The Dark Triad and trait aggression in women and men: Clarifying the substantive consequences of factor overlap

Although the Dark Triad (i.e., psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism) has been consistently linked to aggressive behaviors such as bullying and violence, two important questions about these associations remain unresolved. First, little is known about how they differ between women and men. Second, it remains unclear how factor overlap affects their substantive interpretation. Drawing on evolutionary accounts of intrasexual competition, we predict stronger associations with physical and verbal aggression in men and hostility in women. We test these predictions on Short Dark Triad and Buss and Perry Aggression Questionnaire data from 600 Chilean adults, using bifactor (S−1) structural equation modeling. We find that Machiavellianism predicts all aggression outcomes, psychopathy-specific variance positively predicts physical aggression, and narcissism-specific variance negatively predicts hostility. Sex differences in aggression overlap with sex differences in aversive traits, but none of the Dark Triad-aggression associations consistently differ by sex. By introducing the variance-weighted latent effect (VWLE), we provide the first substantive translation of these bifactor associations. VWLE clarifies how reference facet and trait-specific associations reinforce one another for psychopathy but largely cancel out for narcissism, making the implications of residual coefficients explicit.