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.
The connection between psychopathy and diminished concern for casualties of conflict follows from the definition of the trait.
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.
That is not comforting. It is, however, true.
Read next: The Polycrisis: What Happens to the Human Mind When Everything Goes Wrong at Once ·
