Bobby Haddad, Mia Angman, Trevor Archer and Danilo Garcia
Objective: We examined the relationships between individuals’ malevolent tendencies (i.e., the Dark Triad: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy), sociosexual orientation (i.e., behavior, attitude, and desire to participate in uncommited sex) and religious affiliation. Method: The participants consisted of US-residents (N = 309) who responded to an online survey through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). A correlation analysis was used to investigate the association between variables and multiple regressionanalyses were used to investigate if religious affiliation moderated the effect of the Dark Triad composite (i.e., the sum of the three dark traits) on global sociosexual orientation. Results: The Dark Triad traits had a positive relationship with each of the dimensions of sociosexual orientation, but only psychopathy was significantly negatively related to religious affiliation. Religious affiliation, in turn, was negatively related to sociosexual orientation and its’ dimensions. Religious affiliation, however, did not moderate the effect of Dark Triad on sociosexual orientation. Conclusion: Our findings confirm the impact of religiousness/spirituality upon aspects of malevolent character traits, that is, deviant sexual orientation.