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The origins of darkness: An evolutionary-developmental integration of Dark traits with the HEXACO

2025· article· en· W4409597782 on OpenAlexafffund
Anthony A. Volk, Andrew V. Dane, Alexandra Puchalski

Bibliographic record

VenueEvolution and Human Behavior · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicPersonality Traits and Psychology
Canadian institutionsBrock University
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research CouncilSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsDarknessPsychologyBiologyBotany

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Exploitative, selfish behavior has been a topic of interest to researchers across a wide range of domains. One prominent area of research has focused on personality as an important contributor to harmful and selfish behavior. The term “Dark Triad” was coined to identify three selfish personality traits that all share a common core (D): Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy. While numerous candidates have emerged to explain D, evidence suggests that the HEXACO model of personality provides the best fit. In particular, the latent core of the HEXACO trait Honesty-Humility (H) appears to be statistically identical to the latent core of D ( r ≈ 0.95). We adopt an evolutionary-developmental perspective to address how this common core may have emerged over evolution as well as developed in individuals. Specifically, we offer: 1) an adaptive explanation of high and low levels of H/D, 2) a parsimonious and plausible evolutionary and developmental model to explain the existence of Dark Triad traits that fits with both modern and historical patterns of human behavior, and 3) an explanation for how developmental and evolutionary processes of modification can change the levels of other HEXACO traits to lead to the expression of not only the Dark Triad, but to an entire array of Dark traits. We end by discussing implications for intervention and understanding personality models of exploitative, selfish traits.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.003
Threshold uncertainty score0.006

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.005
Scholarly communication0.0020.001
Open science0.0000.002
Research integrity0.0000.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.031
GPT teacher head0.345
Teacher spread0.314 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations7
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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