Centre for Positive Psychology and Education

To date the measurement of antisocial attitudes and behaviors in social and personality psycholgoy has been limited by psychometrically questionable measures. In order to provide an efficient and effective measure of these traits, a series of studies were conducted to create and validate a concise measure of the Dark Triad called The Dirty Dozen (Jonason & Webster, 2010). In a series of 10 studies (N = 3,266), this measure has been subjected to a variety of psychometric assessments using both Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory. For instance, the measure appears to efficiently recovered information and showed some evidence of differential scale functioning by sex using IRT (Webster & Jonason, 2012), is linked by both a disagreeable and dishonest core when assessed in relation to the Big Five and the HEXACO models of personality (Jonason, Kaufman, Geher, & Webster, 2012; Jonason & McCain, 2012; Jonason & Webster, 2010), and is moderately correlated with the longer, traditional measures of the Dark Triad (Jonason, Luévano , & Adams, 2012; Jonason & Webster, 2010). Subsequent theoretical work has shown it to have predictive validity in the domains of mating (Jonason, Valentine, Li, & Harbeson, 2011), social influence (Jonason & Webster, 2012), and friendship-selection (Jonason & Schmitt, 2012).

I originally intended to be a lawyer but at the 11th hour, I was inspired to pursue a career in academe by a social psychology professor. After I completed my B.A. in Political Science and Communication Sciences and my M.A. in Communication Sciences at the University of Connecticut, I got my Ph.D. in Psychology at New Mexico State University. After graduation, I taught Personality Psychology, Social Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Introductory Psychology at the University of West Florida and the University of South Alabama. At the University of Western Sydney I teach Advanced Research Methods and two honors courses, one in Individual Differences and one in Evolutionary Psychology. By training I am a social-personality psychologist who uses evolutionary theory to derive predictions and account for observable phenomena in personality, individual differences, mating strategies, and sexuality. At heart, I am an inter-disciplinarian; I draw upon Psychology, Economics, Biology, Primatology, Anthropology, and Ethology to understand human nature.

• The Psychometric Properties and Utility of the Dark Triad Dirty Dozen - Presentation (opens in a new window)