Perception and Evaluation of Antisocial Behaviors

Abstract

This project aimed to provide a better understanding of how personality traits impact the manner in which people perceive and evaluate antisocial behaviors performed by others. There were two studies completed. The first included 297 responses recorded from students in an introductory psychology course at a university in the Southern US. The second study included 177 responses recorded from Amazon’s mTurk. Participants were first asked to read vignettes of various antisocial behaviors, then respond to a series of questions about the individuals who performed these behaviors. The vignettes that were provided to the survey-takers include the topics of romantic cheating, academic cheating, theft, littering, lying, and illegal substance use. The following questions were measuring the Dark Tetrad (Palhus, 2020), HEXACO (Ashton, 2009), and Fundamental Social Motives (Neel, 2016) personality inventories in order to measure personality traits that may be relevant to perception of antisocial behaviors. Several hypotheses regarding the relationships between these variables were tested and exploratory analyses were conducted as well. A number of significant relationships were identified in both samples.