Dark Triad - History

History

Research on the Dark Triad traits began in isolation from one another. Narcissism is debatably the oldest, dating back to Sigmund Freud; psychopathy and Machiavellianism are more recent. Psychopathy, like narcissism, is a concept rooted in clinical and abnormal psychology. By contrast, Machiavellianism was first proposed as a personality trait.

In 1998 McHoskey, Worzel, and Szyarto claimed that Machiavellianism is nothing more than a mild form of psychopathy: aside from their relative severity, there is no difference between them. Delroy L. Paulhus and McHoskey debated these perspectives at a subsequent American Psychological Association (APA) conference, inspiring the famous Paulhus and Williams (2002) research on the "Dark Triad". Paulhus and Williams found enough behavioral, personality, and cognitive differences between the traits to suggest that they were different from each other; however, they concluded that further research was needed to elucidate how and why they overlap.