Trauma and the Dark Triad: The Impact of Early Adversity on the Development of Machiavellian, Narcissistic, and Psychopathic Traits

While personality traits like the Dark Triad (i.e., psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism) are heritable, a substantial portion of variance in the traits is correlated with environmental factors, but what factors? In a sample of 1018 Spanish participants we focused on the role of (retrospective, self-reported) childhood trauma in predicting (adult) rates of the Dark Triad traits overall and in men and women as measured with the Dirty Dozen and Short Dark Triad measures of the traits. Our findings revealed distinct patterns of childhood trauma experiences between men and women. We found that men were more likely to experience existential threats than women (an effect mediated by narcissism in particular) whereas women were more likely to experience sexual traumas. More specifically, men were more psychopathic in response to childhood trauma than women, while women were more narcissistic than men. Furthermore, we also found that individuals who have experienced traumas such as war, assault, deadly diseases, sexual abuse, armed robbery, and witnessed family violence were found to be more psychopathic as assessed by either scale. This study has important implications for understanding how external environmental events affect the development of Dark Triad traits and offers insights for future interventions to reduce their impact.