Development and Initial Validation of the HEXACO-Triarchic Scales

The Triarchic Model posits that psychopathic personality traits are captured by three dimensions-boldness, meanness, and disinhibition. Recent findings indicate considerable overlap between the Triarchic constructs and the six-factor HEXACO (honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience) model of normal personality traits (Ruchensky & Donnellan, 2017). The current study describes the development and validation of Triarchic proxy scales drawn from the HEXACO-100 item pool (Lee & Ashton, 2016) using two large undergraduate samples (Ns = 545, 398) and a community sample from MTurk (N = 391). The HEXACO-Triarchic scales were strongly correlated with other Triarchic measures and showed theoretically predicted relations with criterion variables. The HEXACO-Triarchic scales also appear to have greater discrimination between the three Triarchic dimensions compared with alternative measures. Public Significance Statement This study developed and validated a measure of the Triarchic Model of psychopathy using an existing measure of the HEXACO model of normal personality traits. These new scales, referred to as the HEXACO-Triarchic scales, related in expected ways to other measures of the Triarchic Model as well as correlates pertinent to clinical and criminal justice settings, such as personality pathology and aggression.