You may be familiar with the dark triad in personality: the unpleasant trait bundle that includes narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. People high in these qualities manipulate, lie, and use people without feeling the slightest tinge of regret. If you know someone who fits this description, you’re aware of the dangers they can present.

Yet, even with its simple elegance, the dark triad concept is not without its problems. Within the study of personality, the dark triad has remained somewhat outside the general study of traits as a way to characterize individual differences. Prior attempts to link the dark triad to popular trait models are paving the way toward integration. However, according to a new study by University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU)’s David Scholz and Benjamin Hilbig (2024), there still remains a gap.

The Many Flavors of Darkness

Scholz and Hilbig point out that the trait of aversiveness has the potential to link the dark triad not only to personality theories in general but to the understanding of personality disorders. Moving away from categorizing these disturbances in long-term adaptation and behavior, personality disorder researchers are increasingly advocating for the Alternative Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD). In the AMPD, personality disorders are seen along two dimensions of “style” and severity. Style in the AMPD refers to the particular mix of traits an individual may show, linking this approach to personality disorders with personality theory more generally. Bringing the dark triad into the mix would add further utility to this whole system.

One of the issues with the dark triad is that it’s not necessarily reflective of a “clinical” (i.e., diagnosable) set of qualities. As the RPTU authors point out, these qualities show up frequently in everyday life in settings such as work and romantic relationships. Along with other traits such as sadism, spitefulness, and greed, these distasteful combinations become “aversive subclinical traits.” From their own theoretical perspective of interpersonal personality dysfunction, these qualities can produce negative consequences for others.

Maybe, Scholz and Hilbig suggest, these traditions can all be brought together in a “single, broad, underlying disposition,” which they propose to be “the D factor of personality,” defined, based on prior research, as the “common core of all socially/ethically aversive traits.” Any individual trait, following from this idea, can be viewed as a “flavored manifestation of D,” varying in its unique component. Like a milkshake, all forms of D have a common core (such as ice cream and milk); what determines its form is whether you add chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry.

Measuring the Flavors of D

Across five studies, the German researchers measured a collection of aversive traits reflected in existing personality tests to see how they would cluster with each other yet retain their separate “flavors.” The 20 aversive traits they measured in their online samples totaling 4,847 adults included the AMPD traits of attention-seeking, callousness, deceitfulness, grandiosity, hostility, irresponsibility, manipulativeness, and suspiciousness. The remaining traits were drawn from subclinical measures of amoralism, egoism, entitlement, frustration intolerance, greed, Machiavellianism, moral disengagement, narcissism, psychopathy, sadism, self-centeredness, and spitefulness.

From this rogue’s gallery of traits, Scholz and Hilbig were able to establish, first of all, that there was no difference between the strength of aversive traits as seen in subclinical vs. clinical measures. D’s core emerged as “utility maximization at others’ expense accompanied by justifying beliefs.” From adaptive to maladaptive, then, is only a matter of degree. That everyday form of aversiveness can get people by without any need for a diagnosis until it becomes severe enough to impede their ability to sustain relationships, work, and overall adaptation to life.

The proposal that D comes in different flavors was also supported by the data. Specifically, these three variations emerged:

Flavor of hostility: difficulties in emotion regulation

Flavor of irresponsibility: lack of self-control

Flavor of suspiciousness: delusional paranoid thoughts

Because 17 of the 20 traits measured all converged upon each other, it remained for these three to become the distinguishing features of specific forms of D. As it doesn’t require a system for diagnosing people that’s separate from one that describes ordinary darkness, this approach has the advantage, always sought in science, of being parsimonious.

Identifying the Flavors of D in Your Life

As personality researchers, the German team sought primarily to align divergent concepts and traditions in the general area of trait theory. All of this may be of esoteric interest to these academicians, but what do the findings mean for you?

If you follow the personality disorder, antagonism, dark triad, and aversiveness threads in the popular literature, it’s easy to get confused about which set of traits could help explain the people in your life you’re trying to understand. All you know is that you’ve become platonically or romantically attracted to someone who you fear is using you for their own purposes. You’ve tried to determine if they truly lack morals or just seek expeditious ways to get what they want. From time to time, they talk you into handing over some of your hard-earned cash or engaging in questionable behaviors such as taking risks you don’t feel comfortable with. It’s not that easy to tell them to stop.

This new understanding of D can allow you to zero in on the core nature of antagonism without having to run through items on a dark triad instrument. Then, you can go on to use evidence from your interactions with such people to figure out which flavor their antagonism reflects. It’s pretty easy to see who gets mad easily, acts in impulsive ways, and treats others as wanting to do them harm. These variations sit on top of a core utilitarian view that such individuals have of relationships.

To sum up, it appears from this comprehensive study that a single set of personality qualities can give you insight into why some people just seem “bad.” Although fulfillment may not be in the cards for them, by knowing what to look for, you can develop your own more fulfilling relationships.