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The dark triad personality traits are three closely related personality traits; they are machiavellianism (a manipulative attitude), narcissism (excessive self-love), and psychopathy (lack of empathy). Is it possible to find these three in a person?
A narcissist thinks people are there to admire and praise him, all their actions are directed towards this goal or with this view of people on their minds. A psychopath views others as objects that hold no value. That makes him reckless and fearless of consequences. A machiavellian does everything for the cause. If that means killing people or hurting them, it doesn’t matter to him.
Here you can see the contradiction. People can’t admire or praise you, when they mean nothing to you. Their praise would be like a constant annoying noise in the background and not something to actively seek out. People being meaningless and manipulating them for a pure goal also contradicts. The core essence of the three dark triad personality traits go against each other. Of course a person can have certain traits from these. Someone can be very manipulative and self centered. But that doesn’t make him a machiavellian or a narcissist. These terms only apply if the trait is very dominant and that doesn’t appear with more than one of these.
Of course. Why not? All components share a fair bit of similarity. Being high in one or two will mean that you’d be higher than average in the other one. None of these qualities are mutually exclusive from the others, even in any sort of clinical or forensic assessment. Machiavellianism doesn’t cleanly relate to any specific personality disorder, but some blend of narcissistic PD and primary psychopathy may be the closest thing. Obviously the “narcissism” domain relates to both narcissistic PD, but it also seems to have elements of histrionic and borderline PD. The psychopathy domain has elements of narcissistic PD, antisocial PD, and psychopathy as per the PCL.