ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Using a Serious Game for a Brief Assessment of Dark Personality in the Workplace
Provisionally accepted
- University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The assessment of dark personality using self-report questionnaires suffers limitations due to social desirability, bias, and response faking, particularly in organizational contexts. This research examines the psychometric properties of an extended version of VASSIP, a gamified assessment to briefly measure dark personality through an immersive situational judgment test (SJT). A sample of 395 Spanish workers (47.4% female, Mjob experience = 10.4 years) participated in the study, completing questionnaires of the target variables and playing the gamified assessment. The hard-gamified extension of VASSIP has a unidimensional factor structure with 5 items. Validity was supported by direct associations with Honesty-Humility, moral disengagement, task performance, and counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs). Therefore, this measure appears to be valuable for briefly assessing dark personality, although its predictive capacity could be optimized. Its situational approach offers a more nuanced understanding of how individuals manifest dark personality in workplace scenarios.
Keywords: Dark personality, Gamification, game-related assessment, Gamified assessment, Jobperformance, Counterproductive work behaviors
Received: 15 Aug 2025; Accepted: 18 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Navas-Sánchez, Fernández-Del-Río and Ramos-Villagrasa. 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: Pedro José Ramos-Villagrasa, pjramos@unizar.es
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.