Couple dominance dark personality traits and power motivation

Javier I. Borráz-León⁽¹⁾, Coltan Scrivner^(1,4), Oliver C. Schultheiss⁽²⁾, Royce Lee⁽³⁾, Dario Maestripieri^(1,4)

⁽¹⁾ Institute for Mind and Biology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

⁽²⁾ Institute of Psychology, Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany

⁽³⁾ Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

⁽⁴⁾ Department of Comparative Human Development, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Correspondence: Dario Maestripieri, dario@uchicago.edu

Published

January 5, 2024

Title

Couple dominance, dark personality traits, and power motivation

Authors

Javier I. Borráz-León(1), Coltan Scrivner(1,4), Oliver C. Schultheiss(2), Royce Lee(3), Dario Maestripieri(1,4)

Keywords

Couple dominance; explicit power; implicit power; psychopathy; borderline; narcissism; autistic-like trait

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Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Author Contributions

JIB-L: Data Analysis, Investigation, Writing - Review & Editing. CS: Data collection, Methodology, Writing – Review & Editing. OCS: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Data Analysis, Writing – Review & Editing. RL: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – Review & Editing. DM: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Resources, Writing – Review & Editing.

Funding

The authors have no funding sources to report.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the late Scott O. Lilienfeld for helpful discussions of conceptual and methodological aspects of this research.

Abstract

In romantic couples, there is usually an asymmetry in decisional power such that one partner is dominant and the other is subordinate. This study investigated the role of sex, ethnicity, self-assessed social status, personality traits, and power motivation (both explicit and implicit) as potential determinants or correlates of couple dominance in a mixed-sex sample of 50 college students. Through a previously validated questionnaire, participants indicated whether they were dominant or subordinate in their romantic relationship, or whether the latter was egalitarian. Major personality domains, narcissism, psychopathy, borderline, autistic-like traits, and explicit power were assessed through questionnaires. Participants also underwent a Picture Story Exercise to evaluate their implicit motives. Being dominant and having high explicit, but not implicit, power motivation were associated with some psychopathic, narcissistic, and/or borderline traits, while autistic-like traits were associated with being subordinate. Traits such as extraversion, conscientiousness, and honesty-humility had weak associations with couple dominance and/or explicit or implicit power motivation. Our findings have implications for the understanding of dominance dynamics within couples and the relationship between personality traits and power motivation.

Introduction

Dyadic dominance constitutes the building block for status hierarchies and both are ubiquitous in socially living vertebrates, including many species of nonhuman primates as well as humans [1]. In human romantic couples, and especially in those in which the relationship has lasted more than a few weeks or months, there is usually an asymmetry in decisional power such that one partner is dominant and the other is subordinate [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. In heterosexual couples, and especially in older couples or couples in which the man is much older than the woman, men are more likely to be dominant and women are more likely to be subordinate [5, 7; but see 8]. When decisional power is roughly shared within a couple and there is no clear-cut dominance, the relationship is considered to be egalitarian [5, 7].

Clear asymmetries in characteristics other than age (e.g., cultural beliefs associated with ethnicity, explicit or implicit power motivation, attractiveness, status in society, earning power, personality traits, etc.), may or may not be associated with couple dominance. Explicit motivation refers to conscious interest in attaining a particular goal (e.g., power), whereas implicit motivation refers to unconscious dispositions [9, 10].

In this study, we investigated the role of sex, ethnicity, self-assessed social status, personality traits, and power motivation (both explicit and implicit) as potential determinants or correlates of couple dominance. We are careful here to clarify that our use of the term ‘traits’ is specific to the instruments and the constructs that they measure, with no assumption that they are static over the life course, inherently genetically transmitted, or inherently pathological. We also will try to sidestep the debate over the precise boundaries between personality traits and personality disorders, given that our real interest here is understanding how personality constructs are related to dyadic relationships.

Previous research on personality traits assessed with the Big-Five Inventory has suggested that extraversion and introversion may be associated with dominance and subordination, respectively [11]. Assessments of personality with the HEXACO or the Autistic Quotient (AQ) questionnaire have suggested that honesty-humility and autistic-like traits may be associated with subordination in dyadic relationships as well [12, 13]. In contrast, dominance may be predicted by narcissistic, psychopathic, and borderline personality traits, all of which seem to be characterized by some degree of self-assertiveness, aggressiveness, and attempts to control, manipulate, and exploit others [14, 15, 16, 17]. Psychopathy, in particular, seems to be characterized, at least in high-functioning, socially successful individuals, by ‘fearless dominance’, that is the tendency to threaten, intimidate, control, and coerce others without any fear of the consequences of such behavior [18, 19, 20]. The hypothesis, however, that personality styles or traits associated with interpersonal aggression (narcissistic, psychopathic, or borderline), in both their dimensional and their pathological manifestations, may be characterized by high power motivation and the tendency to achieve dominance in dyadic relationships has not been systematically investigated (but see [21]).

In this study, we tested two non-mutually exclusive hypotheses: H1) that some personality traits (e.g., extraversion/introversion, honesty-humility, autistic-like traits, narcissism, psychopathy, and borderline) and explicit/implicit power motivation can independently predict or be associated with dominance or subordination in young romantic couples; H2) that explicit/implicit power motives are psychological mechanisms mediating the association between personality traits and couple dominance.

Whether H1) or H2), or both, are supported, we expect that greater power motivation (both explicit and implicit) is positively associated with narcissism, psychopathy, and borderline personality traits, and negatively associated with autistic-like personality and honesty-humility [13, 15, 22, 23]. We further hypothesize that some of these associations may be moderated by sex (H3), such that the association between, for example, narcissism and power motivation, and between psychopathy and power motivation, would be stronger for men than for women, while the association between borderline personality traits and power motivation would be stronger for women than for men. The rationale for this hypothesis is that traits associated with interpersonal aggression can be interpreted as strategies to achieve social success, and that men and women, on average, may use different strategies to pursue and maintain power (i.e., dominance) [21, 24, 25] in heterosexual relationships, especially long-lasting ones.

Methods

Participants and study procedure

A sample of 50 subjects with an age range of 18-53 years participated in this study (n_males = 18, age: M = 27.38, SD = 8.89; nfemales = 32, age: M = 22.71, SD = 3.40); the difference in age between males and females was statistically significant (t = 2.141, p = 0.045). Participants were recruited on the University of Chicago campus through fliers, Marketplace, and a human subject recruitment website (Sona System). Study participants were all heterosexual and were not recruited from a clinical sample. Approximately 32% of