In the search of a prosocial personality: Personality traits as predictors of prosocial behavior

Prosocial behavior includes a broad range of actions intended to benefit others rather than oneself. Determinants of prosocial behavior can be both situational and dispositional. The most pronounced dispositional determinants of prosocial behavior among personality traits are Agreeableness form the Five Factor model and, even more, Honesty-Humility from the HEXACO model. Moreover, the interesting question is the relationship between prosocial and antisocial behavior. The substantial determinants of the latter are so called dark personality traits (i.e. Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy). The significant proportion of research in this area is conducted solely on self-report measures of prosocial behavior, mostly neglecting the actual behavioral measures. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine which personality traits have the best contribution in predicting prosocial behavior. Data was collected within a larger on-line survey on 337 students from various universities in Croatia (280 female and 57 male). Apart from self-report measures of personality (i.e. HEXACO-60 and Short Dark Triad), a categorical behavioral measure of prosocial behavior was implied. The results of the hierarchical binary logistic regression analysis showed that the best predictor of prosocial behavior is the Dark Triad trait narcissism (in the negative direction), even when controlling for empathy, which was previously shown to be positively related to prosocial behavior and negatively to dark traits. These findings suggest that, when it comes to the prediction of prosocial behavior, the luck can be on the other side of the coin as well.