The Dark Triad Test

The 'dark triad' refers to three socially aversive personality traits, Machiavellianism (strategic manipulation), Narcissism (grandiosity, attention-seeking), and Psychopathy (callousness, impulsivity). The construct was named by Paulhus & Williams in 2002 and has since become one of the most-studied frameworks in personality psychology. This test uses the Short Dark Triad (SD3, Jones & Paulhus 2014), the canonical brief measure: 27 items, 9 per axis.

No. The SD3 is a research instrument, and the dark triad is a personality-psychology construct, not a DSM diagnosis. None of 'Machiavellianism', 'Narcissism (in this trait sense)', or 'Psychopathy (in this trait sense)' are clinical categories on their own. They map roughly to the DSM categories of ASPD and NPD plus a non-clinical Mach trait. Only a licensed clinician with a full history can diagnose a personality disorder.

Because the SD3 was deliberately designed as a brief measure, 9 items per axis is the minimum for adequate factor reliability. Longer instruments exist (Dirty Dozen at 12, Mach-IV + NPI + SRP-III at ~70 combined) but the SD3 has comparable psychometric properties to the long combinations and is the standard brief instrument used by the field. If you want deeper reads on a specific axis, the dedicated tests are linked in the result page.

The dedicated tests (NPI-40 for grandiose narcissism, HSNS for vulnerable narcissism, LSRP for psychopathy) are deeper reads on a single construct. The SD3 is the wide map across all three. Most users take the SD3 first, then take the dedicated test for whichever axis came in elevated. The two together, wide map + close read, produce a substantially better picture than either alone.

The Full Triad configuration places you in the top band on all three scales, a share these convenience norms cannot put a precise number on. The instrument cannot diagnose; it can flag. A high score on all three axes is the right signal for considering a diagnostic interview with a personality-disorder specialist, particularly one with experience in ASPD and NPD. The result page lays out the specific options.

You've configured as 'The Strategist'. High Mach without elevated Narc or Psych is the configuration the literature describes as the most cognitively-driven of the dark-triad subset, strategic, deliberate, low-warmth without being low-control or low-empathy at the impulsive level. The result page profile and the deeper-read companion tests (linked from there) cover what this means.

Because it's the standard. Jones & Paulhus 2014 is among the most-cited papers in trait personality research; the SD3 is short, free, well-validated, and translates cleanly across languages. Almost every free dark-triad quiz on the internet uses some form of it.

Stored only in your browser session by default. We do not sell or share quiz responses. If you choose to register or capture your result via email, the data lives on our servers under standard access controls and you can request deletion at any time.

More complicated than 'always bad'. The dark-triad traits correlate negatively with most prosocial outcomes (relationship stability, mental health of partners, ethical decision-making) and positively with a narrower set (short-term mating success, certain forms of leadership effectiveness, resilience under specific stressors). The literature on 'adaptive' dark-triad outcomes is contested. The honest summary: the costs land on people around you and the benefits, where they exist, accrue mostly to you.

We do not auto-publish anything. There's no share button on the result page by default, this kind of result is rarely something users want to broadcast and we have not built infrastructure to encourage that. The result page is yours alone unless you choose to copy and share.

The dark core is your average across all 27 items on the 1 to 5 scale, the one number the three traits share, banded against the mean of the three published subscale means (2.72, with a derived SD of 0.42). When Machiavellianism or psychopathy leads and the other of the two sits within half a standard deviation of it, one sitting cannot tell them apart, so the read says cold-calculating and names neither rather than crowning one on a coin-flip gap. A single-axis result in that state is called The Cold Calculator instead of The Strategist or The Predator. Narcissism leading is always named, because it separates cleanly. One more thing the number does not carry: Machiavellianism and psychopathy scores fall with age and the norm sample skews young, so the same score sits further above your own age group the older you are.