Dark triad
[9] High scores in these traits have been found to statistically increase a person's likelihood to commit crimes, cause social distress, and create severe problems for organizations, especially if they are in leadership positions.
[18] In 1998, John McHoskey, William Worzel, and Christopher Szyarto provoked a controversy by claiming that narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy are more or less interchangeable in normal samples.
[19] Delroy L. Paulhus and McHoskey debated these perspectives at a subsequent American Psychological Association conference, inspiring a body of research that continues to grow in the published literature.
Paulhus and Kevin Williams found enough behavioral, personality, and cognitive differences between the traits to suggest that they were distinct constructs; however, they concluded that further research was needed to elucidate how and why they overlap.
[31] Assessment of narcissism required clinical interviews until the popular Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) was created by Raskin and Hall in 1979.
[35][36] People who score high on this trait, conceptualized in 1970 by psychologists Richard Christie and Florence Geis, are callous, unprincipled, and are excessively motivated by self-interest.
[51] Harmful behavior against living creatures, brutal and destructive amoral dispositions, and criminal recidivism were additionally more prominently predicted by sadism than psychopathic traits.
[51] Studies on how sadists gain pleasure from cruelty to subjects were applied towards testing people who possessed dark triad traits.
[64][65] Some authors have stated that Machiavellianism and psychopathy represent the issue of a jangle fallacy, as both constructs are named differently yet describe the same concept.
[81] A 2017 UK study found that companies with leaders who show "psychopathic characteristics" destroy shareholder value, tending to have poor future returns on equity.
[83] Recent studies have found that people who are identified as internet trolls tend to have dark personality traits and show signs of sadism, antisocial behavior, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.
A 2021 study found that the dark triad's influence may be mediated by malicious motives, and that there is no strong connection between having these traits and engaging in trolling.
[90] Those higher in psychopathy and Machiavellianism were shown to predict psychological abuse with intimate partner violence, however agreeableness was found to be the main factor.
Support for the alt-right, which was prolifically associated with online trolling and harassment, and politically correct authoritarianism both correlate with all three traits as well as measures of entitlement.
[95] Dark triad characteristics correlate positively with out-group threat perceptions, anti-immigrant prejudice, and social dominance orientation, a psychological disposition toward group-based supremacy.
[38] During childhood and adolescence, environmental factors that are not shared with siblings (such as friends or extracurricular activities) contribute to all three dark triad traits.
[106] The everyday versions of these traits appear in student and community samples, where even high levels can be observed among individuals who manage to get along in daily life.
[120] These traits have been identified as part of a strategy that appears to be enacted by an exploitative, opportunistic, and protean approach to life in general[121] and at work.
[123][124][125] One of the studies concluded that "The third DT trait, Machiavellianism, was significantly negatively associated with being chosen and mate appeal for STR (short term relationships) in women.
One interesting finding related to narcissism—albeit one based on non-representative samples—is that while men continue to score higher than women, it seems that the gender gap has shrunk considerably when comparing cohort data from 1992 and 2006.
[130] When looking at the Dirty Dozen measurement, one study found that men generally scored higher in narcissism and psychopathy than women, and that there was little variance between sex for Machiavellianism.
For instance, a 2008 research study using undergraduate participants found that Caucasians reported higher levels of narcissism relative to Asians.
[142][143] Additionally, when comparing Caucasians and African Americans from correctional, substance abuse, and psychiatric samples—groups with typically high prevalence rates of psychopathy—researchers again failed to find any meaningful group differences in psychopathy.
[147] However, a 2017 study found little evidence of strong or widespread cohort-linked changes in disposition or behavioral strategies, although they did find some indications that the current generation is more cynical and less trusting.
[38] The conceptual overlap of the three traits which represents a tendency to manipulate and exploit others for personal gain defines the negative pole of the honesty–humility factor.
Individuals who score high on light triad traits also report higher levels of religiosity, spirituality, life satisfaction, acceptance of others, belief that they and others are good, compassion, empathy, self-esteem, authenticity, sense of self, positive enthusiasm, having a quiet ego, openness to experience, and conscientiousness.
Adjectives representing the behavioural patterns described by the Dark Triad were scored according to the atlas and visualised using kernel density plots in two dimensions.
Some researchers have criticised the dark triad and studies which use it as a foundation, arguing that "such work is often superficial, statistically weak, and presents an overly simplistic view of human nature.
"[160] Clinical psychologist Joshua Miller published a critical appraisal of dark triad literature in 2019, arguing that issues and limitations had been "unrecognized or ignored",[161] including: "the treatment of dark-triad constructs as unidimensional, contrary to evidence for their multidimensionality ... the indistinctness between current measures of Machiavellianism and psychopathy ... the use of multivariate statistical approaches that pose statistical and interpretive difficulties ... failure to test dark-triad relations directly against one another; and ... methodological concerns related to convenience sampling and reliance on mono-method approaches.
"[161]Other researchers have blamed "sloppy psychologists rather than fundamental weaknesses with the idea",[160] and argue that "psychopathy and Machiavellianism can both be accurately measured by the dark triad.
