The Brief Survey of Interpersonal Exploitative Behavior: Preliminary Development and Validation

The development and preliminary validation of a new measure of interpersonal exploitativeness, i.e., Brief Survey of Interpersonal Exploitative Behavior (BSIEB), is described in two studies. Interpersonal exploitativeness is a transdiagnostic feature of Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder. The BSIEB focuses on instantiating interpersonal exploitative behavior by surveying specific, "real world” exploitative behaviors. In Study 1, an item pool was generated by 50 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) participants. Inter-rater reliability was assessed via independent ratings from a second group of MTurk participants. The BSIEB was administered to a new sample of 508 adults (64.5% males; M age = 37.1). The BSIEB demonstrated excellent internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s α = .94) and convergent validity (r = .64) with a measure of exploitativeness based on the Five-Factor Model of personality. A 1-factor measurement model fit well and was invariant for gender. In Study 2, the BSIEB demonstrated convergent validity with other measures of exploitativeness and incremental validity, registering the most significant share of unique variance in predicting the outcome variables of social aggression and alcohol and substance use, which are associated with narcissism and antisocial personality disorder.  The results support using the BSIEB as a valid research measure that expands construct coverage of interpersonal exploitative behavior.