Subclinical psychopathy and the “dark triad” of personality

This paper has two objectives: first, to further our knowledge of subclinical psychopathy by studying its relationship with the other two components of the “dark triad” of personality (narcissism and Machiavellianism) in order to shed more light on the debate about which of these two items is more closely related to psychopathy; second, we studied the self-report instrument SRP-III (Self-Report Psychopathy III, Paulhus, Hemphill, & Hare, in press) as a measure of psychopathy amongst the population (excluding prison inmates), comparing our results with normative data. The sample consisted of 512 Spanish undergraduates. The instruments used were the SRP-III, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI; Raskin & Hall, 1981) and the Machiavellianism Scale (Mach-IV; Christie & Geis, 1970). Regarding the relationship between the components of the dark triad of personality, the results indicate that Machiavellianism is the one most closely related to subclinical psychopathy. Finally, the functioning of the SRP-III in the study sample is similar to the normative sample.