Four distinct ethical perspectives are discussed: (a) situationism, which advocates a contextual analysis of morally questionable actions; (b) absolutism, which uses inviolate, universal moral principles to formulate moral judgments; (c) subjectivism, which argues that moral judgments should depend primarily on one's own personal values; and (d) exceptionism, which admits that exceptions must sometimes be made to moral absolutes. The Ethics Position Questionnaire (EPQ), which assesses degree of idealism and rejection of universal moral rules in favor of relativism, was developed to measure the extent to *. which individuals adopt one of these four ethical ideologies. The two scales that make up the EPQ were found to have adequate internal consistency, were reliable over time, were not correlated with social desirability, and were not related to scores on the Denning Issues Test. The relativism scale did correlate with scores on Hogan's Survey of Ethical Attitudes. When the scales were used to classify individuals into one of the four different ethica^ ideologies, predictions concerning differences in each ideology's moral judgment processes were supported.In 1898 Sharp, an early psychologist interested in moral judgment, complained that his research was hindered by the lack of agreement among his subjects concerning what was moral and what was not. Sharp noted that even when people with apparently similar characteristics were making judgments about the same person, they still managed to sometimes reach opposite conclusions concerning the other's moral worth. Although Sharp entertained the notion that the lack of consensus that typifies moral deliberations indicates that people, including moral philosophers, are simply incompetent or careless, he preferred an individual differences explanation. A person faced with making a decision about Portions of this article are based on the author's PhD dissertation submitted to the Department of Psychology at the University of Florida. Thanks are extended to the following members of the committee for their critical commentary:

We reviewed studies of the Dark Triad (DT) personality traits--Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy-and meta-analytically examined their implications for job performance and counterproductive work behavior (CWB). Relations among the DT traits and behaviors were extracted from original reports published between 1951 and 2011 of 245 independent samples (N = 43,907). We found that reductions in the quality of job performance were consistently associated with increases in Machiavellianism and psychopathy and that CWB was associated with increases in all 3 components of the DT, but that these associations were moderated by such contextual factors as authority and culture. Multivariate analyses demonstrated that the DT explains moderate amounts of the variance in counterproductivity, but not job performance. The results showed that the 3 traits are positively related to one another but are sufficiently distinctive to warrant theoretical and empirical partitioning.

We examined the relationships between Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy-the three traits of the Dark Triad (DT)-and the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality. The review identified 310 independent samples drawn from 215 sources and yielded information pertaining to global trait relationships and facet-level relationships. We used meta-analysis to examine (a) the bivariate relations between the DT and the five global traits and 30 facets of the FFM, (b) the relative importance of each of the FFM global traits in predicting DT, and (c) the relationship between the DT and FFM facets identified in translational models of narcissism and psychopathy. These analyses identified consistent and theoretically meaningful associations between the DT traits and the facets of the FFM. The five traits of the FFM, in a relative importance analysis, accounted for much of the variance in Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy, respectively, and facet-level analyses identified specific facets of each FFM trait that were consistently associated with narcissism (e.g., angry/hostility, modesty) and psychopathy (e.g., straightforwardness, deliberation). The FFM explained nearly all of the variance in psychopathy (R(2) c  = .88) and a substantial portion of the variance in narcissism (R(2) c  = .42).

ABSTRACT. Ethics position theory (EPT) maintains that individuals' personal moral philosophies influence their judgments, actions, and emotions in ethically intense situations. The theory, when describing these moral viewpoints, stresses two dimensions: idealism (concern for benign outcomes) and relativism (skepticism with regards to inviolate moral principles). Variations in idealism and relativism across countries were examined via a meta-analysis of studies that assessed these two aspects of moral thought using the ethics position questionnaire (EPQ; Forsyth, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39, 175-184, 1980). This review identified 139 samples drawn from 29 different countries, for a total sample of 30,230 respondents, and concluded that (a) levels of idealism and relativism vary across regions of the world in predictable ways; (b) an exceptionist ethic is more common in Western countries, subjectivism and situationism in Eastern countries, and absolutism and situationism in Middle Eastern countries; and (c) a nation's ethics position predicted that country's location on previously documented cultural dimensions, such as individualism and avoidance of uncertainty (Hofstede, Culture's Consequences: International Differences in WorkRelated Values, 1980). Limitations in these methods and concerns about the validity of these cross-cultural conclusions are noted, as are suggestions for further research using the EPQ.

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