Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed?

The term dark personalities refer to a set of socially aversive traits (such as spitefulness, greed, sadism, narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) in the subclinical range. And thus, according yo this article, those with dark personality traits are slightly more likely to emerge as leaders and are seen as charismatic but, when it comes to getting the job done, they tend to achieve less and are considered poor team players.

It mentions those with "dark traits" tend to be seen as poor team players, but perhaps that's exactly why these types ascend to top leadership positions. Your "team play" ability only matters to the extent that you engage in peer-to-peer relationships, which can be relatively minimal in that position compared to, say, middle management. See, for instance, Steve Jobs. I've never heard him described as a "team player", exactly.

In the end, I'd say both types are important. Obviously we need team players, but sometimes you need an auteur or benevolent dictator. Measuring success for these different types should account for their respective strengths.

The test itself is very well done - they try to get people to respond precisely, but checking attention, and asking multiple times questions about the same concept.

However, the article has a very fundamental flaw:

> Unfortunately, most people with extreme levels of dark personality traits don’t want to change who they are. Despite not being particularly happy with their lives

The test doesn't deal with "happiness" at all, which is a key component of the argument.

If consider as example a person like Steve Jobs, who would fair very high on narcisissm and machiavellism, what would be his happiness?

While he could have been as much successful being a nice person (there are examples in history, my favorite being Carmack), what does represent happiness for him, from the perspective of other people, and from his own?

Probably, from his own perspective, he's a "happy" person - he craves attention and success, and he satisfies both.

I think defining happiness in a more general sense requires a certain "wider" personality, which this type of people doesn't have - ultimately, they're very narrow.

Generalizing this example, the argument "Despite not being particularly happy with their lives" doesn't really hold - this type of ferociously and single-mindedly driven people are ultimately succeeding in their own, narrow, purpose.

Based on who I have seen as leaders I would say this is true.

In my personal experience, the problem with individuals with narcissistic psychopathic features in management or executive positions is that there's almost always opportunity costs with regard to a different way that could have achieved more with less cost. That is, they are ruthless and destructive, and claim doing so was necessary, but it's only because there was a very very simple alternate approach (often requiring some modicum of social awareness) that could have yielded something even better at a fraction of the financial and personal cost. Their approach is often presented as "harsh but necessary" when it's anything but.

Also, they tend to deceptively take credit for progress, in the sense that things that would have occurred regardless, even without them in that position. Often things were already in progress before they attained their position, and often the people who were responsible for that are actually eliminated by them so as to remove threats to them getting credit. This is part of the problem: that they tend to manipulate others and the system for their own gain. In fact, I'm a bit suspicious of attributions of success associated with dark traits, even in a research context, because of this phenomenon. I wouldn't say I think the association isn't there, but I think it's a serious research design problem that isn't completely addressed (e.g., let's say you have a company whose profits are starting to increase with acceleration, and a psychopath who wants to gain from that. if they move up in a leadership position as they see it as profitable personally, are subsequent institutional gains due to them or the pre-existing conditions the psychopath appraised? It will look like the gains occurred after the psychopath entered the position, but in reality, the causal direction goes the other way around -- that the psychopath was attracted to the position because they saw it as something that would reflect well on them).

I think there's some kind of bias in play with these sorts of social-personality characteristics, where people tend to have a blind spot to the opportunity costs of this behavior (akin to survivorship bias but different). It probably has an established name, but I don't know what it is.