Dark Tetrad of Personality and Lying in a Cheating Task

How much do people lie, who lies, and who lies a lot? Deception literature often seeks to answer these questions. Dark personality traits such as Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism have been shown to play a role in who lies and who lies a lot. We investigated which dark personality traits predicted lying and lying frequency in a cheating task. Participants completed a survey with the short dark tetrad (SD4) and a numerical matrix task. Participants had the option to lie about their performance in the matrix task while they could not be caught. We found Machiavellianism to predict lying while psychopathy predicted lying frequency when we controlled for the effect of age and gender. Sadism did also predict lying but only when not controlling for age