (c) personality disorder traits (narcissism, psychopathy, disinhibition), and (d) internalizing symptoms (depression, anxiety, anger). Results: Agreeableness and conscientiousness were significant negative correlates of conspiracy beliefs, although other general personality dimensions tended to manifest negligible associations. Significant associations between lower-order personality facets and conspiracy beliefs, ...
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Theorists and philosophers have long speculated that trait authoritarianism and belief in determinism are functionally related (e.g., because both serve to impose a sense of certainty and structure on one’s environment). To evaluate this... more
Theorists and philosophers have long speculated that trait authoritarianism and belief in determinism are functionally related (e.g., because both serve to impose a sense of certainty and structure on one’s environment). To evaluate this hypothesis, we assessed the degree to which authoritarianism and allied constructs (i.e., social dominance orientation, dogmatism, political intolerance, needs for closure and cognition, intolerance of ambiguity, and social and economic political conservatism), on the one hand, predict varieties of belief in determinism (i.e., fatalistic determinism, genetic determinism, and environmental determinism), on the other, in two large community samples using self-report measures (N1= 20,010; N2=479). In both samples, authoritarianism manifested moderate to large positive correlations with both fatalistic determinism and genetic determinism beliefs. Moreover, right-wing authoritarianism was a stronger predictor of belief in fatalistic determinism than was ...
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The quality of empathy research, and clinical assessment, hinges on the validity and proper interpretation of the measures used to assess the construct. This study investigates, in an online sample of 401 adult community participants, the... more
The quality of empathy research, and clinical assessment, hinges on the validity and proper interpretation of the measures used to assess the construct. This study investigates, in an online sample of 401 adult community participants, the construct validity of the Affective and Cognitive Measure of Empathy (ACME) relative to that of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), the most widely used multidimensional empathy research measure. We investigated the factor structures of both measures, as well as their measurement precision across varying trait levels. We also examined them both in relation to convergent and discriminant criteria, including broadband personality dimensions, general emotionality, personality disorder features, and interpersonal malignancy. Our findings suggest that the ACME possesses incremental validity beyond the IRI for most constructs related to interpersonal malignancy. Our results further indicate that the IRI Personal Distress scale is severely deficient...
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Right-left political views can be decomposed into distinct economic and social dimensions that bear differing relations with external criteria. In three community samples (total N = 1487), we identify replicable suppressor situations in... more
Right-left political views can be decomposed into distinct economic and social dimensions that bear differing relations with external criteria. In three community samples (total N = 1487), we identify replicable suppressor situations in which statistically controlling for either social or economic political ideology increases the other dimension’s relation with theoretically relevant external criteria, and vice versa. Specifically, positive relations between social conservatism and variables reflecting cognitive rigidity, authoritarianism, dangerous worldview, and political aggression were enhanced after controlling for economic conservatism, whereas statistically controlling for social conservatism revealed negative relations between economic conservatism and these variables. We identify similar suppressor phenomena using the HEXACO model of personality, yet these did not replicate across studies. Taken together, our results suggest that social and economic conservatism differ subs...
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Commentary on Gries, T., Mueller, V., & Jost, J. (2021). The market for belief systems: A formal model of ideological choice. Psychological Inquiry.
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The present investigation examined curvilinear relations between left-right political ideology, on the one hand, and absolute certainty and dogmatism, on the other, across six community samples (N = 2889). Ideological extremists were more... more
The present investigation examined curvilinear relations between left-right political ideology, on the one hand, and absolute certainty and dogmatism, on the other, across six community samples (N = 2889). Ideological extremists were more likely than others to be absolutely certain: about 1 in 3 extremists reported being absolutely (i.e., 100%) certain of the correctness of their political beliefs, whereas about 1 in 15 non-extremists reported being absolutely certain. Although absolute political certainty was relatively symmetrical across the political left and right, conservatives tended to report greater domain-general dogmatism than liberals. Extremism effects for domain-general dogmatism were also present, however, such that Socialists and extreme conservatives demonstrated similar levels of dogmatism. Taken together, these findings underscore the complexity of relations between absolute certainty, dogmatism, and ideology, ultimately challenging the sufficiency of contemporary ...
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Authoritarianism has been the subject of scientific inquiry for nearly a century, yet the vast majority of authoritarianism research has focused on right-wing authoritarianism. In the present studies, we investigate the nature, structure,... more
Authoritarianism has been the subject of scientific inquiry for nearly a century, yet the vast majority of authoritarianism research has focused on right-wing authoritarianism. In the present studies, we investigate the nature, structure, and nomological network of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA), a construct famously known as “the Loch Ness Monster” of political psychology. We iteratively construct a measure and data-driven conceptualization of LWA across six samples (N = 7,258) and conduct quantitative tests of LWA’s relations with over 60 authoritarianism-related variables. We find that LWA, right-wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation reflect a shared constellation of personality traits, cognitive features, beliefs, and motivational values that might be considered the “heart” of authoritarianism. Still, relative to right-wing authoritarians, left-wing authoritarians were lower in dogmatism and cognitive rigidity, higher in negative emotionality, and expressed s...
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Personality disorders have long been bedeviled by a host of conceptual and methodological quandaries. Starting from the assumption that personality disorders are inherently interpersonal conditions that reflect folk concepts of social... more
Personality disorders have long been bedeviled by a host of conceptual and methodological quandaries. Starting from the assumption that personality disorders are inherently interpersonal conditions that reflect folk concepts of social impairment, the authors contend that a subset of personality disorders, rather than traditional syndromes, are emergent interpersonal syndromes (EISs): interpersonally malignant configurations (statistical interactions) of distinct personality dimensions that may be only modestly, weakly, or even negatively correlated. Preliminary support for this perspective derives from a surprising source, namely, largely forgotten research on the intercorrelations among the subscales of select MMPI/MMPI-2 clinical scales. Using psychopathic personality as a case example, the authors offer provisional evidence for the EIS hypothesis from four lines of research and delineate its implications for personality disorder theory, research, and classification. Conceptualizi...
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In our article (Lilienfeld et al., 2019), we hypothesized that psychopathy and some other personality disorders are emergent interpersonal syndromes (EISs): interpersonally malignant configurations of distinct personality subdimensions.... more
In our article (Lilienfeld et al., 2019), we hypothesized that psychopathy and some other personality disorders are emergent interpersonal syndromes (EISs): interpersonally malignant configurations of distinct personality subdimensions. We respond to three commentaries by distinguished scholars who raise provocative challenges to our arguments and intriguing suggestions for future research. We clarify the role of folk concepts in our understanding of psychopathy, offer further suggestions for testing our interactional hypotheses, consider the role of boldness in motivational accounts of psychopathy, and discuss future directions for incorporating developmental considerations and the role of victims in our EIS account. We are optimistic that this account will prove to be of heuristic value, and should encourage researchers and theoreticians to explore alternative models of psychopathy and other personality disorders.
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Despite widespread assumptions that psychopathy is associated with serious and repeated law-breaking, individuals with psychopathic personality traits do not invariably become chronic criminal offenders. As a partial explanation for this... more
Despite widespread assumptions that psychopathy is associated with serious and repeated law-breaking, individuals with psychopathic personality traits do not invariably become chronic criminal offenders. As a partial explanation for this finding, Lykken (1995) ventured that a fearless temperament underlies both psychopathic traits and heroic behavior, and that heroic individuals' early exposure to effective socializing forces such as warm parenting or healthy self-esteem often fosters a characteristic adaption that tends to beget "successful" behaviors, thereby differentiating heroes from convicts. In this study, we investigate relations between psychopathy, principally its fearless dominance dimension, pride, and prosocial and antisocial behavior in a community sample (= 339). Fearless dominance and self-centered impulsivity components of psychopathy yielded differential relations with authentic and hubristic pride (Tracy and Robins, 2004), such that fearless dominanc...
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Objective We sought to replicate and extend provisional research on the personological correlates of conspiracy beliefs by examining their associations with abnormal‐ and normal‐range personality domain‐level traits and, for the first... more
Objective
We sought to replicate and extend provisional research on the personological correlates of conspiracy beliefs by examining their associations with abnormal‐ and normal‐range personality domain‐level traits and, for the first time, lower‐order personality facets; we also examined internalizing symptoms.
Method
The study comprised four samples of community and student participants (Ntotal = 1,927), and examined the cross‐sectional relations between self‐reported conspiratorial ideation and measures of (a) the six‐factor model of general personality, (b) intellectual humility (IH), (c) traits relevant to certain personality disorder features (narcissism, psychopathy, disinhibition), and (d) internalizing symptoms (depression, anxiety, anger).
Results
Agreeableness and conscientiousness were significant, albeit modest, negative correlates of conspiracy beliefs, although other general personality dimensions tended to manifest negligible associations. Significant associations between lower‐order personality facets and conspiracy beliefs, not evident at the domain level, emerged. Indices of IH were significant negative correlates. Conspiracy beliefs were also associated with a range of personality disorder features and internalizing symptoms.
Conclusions
Our results suggest that the nonclinical individual prone to conspiratorial ideation is somewhat likely to display a complex mixture of traits including distress, immodesty, impulsivity, and negative affect. Future research should investigate potential multiplicative relations among personological variables in predicting conspiracy beliefs.
We sought to replicate and extend provisional research on the personological correlates of conspiracy beliefs by examining their associations with abnormal‐ and normal‐range personality domain‐level traits and, for the first time, lower‐order personality facets; we also examined internalizing symptoms.
Method
The study comprised four samples of community and student participants (Ntotal = 1,927), and examined the cross‐sectional relations between self‐reported conspiratorial ideation and measures of (a) the six‐factor model of general personality, (b) intellectual humility (IH), (c) traits relevant to certain personality disorder features (narcissism, psychopathy, disinhibition), and (d) internalizing symptoms (depression, anxiety, anger).
Results
Agreeableness and conscientiousness were significant, albeit modest, negative correlates of conspiracy beliefs, although other general personality dimensions tended to manifest negligible associations. Significant associations between lower‐order personality facets and conspiracy beliefs, not evident at the domain level, emerged. Indices of IH were significant negative correlates. Conspiracy beliefs were also associated with a range of personality disorder features and internalizing symptoms.
Conclusions
Our results suggest that the nonclinical individual prone to conspiratorial ideation is somewhat likely to display a complex mixture of traits including distress, immodesty, impulsivity, and negative affect. Future research should investigate potential multiplicative relations among personological variables in predicting conspiracy beliefs.
Research Interests:
Personality disorders have long been bedeviled by a host of conceptual and methodological quandaries. Starting from the assumption that personality disorders are inherently interpersonal conditions that reflect folk concepts of social... more
Personality disorders have long been bedeviled by a host of conceptual and methodological quandaries. Starting from the assumption that personality disorders are inherently interpersonal conditions that reflect folk concepts of social impairment, the authors contend that a subset of personality disorders, rather than traditional syndromes, are emergent interpersonal syndromes (EISs): interpersonally malignant configurations (statistical interactions) of distinct personality dimensions that may be only modestly, weakly, or even negatively correlated. Preliminary support for this perspective derives from a surprising source, namely, largely forgotten research on the intercorrelations among the subscales of select MMPI/MMPI-2 clinical scales. Using psychopathic personality as a case example, the authors offer provisional evidence for the EIS hypothesis from four lines of research and delineate its implications for personality disorder theory, research, and classification. Conceptualizing some personality disorders as EISs elucidates long-standing quandaries and controversies in the psychopathology literature and affords fruitful avenues for future investigation.
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We examined the associations between psychopathic subdimensions and music and movie genre preferences in a community sample (N = 429). We also considered the extent to which these relations were specific to psy-chopathy per se as opposed... more
We examined the associations between psychopathic subdimensions and music and movie genre preferences in a community sample (N = 429). We also considered the extent to which these relations were specific to psy-chopathy per se as opposed to other personality disorder or general personality traits. Fearless Dominance psychopathy features were moderately related to a variety of entertainment preferences, whereas Self-centered Impulsivity and Coldheartedness traits were largely unrelated. There was a notable lack of specificity in psy-chopathy subdimensions' relations with entertainment preferences: Leadership/Authority narcissism features, extraversion, and openness to experience were also moderately positively associated with a swath of entertainment interests whereas Entitlement/Exploitativeness narcissism features and Machiavellianism were largely unrelated. The higher-order trait of Beta, comprising extraversion and openness, statistically accounted for most of the associations between Fearless Dominance and entertainment preferences. In accordance with "niche picking" theories, our findings suggest that individuals' may prefer genres of music and movies that most closely align with their respective personality traits.
The quality of empathy research, and clinical assessment, hinges on the validity and proper interpretation of the measures used to assess the construct. This study investigates, in an online sample of 401 adult community participants, the... more
The quality of empathy research, and clinical assessment, hinges on the validity and proper interpretation of the measures used to assess the construct. This study investigates, in an online sample of 401 adult community participants, the construct validity of the Affective and Cognitive Measure of Empathy (ACME) relative to that of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), the most widely used multidimensional empathy research measure. We investigated the factor structures of both measures, as well as their measurement precision across varying trait levels. We also examined them both in relation to convergent and discriminant criteria, including broadband personality dimensions, general emotionality, personality disorder features, and interpersonal malignancy. Our findings suggest that the ACME possesses incremental validity beyond the IRI for most constructs related to interpersonal malignancy. Our results further indicate that the IRI Personal Distress scale is severely deficient in construct validity, raising serious concerns regarding past findings that have included it when computing total empathy scores. Finally, our results indicate that both questionnaires display poor measurement precision at high trait levels, emphasizing the need for future researchers to develop indices that can reliably measure high levels of empathy.
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Some theorists have argued that empathy should be defined as feeling the same emotion that one thinks another person is feeling and that other-oriented sympathetic caring should be excluded from this construct. Jordan, Amir, and Bloom... more
Some theorists have argued that empathy should be defined as feeling the same emotion that one thinks another person is feeling and that other-oriented sympathetic caring should be excluded from this construct. Jordan, Amir, and Bloom (2016) introduced the Empathy Index (EI) as a self-report questionnaire to measure the former circumscribed conceptualization of empathy. They reported that this scale (a) was only weakly associated with broader sympathetic caring and (b) was not robustly predictive of heightened prosociality in behavioral tasks. Using an online sample of adult community participants (N 389), we demonstrate that the factor structure of the EI is substantively different from that proposed by Jordan and colleagues. In addition, we demonstrate that contagion for enjoyable emotions as measured by the EI is strongly correlated with sympathetic caring, interpersonal attachment, and psychological well-being, as well as substantially negatively correlated with meanness. In sharp contrast, contagion for aversive emotions, as measured by the EI, is not associated with sympathetic caring but is positively associated with emotional distress and personality disorder features. We conclude that empathic conta-gion should not be treated as a unidimensional construct, as enjoyable contagion and aversive contagion may be associated with markedly different nomological networks. Public Significance Statement This study demonstrates that empathic contagion for the enjoyable emotions of others and the aversive emotions of others appear to be importantly distinguishable and should be measured separately in research and clinical assessment.
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Using a risky-choice framing paradigm, we investigated (a) the extent to which psychopathic features shape behavioral responses to potential losses vs. potential gains and (b) how these relations bear on real-world economic... more
Using a risky-choice framing paradigm, we investigated (a) the extent to which psychopathic features shape behavioral responses to potential losses vs. potential gains and (b) how these relations bear on real-world economic decision-making in a community sample (N = 475). Associations among psycho-pathic features, risk-seeking, sensitivity to framing, and financial practices were also examined. Disinhibition manifested positive relations with risk-seeking and maladaptive financial practices, whereas boldness manifested positive relations with risk-seeking and adaptive financial practices. Individuals high in disinhibition and/or meanness were significantly less likely to endorse risk seeking in negative frames. Results provisionally suggest boundary conditions for framing effects; in particular, certain psychopathic traits may render individuals modestly less susceptible to framing or bias them towards risk-taking in positive frames.
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Despite widespread assumptions that psychopathy is associated with serious and repeated law-breaking, individuals with psychopathic personality traits do not invariably become chronic criminal offenders. As a partial explanation for this... more
Despite widespread assumptions that psychopathy is associated with serious and repeated law-breaking, individuals with psychopathic personality traits do not invariably become chronic criminal offenders. As a partial explanation for this finding, Lykken (1995) ventured that a fearless temperament underlies both psychopathic traits and heroic behavior, and that heroic individuals' early exposure to effective socializing forces such as warm parenting or healthy self-esteem often fosters a characteristic adaption that tends to beget "successful" behaviors, thereby differentiating heroes from convicts. In this study, we investigate relations between psychopathy, principally its fearless dominance dimension, pride, and prosocial and antisocial behavior in a community sample (N = 339). Fearless dominance and self-centered impulsivity components of psychopathy yielded differential relations with authentic and hubristic pride (Tracy and Robins, 2004), such that fearless dominance was significantly positively correlated with both facets of pride while self-centered Impulsivity was significantly negatively correlated with authentic pride and significantly positively correlated with hubristic pride. Further, authentic pride moderated (potentiated) the relation between fearless dominance and transformational leadership, one of the two outcome measures for prosocial behavior employed in our investigation. Authentic pride did not moderate the relations between fearless dominance and either our other measure of prosocial behavior (heroism) or antisocial behavior, nor did positive parenting moderate the relations between psychopathy components and social behavior. Unexpectedly, hubristic pride significantly moderated the relation between impulsive-antisocial features and antisocial behavior in a protective manner.
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Philosophers have long speculated that authoritarianism and belief in determinism are functionally related. To evaluate this hypothesis, we assessed whether authoritarianism and allied personality and political variables predict varieties... more
Philosophers have long speculated that authoritarianism and belief in determinism are functionally related. To evaluate this hypothesis, we assessed whether authoritarianism and allied personality and political variables predict varieties of belief in determinism in three community samples (N1 = 566 to 20,010; N2 = 500; N3 = 419). Authoritarianism and allied variables manifested moderate to large positive correlations with both fatalistic and genetic determinism beliefs. Controlling for political conservatism did not meaningfully attenuate these relations. Further, openness was negatively related to fatalistic determinism beliefs and agreeableness was negatively related to genetic determinism beliefs. Taken together, our findings clarify the nature of relations between authoritarianism and general personality, on the one hand, and free will/determinism beliefs, on the other, and suggest intriguing intersections between worldviews and personality traits.
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Although the causes and correlates of sexual objectification almost certainly comprise a heterogeneous array of individual difference variables, little is known about sexual objectification perpetration’s nomological network. We... more
Although the causes and correlates of sexual objectification almost certainly comprise a heterogeneous array of individual difference variables, little is known about sexual objectification perpetration’s nomological network. We hypothesized that the broad personality construct of psychopathy would afford a fruitful framework for understanding and statistically predicting sexual objectification and investigated the implications of a host of psychopathic and psychopathy-related traits, including empathy, narcissism, impulsivity, and sadism, for interpersonal sexual objectification perpetration. We augmented an extant self-report instrument of behavioral sexual objectification, the Interpersonal Sexual Objectification Scale – Perpetrator Version (ISOS-P; Gervais, DiLillo, & McChargue, 2014), with attitudinal items. Two MTurk samples (Study 1: N = 401, 53% female, Mage = 36; Study 2: N = 419, 48% female, Mage = 37) were administered the augmented ISOS-P and a battery of well-validated self-report instruments describing psychopathic and psychopathy-related traits. Dark personality traits were strongly associated with sexual objectification; sadism, low affective empathy, narcissism, disinhibition, and meanness emerged as the largest correlates. Further, our hypothesis that psychopathic traits would moderate (potentiate) the relation between ISOP attitudes and ISOP behaviors found support in both samples.
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Authoritarianism has been the subject of scientific inquiry for nearly a century, yet the vast majority of authoritarianism research has focused on right-wing authoritarianism. In the present studies, we investigate the nature, structure,... more
Authoritarianism has been the subject of scientific inquiry for nearly a century, yet the vast majority of authoritarianism research has focused on right-wing authoritarianism. In the present studies, we investigate the nature, structure, and nomological network of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA), a construct famously known as “the Loch Ness Monster” of political psychology. We iteratively construct a measure and data-driven conceptualization of LWA across six samples (N = 7,258) and conduct quantitative tests of LWA’s relations with over 60 authoritarianism-related variables. We find that LWA, right-wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation reflect a shared constellation of personality traits, cognitive features, beliefs, and motivational values that might be considered the “heart” of authoritarianism. Still, relative to right-wing authoritarians, left-wing authoritarians were lower in dogmatism and cognitive rigidity, higher in negative emotionality, and expressed stronger support for a political system with substantial centralized state control. Our results also indicate that LWA powerfully predicts behavioral aggression and is strongly correlated with participation in political violence. We conclude that a movement away from exclusively right-wing conceptualizations of authoritarianism may be required to illuminate authoritarianism’s central features, conceptual breadth, and psychological appeal.