An interesting and comprehensive research report this week appeared in "Frontiers in Psychology." The authors had been working for quite some time on a counter-balance to the popular and often-cited 2002 research on the Dark Triad of Personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy. After some excellent, comprehensive, longitudinal, and provably repeatable studies, they have finally written up their results and findings.
One of their interesting results is that their new triad actually measures different characteristics. "The absence of darkness does not necessarily indicate the presence of light," the authors write, "… there appears to be some degree of independence between the Light and Dark Triad, leaving room for people to have a mix of both light and dark traits." The authors constructed what they call "portraits of the light vs.dark triad." Participants who scored high on light triad traits tended to be older, female and have experienced less unpredictability in their childhoods. They also tended to report higher levels of: religiosity, spirituality, life satisfaction, acceptance of others, belief that they and others were good, compassion, empathy, openness to experience and conscientiousness. People who scored higher on dark triad traits were more likely to be younger, male and more motivated by power, achievement, superficial sex and short-term relationships. They also tended to be less compassionate, agreeable, empathetic, satisfied with their lives and likely to believe they and others were good.
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