How Common Are Dark Personality Traits?

Dark traits—including sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy—exist on a continuum, so estimates depend on how “high” is defined.

• Clinical-level psychopathy: About 1% of the population, using a score of 30 or higher on the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised.
• Narcissistic personality disorder: An estimated 2–5% of the population.
• Sadism and Machiavellianism: There are no established clinical cutoffs, so their prevalence is harder to estimate.
• High self-reported traits overall: Roughly 10% of people, based on those who tend to agree with questionnaire items measuring these traits.

These figures refer to different ways of defining and measuring the traits, so they are not directly equivalent.