Delroy Paulhus

Who they are

The vault's note describes Paulhus as a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, working on personality measurement, socially desirable responding and aversive personality traits. That description comes from the vault and was not re-checked against a university page for this site, so treat it as the working description.

What is established for this site is his authorship. Paulhus and Williams are the authors of the paper that Adrian Furnham quotes from page 557 of the Journal of Research in Personality in the dark triad entry of The New Psychology. Furnham credits the origin properly in his prose, which the vault notes is not typical of that book.

Key papers

The Dark Triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy (Paulhus and Williams, 2002), Journal of Research in Personality, 36(6), 556-563. doi:10.1016/S0092-6566(02)00505-6.

In Furnham's quotation, the authors noticed an overlap of similar features: all three entail a socially malevolent character with behaviour tendencies toward self-promotion, emotional coldness, duplicity and aggressiveness. The abstract of the paper was not read for this site; the account here relies on Furnham's quotation and the citation record, which Crossref confirms.

Key ideas

Three literatures, one question. The original move was to ask whether three separate literatures were studying one thing. That is the jingle-jangle check applied before the term became common.

A subclinical construct. The grouping describes ordinary variation in non-clinical people. Furnham notes that Machiavellianism is the only one of the three never treated as a clinical syndrome, and that the dark triad may refer to the disordered traits only at a subclinical level.

A short measure followed. Furnham points to Jonason and Webster's 2010 Dirty Dozen as the single twelve-item measure made possible by the triad's three components being related. Most workplace studies on this site use it by self-report.

The question now points back at the triad. A 2021 review in Acta Psychologica by Christopher Kowalski and colleagues, quoted by Furnham, argues that adding dark traits without a criterion may overexpand the dark cluster until the label is no longer meaningful. This publication agrees with that critique on the additions and not on the original three.

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