A new psychological study has found that people who report favorable views of Donald Trump also tend to score higher on measures of callousness, manipulation, and other malevolent traits and lower on empathy and compassion. The findings, based on two large surveys of U.S. adults, shed light on how personality traits relate to political beliefs, including support for conservative ideology and Trump. The research was recently published in the Journal of Research in Personality.
Malevolent personality traits, sometimes called “dark” traits, include tendencies such as manipulativeness, callousness, narcissism, and a lack of empathy. These traits are often captured by concepts like psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism, which together reflect a general disposition toward exploiting or disregarding others for personal gain.
People with stronger malevolent traits may be more comfortable with aggression, dominance, or cruelty and less likely to value fairness or kindness. These tendencies are associated with lower levels of affective empathy (concern for others’ suffering) and, in some cases, higher levels of dissonant empathy (enjoyment of others’ pain). In contrast, benevolent traits reflect the opposite, a disposition marked by compassion, humanism, and a belief in treating others with dignity and respect.
The researchers conducted the study to better understand the psychological traits that underlie political ideology, particularly support for Donald Trump and conservative beliefs. Prior work had already linked conservative ideology with right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance, but the researchers hypothesized that malevolent personality traits might also play a role. They pointed to research describing Trump’s own personality as high in malevolent traits, along with evidence that voters tend to favor politicians whose traits resemble their own.
They were especially interested in whether support for Trump was associated with higher malevolent traits and lower empathy, and whether benevolent traits might predict a more liberal outlook. The study aimed to clarify how these personality dispositions relate to political beliefs and what this might reveal about the deeper psychological dimensions of ideology.
“This paper was several years in the making, starting as a result of the 2016 election, and was designed to address why some people might view favorably a political figure with a history of business failures, bankruptcies, misogynistic statements caught on video, use of charity money for a self-portrait, etc,” explained study author Craig Neumann, a Regents Professor of Psychology at the University of North Texas.
“Also, there is a large literature on personality and ideology (e.g., low honesty-humility associated with conservative ideology), but only recently have there been studies on malevolent personality (e.g., callousness, narcissism, Machiavellianism) and ideology. More critically, few studies have examined the associations between benevolent (affiliative) personality and political ideology. Finally, many studies in this area tend to statistically control demographic factors, but we sought to examine how the associations between personality and ideology might be moderated by gender or minority status.”
To investigate these links, the researchers conducted two large surveys with a total of over 9,000 participants from the United States. The first sample consisted of 1,000 men recruited online, about one-third of whom were racial or ethnic minorities. The second sample included 8,047 men and women who completed personality questionnaires on a public psychology website (Scott Barry Kaufman’s Light Triad page), making it a self-selected group. Both samples leaned liberal, with about 70% to 75% of participants describing themselves as liberal.
Participants in both samples completed a range of validated questionnaires measuring political attitudes, personality traits, and empathy. Political ideology was assessed through questions about general political orientation, preferences for military versus social spending, support for gun control, and evaluations of Trump’s first term as president.
In both samples, participants counted as favorable toward Trump if they gave his first term a grade of C or higher. This included 32% of the first sample and 26% of the second sample. The researchers used structural equation modeling, a statistical technique that allows for the testing of relationships between multiple variables at once, while accounting for measurement errors.
In Sample 1, the researchers measured social dominance orientation (the belief that some groups should dominate others), right-wing authoritarianism (support for conformity, obedience, and traditional norms), and psychopathic traits. In Sample 2, they added measures of broader malevolent traits (psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism) and benevolent traits (humanism, faith in humanity, Kantian respect for others). Empathy was also assessed in the first sample, distinguishing between its emotional, cognitive, and dissonant forms.
The findings consistently showed that people who identified as politically conservative were more likely to score higher on measures of authoritarianism, social dominance, and malevolent personality traits.
In the first sample of men, social dominance and authoritarianism predicted conservative ideology and favorable views of Trump among both white and minority participants, with authoritarianism by far the strongest predictor. Psychopathic traits added a small amount of predictive power, but only among white men. The authors suggest this points to sociocultural factors, not just personality, in the link between psychopathic traits and conservatism.
Support for Trump was also associated with distinct patterns in empathy, which was measured in the first sample. Trump supporters reported lower affective empathy (less emotional concern for others) and higher dissonant empathy (greater enjoyment of others’ suffering), even after controlling for age, education, and racial background. The groups did not differ in cognitive empathy: Trump supporters reported being just as able as others to recognize emotions, but they appeared to care less, on average. In the same sample, the largest difference in psychopathic traits between the groups was in callousness.
In the second, larger sample that included both men and women, the researchers focused on how broad personality dispositions, benevolent versus malevolent, related to political beliefs. They found that people who reported stronger benevolent traits, such as valuing the dignity and worth of others, were more likely to hold liberal views and reject Trump. In contrast, people who reported more malevolent traits, such as manipulation, selfishness, and emotional coldness, were more likely to support Trump and identify as conservative. In this sample, these traits explained 11% of the variation in ideology among men and 3% among women. Benevolent traits were also a stronger predictor of ideology than malevolent ones.
While both men and women showed this pattern, the associations were stronger for men. In other words, malevolent traits were more predictive of conservative ideology among men than among women. Women in the sample tended to score higher on benevolent traits overall and lower on malevolent ones.
Those who viewed Trump favorably reported higher levels of malevolent traits and lower levels of benevolent ones. In other words, Trump supporters scored higher on traits such as Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy, which reflect manipulativeness, entitlement, emotional callousness, impulsivity, and antisocial behavior, and lower on traits such as humanism, faith in humanity, and Kantianism, which reflect compassion, belief in others’ basic goodness, and a commitment to treating people as ends rather than means. Overall, these differences between the groups were small to moderate, running about 0.2 to 0.4 standard deviations.
The group differences remained after accounting for age, gender, income, education, and minority status, explaining 2% to 4% of the variation in trait scores. The authors concluded that personality traits linked to callousness and self-centeredness are associated with conservative ideology and support for Trump.
The new findings align with earlier research showing that Donald Trump’s political appeal has been especially strong among individuals who endorse authoritarian aggression and group-based dominance. In the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump supporters stood out from supporters of other Republican candidates not because they were more submissive to authority or resistant to social change, but because they were more likely to endorse the use of aggressive tactics and hierarchical worldviews that place some groups above others.
The current study builds on this by suggesting that these ideological patterns are not just political opinions; they are linked to deeper psychological dispositions, including lower empathy and stronger malevolent traits like callousness, narcissism, and enjoyment of others’ suffering.
“Consistent with emerging research, our findings suggest a link between malevolent (aversive) personality and conservative political ideology, which in our study included positive view of Trump, and that persons with malevolent personality dispositions view political figures with malevolent traits favorably,” Neumann told PsyPost. “Further, people who view malevolent political figures favorably also report less empathy for others and enjoy the suffering of others.”
“We also found that benevolent (affiliative) dispositions were associated with a liberal political ideology. All of these findings are bolstered by the use of a strong measurement invariance approach, indicating that measurement error or bias cannot account for the results. Finally, we found the same pattern of results across two samples which were from two different historical time periods when views of Trump may have changed (pre- and during COVID-19).”
But the study, like all research, has limitations. Although the study is based on large and diverse samples, the research was cross-sectional, meaning that it cannot determine cause and effect. It is also focused specifically on Trump’s first term in office, and attitudes may have shifted since then. Additionally, the study relied on self-report measures, which can be influenced by personal biases, though the authors screened out inattentive responses.
This research compares average personality trait scores between two groups of people (those who viewed Trump favorably and those who did not). While the researchers found measurable differences, such as higher average scores on traits like psychopathy and lower scores on empathy among Trump supporters, these are group-level trends, not absolute labels. The findings do not mean that all Trump supporters are manipulative or lack compassion, nor that all non-supporters are empathetic or benevolent. Individuals within each group vary widely, and the results reflect differences in average tendencies, not universal characteristics.
“Next papers in the pipeline employ mega-samples from across the globe to further study of the connections between malevolent/benevolent personality and ideology, as well as modeling the core domains involved in Professor John Jost’s theory of motivated social cognition (epistemic, existential, relational) and their connection to ideology in different cultures,” Neumann said.
“Political ideology (left vs. right leaning; liberal vs. conservative) is not necessarily a good or bad thing, if it involves ideas about how to productively arrange our world. However, if a given ideology is fundamentally about one group’s malevolent domination of other individuals, then we should ask ourselves if this is the type of (uncivil) society we want to live in. For instance, does taking Medicaid away from vulnerable people while also giving money to the wealthy involve political malevolence or benevolence?”
The study, “Malevolent vs. benevolent dispositions and conservative political ideology in the Trump era,” was authored by Craig S. Neumann and Darlene A. Ngo.