People who move around a lot tend to score higher on the so-called Dark Triad of personality: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. And the link seems to run both ways.
That is the conclusion of eight studies with a combined 6,147 participants by Shijiang Zuo, Xueli Zhu, Fang Wang, Niwen Huang and Pan Cai. The paper was published online on November 9, 2023 in the European Journal of Personality, under the title “Moving towards darkness: The personality-environment association between the Dark Triad and residential mobility.”
From individuals to whole regions
The first set of studies looked for the basic association. People who had moved more often in their own lives reported higher Dark Triad scores, and ordinary observers picked up on the same link when judging others.
The pattern also appeared at a larger scale. Residents of countries, and of provinces, with a high net outflow of population reported higher levels of the three traits.
Which comes first
The later studies tried to untangle cause and effect. When participants were put into a mindset of residential mobility rather than stability, they leaned more toward Dark Triad tendencies.
The reverse held too. People already high in the traits said they preferred a mobile lifestyle, and preferred to live in places that many people were leaving.
The authors read this as a two-way relationship between personality and environment: an unsettled, mobile setting can draw out darker traits, and people with those traits are drawn to such settings. Most of the evidence links moving with trait scores. The causal pieces come from experiments that shifted people’s mindset about mobility and from stated preferences about where to live.
Study Details:
- Title: Moving towards darkness: The personality-environment association between the Dark Triad and residential mobility
- Authors: Shijiang Zuo, Xueli Zhu, Fang Wang, Niwen Huang, Pan Cai
- Journal: European Journal of Personality
- Publication Date: November 9, 2023
- DOI: 10.1177/08902070231209789