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

2025· article· en· W4409597782 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.936
Threshold uncertainty score0.326

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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