Reconceptualizing ethically and socially aversive (“dark”) personality traits

Many ethically and socially aversive (“dark”) traits have been proposed to account for corresponding behaviors. Despite their popularity and success in predicting relevant outcomes, research on aversive traits is beset both by conceptual overlap between traits assigned different labels and by heterogenous conceptualizations of traits assigned the same label. This not only implies a lack of distinctiveness, but also a lack of consistency and specificity concerning relations to outcomes. As a remedy, any aversive trait can be conceived as the conjuncture of (a) the aversive essence shared across all aversive traits and (b) an essentially non-aversive unique part. Beyond tackling the identified issues, this approach avails several additional benefits, including increased parsimony while maintaining or increasing predictive power.