Giftige Gesellschaften bringen dunklere Persönlichkeiten hervor; Eine Studie aus dem Jahr 2025 bringt Korruption, Ungleichheit und Gewalt mit höheren Dark-Factor-(D)-Werten weltweit in Verbindung
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-found-the-driving-force-behind-your-darkest-impulses-and-its-more-widespread-than-thought
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Psychologists have long studied ‚dark‘ personality traits such as narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, sadism, and spitefulness. In 2018, researchers proposed that these traits share a common core they call the Dark Factor of Personality, or D, reflecting a general tendency to put one’s own interests first while disregarding or even harming others, often justified by convenient beliefs. Someone high in D might express it mainly as narcissism, psychopathy, or another trait depending on the person, but the underlying disposition is the same. Over the past decade studies have shown that D is remarkably stable over time, predicts a wide range of selfish or harmful behaviors, and influences real-life choices like avoiding caring professions such as teaching or nursing.
A new paper published in PNAS in 2025 takes this research to the societal level; using data from over 1.79 million people across 183 countries and another large sample from all 50 US states, researchers examined whether harsher societal conditions are linked to higher average levels of D. They created an index of aversive societal conditions based on corruption, inequality, poverty, and violence measured about 20 years earlier. Results showed a clear pattern: people living in places with more toxic conditions tended to score higher on the Dark Factor. Relationships held even after accounting for age and gender, though effect size was modest as expected for complex personality traits. This supports the idea that while D has strong individual stability, surrounding environments also shapes how dark tendencies develop in populations. In tougher, less fair societies, self-serving, and distrustful outlooks, may become more adaptive or normalized over time.
Test your own D factor here: [https://www.darkfactor.org/](https://www.darkfactor.org/)
It’s the official questionnaire from the researchers behind the Dark Factor of Personality studies.
Cool I always like seeing junk science that will probably be debunked in the future but makes for easy to sell airport pop-psychology books that leave lasting damage on society and needless discrimination against neuro-diverse people.
Definitely a future episode of ‚If Books Could Kill‘ .
How could an economic system that rewards selfishness and greed with social status and riches cause this to happen??
It was ages ago but I read an article about how schizophrenia is different in different cultures. In north America it often manifests as angry, or more dark thoughts. I don’t remember the name of the other country in the study. But I’m some countries schizophrenia is more light hearted on it’s communications.
To me this seems like it could be a correlation.
I feel like this is very much true. Look at Russia, everyone follows the example of the head asshole. A wide berth is given to corruption for the oligarchy.
Or now in the US, people look up to the President and when he’s morally vacuous, self serving, and generally a prick… Many will take that as thier North star and imitate that behaviour. This is how I get ahead! SMDH… Make Empathy Great Again!
Toxic societies breeding darker personalities isn’t shocking, but it sounds like it would go both ways: a collective of darker personalities will create an even more toxic society, so this sounds like an inescapable cycle which only ends when the society inevitably self-destructs.
I’m more curious about how a toxic society would go about improving itself
Wait personality is socially constructed no way
I’d argue we can see a great example of this in torture of captured Ukrainian soldiers by russians.
If you are miserable for generations, constantly told it’s everyone’s fault but yours, you will become hateful, resentful, angry little torturer.
Society turning away from religion and people are surprised why narcissism and selfishness is spreading… tiktok, instagram, social media, reality tv, are a catalyst for these traits.
Reminds me of this study on baboon’s stress levels relative to social status.
When tainted meat killed off disproportionately aggressive males, thes studied community changed to become much more peaceful, egalitarian and more inclusive of newcomers.
Importantly, the study:
* sampled German adults only,
* did not compare countries or cultures,
* did not measure social institutions or societal characteristics,
* did not test whether “dark societies” produce more dark individuals.
Explains USA and high violence.
This is a great illustration of why the people who have lately been bleating about „high trust societies“ cannot themselves be trusted. The way to increase trust in a society is to tax the rich, reduce inequality, and prosecute corporate corruption. But since these people are largely backed by billionaires, they instead blame all of society’s woes on immigrants.