Dark triad test: your Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy

The Dark Triad is a name for three traits that share a cold, self-serving streak: Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy. Each one is a range, not a category. Everyone sits somewhere on each scale, and many people land in the low to middle part. The dark triad test asks how strongly each tendency shows up in your everyday thinking and behavior: at work, with friends and in conflict.

Machiavellianism is about strategy: planning what to reveal, reading people's motives and playing a long game. Narcissism is about the self: wanting admiration, feeling special and enjoying status. Psychopathy, as the term is used here, means everyday callousness, impulsiveness and a taste for risk, not the clinical condition. The three overlap, so a high score on one often comes with a raised score on another, but each has its own flavor.

Psychologists Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams coined the term in a 2002 paper. They noticed that three traits, usually studied by separate research traditions, kept turning up together in ordinary samples of university students, and they argued that the traits were related but distinct. Their point was that these tendencies are not found only in clinics or prisons: they show up, in milder forms, in everyday life.

Each trait has a longer history. Richard Christie and Florence Geis built questionnaires on Machiavellianism in the 1960s, naming the trait after Niccolò Machiavelli, the Renaissance author of The Prince. Robert Raskin and Calvin Hall published a widely used narcissism questionnaire in 1979. Research on psychopathy grew out of clinical descriptions, such as Hervey Cleckley's 1941 book The Mask of Sanity, before later studies looked at milder versions in the general population.

Researchers often find that the three traits share a core of low empathy and low agreeableness, which helps explain why they correlate. Some have proposed adding everyday sadism to make a Dark Tetrad. The statements on this dark triad test were written from scratch for this site and are not taken from any research questionnaire.

The dark triad test has 27 statements, nine for each trait, shown in a shuffled order. For each one you choose Strongly agree, Agree, Neutral or unsure, Disagree or Strongly disagree. Strongly agree counts fully toward the trait, Agree counts half, Neutral counts nothing, and the two disagree options count the same amounts in the other direction. Every statement belongs to exactly one trait.

Two statements per trait are reverse-keyed. Agreeing with "I take people at their word unless they give me a reason not to" lowers your Machiavellianism score, for example. Each total is then shown as 0 to 100% of the possible range: 100% means every answer pointed fully toward the trait, 0% fully away from it, and 50% is the midpoint.

These numbers are not percentiles. A Narcissism score of 65% does not mean you outscored 65% of people; it means your own answers sat about two-thirds of the way up the scale. The test has no population norms, so treat each score as a description of how you answered, not a ranking against anyone else.

Below 40% counts as low, above 60% as high and 40 to 60% as middle, and your results page shows a short description for each level. A low score means the statements for that trait mostly did not fit you, a high score means they mostly did, and a middle score means you agreed with some and not others, which is where many people end up.

Read the three scores together. High Machiavellianism with low psychopathy often looks like a careful strategist who rarely acts on impulse. High narcissism with low Machiavellianism can look like open, easy-to-spot self-promotion. A raised psychopathy score with low narcissism may describe someone who takes risks and speaks bluntly without needing an audience. None of these combinations sums up your character.

A high result here is not a verdict, and a low one is not a halo. People with low scores can still be manipulative on a bad day, and people with high scores can be loyal friends and fair colleagues. What matters is what you do with a tendency once you can see it clearly.

Partly, and it depends on the setting. Research on first impressions suggests that narcissistic confidence often comes across well at first, then wears thin as people get to know each other. Machiavellian planning can help in negotiation and politics, and the calm, fearless side of psychopathy can help in emergencies or high-pressure jobs. Many researchers describe these traits as strategies that tend to pay off in the short term.

The costs tend to arrive later. Trust is slow to build and quick to lose, and the same habits that win a single deal can damage a long working relationship or a marriage. That is why the results here focus on balance: keeping the ambition, nerve and strategic sense while dropping the parts that hurt other people.

The Dark Triad overlaps with broader models. In Big Five terms, all three traits tend to go with lower Agreeableness, and psychopathy also with lower Conscientiousness. For the wider picture, the Big Five personality test scores five broad traits, the 16 personality test gives you a four-letter type, and the Enneagram test points to the motivation behind your habits.

Like every test on this site, the dark triad test is free, needs no account and runs entirely in your browser. Your answers are scored on your device and are not sent to our servers, so nobody else sees how you responded unless you choose to share your results with someone.