Psychopathic boldness: Narcissism, self-esteem, or something in between?
Although psychopathy remains to be one of the most well-studied and validated personality disorders, debate remains regarding the necessity and sufficiency of fearless dominance/boldness. The crux of this debate revolves around the robust relations boldness shares with adaptive outcomes (e.g., self-esteem) and the limited relations it evinces with psychopathy’s other features and theoretically-relevant outcomes. Nevertheless, boldness also typically exhibits moderate to large relations with grandiose narcissism; however, these relations are less frequently examined at the factor level. The aim of the present study was to conduct a comprehensive examination of the relations between psychopathic boldness, narcissism, and other adaptive features in a large, Amazon Mechanical Turk sample (N = 591). Consistent with previous findings, boldness exhibited moderate to large relations with grandiose narcissism; however, the use of a trifurcated three-factor model of narcissism demonstrates that boldness is robustly related to an agentic extraversion component of narcissism but evinces small relations with narcissism’s antagonistic and neuroticism-related features. Psychopathic boldness also evinced large, positive relations with self-esteem, and across outcomes, similarity analysis reveal that they exhibit nearly identical trait profiles.