People with darker personalities tend to prefer partners like themselves, study suggests

People generally want a romantic partner who is kind and cooperative, yet some individuals are drawn to manipulative personalities and even violent criminals. A new study published in Evolution and Human Behavior suggests that preferences for these dark traits largely track people’s own personalities, with those higher in such traits rating them as more desirable in a partner. The study also found that a hypothetical partner described as manipulative and as having committed physical assault was rated as highly undesirable, and adding fame, wealth, or good looks did not make that person any more appealing.

When people look for a romantic partner, evolutionary biology suggests they should favor prosocial traits like kindness, trustworthiness, and cooperation. These qualities help build stable relationships and help ensure that both partners invest in raising children. Despite this general rule, some people are attracted to antisocial personalities, and at the extreme, to people who have committed serious crimes, a sexual attraction known as hybristophilia.

Public fascination with notorious offenders such as the American serial killer Ted Bundy helped inspire the new investigation. “The idea for this study came from observing the attraction to famous criminals, such as Ted Bundy, who famously received many love letters during his imprisonment,” study lead author Katharina P. da Silva told PsyPost. “This observation led me to question whether there might be an evolutionary basis for being attracted to individuals with socially undesirable traits, given that these traits could bring disadvantages to those who form relationships with them.”

To understand why someone would choose a partner likely to exploit or harm them, psychologists often examine the Dark Triad of personality. The Dark Triad is a cluster of three distinct but overlapping socially offensive traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Narcissism involves grandiosity, entitlement, and a constant need for admiration. Machiavellianism is defined by strategic manipulation, deceit, and a belief that the ends justify the means, while psychopathy is characterized by callousness, impulsivity, and a lack of empathy or remorse.

These traits exist on a spectrum in the general population, meaning people can display everyday, non-clinical levels of selfishness and manipulation without being diagnosed with a personality disorder or committing crimes. Early evolutionary research into these traits suggested they might actually offer an advantage in the dating pool. For instance, a 2008 survey of college students found that men with higher Dark Triad scores tended to have more casual sexual partners and a stronger preference for short-term relationships.

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Building on this idea, a 2013 experiment asked women to rate written descriptions of fictional men and found that the Dark Triad personality was rated as more attractive than a regular control personality. However, subsequent research questioned whether dark traits are inherently appealing or if they simply piggyback on other attractive qualities. The new study’s authors refer to this idea as the desirability by-product hypothesis, which proposes that people are not actually drawn to manipulation or cruelty itself, but rather to desirable traits like physical beauty, social status, or wealth that happen to appear alongside a dark personality.

Another competing explanation for the appeal of dark personalities is homogamy, also known as assortative mating, which is the tendency for people to choose partners who are similar to themselves. Under this view, manipulative or callous individuals actively prefer partners who share their worldview and lifestyle. For example, a 2016 study found that women who scored high in narcissism preferred male faces digitally altered to look narcissistic, though this self-similarity effect did not appear for Machiavellianism or psychopathy.

Da Silva, who holds a master’s degree in experimental psychology, developed the research in the Behavior, Evolution and Sexuality Lab at the Institute of Psychology at the University of São Paulo under the supervision of Jaroslava V. Valentova, with whom she and co-author Marco Antonio C. Varella also recently published a book chapter on Dark Triad traits and casual sex across cultures. Now a doctoral student at the Laboratory of Translational and Behavioral Neuroscience at the Federal University of São Paulo, she and her colleagues set out to directly test both homogamy and the desirability by-product hypothesis in a single study.

The researchers wanted to see whether attraction to Dark Triad traits is linked to a person’s own dark traits and risk-taking tendencies, and whether adding fame, wealth, or good looks to a violent criminal profile could make an antisocial partner seem desirable.

The researchers recruited 400 Brazilian adults between the ages of 18 and 60, with an average age of about 28. The sample included 193 women, 176 men, and 31 participants who identified as non-binary, identified as a Latin American trans-feminine identity known as travesti, or chose not to state their gender. Because the non-binary and travesti groups were small, the researchers excluded those 31 individuals from statistical models that specifically tested for gender differences, leaving 369 participants for those specific comparisons.

Participants completed a series of online questionnaires measuring their own personalities and behavioral tendencies. To measure Dark Triad traits, the authors used a 12-item survey called the Dirty Dozen, which asks respondents how much they agree with statements reflecting narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy on a 1-to-5 scale. Participants also completed an adapted version of this same scale to rate how desirable they found each of those 12 dark traits in a potential romantic partner.

To measure risk-taking and thrill-seeking, the researchers administered two additional questionnaires. One was a 10-item scale assessing sexual sensation-seeking, which measures a person’s desire for novel and varied sexual experiences. The other was the 12-item sensation-seeking portion of an impulsivity questionnaire, which measures the tendency to seek out exciting, risky activities.

For the experimental portion of the study, each participant was randomly assigned to read one of six short written vignettes describing a hypothetical person. The descriptions were kept completely neutral regarding gender, age, and race, and no photographs were used so that physical facial features would not accidentally bias the ratings. After reading their assigned profile, participants rated how willing they would be to enter a casual, short-term relationship and a stable, long-term relationship with that person on a scale from 1 (extremely unwilling) to 7 (extremely willing).

The first vignette served as a prosocial control condition, describing an intelligent, kind, and helpful person who enjoys teamwork and cares about how their actions affect others. The second vignette described a person with Dark Triad traits but no criminal record, portraying them as calculating, persuasive, and willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead because they believe the ends justify the means. The third vignette used this exact same Dark Triad description but added that the person had committed the crime of physical assault.

The remaining three vignettes tested the by-product hypothesis by pairing the Dark Triad and physical assault profile with a major desirable attribute. In the fourth scenario, the assault gained media attention, and the person became famous with a large social media following. In the fifth scenario, the person was described as wealthy and of high social status, able to post bail after the assault arrest. In the sixth scenario, the person was described as extremely physically attractive, drawing media focus for their good looks after being sent to jail for the assault.

When analyzing the personality questionnaires, the researchers found evidence consistent with the homogamy hypothesis. Across the board, participants who scored higher on Dark Triad traits rated those same traits as more desirable in a romantic partner. People’s own scores correlated with their preference for the same trait at about 0.59 for Machiavellianism, 0.66 for psychopathy, and 0.69 for narcissism, on a scale where 1 is a perfect relationship. Even when controlling for gender, sexual sensation-seeking, and thrill-seeking in a combined statistical model, a person’s own levels of Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism remained the primary predictors of their preference for those respective traits in a mate.

While sexual sensation-seeking and thrill-seeking were weakly linked to dark trait preferences in simple one-to-one comparisons, their influence disappeared once the participants’ own Dark Triad scores were accounted for. This suggests that thrill-seeking does not explain preferences for dark traits beyond its overlap with people’s own dark traits. As a further check, the researchers compared each participant’s preferences with the self-ratings of randomly paired participants and found that people’s preferences sat closer to their own scores than chance pairings would predict.

These findings align with research covered by PsyPost in October 2024, which examined real-world romantic couples rather than ratings of hypothetical profiles and similarly found that partners tend to share similar levels of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. The results are also consistent with a study covered by PsyPost in August 2024, which evaluated real-world couples and found that people with dark personalities feel more satisfied in relationships when their partners share similar levels of psychopathy and narcissism.

“It is worth noting that, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first evidence of assortative mating for antisocial traits in a Brazilian sample,” da Silva noted. “We hope these findings encourage further investigation into the underlying factors driving such attraction in Latin American populations.”

In the experimental vignette portion of the study, the desirability by-product hypothesis was not supported. On the 1-to-7 willingness scale, the kind, prosocial control profile received an average rating of 5.92, making it by far the most desirable option. When the profile switched to a calculating Dark Triad personality without a criminal record, average willingness to date the person dropped sharply to 2.40.

“The main takeaway is that, despite evidence showing some attraction to antisocial traits and criminal individuals, prosociality still remains a far more desirable trait in the context of mate choice,” da Silva explained.

Adding a history of physical assault caused desirability to fall even further, down to an average rating of 1.52. Pairing that profile with fame, wealth, or extreme physical attractiveness did not improve its appeal. The famous criminal received an average score of 1.46, the wealthy criminal scored 1.49, and the physically attractive criminal scored 1.60, none of which were statistically different from the plain criminal profile.

“Given the extensive literature supporting attraction to traits such as fame, high socioeconomic status, and physical attractiveness, it was an interesting surprise when the byproduct hypothesis was not confirmed,” da Silva said. “However, this finding suggests that the effect of antisocial traits combined specifically with the crime of physical assault may have acted as a dealbreaker, that is, a negative trait in a potential partner that carries more weight in attraction than any positive characteristics presented by them.”

The researchers also looked at whether these preferences changed depending on whether the relationship was casual or long-term. Overall, participants expressed slightly higher willingness to engage in short-term relationships than long-term ones across all profiles, and men gave slightly higher willingness ratings than women for short-term dating. Contrary to the authors’ expectations, however, the dark and criminal profiles gained no special advantage in the casual context; the gap between them and the prosocial profile was similar for flings and for stable relationships.

This general rejection of dark personalities is in line with a study covered by PsyPost in February 2025, which also used written vignettes of hypothetical partners and found that people generally prefer low levels of Dark Triad traits for both short-term and long-term dating. The results also differ from the 2013 experiment described earlier, in which women rated a fictional man with Dark Triad traits as more attractive than a control character. Similarly, the new findings stand in tension with a 2016 speed-dating study covered by PsyPost, which found that narcissism and psychopathy were linked to greater short-term dating success. That study involved real face-to-face meetings rather than written profiles, and in person, charm and body language might mask a person’s underlying manipulation.

As with all research, there are some caveats to consider when interpreting these findings. In the personality survey, most participants rated themselves and their ideal partners very low on the Dark Triad scale, clustering near the bottom of the 1-to-5 range. For example, average self-ratings were 1.62 for Machiavellianism, 1.58 for psychopathy, and 2.45 for narcissism, which creates a “floor effect” where the lack of high scores can artificially inflate the statistical similarity between self-ratings and partner preferences. The homogamy results also reflect stated preferences rather than the partners people actually choose.

There are also a few methodological details to keep in mind regarding the online survey tools and vignettes. The researchers noted that the brief 12-item Dirty Dozen scale had slightly weaker internal consistency for Machiavellianism and psychopathy than is ideal, and the survey did not include attention-check questions to weed out distracted readers.

The researchers also did not check whether participants saw the added fame, wealth, and looks as desirable, or whether they viewed the assault as equally serious across profiles. In addition, using written descriptions of beauty, wealth, and fame may not trigger the same automatic emotional reactions as seeing an actual photograph of a gorgeous person or interacting with someone of high status in real life.

The specific crime chosen for the vignettes, physical assault, may also help explain why the desirable traits failed to make the criminal profiles appealing, since violence may signal a direct threat to a partner’s safety. In addition, every profile with fame, wealth, or good looks also described an assault, so the study could not test whether those attributes would make a manipulative but law-abiding partner more appealing. Those profiles were also rated near the bottom of the scale, leaving little room to detect any improvement. Future studies could test whether non-violent offenses, such as financial fraud or white-collar crime, are more easily forgiven when a potential partner is wealthy, famous, or good-looking.

Finally, the study relied on a convenience sample of Brazilian internet users. Even though Brazil has high rates of violent crime overall, the participants were more educated than the general population and were recruited mainly through university channels and social media, so they may not reflect people in settings where crime is more common.

“It’s important to say that the use of a convenience sample may have limited the representation of individuals who are attracted to partners with criminal records, as this preference is likely rare in the general population,” da Silva added. “This could have diluted the observed effects of criminal behavior on mate preferences. Additionally, it is essential to remember that our research was performed in a Brazilian sample, and that no single sample can represent humanity. Also, this reinforces why it is so important to do research on diverse, ‘in-between’ populations such as ours, which are unfortunately still underrepresented in the literature, building a more robust evolutionary psychological science.”

Looking ahead, the researchers hope to explore whether these mating preferences shift in different social environments where aggressive, dominant behavior might be viewed by some as a practical form of protection or resource acquisition. “Future research could benefit from employing targeted sampling strategies (e.g., in high-crime areas or specific subcultures) to test whether the observed mechanisms are amplified in ecologies where the cost-benefit ratio of criminality is altered,” da Silva said.

The study, “Dark side of mate choice: homogamy drives attraction to dark triad, but desirability of antisocial traits and criminal behavior is not enhanced by fame, wealth, or looks,” was authored by Katharina P. da Silva, Bruno H. Amaral, Marco Antonio C. Varella, and Jaroslava V. Valentova.