Dark Triad Test (Short Dark Triad, SD3)

The dark triad names three socially aversive traits that overlap but are distinct. Machiavellianism is strategic manipulation — a willingness to use people instrumentally, with patience and planning. Narcissism is grandiosity — a need for admiration and a sense of entitlement to it. Psychopathy, in the non-forensic sense used here, is callousness combined with impulsivity: low empathy paired with poor inhibition.

Scoring them separately is the whole point of the SD3. The three correlate enough that older brief measures collapsed them into a single dark-personality score, which loses the information that matters. A high Machiavellianism score with low psychopathy describes a calculating operator who keeps their commitments because reputation is an asset. The reverse describes someone impulsive who burns bridges without meaning to. Those are not variants of one thing.

These traits are continuous and everyone sits somewhere on each. A moderate score is not a warning; some Machiavellianism is ordinary strategic awareness, and some narcissism is ordinary self-regard. What the research associates with real cost is elevation across all three at once, and even then this is a self-report questionnaire about tendencies, not an assessment of anything clinical.

You get three separate scores charted together, each with an interpretation of what that level looks like in practice — how it shows up at work, in negotiation, and in close relationships.

All three are charted inversely, so high reads as a concern. The written interpretation avoids moralising: it describes the behavioral pattern and the situations where it costs you, since that is the part you can act on.