A person-centered view of prejudice: The Big Five, Dark Triad, and prejudice

While contextual factors are important in understanding prejudice, person-centered factors matter as well. In a sample of American students and MTurk workers (N = 473), we assessed the correlations between personality traits and two forms of prejudice; cognitive and affective prejudice. People who were low in agreeableness and openness, and high in neuroticism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism held more overall prejudicial attitudes. The Dark Triad traits accounted for 2% additional variance towards explaining individual differences in prejudice above that associated with the Big Five traits for cognitive prejudice, but the same cannot be said for individual differences in affective prejudice. This highlights the importance of both discerning the type of discrimination and of the Dark Triad traits to be used in parallel with the Big Five traits when understanding prejudice. Adopting a person-centered approach to prejudice provides inference of the within-person factors that affect social attitudes.