Factors predictive of sexual violence: Testing the four pillars of the Confluence Model in a large diverse sample of college men

Research on human aggression has progressed to a point at which a unifying framework is needed. Major domain-limited theories of aggression include cognitive neoassociation, social learning, social interaction, script, and excitation transfer theories. Using the general aggression model (GAM), this review posits cognition, affect, and arousal to mediate the effects of situational and personological variables on aggression. The review also organizes recent theories of the development and persistence of aggressive personality. Personality is conceptualized as a set of stable knowledge structures that individuals use to interpret events in their social world and to guide their behavior. In addition to organizing what is already known about human aggression, this review, using the GAM framework, also serves the heuristic function of suggesting what research is needed to fill in theoretical gaps and can be used to create and test interventions for reducing aggression.

Being able to replicate scientific findings is crucial for scientific progress1-15. We replicate 21 systematically selected experimental studies in the social sciences published in Nature and Science between 2010 and 201516-36. The replications follow analysis plans reviewed by the original authors and pre-registered prior to the replications. The replications are high powered, with sample sizes on average about five times higher than in the original studies. We find a significant effect in the same direction as the original study for 13 (62%) studies, and the effect size of the replications is on average about 50% of the original effect size. Replicability varies between 12 (57%) and 14 (67%) studies for complementary replicability indicators. Consistent with these results, the estimated true-positive rate is 67% in a Bayesian analysis. The relative effect size of true positives is estimated to be 71%, suggesting that both false positives and inflated effect sizes of true positives contribute to imperfect reproducibility. Furthermore, we find that peer beliefs of replicability are strongly related to replicability, suggesting that the research community could predict which results would replicate and that failures to replicate were not the result of chance alone.

Three socially aversive traits-Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy-have been studied as an overlapping constellation known as the Dark Triad. Here, we develop and validate the Short Dark Triad (SD3), a brief proxy measure. Four studies (total N = 1,063) examined the structure, reliability, and validity of the subscales in both community and student samples. In Studies 1 and 2, structural analyses yielded three factors with the final 27 items loading appropriately on their respective factors. Study 3 confirmed that the resulting SD3 subscales map well onto the longer standard measures. Study 4 validated the SD3 subscales against informant ratings. Together, these studies indicate that the SD3 provides efficient, reliable, and valid measures of the Dark Triad of personalities.