Narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism: that’s what’s become known as the dark triad. The term gained popularity in the United States before projecting itself to the rest of the world and exploding into a thousand viral ramifications.
Today there is a proliferation of definitions in which its original meaning, already unscientific, is stretched or distorted. The label has been used to categorize the eccentricities of Elon Musk with empirical varnish and the sinister stratagems of that co-worker who, we consider, is making our lives impossible.
The expression was coined in 2002 by Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams in their publication The Dark Triad of Personality, which was published in the Journal of Personality Research. Their theory is that these three personality traits — Narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism — coexist with their own manifestations and, in some individuals, overlap to constitute a common core with strong roots. Since the article’s publication, academics have increasingly been drawn to the dark triad. Today there are thousands of studies circulating whose titles include the construct, evoking everything from underground mafias to the triangle of the helmet through which the evil Darth Vader wheezes.
“I don’t think its creators were marketing geniuses or thought they were founding a new area of research, but the term is ideal for doing science of dubious quality and clickbait journalism,” says Josh Miller, a professor at the University of Georgia, who wrote an article in 2019 on the weaknesses of the term. According to Miller, much of the research is based on surveys of around 200 participants. In these, scores on Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissism are usually explored through a specific behavior or inclination: sexual tastes, job success, relational patterns or political preferences.
British professor Minna Lyons, who published a book on the dark triad and has now moved away from its postulates, notes the fascination that this field of analysis has for upcoming psychologists: “My students love it, they find it terribly sexy and many propose work on it,” she says. The seductive power of the phenomenon as a synthesis of evil explains, to a large extent, why the dark triad is so in vogue in psychology faculties around the world.
Conceptual vagueness also contributes to its success while exacerbating the confusion that surrounds it. Several questions remain. Do we have to focus on each element separately or on the axis that brings them together? Does this intersection of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism really exist, as an observable entity? Why focus on these three traits and not on others? In fact, several authors speak of the dark tetrad, with sadism as the fourth element.
The answers are elusive. After more than two decades, the contours of the dark triad, which Jaime García-Fernández, a researcher at the University of Oviedo, considers reductionist as a paradigm, have not yet been properly established. He and his collaborators are working on a “psychometric battery of nine socially aversive personality traits with sufficient entity to be dissected independently.”
However, García-Fernández does grant “scientific validity” to the construct. As long as we do not lose sight of its “brutal theoretical overlap” and approach it as a grayscale, resisting Manichean temptations. Lyons is wary of our instinct to draw a firm line between dark minds and, let’s say, normal ones: “It is the idea that there are bad people out there who, of course, are not us.” Miller also rejects the term dark, which he judges “unscientific, sensationalist and superficial.”
According to Lyons, when measuring, the traits of the triad, it’s a free for all. “It’s a real mess,” he says. Countless questionnaires and scales circulate, but have only furthered bewilderment. One of the most widely used, which contains 12 items, was christened the dirty dozen and uses a lexical hook to refer to the most ignoble corners of the human condition.
In a 2022 review, Cameron Kay from the University of Oregon exposed the weakness of such methods, which undermine the robustness of the literature on the topic. “Take narcissism for example. We assume that we are evaluating more or less one thing, when in reality narcissism is very different things,” he tells EL PAÍS. Conversely, there are many tests designed to analyze the various traits of Machiavellianism and psychopathy, but when you look more closely, you can see that they try to quantify almost identical things.
According to the four experts consulted, the term dark triad is easily used to stigmatize others, especially in polarized spheres. García-Fernández states that it is beginning to be used to silence or discredit other people, without nuance or context. “People love to think that hostile personality traits are categorical, that you have them or not, when the evidence tells us that they are usually changeable,” Kay adds.
Another controversy has emerged between the pathological and non-pathological. The creators of the dark triad specify that it refers to high levels of narcissism or psychopathy, but cannot be classed as a personality disorder. Perhaps on account of this, they allowed themselves the license to use the adjective dark at a time when care is taken, at least in clinical and academic environments, over how we refer to individuals suffering from mental health disorders. “We don’t call people who suffer from a psychotic disorder crazy anymore,” says Miller, who finds the terminology chosen by Paulhus and Williams “from another era.”
As in good guy-bad guys movies, the dark triad has a flipside that is pure goodness and light. Devised in 2018 by Laura Johnson, the light triad consists of empathy, compassion and altruism. But just like the dark triad, it is vague and hard to pin down, although this has not prevented it from experiencing its own (albeit smaller) research and media boom.
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