Aggressive behaviors in highly sadistic and highly impulsive individuals

Abstract Sadism is tightly linked with aggressive behaviors against others, akin to impulsivity. However, whether the aggressive behaviors predicted by sadism and impulsivity differ remains unknown. In this work, self-reported scales were used in Study 1 (N = 1183, 579 males) with correlation analyses, while Studies 2 and 3 utilized the Taylor aggression paradigm and compared reactive/proactive aggression across three groups of individuals: those with highly sadistic traits but an average level of impulsivity (N = 30, 15 males), those with high impulsivity but an average level of sadism (N = 30, 15 males), and those with both low sadism and low impulsivity (i.e., control group; N = 30, 15 males). Results showed that sadism was more strongly correlated with proactive aggression than was impulsivity and that impulsivity was more strongly related to reactive aggression than was sadism. Furthermore, provocation led to more reactive aggression in highly impulsive individuals than in the control group, and highly sadistic individuals showed more proactive aggression than did the control group. The dominance analysis revealed that impulsivity drives reactive aggression over and above sadism, but proactive aggression is mainly driven by sadism. Hence, sadistic and impulsive traits are relatively associated with different types of aggression.