Bad People All Share This One Personality Trait

Narcissists, egoists, sadists, psychopaths, and other nasty people all share one dark personality trait.

People who possess a ‘dark core’ personality is shared by every nasty person, according to new research.

Whether they are narcissists, egoists, sadists, psychopaths, or just spiteful people, they all share the same tendency to always put themselves before anyone else in the worst possible way.

A new study has confirmed that nine dark personality types all turned out to have this core of callous selfishness, that involved a total disregard for the rights of others.

The difference, however, is that psychopaths, narcissist, sadists and the rest express their dark core in slightly different ways.

All of them, though, justify their amoral behaviours to themselves in order to avoid feeling guilty about them.

Dr Ingo Zettler, the study co-author, explains the D-factor:

“…the dark aspects of human personality have a common denominator, which means that — similar to intelligence — one can say that they are all an expression of the same dispositional tendency.

For example, in a given person, the D-factor can mostly manifest itself as narcissism, psychopathy or one of the other dark traits, or a combination of these.

But with our mapping of the common denominator of the various dark personality traits, one can simply ascertain that the person has a high D-factor.

This is because the D-factor indicates how likely a person is to engage in behaviour associated with one or more of these dark traits.”

The results come from a sequence of studies conducted with over 2,500 people.

All persons taking part were asked whether they agreed with statements like:

“It is sometimes worth a little suffering on my part to see others receive the punishment they deserve.”

“I know that I am special because everyone keeps telling me so.”

The study examined the following nine nefarious personality factors:

Egoism

Machiavellianism

Moral disengagement

Narcissism

Psychological entitlement

Psychopathy

Sadism

Self-interest

Spitefulness

The results showed that at their centre, each one of the dark personality factors had much in common.

People who have the nasty core factor are also likely to have the behaviours of multiple unhealthy personality types.

People with this nasty factor are all around us, said Dr Zettler:

“We see it, for example, in cases of extreme violence, or rule-breaking, lying, and deception in the corporate or public sectors.

It is here that knowledge about a person’s D-factor may be a useful tool, for example, to assess the chances that the person will re-offend or engage in a more harmful behaviour.”