As it turns out, our personalities are, in fact, shaped by the environments we grow up in, and Nevada, New York, South Dakota, and Texas contain the highest percentages of those in possession of “dark personality traits.”
A recent study conducted by Ingo Zettler, Lau Lilleholt, Benjamin E. Hilbig, Morten Moshagen, and Martina Bader at the University of Copenhagen found that humans display different levels of dark personality traits depending on their location and the concentration of aversive societal conditions (ASC) that place possesses.
Dark personality traits, or the dark triad, are recognized by psychologists as psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism — the desire or urge to exploit others.
Meanwhile, ASC can be defined as societal circumstances that occur on a large, collective scale, such as exploitation, fraud, corruption, inequality, and violence, among others.
“It is relatively well known that both genetic and socio-ecological factors shape individuals’ personality. However, respective research has hardly considered ethically or socially aversive personality characteristics,” Ingo Zettler, co-author and point-person on the study, told Newsweek.
The study, published in 2025, took place across a period of 20 years, in which researchers studied global correlations between general living conditions and the percentage of the population that possesses dark traits.
The study probed 183 countries across the world with a total of 1,791,542 participants.
In their exploration of the correlation between dark personality traits and aversive social conditions, the researchers examined the U.S. through the lens of individual states.
Data was gathered via survey, and for the U.S.-focused portion of the study, used Census data on socioeconomic disparity and poverty, FBI homicide rates, and Justice Department corruption sentences to draw conclusions.
Within the U.S., researchers looked into all 50 states and compiled responses from 144,576 Americans.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2500830122 Zettler et al., PNAS
“The more adverse conditions in a society, the higher the level of the dark factor of personality among its citizens,” Zettler summarized. “Aversive personality traits are associated with behaviors such as aggression, cheating, and exploitation — and thus with high social costs. Therefore, even small variations can lead to large differences in how societies function.”
Urban areas of the United States tend to house extraordinarily economically diverse populations — cities like Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco — in close concentration, which can lead to tensions and concerns over quality of life and equal access to essential resources, resulting in higher D levels.
On the other hand, rural areas — like much of Vermont, Utah, Maine, and Oregon, the four states with the lowest probability of producing individuals as a result of living conditions — are more likely to be geographically isolated and relatively economically balanced, per findings from the study.
“Because you might grow up in a country with a high ASC, you’re not necessarily fated to become an immoral, exploitative, and self-centered individual,” wrote Susan Krauss Whitbourne in Psychology Today. “What the findings suggest, instead, is that consistent with the adaptational hypothesis, people may acquire a tendency toward high levels of D if that’s what they see around them, or if their own economic deprivation and hardship are particularly pronounced.”
“Our findings substantiate that personality is not just something we are born with, but also shaped by the society we grew up and live in,” Zettler concluded.
“This means that reforms that reduce corruption and inequality not only create better living conditions just now, they may also contribute to mitigating aversive personality levels among the citizens in the future.”
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