Here's when traits from 'dark' personality types—including narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism—are most likely to appear in our lifetime
, collectively known as the Dark Triad. Related, because thoroughly measuring everything relevant to the Dark Triad features would require filling out 100 questions or more. The only people who’d be up to doing that without an incentive might be people who’d score really low on the Dark Triad, and we wanted a representative group. Therefore, we measured the more specific “dark” features of egocentricity, callous affect , and manipulativeness.
You might recognize this phenomenon in famous people publicly and openly talking about their selfish, manipulative, or outright antisocial behavior in a way that suggests they don’t see these behavioral tendencies as problematic. In our study, the averages for “dark” personality features rarely exceeded five, which was right in the middle of our nine-point rating scale. In other words, on average, people really aren’t that bad.
The most important nuance about this is that our findings are about differences in averages between groups. Those averages are based on a lot of different scores from different individuals of a particular age. If you look beyond the average, we see that there are people with high or low scores on egocentricity, manipulativeness, and callous affect within every single age group.