Dark triads, tetrads, tents, and cores: Why navigate (research) the jungle of dark personality models without a compass (criterion)?
Christopher Kowalski, Radosław Rogoza, Donald Saklofske and Julie Schermer review the dark triad literature and the wider field of dark personality traits as a primer on its unresolved issues. They examine how a trait comes to be defined as dark, discuss the dark core concept, critique common quantitative methods such as multivariate analyses, bifactor modelling and composite measures, and propose some solutions. This page cites the paper through Adrian Furnham's quotation of it, for the warning that adding new dark traits without a criterion can overexpand the cluster.
Christopher Kowalski, Radosław Rogoza, Donald Saklofske and Julie Schermer review the dark triad literature and the wider field of dark personality traits as a primer on its unresolved issues. They examine how a trait comes to be defined as dark, discuss the dark core concept, critique common quantitative methods such as multivariate analyses, bifactor modelling and composite measures, and propose some solutions. This page cites the paper through Adrian Furnham's quotation of it, for the warning that adding new dark traits without a criterion can overexpand the cluster.
Written from the abstract on the university repository, read 2026-10-24.
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Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
Kowalski, C. M., Rogoza, R., Saklofske, D. H., & Schermer, J. A. (2021). Dark triads, tetrads, tents, and cores: Why navigate (research) the jungle of dark personality models without a compass (criterion)? Acta Psychologica, 221, 103455. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103455. Quoted in Furnham (2024).