TRAVIS LANGLEY
Many professionals in psychology examine how we develop our morals,1 but what are good and evil in the first place? The recently regenerated Twelfth Doctor asks Clara if he’s a good man, unsure of the answer himself.2 The previous Doctor does not think of himself as a good man, telling enemies who abducted pregnant Amy, “Good men don’t need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.”3 Can a person, not just his or her actions, be good or evil? In terms of individual personality, what do these primal concepts really mean?
HEXACO
Akin to how personality psychology founder Gordon Allport launched the study of traits through lexical studies (word analyses),4 some personality psychologists added their H factor to the Big Five first by studying trait adjectives in several European and Asian languages.5 The trait lists associated with the Big Five left out many terms related to selflessness or selfishness. Focusing on the positive side of the dimension, they called this new factor Honesty-Humility to give their six-factor theory a name that reads like an alien planet or a spell-casting company, HEXACO: Honesty–Humility, Emotionality (essentially Neuroticism), eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness.
Good: Honesty-Humility
A person scoring high in this factor is unlikely to be boastful, deceitful, hypocritical, pompous, or sly. The Doctor seeks truth and yet he tells many lies. Even a person with good intentions may end up on the not-so-good end of the scale. Long before Clara Oswald has no answer when the Twelfth Doctor asks her if he’s good, Jamie McCrimmon questions the Second Doctor’s priorities: “People have died. The Daleks are all over the place, fit to murder the lot of us, and all you can say is you’ve had a good night’s work.”6
Examples of Honesty-Humility Traits
Faithfulness
Generosity
Honesty
Lack of Pretense
Loyalty
Modesty
Sincerity
Evil: The Dark Tetrad
The dark triad of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism (described in Chapter Nine, “Who Makes a Good Companion?”) is a model of variables that, when combined, strike people as selfish and on the evil side—more so when combined with a fourth trait, sadism, to form a dark tetrad. These constructs tend to go unrepresented in the Big Five, partially correlating with disagreeableness but not completely. All four selfish, overlapping parts of the dark tetrad correlate with the low end of factor H.7
• Psychopathy is a broad personality dimension involving lack of empathy, lack of remorse, or lack of consideration as to what is right or wrong.8 While the Doctor sometimes shows little empathy, insufficient ability to recognize or share the feelings of others, he has a conscience, he cares about right and wrong, and even when he thinks he does not care, he will shift into protector mode as soon as he sees suffering, especially if it involves a crying child.
• Narcissism goes beyond merely thinking highly of oneself. This egotistical, grandiose sense of oneself includes inordinate fascination with oneself. The narcissist is in love with himself or herself. Perhaps in reaction to the Fifth Doctor’s uncertainty, the Sixth Doctor emerges from his regeneration seemingly the most pompous and egotistical of them all. Narcissism, however, is unlikely to be considered narcissistic personality disorder in the case of the person who genuinely has reason to regard his or her own abilities highly.9
• Machiavellianism, classically thought of as the application of deceit and cunning to get what a person wants out of others, psychologically is more of an attitude about such things. The Machiavellian takes a practical, pragmatic view of morality, with a cynical view of moral concerns. Even though Jamie does not believe him under the circumstances, the Second Doctor insists that he has never believed the ends justify the means.10
• Sadism as a personality trait is not the same thing as sexual sadism, which means deriving sexual gratification from inflicting pain on others. Someone with a sadistic personality takes pleasure in other people’s suffering in many ways, possibly none of which include anything erotic. Regardless of which form a sadistic tendency takes, whether sexual or not, combining it with the dark triad produces a personality most people view as evil. A manipulative egotist lacking empathy or conscience seems quite dangerous if that person enjoys hurting others. The Doctor does not enjoy seeing people get hurt, despite moments of anger in which he makes it clear that he believes some of his enemies deserve to hurt. Usually he’s referring to enemies who, themselves, relish the pain of others, such as the cruel Dominators,11 the Kandyman who delights in torturing and killing with confectionary,12 or Angel Bob who taunts the Doctor about murder.13
Gray Areas
Factor H for good and the dark tetrad for evil both remain controversial, with plenty of researchers debating their validity as empirically testable constructs.14 If good and evil themselves were easy to define, members of the human race would not have spent thousands of years arguing over them. We do not stop contemplating them, nor does the Doctor come up with a clear opinion of how they fit himself, but their intangible nature does not make them any less important in our lives. Dismissively saying “We can’t define them” does not make them go away.
References
Allport, G. W., & Odbert, H. S. (1936). Trait-names: A psycho-lexical study. Psychological Monographs, 47(1), i–171.
American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.
Book, A. S., Visser, B., Blais, J., & D’Agata, M. T. (2016). Unpacking more “evil”: What is at the core of the dark tetrad? Personality and Individual Differences, 90, 269–272.
Cleckley, H. M. (1941/1976). The mask of sanity: An attempt to clarify some issues about the so-called psychopathic personality. Maryland Heights, MO: Mosby.
De Raad, B., Barelds, D. P. H., Mlacˇic´, B., Church, A. T., Katigbak, M. S., Ostendorf, F., Hrˇebícˇková, M., Di Blas, L., & Szirmák, Z. (2010). Only three personality factors are fully replicable across languages: Reply to Ashton and Lee. Journal of Research in Personality, 44(4), 442–445.
Freud, S. (1909). Analysis of a phobia in a 5-year-old boy. In Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische under psychopathologische Forshugen, Bd. 1. Reprinted with translation in The sexual enlightenment of children (1963). New York, NY: Collier.
Freud, S. (1940). An outline of psychoanalysis. In Standard edition of the complete works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 23, pp. 141–207). London, UK: Hogarth.
Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on moral development. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row.
Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2005). Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism in the five-factor model and the HEXACO model of personality structure. Personality, and Individual Differences (7), 1571–1582.
Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2012). The H factor of personality: Why some people are manipulative, self-entitled, materialistic, and exploitative—and why it matters for everyone. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfred Laurier University Press.
Piaget, J. (1932). The moral judgment of the child. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Med-edovic´, J., & Petrovic´, B. (2015). The Dark Tetrad: Structural properties and location in the personality space. Journal of Individual Differences, 36(4), 228–236.
Notes
1. e.g., Freud (1909, 1940); Kohlberg (1981); Piaget (1932).
2. Modern episode 8–2, “Into the Dalek” (August 30, 2014).
3. Modern episode 6–7, “A Good Man Goes to War” (June 4, 2011).
4. e.g., Allport & Odbert (1936).
5. Lee & Ashton (2012).
6. Classic serial 4–9, The Evil of the Daleks, pt. 5 (June 17, 1967).
7. Book et al. (2016); Lee & Ashton (2005); Med-edovic´, J., & Petrovic´ (2015).
8. Cleckley (1941/1976).
9. American Psychiatric Association (2013).
10. Classic serial 4–9, The Evil of the Daleks, pt. 5 (June 17, 1967).
11. Classic serial 6–1, The Dominators (August 10–September 7, 1968).
12. Classic serial 25–2, The Happiness Patrol (November 2–16, 1988).
13. Episodes 5–4, “The Time of Angels” (April 24, 2010); 5–5, “Flesh and Stone” (May 1, 2010).
14. e.g., De Raad et al. (2010).