It’s Time to Clean Up the Dark Triad’s Dirty Dozen
New research zeroes in on fixing the problems with the Dark Triad.
Posted July 15, 2025 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
The Dark Triad in personality is an increasingly popular way to think about people who care about no one other than themselves, lie without any shame , and manipulate to get their way. The traits of narcissism , psychopathy , and Machiavellianism that comprise the Dark Triad can each be looked at and measured separately, or they can be thought of as a particularly nasty combination of qualities.
Personality researchers believe that it’s always worth seeking parsimony when approaching the question of what makes people tick. We have theories that propose five basic factors (the Five Factor Model [FFM]), six (the HEXACO model), or the three in the Dark Triad. However you slice up the components of personality, though, there’s bound to be some overlap. One of the problems with the Dark Triad is that it doesn’t always play nicely with the other models; FFM’s only “pathological” qualities fall into the neuroticism domain, and HEXACO has an honesty-humility dimension that is Dark Triad-adjacent. Psychologists studying the Dark Triad had to make up their own scales.
A Brief History of the Dark Triad and How We Got Here
Believing that bad leadership occurs when people in charge have Dark Triad qualities, University of Georgia’s Nathaniel Phillips and colleagues (2025) began to test out this basic idea by rounding up the available Dark Triad measures and approaches and addressing their strengths and weaknesses. As they observe, “Notable limitations and challenges with the predominant conceptualization and measurement of the [Dark Triad] have existed since their initial development, with the strongest critiques aimed at existing short omnibus measures that fail to account for these nuanced distinctions.”
Let’s unpack that statement. The original Dark Triad measure, called the “Dirty Dozen,” indeed had a mere 12 items; a later version had 27, invented independently of the existing theories. Subsequent researchers busily began to see how this measure overlapped with others, the “more nuanced” that tap into broader personality traits. Several of the authors in this paper had, two years earlier, devised a more comprehensive measure, the Five-Factor Model Antagonistic Triad Measure (FFM ATM), a 46-item questionnaire latched onto the FFM model while also capturing the unique qualities of the Dark Triad (Rose et al., 2023).
After testing the FFM ATM across a range of samples, Rose et al. landed on four empirically based scales: Antagonism, Impulsivity, Emotional Stability , and Agency. Scores on these scales predicted theoretically relevant outcomes that included substance abuse , aggression , antisocial behavior, and (interestingly) political skill.
Testing the Cleaner Measure on Dark Triad Managers
If the FFM ATM produced this impressive range of results, the UGA authors thought it just might do the same in predicting bad managerial leadership. Observing that poor management is a major contributor to “managerial failure” along with stressed-out employees, the authors suggested that maybe these outcomes could be explained by a Dark Triad boss.
Testing this idea on a sample of 427 participants (average age 42 years) who occupied managerial positions, Phillips et al. used the FFM ANT along with the Dark Triad, a psychopathy measure, and an instrument assessing leadership styles (“Transformational” and “Transactional”). As you might suspect, Dark Triad leaders were hypothesized to be low on transformational and high on transactional qualities.
Turning to the FFM ANT, the main focus of this study, here are sample items from its four scales:
From this sample of items, you can see that they get at their underlying concepts indirectly. People might be reluctant to admit to some of the nastier qualities of Dark Triad items (such as “People suffering from incurable diseases should have the choice of being put painlessly to death”). Here, although the antagonism items aren’t all that nice (purposely), they still don’t involve admitting to agreeing that sick people should die.
The findings showed that the FFM ATM did a better job of predicting poor leadership style than did the simple Dirty Dozen questionnaire. In their words, “By distilling the Dark Triad constructs into their core traits, the FFM ATM provides a more nuanced understanding of the individual differences associated with leadership and tethers the Dark Triad constructs to a widely understood and well-validated structural model of personality.” Again, translating this, it’s not enough to give someone a quick bad behavior inventory. Locating the Dark Triad in the overall matrix of an individual’s personality provides a more realistic and complete description than a quickie checklist could do.
Using This Cleaner Dark Triad Approach
As tempted as you might be to want to identify someone’s Dark Triad qualities with a few seemingly diagnostic questions, the UGA study shows that it will not be that simple. Obviously, you won’t be sitting down with someone to go through all 46 items ( which the authors do make available ), but you might be better able to weigh behaviors that might not have struck you as obvious in calculating who might be out to give you a hard time.
Another important lesson from the Phillips et al. study is that you can also gain insight into why you might be suffering if you’re at the mercy of a Dark Triad boss, friend, or relative. Some of their behaviors might seem admirable, such as being reliable and dependable. However, mixed with the impulsive and antagonistic components that are also part of the equation will definitely spell trouble. Barring being able to avoid these people, you can at least know enough now to protect yourself from their manipulative ways.
To sum up, easy measures of personality are always fun to play with, but their very ease can be misleading.
Rose, L., Crowe, M. L., Sharpe, B. M., Van Til, K., Lynam, D. R., & Miller, J. D. (2023). Factor structure of the FFM ATM: Antagonism, emotional stability, impulsivity, and agency. Journal of Personality Assessment , 105 (3), 342–354. doi:10.1080/00223891.2022.2117624.
Phillips, N. L., Rose, L., Lynam, D. R., & Miller, J. D. (2025). Pathological Personality Traits and Self-Reported Managerial Leadership: A Comparison of the Dirty Dozen and Five-Factor Model Antagonistic Triad Measure. Journal of Personality Assessment , 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223891.2025.2481296
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Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. , is a Professor Emerita of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her latest book is The Search for Fulfillment.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.