Does personality predict support for war? a new study has a disturbing answer
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
Support for war is most strongly linked to sadism, a tendency to derive pleasure from others' suffering, rather than anger or nationalism.
Authoritarian submission and psychopathy also predict pro-war attitudes, reflecting deference to authority and emotional detachment from others' pain.
Contrary to popular belief, narcissism and Machiavellianism do not significantly predict support for military conflict among the general population.
Masculinity-related violence norms strongly correlate with war support, highlighting cultural ideas about aggression and strength.
Arguments against war are more persuasive when delivered by authoritative figures rather than anti-authority voices, due to the psychological basis of war support.
GLOSSARY
Sadism
A personality trait characterized by deriving pleasure from others' pain or discomfort, measured as a mild but consistent tendency rather than clinical violence.
Authoritarian Submission
A psychological orientation involving deference to established authority, rigid hierarchy adherence, and hostility toward social challengers, linked to support for strong leadership and military action.
Psychopathy
A personality trait marked by callousness and emotional detachment from others' suffering, associated with greater acceptance of military conflict.
Dark Tetrad
A set of four personality traits—sadism, psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism—studied for their links to antisocial behavior; only sadism and psychopathy predicted war support here.
Masculinity-Related Violence Norms
Cultural beliefs that associate violence, aggression, and emotional hardness with masculinity and strength, strongly predicting support for military conflict.
Gut-Level Sense
The intuitive, emotional basis on which people form initial judgments about war, influenced by personality traits rather than rational analysis.
FAQ
Which personality trait most strongly predicts support for war according to the study?
The study found that sadism, the tendency to derive pleasure from others' suffering, is the strongest personality predictor of support for war, surpassing traits like anger or nationalism.
Why do narcissism and Machiavellianism not predict war support as expected?
Despite popular assumptions, narcissism and Machiavellianism showed no significant association with war support in the general UK population, suggesting that vanity and strategic calculation are less influential than emotional and authoritarian traits.
How do masculinity-related violence norms influence attitudes toward military conflict?
Men who endorse norms linking violence and aggression to masculinity are significantly more likely to support military action, indicating cultural beliefs about strength and emotional hardness play a key role.
What implications do these findings have for anti-war arguments?
Arguments against war are more effective when delivered by authoritative figures rather than anti-authority voices, because those who support war often process messages based on the messenger's perceived authority rather than the argument's logic.
Does personality fully explain support for war?
No, personality explains part of the variance in war support, but context, history, national identity, media framing, and perceived legitimacy of the enemy also significantly influence public opinion.
EDITORIAL NOTE
This piece is part of The Present Minds — essays on psychology, identity, and modern life.
Posted by The Present Minds • March 9, 2026 • Psychology
Does personality predict support for war? a new study has a disturbing answer
Does personality predict support for war? The question sounds abstract until the week it is published, which happened to be the same week missiles hit Tehran and three American soldiers came home in coffins.
A study by researchers Alexander Yendell and David Herbert, published in the journal Politics and Governance, surveyed over a thousand people across the UK population and looked for links between specific personality traits and attitudes toward military conflict.
The study did not ask whether war was sometimes justified. It asked what kind of person is most likely to think it is.
The findings are uncomfortable in ways that go beyond the obvious.
What the Study Found
The personality trait most strongly associated with support for war was not what most people would predict.
It was not anger. It was not nationalism. It was not even a particularly political trait in the conventional sense.
It was sadism.
Sadism, as a psychological construct, does not mean what most people picture. In the research literature it describes a measurable tendency to derive pleasure from other people’s pain or suffering.
Not clinical. Not violent in any direct sense. A mild but consistent appetite for the discomfort of others, which shows up in everyday behaviour as the person who enjoys watching someone fail, who finds a particular satisfaction in the cutting remark, who laughs at something that hurts and feels briefly, quietly better for it.
That trait, measured on a validated scale in a representative UK sample, was the personality characteristic most consistently associated with telling researchers that military conflict was a legitimate and desirable response to international disputes.
The second strongest predictor was authoritarian submission: a psychological orientation toward deference to established authority, rigid adherence to hierarchy, and hostility toward those who challenge the social order. People who score high on authoritarian submission tend to believe that strong leadership justifies strong measures.
That rules exist to be enforced. That those who question authority are, in some fundamental way, a threat.
Psychopathy also emerged as a significant predictor. People with elevated psychopathic traits, characterised by callousness and emotional detachment from the suffering of others, were meaningfully more likely to support military action.
The Surprise Finding
Here is the part the researchers did not fully expect.
Narcissism and Machiavellianism, two of the other traits in the so-called Dark Tetrad of personality, showed no significant association with war support.
This matters because narcissism and Machiavellianism are the traits most commonly associated in popular discourse with the kind of political behaviour that leads to wars.
The vain leader who needs a military victory to prove something. The calculating strategist who treats human lives as variables in a geopolitical equation.
Those traits, it turns out, do not particularly predict whether an ordinary person in the UK population will support military conflict. What predicts it is something simpler and more visceral. Not vanity. Not calculation.
The enjoyment of harm. The comfort of submission to authority. The emotional detachment that allows another person’s suffering to register as acceptable collateral.
The researchers also found that masculinity-related violence norms were among the strongest predictors in the study. Men who endorsed the idea that violence is an appropriate expression of masculinity, that aggression is inherent to strength, that emotional hardness is a virtue, were significantly more likely to support military action.
This was described as one of the most robust findings in the entire study.
Why This Is Not Surprising and Why It Still Lands
None of these findings are entirely new in isolation. Research over decades has established links between authoritarian personality structures and support for aggressive foreign policy.
What the study does that is new is bring these findings together in a single UK population sample, at a moment when a specific conflict is active, and show that the psychological architecture of support for war is not primarily driven by ideology or geopolitics but by something more fundamental: the specific emotional and personality features that make violence feel acceptable, even appealing.
The political debate about any given war is conducted in the language of strategy, justice, proportionality, and national interest. These are real considerations and they matter.
But underneath the argument, in the space where people form their gut-level sense of whether fighting is the right answer, the study suggests that personality is doing significant work that the argument is not.
What It Means for How We Argue
The researchers noted one practical implication of their findings that is worth dwelling on.
If support for war is driven meaningfully by authoritarian submission, then arguments against military action are unlikely to be persuasive when they come from sources perceived as anti-authority. A retired general who opposes a conflict will be more persuasive to the pro-war population than a peace activist making the same argument with superior evidence.
The messenger carries more weight than the message, because the receiver is not primarily processing the logic. They are processing the authority signal.
This is dispiriting from the perspective of rational public discourse. It suggests that the arguments most likely to change minds are not the best arguments but the ones delivered in the right register, by the right kind of voice, wearing the right kind of credentials.
It also suggests something about the limits of simply providing better information to people whose support for or opposition to conflict is rooted not in analysis but in personality features that formed long before any specific war began.
The Harder Question
Does personality predict support for war fully? No. The study explains part of the variance, not all of it. Context matters. The specific nature of a conflict matters. History, national identity, media framing, and the perceived legitimacy of the enemy all do real work in shaping public opinion that personality alone cannot account for.
What the study establishes is a baseline. Before the specific arguments about any specific war begin, before the maps and the casualty figures and the speeches about freedom and security, a portion of any given population is already oriented toward supporting military action by virtue of who they are.
And another portion is already oriented against it for the same reason.
The conversation about war happens on top of that substrate. Understanding the substrate does not make the conversation easier. But it does make it more honest.
The study was published in a world where a war had just begun. It arrived not as prediction but as explanation. Not telling us what would happen but illuminating what was already happening, underneath the arguments, in the part of the human mind that forms its conclusions before it knows the facts.
Some links on this page may be affiliate links. If you purchase through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
Written by
The Present Minds
Administrator
A digital sanctuary for the overstimulated.
Clarity. Depth. Silence.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Support for war is most strongly linked to sadism, a tendency to derive pleasure from others' suffering, rather than anger or nationalism.
Authoritarian submission and psychopathy also predict pro-war attitudes, reflecting deference to authority and emotional detachment from others' pain.
Contrary to popular belief, narcissism and Machiavellianism do not significantly predict support for military conflict among the general population.
Masculinity-related violence norms strongly correlate with war support, highlighting cultural ideas about aggression and strength.
Arguments against war are more persuasive when delivered by authoritative figures rather than anti-authority voices, due to the psychological basis of war support.
GLOSSARY
Sadism
A personality trait characterized by deriving pleasure from others' pain or discomfort, measured as a mild but consistent tendency rather than clinical violence.
Authoritarian Submission
A psychological orientation involving deference to established authority, rigid hierarchy adherence, and hostility toward social challengers, linked to support for strong leadership and military action.
Psychopathy
A personality trait marked by callousness and emotional detachment from others' suffering, associated with greater acceptance of military conflict.
Dark Tetrad
A set of four personality traits—sadism, psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism—studied for their links to antisocial behavior; only sadism and psychopathy predicted war support here.
Masculinity-Related Violence Norms
Cultural beliefs that associate violence, aggression, and emotional hardness with masculinity and strength, strongly predicting support for military conflict.
Gut-Level Sense
The intuitive, emotional basis on which people form initial judgments about war, influenced by personality traits rather than rational analysis.
FAQ
Which personality trait most strongly predicts support for war according to the study?
The study found that sadism, the tendency to derive pleasure from others' suffering, is the strongest personality predictor of support for war, surpassing traits like anger or nationalism.
Why do narcissism and Machiavellianism not predict war support as expected?
Despite popular assumptions, narcissism and Machiavellianism showed no significant association with war support in the general UK population, suggesting that vanity and strategic calculation are less influential than emotional and authoritarian traits.
How do masculinity-related violence norms influence attitudes toward military conflict?
Men who endorse norms linking violence and aggression to masculinity are significantly more likely to support military action, indicating cultural beliefs about strength and emotional hardness play a key role.
What implications do these findings have for anti-war arguments?
Arguments against war are more effective when delivered by authoritative figures rather than anti-authority voices, because those who support war often process messages based on the messenger's perceived authority rather than the argument's logic.
Does personality fully explain support for war?
No, personality explains part of the variance in war support, but context, history, national identity, media framing, and perceived legitimacy of the enemy also significantly influence public opinion.
EDITORIAL NOTE
This piece is part of The Present Minds — essays on psychology, identity, and modern life.
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