Everyday Sadism, Self-Importance of Moral Identity and Moral Self-Concept

We aim to examine the relationship between everyday sadism, self-importance of moral identity, and moral self-concept. Everyday sadism is a dispositional tendency to seek or enjoy the infliction of harm, control, or humiliation in interpersonal settings (e.g., Buckels et al., 2013). But how do people with high everyday sadism perceive their own morality? Do they think about themselves in a positive light? Or maybe do they want to only show themselves in a positive light, but inside they feel like immoral people? We aim to find out. We will measure moral self-perception via two constructs. First, the self-importance of moral identity, which has two aspects: 1) the importance of possessing moral traits for myself (internalization) and 2) the importance of showing moral traits to others (symbolization) (Aquino & Reed, 2002). Second, moral self-concept, that is, the extent to which individuals see themselves as currently possessing various moral characteristics (Stake, 1994). The associations between everyday sadism and moral self-assessment were not sufficiently studied. To date, only one study has examined the correlational relationships between everyday sadism, measured with the Short Sadistic Impulse Scale (SSIS), and the self-importance of moral identity (Shahnawaz et al., 2019) measured with scale developed by Aquino & Reed (2002). The results indicated that everyday sadism was negatively associated with the internalization, while not related to symbolization. Related evidence comes from research on psychopathy, measured with the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (LSRP), which has shown negative associations between psychopathy and both dimensions of self-importance of moral identity (Glenn et al., 2010), measured with the previously cited scale (Aquino & Reed, 2002). That is why we could also suspect observing negative correlations between everyday sadism and all measures of moral self-assessment (i.e., internalization, symbolization, moral self-concept). We based our hypotheses on this line of research. From a theoretical perspective, sadism is characterized by the deliberate engagement in harmful behaviors, as these acts are the primary source of pleasure. Research links this trait to relational aggression (Beckett & Longpré, 2024), deficits in empathy and social skills (Sest & March, 2017), a tendency to deliberately undermine cooperation in the workplace (Dierdorff & Fisher, 2022), and a propensity to administer punishment without provocation (Pfattheicher et al., 2017). These findings support the view that individuals high in sadism often adopt a relative or even dismissive approach to moral reasoning. The selection of instruments to measure sadism (SSIS, CAST-12, ASP-8) is based on the results of the conducted adaptation of these tools. Psychopathy (LSRP) will be measured in the study to control the shared variance with everyday sadism.