Individual Differences in Aggression: The Role of Dark Personalities

Is aggression a trait? Specifically, do individual differences in aggression form a coherent and stable continuum along which all of us can be arrayed? That is the assumption behind the development of the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire (BPAQ) (1992), often considered the gold standard for dispositional aggression.1 This notion is supported by a number of empirical findings. First, scores on the BPAQ show large variance and substantial temporal stability (Becker, 2007). BPAQ scores also map onto other personality variables in a consistent fashion (Egan, 2009; Miller et al., 2012).