Science

What motivates victim-signalling – the “public and intentional expression of one's disadvantages, suffering, oppression, or personal limitations” (Ok et al., 2021, p. 1635)? And why does victim-signalling at times co-occur with virtue-signalling in what is known as “virtuous-victim signalling”? Being victimized often leads to feelings of vulnerability (Janoff-Bulman & Frieze, 1983) and, as such, genuine victims often avoid actively signalling their victim status (Fohring, 2018). This raises the question: why do some people actively signal victimhood? Noor et al. (2012) and others have demonstrated what they term “competitive victimhood” in which victims are enabled to claim not only compensation from nonvictims, but also immunization from claims on their own moral transgressions – be these deceit, intimidation, or even violence – in transferring resources to themselves or to their social group (Gray & Wegner, 2011). Building on this work, Ok et al. (2021) proposed that the combination of virtue signalling together with victim signalling is a strategic manipulation of non-victims, designed to elicit a transfer of resources from the non-victims to the victim signaller. Importantly, Ok et al. (2021) proposed and validated that this virtuous-victim signal is driven by dark traits of narcissism and amoral Machiavellianism. Here we 1) report a direct replication of the key study (study five) reported by Ok et al. (2021); 2) test robustness of the strategic manipulation model of victim signalling to different outcome measures, and 3) test association with sadism or taking pleasure in or causing pain to others, which has been proposed as a fourth dark trait extending the dark triad to a “dark tedrad”.