Story perspectives

Fake Job Applications Boost Narcissism, Reduce Psychopathy, Sadism

7/6/2026

Summary

Researchers Uncover Dark

Researchers Bojana M. Dinic and Irena Boskovic found that faking an application raised narcissism scores and lowered psychopathy and sadism scores.
Machiavellianism scores stayed stable while higher honest Machiavellianism predicted a smaller rise in communal management.
High narcissism and Machiavellianism linked to agentic management whereas high psychopathy or sadism linked to low communal management.
No Dark Tetrad trait correlated with supernormality, and the Serbian sample of young women limits generalizability.

Summary

Researchers Test Deception

Researchers instructed 104 Serbian volunteers to “fake good.”
They defined agentic management as exaggerating competence and status and communal management as inflating cooperativeness.
They introduced “supernormality” to describe denial of common health complaints.
The authors note that these deceptive strategies appear frequently in high-stakes contexts such as job interviews and forensic assessments.
The sample was 87 women and 17 men, average age 27, mostly students or employed.

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Researchers Uncover Dark

Researchers Bojana M. Dinic and Irena Boskovic found that faking an application raised narcissism scores and lowered psychopathy and sadism scores.
Machiavellianism scores stayed stable while higher honest Machiavellianism predicted a smaller rise in communal management.
High narcissism and Machiavellianism linked to agentic management whereas high psychopathy or sadism linked to low communal management.
No Dark Tetrad trait correlated with supernormality, and the Serbian sample of young women limits generalizability.

1 / 2