Areas of contention and other issues covered in Chapter 5 of Mitchell's thesis
Chapter 5 of Dr. Mitchell's thesis concerns a number of "points of contention and other issues." I will only cover a handful of the issues as the rest are covered briefly in my previous articles.
On the Spectrum?
The first is whether or not "continuum models" of normal personality are useful in identifying dark personalities (DPs). These models consider all attributes to exist in the general population to greater or lesser degrees, like the "Big Five" personality traits. If DP existed on a continuum, everyone would place somewhere on the spectrum; some would have a very low DP score, some very high, and others in between.
The response from participants was mixed on this issue, with academics defending continuum models and practitioners holding more of a categorical view of dark personality (i.e. you're a predator, or you're not). In their expert opinion, DPs "have a discrete set of specific attributes," and continuum models aren't specific enough to capture these attributes and subtleties (especially in the use of tactics); nor do they capture the degree of malevolence, which is usually unimaginable to most people.
