Just Antagonism? Little Support for a Dark Triad or Tetrad Personality Trait Structure

The Dark Triad/Tetrad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism) is commonly argued to be a set of distinct but related traits. However, researchers have argued that these traits may reflect a single underlying factor. In the present study, we evaluated whether a triad or a tetrad structure could be recreated from a comprehensive, reliable, and non-redundant personality item pool. Using the 100 Nuances of Personality (100NP), we adopted a bottom-up approach that combined expert-derived trait definitions, layperson item-interpretability ratings, multi-times and multi-rater data, and a conservative psychometric selection criterion for the selection of items. Across multiple structural analyses, we were unable to recover separate factors corresponding to narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, or sadism. Instead, retained items consistently converged on a broad single factor, which we refer to as Antagonism Core (AC). The resulting 15-item AC scale demonstrates high test–retest reliability (r = 0.90), self–other agreement (r = 0.54), and convergent validity with established Dark Triad measures (Short Dark Triad and Dirty Dozen; 0.79 and 0.83, respectively) as well as the Honesty-Humility domain of the HEXACO (-0.77). These findings provide little empirical support for a distinct triad/tetrad structure, and instead suggest that antagonism is the primary construct assessed by “Dark” personality measures.