A research by the University of Copenhagen identifies a common trait in the darker personalities. This common trait is what D factor is.

According to a new study, there are nine distinctive and common traits that define a person's dark side. Research results show that these types of individuals are characterized by the D factor.

This factor implies a tendency to put one's goals and interests above all else.

A person has a dark personality type ("Dark", hence factor D) when he presents traits related to sadism, psychopathy, narcissism or Machiavellianism. In a document titled"The Dark Core of Personality", published in the journal Psychological Review, the common denominator is the "general trend of maximizing one's individual usefulness".

In essence, put your goals and interests above anything else. Even if it means hurting other people.

Researchers Ingo Zettler, psychologist at the University of Copenhagen, Morten Moshagen, professor at the University of Ulm, and Benjamin Hilbig, professor at the University of Koblenz -Landau, studied 2,500 people.

They asked them to agree or disagree with several statements

For example, "Sometimes it's worth suffering a bit to see others get the punishment they deserve." Or, "I know I'm special because everyone keeps telling me." Zettler said the results showed how dark aspects of personality seem to have a common denominator.

This suggests that dark traits are an expression of the same mental outlook on life,which researchers have called the D factor.

What are the most common dark personality traits identified by the team? There are nine in all:

➢ Selfishness - The excessive need to put one's needs first and foremost.

➢ Machiavellianism - The belief that ends justify means, no matter how manipulative or insensitive they are.

➢ Moral disengagement - The ability to behave unethically without worrying about the consequences.

➢ Narcissism - Self-obsession, mania of greatness, looking down on everyone else, still wanting their attention.

➢ Psychological law - Believing that you are better than everyone and that you deserve better treatment than others.

➢ Psychopathy - A lack of empathy or shame coupled with impulsive and reckless behavior.

➢ Sadism - Wanting to inflict emotional or physical harm on others to feel pleasure.

➢ Personal Interest - Desiring social and financial success above all else.

➢ Malignancy - Destructiveness and willingness to cause harm to others, although this can hurt us.

Psychological manipulation is not only a psychological process, but it is a communicative process: a good communicator is the one who manages to convey simple,even if deep and surprising, concrete and credible messages, leveraging emotional factor sand with an easily reproducible narrative modality.

It is not necessary to believe in a supernatural source of evil: men alone are perfectly capable of any evil.

In making this short guide we have tried to broaden the canons of popular psychological literature, usually dominated by chapters that describe how we can achieve greater personal well-being, what influences sentimental relationships or how to get along with our partner in love, children, work colleagues etc.

Other more specialized chapters provide useful information to an audience of professionals in the psychological disciplines, updating them on new diagnostic procedures, intervention techniques, efficacy studies, etc.

On the other hand, who ever said that psychology is only a helping discipline?

It is probable that the profane reader, in front of the word psychology, imagines himself entering an elegantly furnished study, with the wooden floor and the walls dominated by watercolors, certificates and an immense walnut bookcase.

His imagination will then take him to a comfortable sofa on which to sit, or even lie down, telling what goes on in his head to a bearded gentleman, intent on taking notes.

Today we would like to offer you a much less reassuring image. Inviting you inside a dusty and locked room, without windows, with the ghostly light of a neon that illuminates the face of your interlocutor, intent on smoking a cigarette while his gaze, grim, it does not abandon even your eyes for a moment; he knows that sooner or later you will tell him what he wants to hear.

The study of the processes of manipulation, suggestion and influence is a topic dear to social psychology, which has been dealing with it for decades.

The end of World War II, forced the western world to reflect on totalitarian regimes,raising disturbing questions about the contribution of each individual in the genesis and maintenance of political and social systems, based on the restriction of freedoms, violence and the justification of the most heinous crimes.

Milgram (1974) demonstrated in a masterly way what Hannah Arendt, almost simultaneously, wrote while attending Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem: an ordinary man, placed in a favorable socio-cultural context, could become a ruthless Nazi hierarch. Milgram identified, in the obedience, and in the fear of contradicting a source of authority,the factors capable of carrying out a brutal action, such as administering a high voltage electric discharge to a defenseless person.

However, Eichmann's description of Arendt highlights even more disturbing factors in their meanness, such as careerism and the need to conform to a hierarchical system, as well as an inability to reflect on the consequences of one's actions.

On the one hand the fear of contradicting an authority, on the other the desire to be complicit in it, regardless of the moral implications.

But let's stop here. While these examples concern processes of influence, in which a person adapts himself in a more or less conscious way to imposed decisions, in the more frankly manipulative processes, the victim is subjugated in the way of thinking and perceiving reality, convincing himself of what is inculcated in him.