Dark Core Personality Test: What's Actually Lurking Under the Surface

The dark triad — narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy — gets all the press. Three sinister-sounding traits, endlessly dissected on TikTok and in pop psych articles. But researchers kept noticing something: the three traits overlap. A lot. Someone high in one tends to score elevated on the others.

Which raised a question: is there something deeper? One underlying disposition that all dark traits share?

In 2018, a team of psychologists led by Morten Moshagen published research identifying exactly that. They called it the D-factor — the dark core of personality. And it reframes how we think about everything from everyday selfishness to clinical antisocial behavior.

What the D-Factor Actually Is

The D-factor isn't a new trait. It's the common core shared by all dark personality traits.

Moshagen and colleagues defined it as the general tendency to maximize one's own utility — disregarding, accepting, or malevolently provoking disutility for others — accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications.

Unpacked, that's three components:

Self-interest maximization. Prioritizing your own benefit. Everyone does this to some degree. It only becomes "dark" when combined with the next two.

Disregard for others' outcomes. Not caring whether your gain comes at someone else's expense. At the mild end: indifference. At the extreme end: actively enjoying others' suffering.

Moral justification. Constructing beliefs that make the behavior seem acceptable. "They deserved it." "Everyone does it." "The world is dog-eat-dog." "I'm just being realistic." These aren't afterthoughts — they're load-bearing psychological structures that enable the behavior to continue without guilt.

The D-factor is to dark personality traits what g-factor is to intelligence: a common underlying factor that explains why the specific traits cluster together.

The Nine Dark Traits Under One Roof

Moshagen's original research didn't stop at the dark triad. They tested the D-factor against nine distinct dark traits and found that all of them share the common dark core.

Egoism. Excessive preoccupation with your own advantage at the expense of others and the community. The baseline dark trait — pure self-interest without concern for collateral damage.

Machiavellianism. Strategic manipulation and a cynical disregard for morality. The Machiavellian doesn't just use people — they build a worldview that justifies it. "Everyone manipulates. I'm just honest about it."

Moral disengagement. Cognitive patterns that allow unethical behavior without guilt. Rationalization on autopilot. "It's not that bad." "They wouldn't notice." "I had no choice."

Narcissism. Excessive self-absorption, entitlement, and need for admiration. The narcissist's D-factor manifests as genuine belief in their own superiority, justifying exploitation of those "beneath" them.

Entitlement. The belief that you deserve more than others. Not aspiration — the conviction that rules, reciprocity, and fairness apply to other people. You're the exception.

Psychopathy. Impulsivity, callousness, and lack of empathy. The most neurological of the dark traits — psychopathy involves measurable differences in emotional processing and fear response.

Sadism. Deriving pleasure from others' suffering. The edge of the dark core. Most D-factor research treats sadism as the most extreme expression — when disregard for others' outcomes becomes active enjoyment of their pain.

Self-interest. Pursuing personal gain regardless of social consequences. Overlaps with egoism but emphasizes the relentless, almost compulsive quality of the pursuit.

Spitefulness. Willingness to harm yourself in order to harm others. This one's interesting because it violates pure self-interest. The spiteful person sacrifices their own utility to reduce someone else's. It's D-factor energy turned kamikaze.

All nine share the core: maximizing your position while disregarding, or enjoying, the cost to others, with a ready-made story about why that's fine.

What a Dark Core Test Actually Measures

A legitimate dark core personality test doesn't ask "are you a bad person?" It measures the underlying disposition through indirect assessment of behaviors, attitudes, and reasoning patterns.

D-factor vs. Dark Triad Tests

Dark triad tests measure three specific traits independently: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy. You get three scores. This is useful but misses the shared core.

D-factor tests measure the common thread. A high D-factor score means you're likely elevated across multiple dark traits, even if no single trait is extreme. It's a more parsimonious explanation of why someone is consistently difficult across contexts.

Think of it this way: if the dark triad measures individual symptoms, the D-factor measures the underlying condition.

What the Questions Look Like

D-factor assessment items probe for the three core components:

Self-interest maximization:

Scenarios where personal gain conflicts with fairness
Resource allocation decisions where you can take more than your share
Attitudes toward competitive vs. cooperative strategies

Disregard for others:

Responses to others' misfortune
Willingness to cause harm when it benefits you
Empathy calibration (not just "do you empathize" but "does empathy change your behavior")

Moral justification:

Endorsement of statements that rationalize exploitation
Beliefs about human nature ("most people would do the same")
Responses when confronted with ethical conflicts

The better tests use forced-choice formats or scenario-based questions rather than simple agree/disagree scales, because people high in D-factor are also good at managing their presentation when they know what's being measured.

What Your Score Means (and Doesn't Mean)

Here's where nuance matters, because "dark core" sounds binary and alarming, but the reality is a spectrum.

Low D-Factor

You genuinely care about others' outcomes. When your gain comes at someone else's expense, you feel uncomfortable and adjust. Your moral reasoning is internalized — you don't need external enforcement to behave ethically.

This doesn't mean you're a pushover. Low D-factor people can still be ambitious, competitive, and assertive. The difference: they won't sacrifice others' wellbeing to get ahead, and if they accidentally do, they experience genuine guilt.

Moderate D-Factor

Welcome to normal. Most people have some D-factor. You cut corners occasionally. You're capable of strategic self-interest. You sometimes rationalize behavior you know isn't ideal. You feel empathy but can override it when motivated.

Moderate D-factor isn't pathological. It's the human condition. The capacity for self-serving behavior exists alongside the capacity for genuine care. Context determines which one wins.

High D-Factor

Consistently prioritizing self-interest across contexts. Stable patterns of disregard for others. A well-developed library of justifications that feel genuinely true (not consciously constructed — the person believes their rationalizations).

High D-factor doesn't necessarily mean criminal or violent. Most high-D individuals are functional. They're the colleague who takes credit for your work and genuinely doesn't see the problem. The friend who's always asking for favors and never available when you need one. The partner who reframes their selfishness as "knowing what I want."

The common thread: a blind spot where other people's internal experience should be.

Very High D-Factor

Clinical territory. Personality disorders with antisocial features. The kind of pervasive, rigid pattern that causes significant dysfunction — though often more for others than for the person themselves.

Professional assessment is appropriate here, not online tests.

D-Factor and Everyday Life

You don't need a clinical score to encounter the D-factor in daily life. It shows up in predictable patterns.

At work: Taking credit, shifting blame, treating colleagues as resources rather than people, strategic helpfulness (only helping when it's visible or reciprocated), undermining competitors through indirect means while maintaining a collaborative facade.

In relationships: Keeping score, conditional affection, empathy that activates only when it serves a purpose, consistent pattern of prioritizing your needs while framing it as mutual benefit.

Online: The D-factor goes feral on the internet. Anonymity removes social consequence, which is the main brake on dark core behavior for most people. Trolling, pile-ons, performative cruelty, and status games through aggression are all D-factor expressions with the social mask removed.

In yourself: This is the harder one. D-factor isn't always loud. Sometimes it's the quiet rationalization you barely notice. "They won't mind." "It's not a big deal." "I deserve this more." "They would do the same thing." These micro-justifications are the D-factor at work in otherwise decent people.

The Relationship Between Dark Core and Personality

Your overall personality structure affects how dark traits manifest — if they're present at all.

Using the SoulTrace 5-color model as a lens:

High Black energy (agency, ambition) without moderating Green (connection) or White (fairness) most closely maps to D-factor territory. Pure strategic self-interest, oriented toward outcomes, comfortable with competitive tactics. Not inherently dark — but when Black dominance isn't balanced by other drives, self-interest maximization can become the default operating mode.

High Red energy (intensity, honesty) can look dark-core-adjacent but typically isn't. Red is direct and can be aggressive, but it lacks the strategic manipulation that characterizes the D-factor. Red's selfishness is impulsive and visible, not calculated and hidden. People with high Red are more likely to hurt someone through bluntness than through orchestrated exploitation.

High Blue energy (understanding, precision) combined with high Black and low Green produces the calculating variant — intelligence deployed in service of self-interest, with the analytical capacity to construct sophisticated justifications. This is the profile most associated with corporate psychopathy in research.

High Green energy (connection, belonging) is generally protective against D-factor because empathy and social connection create natural brakes on self-interest maximization. However, even high-Green personalities can develop manipulative patterns, particularly when empathy becomes a tool for influence rather than genuine care.

High White energy (structure, fairness) is also protective, but through a different mechanism: moral conviction rather than empathy. White provides the ethical framework that prevents rationalization from taking root. "This is wrong" stops the behavior before justification can begin.

The most D-factor-resistant personality? Probably high Green and White in combination — empathy backed by principle. The most vulnerable? High Black with low Green, low White — ambition without emotional or moral guardrails.

Should You Take a Dark Core Personality Test?

Yes, if you approach it honestly and use the results for genuine self-understanding rather than entertainment or identity construction.

A few principles:

Don't romanticize a high score. Pop culture has turned dark traits into personality accessories. "I'm a little bit Machiavellian" has become a flex. It shouldn't be. High D-factor correlates with relationship failure, professional instability, and long-term unhappiness — not because dark traits are punished, but because they prevent genuine connection.

Don't panic about a moderate score. Having some capacity for self-interest and moral flexibility is human. The question isn't whether you have any D-factor. The question is whether it dominates your behavioral patterns.

Consider what you do with the information. If you score elevated and your response is "interesting, I should watch for those patterns" — that's healthy self-awareness. If your response is "I knew it, I'm a mastermind" — that's the D-factor talking.

Understanding Your Full Personality Profile

The dark core is one dimension of personality. It matters, but it doesn't define you.

Take the SoulTrace assessment to see your full psychological drive profile — including the drives that balance, amplify, or redirect dark tendencies. The test maps your distribution across five fundamental psychological energies in about 8 minutes.

No email required. No paywall. Adaptive methodology that customizes each question to your specific pattern.

The result shows you the whole picture — not just whether you have dark tendencies, but the full ecosystem of drives that shape how you relate to yourself and others. That's more useful than any single-dimension dark core score.

Dark Core Personality Test: What the D-Factor Reveals About You

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