You’re trying to decide whether the new person who moved in next door is someone you’d like to get to know better. Something about this person just feels off, but you’re wondering if you’re just being too judgmental. Oddly enough, the person seems friendly, but you detect a slight edge that’s putting you on your guard. Should you listen to your inner watchdog or just go ahead and let yourself find out in time whether you need to be cautious?
Antagonism vs. Aggression as a Personality Trait
Because we don’t carry personality test kits around with us at all times, there’s not much else you can do other than to let a new person’s true colors appear over time. However, there may be some easy cues you can use to inform your judgments.
You may be familiar with the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), an assessment device intended for clinical settings. Going back to the 1950s with the original instrument, the MMPI has now been updated to the MMPI-3. Not only were the scales cleaned up in this latest version, but much of the language was also revised to bring it into the 21st century.
As part of the continuing efforts to make sure the MMPI-3 does what it’s supposed to, researchers are investigating its properties compared to other measures. While this may seem like a technical enterprise to you, the latest findings exploring a new MMPI-3 Antagonism scale could offer answers to these questions about your new neighbor.
This new Antagonism scale was developed by University of Otago’s Martin Sellbom and Kent State University’s Jacob Brown (2025), supported in part by the University of Minnesota. The idea behind the study was that an Antagonism scale would be important to have as part of the MMPI-3 because this quality is regarded now as central to the understanding of personality disorders.
As the term implies, antagonism is highly toxic. Translating this into a set of personality qualities, it includes manipulativeness, deceitfulness, grandiosity, attention-seeking, callousness, and hostility. The MMPI-3 only measures Aggression, and as close as this term may seem to be from a straight vocabulary viewpoint, Sellbom and Brown note that it focuses only on assertiveness, dominance, and use of physical aggression rather than the slimier qualities associated with antagonism.
Carving Out Antagonism’s Unique Qualities
Again, from a practical standpoint, you probably don’t care about whether there’s an MMPI-3 Antagonism scale that could fit into the MMPI-3’s set of measures. But the difference between antagonism and aggression can be handy to have. Bad guys aren’t only the ones, after all, who get into fights in the zillions of movies and television dramas depicting antisocial villains.
Turning now to the study itself, Sellbom and Brown began their investigation by comparing MMPI-3 scores with both clinician ratings (for the clinical sample only) and a set of other self-report measures designed to tap into antagonism and all its variations. The final product of their analyses shows antagonism’s shared as well as its unique qualities compared to the MMPI-3 Aggression scale score.
Overall, believe it or not, the research team concluded that it was more “dysfunctional” to be antagonistic than aggressive. The simply aggressive person will, like those fictionalized baddies, use outright force, a quality known as “combativeness.” This is less “dysfunctional in nature compared to items reflecting immorality, distrust, and arrogance.”
“Maladaptive antagonism,” in contrast, uniquely includes such qualities as risk-taking, relationship insecurity, mistrust, proneness to fantasy, a tendency toward loss of contact with reality, emotional instability, and suspiciousness.
Consider Yourself Warned
As tempting as it may be to use outright aggression as your only warning sign for a potential new relationship, the MMPI-3 findings suggest that you stay tuned to the more nuanced ways in which a person can express anger and lack of inhibition. It’s not particularly pleasant to be around someone who’s always angry and occasionally combative, but such a person will be easier to read than the maladaptively antagonistic whose anger and even insecurities lie below the surface.
Personality Essential Reads
There are times when anyone can display a little antagonism, especially in a chance encounter. Maybe that new neighbor is annoyed about the rules for recycling. It’s that chronic and constant display of the many facets of antagonism that becomes worrisome. Indeed, earlier studies of antagonism among nonclinical samples describe a set of traits that include lack of compassion, immorality, cynicism, skepticism, and arrogance, among others. Hearing a constant litany of complaints about other people, frustration with rules, and pride in taking questionable shortcuts around the law are definite causes for concern.
All of this begs the question of why and how people get to be so high on antagonism. Although the Sellbom and Brown paper wasn’t intended to be a theoretical explanation of causes, you can get some hints from the connections between antagonism and relationship insecurity, suspiciousness, and emotional variability. Antagonistic individuals just aren’t that comfortable with others, and may spend an inordinate amount of time questioning their own grasp on reality. At extremes, these become risk factors for personality disorders, given that antagonism stretches across several diagnostic categories.
To sum up, antagonism is a complex quality that has long been understood as an undesirable personality trait in the form of low agreeableness. Knowing how it differs from its close cousin of aggressiveness can help you figure out how to minimize its impact on your own daily life.
