One of these is fire interest, the fascination with fire and fire setting ( Dickens et al., 2009 Gannon and Barrowcliffe, 2012). Research has identified several psychological vulnerabilities that are qualified as potential risk factors. Due to this destructive potential, it is necessary to explore fire setting behavior and investigate which factors lead an individual to it.
A total of 350 deaths and a damage of US$593 million were caused by proven intentionally set fires ( Evarts, 2019). The fires caused 3,655 deaths and destroyed property worth US$25.6 billion. For example, in 2018, there were about 1,318,500 fires in the USA of which 25,000 were intentionally set. When used deliberately or by accident fire causes severe damages to both humans and property. However, tragic cases like the recent wildfires in California and Greece or the Notre-Dame fire in 2019 also bring the destructive potential of fire to the public consciousness. Our results also provide evidence for viewing sadism as the multidimensional construct discriminating between vicarious and other forms of sadism, for the distinction of psychopathy and Machiavellianism, and for the Dark Tetrad being linked to object related violence.įire has always played an important role in humanity, either as a source of warmth and light, a means for cooking in traditional societies, or as a marker for social events and a source for entertainment in Western countries ( Fessler, 2006). This confirms the results of previous studies with clinical and forensic samples with psychopathy and sadism as relevant predictors for fire interest and fire setting. The other Dark Tetrad traits and four sensation seeking facets did not substantially add to the predictions.
Furthermore, vicarious sadism was associated with fire interest. From the Dark Tetrad, consisting of psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and three facets of sadism, psychopathy, and physical sadism were found to be associated with fire interest and fire setting. In addition to zero-order correlations, we calculated path models and a logistic regression including all predictor variables. In this study, we observed the relationship of potentially important personality traits with fire interest and fire setting in a sample of N = 222 students. However, less is known about the relationship of fire interest and fire setting to other variables such as personality traits in subclinical samples. One important risk factor of fire setting observed in forensic samples is fire interest.
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