Got a bumper sticker? You might also have psychopathic tendencies

Does your T-shirt inform people you have “never kissed a Tory”? Or perhaps your bumper sticker tells Remainers, “You lost, get over it”?
Well, then you are letting people know about two things: your politics, and, quite possibly, your tendency to psychopathy.
A study in the US has found that people who engage in “ideological poking” — displaying political symbols designed to mock their opponents — score more highly for psychopathic traits.
Matejas Mackin, from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, conducted the study because, as he perused the bumper stickers and T-shirts of post-Trump America, it felt like something had changed.
“When I was a little younger, I would typically see campaigns with signs that would say something like ‘Hope’ or ‘Vote Obama’ or “Vote McCain’. Then from 2016 onwards, you start to see more and more people expressing their beliefs by insulting the other side. I was interested in understanding this phenomenon. Why do people do it?
“I was curious if it is the case that people who engage in this kind of behaviour are like you and me, is it the case that these individuals tend to have a little bit darker dispositions?”
His study, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, sought to investigate this. It involved almost 500 US residents, all of whom completed a questionnaire assessing their tendency towards “dark personality traits”.
The questionnaire is a standard test looking at narcissism (eg, people rated how much they agreed with statements such as “I tend to want others to admire me”), Machiavellianism (“I tend to manipulate others to get my way”), and psychopathy (“I tend to be unconcerned with the morality of my actions”). Everyone has these traits to some degree, but in certain people they are stronger.
For the second part of the study, Mackin presented people with a range of political slogans and bumper stickers, tailored to whether they were Democrat or Republican. He asked them how willing they would be to display them. Some were simply supportive of their own side. Others were attacks on the other side, such as “Confuse a Democrat/Republican. Use facts and logic”.
Mackin found that there was no link between Machiavellianism and narcissism and ideological poking, but there was with psychopathy. It wasn’t a huge effect, and it certainly didn’t mean that people who did it were clinically psychopathic, but the association was clear.
He said that this might explain some of the toxicity we have seen, on both sides of the Atlantic, in the past decade. “It does seem to be the case that the contemporary polarised political climate might give individuals with slightly darker dispositions more of a channel to speak,” he said.
But, he cautioned, even if ideological poking could be considered crass, it may not be actively malicious. This is why his next research will be in trying to understand people’s motivations.
“When people use these products that derogate political opponents, at first blush it would seem they want to insult the out-group.” But, he said, there’s another explanation, especially in the US. “Political rallies have kind of become like Grateful Dead shows for politically engaged liberals and conservatives. It’s a time where you can get together with like-minded others and make fun of the out-group together. So maybe people use these products more to affirm their in-group.”
It’s just that, these days, the way you affirm who you are is by insulting those you are not.