engleski

Would you do me a favor...? Personality, empathy and helping behavior

There are many reasons people engage in helping behaviors. Some dispositional determinants of these behaviors include personality traits like Agreeableness and Honesty-Humility, as well as dispositional empathy. Moreover, there is certain evidence that even so called the Dark Triad traits (i.e. Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy) can be related to prosocial and helping behaviors under certain circumstances. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore relations between the basic and the dark personality traits, empathy and helping behavior. Study sample consisted of 337 students (280 female, 57 male, mean age 22.09, with SD = 3.72) in Croatia, that filled in on-line self-report measures of both basic and dark personality traits: HEXACO-60 (Ashton & Lee, 2009), Self-Report Psychopathy Scale-Short Form (SRP-SF, Paulhus, Newman & Hare, in press), the short form of Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI-16, Ames, Rose & Anderson, 2006), and Croatian Machiavellisanism Scale (MMS ; ), as well as the short form of Empathy Quotient (EQ, Baron-Cohen & Weelwright, 2004). After approximately one month, students were contacted and asked for a favor that, in average, took half an hour of their time. Surprisingly, doing a favor was not related neither to emotional nor cognitive empathy. Moreover, only psychopathy and narcissism among all the personality traits were related to doing a favor, indicating that those who have more pronounced traits of psychopathy and narcissism are less prone to helping behavior. In sum, these results emphasize the importance of the dark personality traits in the area of individual differences.

Helping behavior; personality; empathy; Dark Triad

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