Dark personalities succeed in getting ahead but fail at getting along. With regard to the Big Five traits, dark personalities score low on agreeableness and conscientiousness.

Boston University

The dark tetrad is a collection of “dark personality” traits, including psychopathy, everyday sadism, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. High scores in these traits is associated with a statistically higher likelihood of not only engaging in cruel behavior, but also committing violent crimes (i.e. murder).

The Dark Tetrad

Paulhus, D. L. (2014). Toward a Taxonomy of Dark Personalities. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(6), 421–426. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414547737

Toward a Taxonomy of Dark Personalities

- Narcissists are grandiose self-promoters who continually crave attention.
- Machiavellians are master manipulators. At least one of them has cheated you out of something valuable, a fact that you may not have realized until it was too late.
- An everyday sadist has tried to hurt you, verbally or physically, for pure enjoyment (e.g. workplace bullies and internet trolls).
- A psychopath will be the most malevolent; they may have caused you serious harm in an impulsive fit of callous thrill-seeking.

Profiling the Dark Tetrad

The common feature in the dark tetrad is callousness (i.e. a lack of empathy toward others). However, since each trait has different features, they each have different outcomes to their version of callousness.

What Ties the Dark Personality Traits Together?

Links with Broader Models of Personality

Narcissism is a personality trait characterized by an inflated self-concept of one’s own worth, a strong sense of entitlement, and a tendency to act selfishly. Narcissism is a spectrum with those at the highest end classified as having narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

Narcissism

Everyday sadism, also known as nonsexual, subclinical sadism, reflects cruelty in everyday life. People of this category experience pleasure from others' physical or psychological pain as they go about daily life. For example, these people might like watching violent movies, seeing a fight outside of a bar, or watching someone mess up a presentation at work. Beyond this, everyday sadists also enjoy doing things to elicit suffering, such as emotional manipulation.

Everyday Sadism

Higher scores in the darker traits are more likely to stalk their partners, have problematic phone and internet use, engage in trolling behaviors online, find media violence funny, have antisocial use of dating apps, and distribute intimate images of other people without consent. Sadism predicts adverse online behavior better than the other dark personality traits, such as cybertrolling, cyberstalking, cyberviolence and cyberbullying.

The Dark Tetrad and Online Behavior

People with higher scores in the Dark Tetrad might use aggression to deal with difficult situations and attain their goals. Dark Tetrad traits have consistently positive associations with aggressive behaviors. Psychopathy and sadism in particular have closer links with various types of aggression, including physical, verbal, between partners, prejudice, bullying, extremism, radicalization, contempt, workplace mistreatment, child corporal punishment, mild and moderate self-harm, and cheating.

The Dark Tetrad and Aggression

- The Dark Tetrad traits are linked to self-preservation and benefit seeking.
- People with higher scores in the traits are often motivated to seek power and control and to display success to receive social approval and esteem. For example, they might view social and romantic relationships as instrumental means of achieving social status. 
- Dark traits correlate with self-direction thoughts (i.e., less open to change), as well as a right-wing political ideology, conservativeness, conspiracist ideation and a competitive view of the world, selective extremism behavior.
- When facing moral dilemmas, the Dark Tetrad traits predict utilitarian decisions and sadism predicts minimizing causal responsibility for harm.
- Machiavellianism and sadism are associated with difficulties in teamwork.
- Psychopathy and sadism are associated with low task performance, and the Dark Tetrad, except narcissism, are associated with high counter-productive work.
- The Dark Tetrad traits are also associated with higher levels of advantageous and disadvantageous risk taking, malevolent creativity, lying and sinning, especially pride, greed, and lust, giving less importance to fairness attitudes and purity values, while tending to not to rely on supernatural beliefs.

The Dark Tetrad and Moral Beliefs/Behaviors

Machiavellianism refers to a duplicitous personality trait, especially in interpersonal style, characterized by a cynical disregard for morality and a focus on self-interest and personal gain.

Machiavellianism

Similar to sociopathy, this condition is a lack of empathy and understanding of others. Emotions may not be experienced much at all in these individuals. However, the emphasis relies more on manipulative behavior. True social connections may not be possible, only feigned. Though manipulative and unempathetic, these individuals can be seen as charming to others and capable of maintaining a relatively normal life. Unlike the sociopath, they tend to be more risk-averse and caring about themselves. 

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