Psychopathic boldness: Narcissism, self-esteem, or something in between?

Although psychopathy is one of the most studied and well-validated personality disorders, debate remains regarding the necessity and sufficiency of fearless dominance/boldness. This debate revolves around the robust relations boldness shares with adaptive outcomes (e.g., self-esteem) and the limited relations it evinces with psychopathy's other features and outcomes. Although boldness exhibits moderate to large relations with grandiose narcissism, these relations are less frequently examined at the factor level. The present study examines the relations between psychopathic boldness, narcissism, and other adaptive features in a large, MTurk sample (N = 591). While boldness exhibited moderate to large relations with grandiose narcissism, the use of a three-factor model of narcissism revealed this relation was driven by the agentic extraversion component of narcissism not the antagonistic or neuroticism components. Boldness similarly evinced large, positive relations with self-esteem, and shared nearly identical trait profiles with self-esteem.