International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) Dark Triad

Three traits make up the dark triad. Machiavellianism is a strategic, manipulative approach to others, with cynicism about human nature and a willingness to use people for one's ends. Narcissism is a sense of grandiosity, entitlement and superiority, with a strong wish for admiration. Psychopathy-related traits include callousness, impulsivity and thrill-seeking with little concern for others. The scale asks about each with ten statements written in everyday terms.

Paulhus and Williams (2002) proposed studying the three traits together after noting that they overlap, sharing a core of callousness and self-interest, while differing in other respects. The traits themselves had separate histories: Machiavellianism was measured by Christie and Geis (1970), narcissism in the general population by Raskin and Terry (1988), and psychopathy-related traits in self-report forms derived from clinical work. The statements here come from public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) versions of those measures.

Each trait is scored separately. Higher scores describe a stronger tendency toward manipulation, grandiosity or callous impulsivity; lower scores describe its relative absence. The traits are measured in the normal range of personality, so a high score describes a style rather than a disorder, and none of the scales is a clinical diagnosis.

The scales are used in research on leadership, relationships and workplace behavior, and in personal development. On this site, each trait can be taken separately, as Machiavellianism, Narcissism and Psychopathy, and the IPIP-HEXACO measures Honesty-Humility, whose low end overlaps with all three.

Convergently, the three measures intercorrelated moderately (rs = .25–.50) but were not equivalent even when disattenuated (maximum disattenuated r ≈ .61 between psychopathy and narcissism; Paulhus & Williams, 2002). Shared Big Five space was limited to low Agreeableness (narcissism r = −.36, Machiavellianism r = −.47, psychopathy r = −.25). Discriminantly, patterns diverged: narcissism and psychopathy also related positively to Extraversion (.42 and .34) and Openness (.38 and .24); Machiavellianism and psychopathy related negatively to Conscientiousness (−.34 and −.24); only psychopathy related negatively to Neuroticism (−.34). On objective self-enhancement indexes, narcissism showed the clearest elevation (over-claiming bias r = .17; IQ self-rating residual r = .24), with a smaller psychopathy link to IQ overestimation (r = .14) and essentially no Machiavellianism self-enhancement—supporting a grounded, reality-based self-view for high Mach scorers relative to narcissists (Paulhus & Williams, 2002).

The battery is not the Short Dark Triad (SD3) or Dirty Dozen.

This version uses public-domain items from the International Personality Item Pool (Goldberg et al., 2006) keyed to the same dimensions.

“Enjoy manipulating other people's feelings.”

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Your report explains each of your scale scores in plain language.