BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Evolutionary Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1644767
This article is part of the Research TopicIndividual Differences from an Evolutionary Perspective: Basic Processes and Applied InsightsView all articles
Adaptiveness of dark personalities: psychopathy and sadism have opposite associations with fertility
Provisionally accepted
- 1Institut za kriminoloska i socioloska istrazivanja, Belgrade, Serbia
- 2University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
- 3Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
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Analyzing the links between behavioral traits and fertility is a pivotal step toward understanding their current adaptiveness and the potential regimes of natural selection acting upon them. In this study, we examined associations between the Dark Tetrad traits—psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sadism—and two fertility indicators: number of children and age of first reproduction, in a representative probabilistic sample of Croatian citizens (N = 690). Regression analyses showed that psychopathy positively predicted the number of children and negatively predicted age of first reproduction; the opposite pattern was observed for sadism. Mediation analysis further revealed that age of first reproduction mediated the relationship between sadism and number of children, while the mediation effect for psychopathy was marginally significant. These findings add to existing evidence suggesting that psychopathy may confer adaptive advantages in terms of evolutionary fitness, potentially supporting positive directional selection for this trait. In contrast, sadism may be maladaptive in an evolutionary context. Additionally, the results contribute to the ongoing debate regarding the potential redundancy of psychopathy and sadism as behavioral dispositions, indicating that such a conclusion may be premature.
Keywords: Dark Tetrad1, psychopathy2, sadism3, Fertility4, natural selection5
Received: 10 Jun 2025; Accepted: 27 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Međedović and Hromatko. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ivana Hromatko, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
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