In the beginning, there was the “dark triad”. Actually, that’s not true, because we had to have the constituent parts of what would become the dark triad before we could have the actual personality trait.
Those parts are Machiavellianism, a “political” personality characterised by guile, deception and selfishness, based on the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli dating back to the 1500s. Machiavellianism as a constellation of personality traits was proposed by American psychologists Richard Christie and Florence Geis in 1970.
It is the relative newcomer compared with the second leg of the dark triad stool – narcissism. While it currently denotes a pathological level of self-involvement and grandeur, one of the earliest references to narcissism as a clinical syndrome I can find dates to 1889, when two separate psychiatrists wrote about narcissism as an obsession with one’s body as a “sexual object”. As with many things, Freud also had a lot to say about narcissism, writing in 1914 that egotism may be normal in children, but pathological if it persists into adulthood.
And, finally, psychopathy. The syndrome of clinical psychopathy has such a rich history I shan’t go into it here, other than to say it dates back at least as far as the 1800s, and has evolved from being theorised as a dysfunction of morality (which it still is) to a more multidimensional construct involving emotional and personality deficits that make it easier for a “psychopath” to move through the world leaving hurt and angry people behind them.
In the 1990s, people started putting Machiavellianism and psychopathy together until, in 2002, Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams added narcissism to complete the dark triad. Basically, Paulhus and others argue that these three things are subtly different, malevolent personality characteristics that tend to travel together. This notion has proved tremendously popular. I think that’s because most of us know a few people who are narcissistic, or who are manipulative and selfish, or just downright bad. Or all three.
How common is this combination? That’s tricky. I’ve seen estimates that as many as 7% of us demonstrate all three, but I’m suspicious because, for example, narcissistic personality disorder diagnoses top out around 6%. Between 1% and 4% tick all the psychopathy boxes.
But what I think this means is that about one person in 15 has significant levels of all three but they’re not clinically relevant, and that’s not a great combination.
But let’s not stop there. In 2013, Paulhus and colleagues added sadism to a shiny dark tetrad, arguing that people who are narcissistic, psychopathic and Machiavellian also have the tendency to actively enjoy causing humiliation or pain to others. Yay.
What all of these have in common is a lack of empathy. Acting selfishly, or actively harmful to others requires an inability to see things through your victim’s eyes. Or does it?
Enter expat New Zealander Alexander Sumich, professor of mental health and biopsychology at Nottingham Trent University. I got to see him in action late last year when he visited here.
Sumich has a research programme that initially proposed a “dark empath”. Based on some rather cool statistical analyses, he and his colleagues identified a group of people who tick a lot of the dark triad boxes, but who score relatively high on measures of empathy.
Before you think this could be a good thing, with empathy mitigating the behavioural damage of the triad, think again. Empathy can be used as a weapon as well, and that’s what dark empaths do. Being able to understand others’ feelings means you can more convincingly manipulate them, often from a distance while appearing uninvolved.
Sumich says he wasn’t prepared for how this notion would take off. If you don’t know what I mean, google it. Enjoy the memes and reels.
