Acquiescence bias and the factor structure of the Dirty Dozen and the Short Dark Triad
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15448/1980-8623.2020.2.33945Keywords:
psychological assessment, psychometrics, dark triadAbstract
The Dark Triad – Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy – has been traditionally assessed via self-report inventories. Self-report instruments might be susceptible to acquiescent responding or the tendency to manifest agreement with items even when they are semantically opposed. We investigated the dimensionality of two popular self-report instruments of the Dark Triad, the Dirty Dozen and the Short Dark Triad, and inspected the interference of the acquiescence bias in the factor structure of each measure. Participants were 449 students (mean age of 23.47 years; SD = 6.76; 64% females. Controlling for acquiescence produced factor solutions that were more theoretically interpretable than the standard bi-factor modeling, largely used in the field. Findings also raise questions about the theoretical underpinnings of both instruments. We argue that, despite valuable, brief measures of the Dark Triad traits should not come at the expense of a structure adequately reflecting the current knowledge about the multidimensionality of these traits.
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