The Relationship Between The Dark Triad Traits And The Utilitarian Moral Judgement:The Effect Of Cognitive Load

The dark triad traits is composed of Narcissistic, Machiavellianism and subclinical psychopathy. Since 2002 proposed the concept of the dark triad traits, researches on it are increasing year by year. When the Dark triad traits is related with the big five personality, all have significantly negative correlation with agreeableness. And in the HEXACO scale, the dark triad traits is put to shame and honest factors significantly negative correlation. The dark triad traits’ behaviors also show some common features:ruthless, aggressive, deception, love adventure, preference for short periods of time, these common features reflect the dark side of subclinical personality. At the same time many studies have also shown that although the three traits exist medium relevant and have some similarities in behaviors, this is just similar to some extent, differences still exist. In the social practice, the dark traid traits has both the prosocial characteristic like enthusiasm, confidence and the anti-social characteristic, The study of dark triad traits helps to identify antisocial personality foundation, and then reflect on the root of social evils. Therefore this research taken moral judgment as a research point, explored the inclination of moral judgment of dark triad traits, as well as the differences of the deep reasons behind this tendency.In the dual process theory of moral judgment, there are two patterns at work. One is the intuitive mode, which response rapidly, mainly dominated by emotion; the other is manual model, this model is consciously thinking analysis, mainly dominated by the cognitive. The two models determine the individual’s moral judgment together. Generally it is believed that intuition is inclined to deontological judgments, and manual models tend to be utilitarian judgment. Moral judgment in the process, start with the intuitive mode, and intuitive mode always exist and affect our judgment. In this study we challenged this basic assumption, because of the ruthless feature in the dark traid, we thought its intuitive mode is still tend to make utilitarianism judgment. By cognitive load task, we tried to suppress or reduce the influence of human model, studied the differences of moral judgment in intuitive mode of the dark triad.This study contains two researches, first, through the questionnaire we investigated the dark triad inclination of moral judgment; Study two, through the behavior experiment, to join the cognitive load in the process of moral judgment tasks, the cognitive load in dark triad in the process of moral judgment caused different effects. Main results and conclusions are as follows:(1) In the questionnaire survey, there is a significant positive correlation between the dark triad and utilitarian moral judgment, means that high dark triad traits tend to make utilitarian moral judgment.(2) In the behavior experiment, cognitive load effects on moral judgments tend to be different in the dark triad. After joining the cognitive load, low narcissistic personality tended to be more utilitarianism, and utilitarianism tendency reduced in high narcissistic personality; contrastly low Machiavellianism tended to less utilitarianism, utilitarianism tendency of high Machiavellianism reinforced; tendency change in Psychopathic was no significant. Although the high dark traits tend to make more utilitarianism judgment, different personality make such judgment or the reason for the influence factors are different, the dark triad traits still exist great differences.