Willingness to share, impulsivity and the Dark Triad traits Marta Malesza 1 & Kasper Kalinowski 2 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract The purpose of the study was to test hypotheses regarding a form of social discounting in which the subjective value of a reward decreases as a function of the number of people it is shared with. Along with the Short Dark Triad measure, participants (N = 284) completed a social discounting task in which they were asked to make choices between a hypothetical amount of money to keep for themselves and a hypothetical amount of money to share with a specified number of people. They also competed a delay discounting task, in which they were asked to make choices between immediate small outcomes and delayed bigger outcomes. To probe the unique contribution of three Dark Triad traits predicting both discounting types, we conducted separated multiple linear regression analyses. The study revealed that the higher one’ s psychopathy and Machiavellianism, the greater one’ s social discounting, indicating more selfishness and lack of willingness to share with other people. On the other hand, the higher one’ s narcissism, the smaller one’ s social discounting, indicating more willingness to share. These findings place in doubt the selfish- ness of narcissism. Second, in case of delay discounting, only psychopathy and narcissism predicted steep delay discounting, suggesting that individuals who score high in psychopathy and narcissism tend to obtain rather immediate outcomes. Also, Machiavellianism was not significantly associated with delay discounting. Finally, a positive correlation was observed between delay and social discounting. The results indicated that social discounting was related to, but not equivalent to, delay discounting. Keywords Dark triad . Delay discounting . Social discounting . Impulsivity . Sharing Introduction The Dark Triad — narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism (Paulhus and Williams 2002)—appears to have pervasive implications in domains of human life ranging from self-control to social influence settings (for a review see Furnham et al. 2013). Although narcissism and psychopathy are originated in clinical literature and practice, they are treat- ed as sub-clinical traits in the Dark Triad composite. Hence, the Dark Triad deals with narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism at non-clinical levels that varies within the normal population (Paulhus and Williams 2002). Individuals high in narcissism crave authority and power, assume self- entitlement, hold biased view towards the self, seek attention and admiration, exploit social relationships, tend to be manip- ulative, and possess high self-esteem (Emmons 1987; Raskin and Hall 1981). People high in Machiavellianism are de- scribed as cold, cynical, pragmatic, low in pro-social orienta- tions, and as engaging in immoral thinking. They show cal- lous emotional detachment and strive for agentic goals such as money, power, and status, they are calculating and use exploit- ative manipulation tactics (Christie and Geis 1970; Jones and Paulhus 2009). Finally, individuals high in psychopathy are characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired em- pathy and remorse, and impulsive, disinhibited, egotistical traits (Hare and Neumann 2008; Williams et al. 2003). Delay Discounting and Social Discounting Literature on personality offers multiple definitions of impul- sivity, identifying several of its constituent parts such as in- sensitivity to consequences, an inability to wait, risk taking, and cognitive and motor impulsivity (Ainslie 1975; de Wit 2008; Madden and Bickel 2010; Reynolds et al. 2006). It seems that the only consensus among researchers is that im- pulsivity is multidimensional in nature (Kirby and Finch 2010; Reynolds et al. 2006). To overcome this problem, some authors refer to the behavioral concept of impulsivity, * Marta Malesza 1 Warsaw, Poland 2 Faculty of Education, Psychology and Sociology, University of Zielona Góra, Zielona Góra, Poland Current Psychology https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00351-5