The light triad was inspired by the more established dark triad which assesses negative personality and thoughts. It was expected that the light triad would be highly anticorrelated with the dark triad. That is, a high score on the light triad would correspond to a low score on the dark triad and vice versa. However researchers found that the two were only moderately anticorrelated at −0.48, showing that they are not merely opposites.[3]
Prior research has indicated that these three characteristics are relatively independent, that the light triad cannot be fully reduced to either the dark triad or fundamental personality dimensions, and that this construct predicts various outcomes related to personal growth and self-transcendence.[4] The two studies presented here seek to cross-validate the structural makeup of this new construct, assess its irreducibility to broader models of aversive traits (the dark tetrad) and personality (HEXACO plus psychoticism), and explore its additional predictive value beyond dark traits for social worldviews, militant extremist mindset, and conspiratorial thinking.[4] Lukic and others demonstrated that the light triad is no more reducible to broad personality domains than the dark traits are, although the light traits, unlike the dark ones, turned out to be weak predictors of adverse socio-psychological outcomes.[4]
Scott Barry Kaufman and his colleagues noted that, overall, scores on the light triad, along with each of its three individual components, showed negative correlations with all dimensions of the dark triad.[5] The strongest negative associations were observed between the light triad (and its facets) and Machiavellianism.[5] In their regression analysis examining the unique variance contributed by each dark triad trait, both Machiavellianism and psychopathy emerged as significant independent negative predictors of light triad scores, whereas narcissism was a weak but significant positive independent predictor, with these results indicating that the three facets of the light triad are not merely the direct opposites of the three dark triad facets.[5]
