Twenty-seven statements used in personality research to describe three overlapping socially aversive trait dimensions.
Method and research sourcesSD3 estimates Machiavellianism, grandiose narcissism, and subclinical psychopathy with nine statements per scale. The constructs overlap, and later research has questioned how cleanly some scales separate.
Responses run from 1 to 5. Five items are reverse-scored. The nine keyed responses for each trait are averaged, producing three values from 1.00 to 5.00; there is no overall Dark Triad score.
The original SD3 paper and recent psychometric reviews are listed below.
Daniel N. Jones, Delroy L. Paulhus
Louise Latham, Zoe Stephenson
Peter Muris, et al.
Related resources are selected by personality and relationship topics, not by your profile.
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Complete the 28-item Short Dark Tetrad and see separate research profiles for Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism.
Explore Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Negative Emotionality, and Open-Mindedness with the 30-item BFI-2-S.
No universal clinical cut-off is used here. SD3 is a dimensional research measure, not a risk assessment.
No. The scale covers subclinical traits and cannot establish a personality-disorder diagnosis.
Reverse-keyed items reduce automatic agreement and are converted internally. The interface does not mark them because every statement should be answered naturally.
