Recent research published in current psychology It has been suggested that how adults remember how they were treated by their parents in childhood tends to predict the development of certain dark personality traits. The results of this study provide evidence that high levels of early childhood pampering are associated with socially negative traits, whereas early childhood praise is associated with more socially advantageous traits.
The Dark Triad is a psychological framework that groups three aspects of socially difficult personality. These aspects are psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. Psychopathy includes a lack of empathy, a tendency toward cruelty, and high impulsivity. Machiavellianism is characterized by a cynical worldview and a tendency to manipulate and exploit others for personal gain. Narcissism involves an exaggerated sense of self-importance, feelings of entitlement, and a deep desire for admiration from others.
People often describe these characteristics on a spectrum. This means that they are present to varying degrees not only in clinical settings but also in the general population. In many everyday situations, some of these dark trait traits can actually confer social benefits. For example, traits such as superficial charm, social assertiveness, and the ability to remain calm under pressure often help people succeed in competitive environments. These traits are so common that psychology researchers want to know exactly how they develop.
Scientists have noticed that components of these traits often emerge in early childhood. This observation suggests that a person’s early developmental environment plays an important role in shaping their personality in adulthood. Previous studies examining early life experiences have yielded mixed results on how exactly parenting shapes these dark traits. To better understand this developmental process, it is helpful to look beyond the broad categories of the Dark Triad.
Rather than treating each dimension as a single giant block, psychological frameworks often break it down into smaller, more specific characteristics. For example, the broad category of psychopathy can be broken down into meanness, boldness, and extreme lack of impulse control. Narcissism is divided into attention-seeking extraversion, defensive hostility, and emotional vulnerability. Decomposing these aspects into multifaceted traits allows scientists to detect subtle differences in how specific parenting strategies relate to different human behaviors.
Jennifer Vonk, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Auckland, explained the motivation behind the study. “We have a long-standing interest in the origins of dark personality traits,” Vonk told SciPost. “The relatively recent three-factor model of the Dark Triad dimensions has revealed some consistency between the fundamental aspects of each dimension and provided an opportunity to take a more nuanced approach to studying the associations between specific parenting strategies and specific traits.”
The authors designed this study to investigate how specific childhood experiences correlate with these precise low-level traits. They focused on how parental praise, pampering, and emphasis on social status shape personality. Praise refers to reinforcing a child’s inherent worth and telling them that they are special. Spoiling involves overestimating a child, not setting limits, and giving the child almost everything he or she wants. Status involves teaching children that achieving success, fame, and prestige is essential to survival in a competitive world.
Vonk noted that focusing on specific tools can help drive research design. “Furthermore, new measures of parental use of praise and shame seemed particularly relevant to the study of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, so we were excited to investigate their associations,” Fonck said.
To investigate these associations, researchers recruited 1,025 undergraduate students from the Midwest who participated and earned course credit. After excluding participants who failed basic attention checks or had incomplete survey data, the final sample consisted of 720 students. This group included 571 women, 133 men, and 16 non-binary individuals. The average age of the participants was 20.14 years, and their ages ranged from 17 to 52 years.
The racial and ethnic composition of the sample was 73.5% White, 13.1% Black, 6.7% Asian, and 5.4% Hispanic. An additional 6.0% of participants identified as other ethnicities, although some chose not to share this information. The students completed a series of online questionnaires designed to measure their current personality traits and memories of how their primary caregivers treated them in childhood.
To measure perceived parenting strategies, the scientists used a tool called the Sweetness of Praise and Parenting Status Scale. The survey asked participants to rate how much their caregiver praised their abilities, gave them everything they asked for, and encouraged them to pursue stardom.
Participants also completed a modified version of the Parental Bonding Instrument. The survey measured levels of parental care, denial of psychological independence, and encouragement of freedom of action. Denial of psychological autonomy includes overprotective behavior by parents, such as invading a child’s privacy or restricting a child’s independence.
Researchers used three separate psychological tests to measure specific traits of the Dark Triad. To assess psychopathy, they used a survey measuring emotional meanness, stress tolerance boldness, and failure to regulate emotions. In the case of Machiavellianism, they used an inventory that captured selfish hostility, ambitious impulses, and thoughtful deliberation. To measure narcissism, the authors used a questionnaire that assessed defensive hostility, desire for attention, and negative emotional reactions to failure.
Through statistical analysis, researchers found consistent patterns linking perceived parenting styles to specific adult personality outcomes. Higher levels of recalled parental indulgence tended to predict negative personality traits across all three Dark Triad domains. For example, participants who remembered parents who were highly indulgent showed higher levels of narcissistic hostility, psychopathic meanness, and psychopathic disinhibition. Disinhibition refers to acting on impulses without considering the consequences.
At the same time, higher levels of parental indulgence were associated with relatively lower levels of positive traits. These people reported lower Machiavellian ambition, lower positive planning, and lower narcissistic extraversion. This combination suggests that giving your child everything they want may foster hostility and impulsivity rather than healthy self-confidence and self-regulation.
Parental praise showed exactly the opposite pattern in the data. High levels of praise during childhood were negatively associated with overall hostile and impulsive traits. Instead, praise was associated with more socially beneficial traits, such as a healthy sense of agency and social trust. This indicates that reinforcing children’s values tends to support adaptive social functioning without creating a cruel sense of entitlement.
Mr. Fonck emphasized the practical implications of these conflicting results. “The fact that high pampering and low praise seem to predict higher levels of pathological traits and lower levels of more positive traits shows the importance of providing children with positive feedback without over-indulging,” Vonk said.
The study also found that valuing social status was associated with a combination of positive and negative personality traits. Participants whose parents imposed prestige on them showed higher levels of both adaptive traits, such as boldness, and maladaptive traits, such as manipulative hostility. Denying children’s psychological autonomy was positively associated with hostility, reduced impulse control, and negative emotional responses to stress.
However, some of the findings regarding emotional vulnerability in narcissism were less pronounced than expected. “Not by exaggeration, but I expected to find that the association with neurotic narcissism was stronger than it actually was,” Fonck said when asked if the study surprised him.
Interestingly, once other parenting strategies were incorporated into the mathematical model, basic parental care no longer showed strong unique associations with most dark traits. Care was only specifically associated with lower levels of impulsive disinhibition. This suggests that in these particular models, the specific ways in which parents praise or set limits may play a larger role in the development of dark personalities than general warmth alone.
Fonck provided some background on the findings, explaining that care and praise often statistically overlap. “We may have been a little surprised that parental warmth and consideration were not stronger predictors of child characteristics, but we think this is simply a product of the association with praise and may be capturing similar variance,” Fonck said. “We don’t want readers to think that parental warmth is not important in nurturing positive traits in children.”
“A key point is the importance of using multidimensional models of these personality dimensions, especially when investigating early etiology,” Fonck said, referring to the causes and origins of these traits. “Although there are some relatively adaptive aspects of these dark dimensions, they may be rooted in distinct childhood experiences that are different from those that produce more pathological aspects of the same dimensions.”
“Studying parenting strategies as overarching styles or higher-order personality dimensions can obscure important patterns in specific parental behaviors and child characteristics,” Fonck added. “These contradictory associations also highlight the need to consider different characteristics separately to avoid overlooking important patterns.”
Although these findings provide a useful background for personality development, they also have certain limitations. Because this study relied on correlational data collected at a single point in time, it is impossible to prove that specific parenting strategies directly cause dark personality traits. People who already have highly hostile or impulsive traits may just remember their childhood in a biased or inaccurate way compared to their peers.
Additionally, it is important to remember the nature of the people surveyed. “We would also like to caution our readers to be aware that our sample is not a clinical sample, so people with high levels of psychopathic meanness, for example, are not ‘psychopaths,'” Vonk said. “These were the people who scored relatively high on this trait compared to the rest of the sample. It is quite possible that a different pattern would emerge in the clinical sample.”
The demographic composition of the sample also limits the extent to which these findings can be applied to the general public. Participants were comprised of primarily female, mostly Caucasian, and all American college students. “I think it’s also important to note that because we sampled college students, our sample of participants likely did not experience the harshest early life circumstances and likely captured only a small amount of variance in the predictor variables,” Vonk said.
Future research could investigate how different parenting strategies interact in real time over the course of early childhood. The researchers also hope to expand their focus to cover a wider range of early childhood environments.
Vonk shared his vision for the next steps in this line of research. “I’m interested in exploring the more negative aspects of early childhood experiences related to adversity and trauma, but I’m also particularly interested in how attachment styles, especially between children and their caregivers, can alleviate or exacerbate some of the potential negative effects of early adversity experiences,” Vonk said.
The study, “Admiring the Light, Reveling in the Dark: Parenting Strategies and Dark Personality Traits,” was authored by Jennifer Vonk, Virgil Zeigler-Hill, and Nyla Griffin.
