"Teens who are willing to exploit others for their own gain are more likely to be bullies and to have more sexual partners than those who score higher on a measure of honesty and humility. That's what a new study from a team at Brock University suggests.

A team including Brock associate professor of child and youth studies Anthony Volk had previously found that bullies had more sex.

They wanted to know: Was it all bullies, or just ones with particular personality traits?

In the follow-up, which was published last month in Evolutionary Psychology Science, they studied a comparison of different negative traits.

Would someone lacking empathy have more sexual partners? Someone with a short fuse?

As it turned out, the variable that could be correlated to having more sex was scoring low on a measure of humility and honesty. Someone who is arrogant and manipulative, and willing to be so, is more likely to have more sex, Volk's team found.

"That's really the only one that came up as being predictive of people taking this behaviour and using it to exploit others," he said. "It's also the trait that best predicts bullying overall.""

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