Light & Dark Triad

About this test

In 2002 the psychologists Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams noticed that three socially awkward traits kept turning up together in ordinary, non-clinical people: Machiavellianism (a cool, strategic approach to getting what you want), narcissism (a hunger for admiration and a grand self-image) and subclinical psychopathy (low empathy combined with impulsiveness and thrill-seeking). They called the trio the Dark Triad. Hervé Chabrol and colleagues later proposed adding everyday sadism, the enjoyment of other people's discomfort, to form the Dark Tetrad, and laboratory studies by Erin Buckels, Daniel Jones and Paulhus showed that it is distinct from the other three.

In 2019 Scott Barry Kaufman and colleagues asked what the opposite profile might look like and proposed the Light Triad: Kantianism (treating people as ends in themselves, not merely as means), humanism (valuing the dignity and worth of each person) and faith in humanity (believing that people are basically good). In their samples the light and dark traits were negatively related but far from mirror images, and most people leaned more toward the light side.

This test uses its own everyday items, not the published research scales, so its scores cannot be compared with research norms. Each trait is a percentage of the range your answers allow, and two composites, light and dark, place you on a compass. Here "psychopathy" and "sadism" mean ordinary tendencies such as coolness under other people's distress, impulsiveness and a love of teasing, which everyone has in some measure.

This is a self-reflection tool, not a clinical or diagnostic instrument: it cannot tell you whether you or anyone else has a personality disorder. Self-reports of dark traits also depend on how candid people are willing to be with themselves.

References

• Paulhus, D. L. & Williams, K. M. (2002). The Dark Triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Journal of Research in Personality, 36, 556-563.
• Chabrol, H., Van Leeuwen, N., Rodgers, R. & Sejourne, N. (2009). Contributions of psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian, and sadistic personality traits to juvenile delinquency. Personality and Individual Differences, 47, 734-739.
• Buckels, E. E., Jones, D. N. & Paulhus, D. L. (2013). Behavioral confirmation of everyday sadism. Psychological Science, 24, 2201-2209.
• Paulhus, D. L. (2014). Toward a taxonomy of dark personalities. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23, 421-426.
• Kaufman, S. B., Yaden, D. B., Hyde, E. & Tsukayama, E. (2019). The Light vs. Dark Triad of Personality: Contrasting two very different profiles of human nature. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 467.