Can we compare personality scores of men and women?
What does science say about the differences between men and women?
Recently I have been reading a lot of articles on the topic of personality traits, and I have also participated in a workshop on personality evaluation.
Despite the fact that the Big Five Questionnaire hold it’s predominant position as the most used tool for personality evaluation, more recently I encountered a lot of articles where researchers verified the correlation of their variable of interest with three personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Those three are usually referred to as the Dark Triad. If you have 5 spare minutes, you can test yourself on openpsychometrics.org.
Of those articles that employed the Dark Triad as a measure of personality, Szabó and Jones’s work is one of the most interesting. Started from the mixed findings of previous studies, they hypothesized and tested the possibility that individuals’ gender may affect obtained results, especially for its relationship with impulsivity.
Impulsivity and Gender differences
In the article, the authors provide a clear and exhaustive definition of the construct of impulsivity, which is characterized by intolerance to action delaying, inability to delay gratifications, premature decision making and lack of planning. Not only, but there are also positive aspects of impulsivity, including venturousness, spontaneity and fast information processing.
In previous work, this construct has been proven to be different in males and females. Different studies demonstrated that boys have higher levels of impulsivity than females and that this factor may explain the difference in the number of crimin acts committed by males and females.
Not only, but previous studies highlighted the fact that the relationship between sexuality and Dark Triad were different in men and women. For example, in individuals high in Machiavellianism, men were less likely than women to engage in short-term sexual behavior but also exhibited a higher level of self-controlled.
Because of this, researchers hypothesized the relationship between gender, impulsivity and dark personality traits.
Methods and Results
Szabó and Jones employed the Short Dark Triad Scale, a 27 items inventory used to measure the three personality components, and the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale, a 30 items questionnaire, to assess participants impulsivity.
Results from their pool of 898 participants showed that not only both Machiavellianism and psychopathy were positively correlated with the score on the impulsivity scale, but also that the latter had a higher correlation with non-planning than Machiavellianism
Moreover, despite the fact that no gender differences were found between the impulsivity scores of males and females, an interesting trend arises: for individuals low in Machiavellianism, average impulsivity scores are higher for men than women, but for individuals high in Machiavellianism, the opposite situation is present, with women showing higher levels of impulsivity.
Should we compare results of males and females?
Results of this study are extremely interesting, but that’s not the only question we should ask ourselves. We often deal, as in the above study, with results from personality assessment tools (including the Dark Triad and the Big 5) that we use to verify the relationship between individuals’ personality traits and other concepts. But should we really aggregate the results of males and females?
In Szabó and Jones work, despite no significant differences were found within the raw scores, the relationship was modulated by different factors.
From now on, I will definitely double check twice all the possible interaction of my participants’ gender on the relationship between their personality traits and other behaviors. What do you think? What are your thoughts on this article? Let me know what do you think of this topic in the comments section!
Source:
Szabó, E., & Jones, D. N. (2019). Gender differences moderate Machiavellianism and impulsivity: Implications for Dark Triad research. Personality and Individual Differences, 141, 160–165. [URL]
