View article

Sadistic pleasure – gratuitous enjoyment from inflicting pain on others – has devastating interpersonal and societal consequences. The current knowledge on non-sexual, everyday sadism – a trait that resides within the general population – is scarce. The present study therefore focussed on personality correlates of sadistic pleasure. It investigated the relationship between the Dark Triad traits, and both dispositional and state-level sadistic pleasure.

N = 120 participants filled out questionnaires to assess their level of Dark Triad traits, psychopathy subfactors, and dispositional sadism. Then, participants engaged in an animal-directed task in which they were led to believe that they were killing bugs; and in a human-directed task where they could ostensibly noise blasts another participant. The two behavioral tasks were administered within-subjects, in randomized order. Sadistic …