Self-described ‘night owls’ tend to score higher on Dark Triad spectrum

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EALING: A new study, courtesy of psych journal Personality and Individual Differences, has found that self-described “night owls” tend to score higher on the Dark Triad spectrum. Isn’t the Dark Triad an alliance in Harry Potter, you ask? Nope: this, too, is a phrase that science uses.
Researchers asked nearly 300 college students to fill out questionnaires ranking themselves in terms of the Dark Triad and their sleep habits.
In a 2013 paper, a joint team of British and Australian researchers found that night owls tend to have the so-called Dark Triad of personality traits.
The nighttime orientation serves as a kind of evolutionary adaptation for the Dark Triad personality type, argue authors Peter K. Jonason of the University of Western Sydney and Amy Jones and Minna Lyon of Liverpool Hope University.
The night, with its lower levels of light in the environment and lower levels of cognitive functioning in people, could be well-suited to the “fast life strategy” that the Dark Triad personality type embodies.
“Such features of the night may facilitate the casual sex, mate-poaching, and risk-taking the Dark Triad traits are linked to,” they argue.
The methodology of their research was clear-cut: 263 volunteers took an online study. The study had a range of personality quizzes, testing for narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism — plus a quiz for chronotypes.