UBC Immorality Lab 的发现：those who regularly signal victimhood are more prone to lying and cheating for selfish ends.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2021, Vol. 120, No. 6, 1634–1661
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000329
Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities
Ekin Ok, Yi Qian, Brendan Strejcek, and Karl Aquino
University of British Columbia
We investigate the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue. In our first three studies, we show that the virtuous victim signal can facilitate nonreciprocal resource transfer from others to the signaler. Next, we develop and validate a victim signaling scale that we combine with an established measure of virtue signaling to operationalize the virtuous victim construct. We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits—Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy—more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies. In Study 5, we show that a specific dimension of Machiavellianism—amoral manipulation—and a form of narcissism that reflects a person’s belief in their superior prosociality predict more frequent virtuous victim signaling. Studies 3, 4, and 6 test our hypothesis that the frequency of emitting virtuous victim signal predicts a person’s willingness to engage in and endorse ethically questionable behaviors, such as lying to earn a bonus, intention to purchase counterfeit products and moral judgments of counterfeiters, and making exaggerated claims about being harmed in an organizational context.
Keywords: Dark Triad, unethical behavior, victim-signaling, victimization, virtue-signaling