What Lies Beneath the Dark Triad Dirty Dozen: Varied Relations with the Big Five

The Dirty Do-en is a recently developed, concise measure of the Dark Triad (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, & Machiavellianism). However, recent evidence has questioned the validity of this scale. In two studies we provide details about this measure in as much as it relates to the Big Five (i.e., Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness) whilst controlling for the shared variance ajnongst the three (Study \: N = 123) and examining meta-traits and aspects of the Big Five (Study 2;N= 290). The Dirty Dozen subscales share an unstable core, which was localized to limited emotional stability, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. Each of the Dark Triad traits, however, was associated with unique aspects of the Big Five providing evidence that each trait measures something slightly different. For instance, psychopathy was linked to agreeableness through limited compassion but Machiavellianism was linked through limited politeness. In a series of factor analyses the scale is best explained by a bifaetor model. Results provide multifaceted definitions of eaeh of the aspects of the Dirty Dozen and evidence of its structural properties. Jonason and Webster (2010) recently introduced their Dirty Dozen measure of the Dark Triad (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism; Paulhus & Williams, 2002). It is a brief measure of each of the three traits composed of 4 items for each dimension. The primary problem facing this measure is its brevity like short measures in general (Burisch, 1997; Smith, McCarthy, & Anderson, 2000). Reeent work suggests that although the Dirty Dozen measure of psychopathy is correlated in a similar fashion with other measures of personality as longer measures of psychopathy, the correlations are somewhat weaker (Miller et al., 2012). Despite this, the Dirty Dozen has good convergent validity with the HEXACO model of personality (Jonason & McCain, 2012), has good psychometric properties in terms of Item Response Theory (Webster & Jonason, 2013), and has been useful in theory-testing studies (Jonason & Buss, 2012; Jonason, Koenig, & Tost, 2010; Jonason, Valentine, Li, & Harbeson, 2011). However,