Photo Credit: Feodor Chistyakov
Scientific Frontline: "At a Glance" Summary: Dark Personality Traits and Career Selection
- Main Discovery: Individuals with high scores in the Dark Factor of Personality display a significantly lower interest in and a reduced likelihood of entering social and artistic professions.
- Methodology: Researchers cross-referenced the Dark Factor of Personality with the RIASEC occupational model by analyzing self-reported questionnaire responses alongside official occupational registry records.
- Key Data: The cross-cultural study evaluated data from more than 8,000 participants spanning Germany, the United States, and Denmark.
- Significance: Intrinsic aversive personality traits actively dictate vocational preferences and career trajectories, proving that job selection is fundamentally shaped by internal disposition rather than solely by external incentives like salary.
- Future Application: These behavioral insights can be utilized to optimize organizational recruitment processes, refine talent acquisition strategies, and improve personalized career guidance counseling.
- Branch of Science: Psychology and Social Data Science
- Additional Detail: The correlation between dark personality traits and an interest in entrepreneurial roles is culturally dependent, showing a positive link within German cohorts but remaining absent in American and Danish populations.
People with high scores on the so-called Dark Factor of Personality have significantly less interest in social and creative jobs. This is shown by new research from the Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science (SODAS) and the Department of Psychology.
When choosing an education or job, your choice is not only based on skills and opportunities. Your personality plays a notable role, too – and according to new research, certain traits can cause you to disregard certain types of work.
This is also true for people who score high on the so-called Dark Factor of Personality (D), which represents one’s tendency to put one's own interests above those of others, e.g., via using aggressiveness, cheating, or manipulation as a means to that end.
‘We know that personality influences career choices, and now we could see for the first time how the dark core of personality is linked to which jobs people find interesting in the first place,’ says Ingo Zettler, professor of personality and social behavior at the University of Copenhagen.
No thanks to social jobs
Together with visiting researcher Lea de Hesselle and other colleagues, they investigated the connection between the D factor and the so-called RIASEC model (developed by psychologist John L. Holland), which divides job interests as well as actual occupations into six categories: realistic (e.g., practical work), investigative (e.g., innovation), artistic (e.g., creativity), social (e.g., social interaction), enterprising (e.g., leadership), and conventional (e.g., rules and regulations).
Across more than 8,000 participants from Germany, the United States and Denmark, using self-report questionnaire data, but also registry data on individuals’ actual jobs, the pattern is clear:
Social jobs such as teachers, nurses, or therapists are least attractive to people with high D scores, and they are less likely to work in such jobs. Artistic jobs such as designers or musicians are also unattractive to those with higher D scores – though not as pronounced as social jobs. Entrepreneurial jobs such as manager or salesperson? Here, the picture is more nuanced:
‘In German data, we see that people with higher D scores show more interest in such jobs, but in American and Danish data, this is not generally the case. This suggests that culture plays a role for how D is linked to entrepreneurial jobs,’ describes Lea de Hesselle.
Unexpectedly, Danish register data also showed a small positive correlation between D scores and realistic jobs – i.e. practical, craft-oriented positions.
“This is not something we expected, and because the effect is small and not apparent in German or American data, we advise against drawing too strong conclusions from this ,” says Lea de Hesselle.
May have implications for recruitment
Job satisfaction and performance are linked to whether we work with something we are actually interested in. If a personality trait such as D relates to our job preferences, this may have implications for both career guidance and recruitment, the researchers assess.
‘It is important to understand that interests do not arise in a vacuum or entirely by external factors (such as the to-be-expected salary). They are shaped by who we are – and some traits can make us less inclined to choose jobs that require, for instance, rather than things like empathy and collaboration,’ concludes Ingo Zettler.
Research material: New book on the Dark Factor of Personality
What do people who are prone to theft, hate speech, lying or bullying have in common? Over 10 years of international research shows that aversive tendencies stem from a single personality trait: the Dark Factor of Personality (D).
In the book ‘Dark Factor – die Essenz des Bösen in uns’ (Ariston Publishing, 2025), Ingo Zettler and his co-authors delve deeper into everything that research currently knows about the Dark Factor.
The book (currently published in German) is based on over 10 years of research and data from more than 2 million people. It provides background knowledge on what D covers, how it can be measured, and why it relates to everything from socio-demographics to political attitudes, from romantic relationship behavior to mental health, and much more.
Published in journal: Journal of Personnel Psychology
Authors: Lea C. de Hesselle, Johanna Einsiedler, Ole Teutloff, Lau Lilleholt, Benjamin E. Hilbig, Morten Moshagen, and Ingo Zettler
Source/Credit: University of Copenhagen
Reference Number: psy031026_01