Psychologists have spent the better part of the last decade confirming what anyone who’s ever read YouTube comments already suspected: all the worst people on Earth seem to be operating with the same God-awful personality traits.
Science Alert has compiled a detailed map of years of scientific research peering into humanity’s darkest thoughts and worst impulses. They argue that some of the worst our species has to offer comes from what researchers from the University of Copenhagen and universities in Germany identified as the “D-factor” back in 2018, aka Dark Factor of Personality, a sort of universal villain setting fueling traits like narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, sadism, spitefulness, and egoism.
The researchers surveyed more than 2,500 people, asking them to rate a variety of statements like “I’ll say anything to get what I want” and “Hurting people would be exciting” — two mantras of the common deranged lunatic. They found that these traits are different flavors of the same underlying tendency to maximize one’s own benefit while caring little, or sometimes even taking great pleasure from, actively making someone else’s life worse.
Researchers Say Humanity’s Worst People All Score High on This One Trait
Later studies found the D-factor remains stable over time. People don’t just wake up one morning and decide to become cartoon villains. Researchers also found that people with high D scores are significantly less likely to choose careers focused on helping others, such as teaching, nursing, or therapy. It’s comforting to know the people least interested in empathy generally don’t volunteer to make empathy their full-time job.
A 2025 study published in PNAS even suggested that the scope can be broadened far beyond the individual, with societies themselves being able to score higher or lower on collective levels of the D-factor, with harsher social environments creating darker personalities. And you thought you had to deal with a handful of toxic people in your life, without realizing they’re just a byproduct of a toxic country.
By better understanding the D-factor, therapists around the world hope to improve their therapeutic methods and more accurately predict harmful behavior, which could eventually help explain and, hopefully, mitigate all sorts of human-created nastiness like corporate fraud and violent crime.
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