#antagonism

Mr. Gardner’s gym class is now in session!

Published: W. Keith Campbell

Published: Oct 28, 2025

Near the dawn of the 21st century, psychologist Del Paulhus proposed the Dark Triad model of personality. This model contained three traits: grandiose narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Each of these traits shared a core element of antagonism—low Big Five agreeableness—but differed in other ways. For example, narcissism was more about attention seeking or status seeking, psychopathy was more about goal pursuit without regard for others, and Machiavellianism was more about manipulation and calculated exploitation.

My friend and colleague Josh Miller and I were chatting about the Dark Triad model back in the day, and we realized it was both arbitrary and useful. Arbitrary in the sense that you could add several additional variables with a core of self-centered antagonism—like sadism, which creates a Dark Tetrad, or really any other trait that falls under the antagonistic and externalizing umbrella. So, we thought it might be useful, albeit somewhat arbitrary, to develop a triad focused on vulnerable narcissism and related traits rather than grandiose narcissism. From Miller and colleagues (2010): “That is, we believe there are personality styles that combine interpersonal antagonism (i.e., low Agreeableness) with emotional dysregulation and negative emotionality (high Neuroticism).” Thus, the Vulnerable Dark Triad was born.

In Big Five terms, you would expect this Vulnerable Dark Triad model to include traits that entail both neuroticism (associated with high vulnerability) and low agreeableness (or high antagonism). The Vulnerable Dark Triad thus became vulnerable narcissism, borderline personality style, and secondary psychopathy, which is a more neurotic, impulsive, and low-functioning form of psychopathy (sometimes called factor 2).

With the Vulnerable Dark Triad, you end up with traits that are self-centered and antagonistic but also neurotic and vulnerable—making them harder to see at first meeting. Vulnerable narcissism involves fantasies of grandiose power, status, and fame, but often an inability to actualize those fantasies. Instead, the vulnerable narcissist becomes defensive, suspicious, or paranoid, constantly scanning for criticism or ego threats but accomplishing little.

Borderline personality style has a core of emotional instability, and that vulnerability is often seen as emotional dysregulation. Someone with a more borderline style—and to be clear, I’m not talking about the full personality disorder here, just the personality trait—might be great to get along with unless they feel threatened, especially by potential abandonment or rejection. In those cases, you’ll see a strong emotional response. You can think of a vulnerable narcissist feeling threatened by rejection because it implies low status, while the borderline personality feels threatened by rejection because it implies a lack of love. In both cases, there is threat and reaction.

Finally, secondary psychopathy is a more impulsive, neurotic, and lower-functioning variant of psychopathy, often associated with a difficult childhood, cold or abusive parenting, and a general mistrust of the world—a sense that the world itself is threatening. Secondary psychopathy is more like Joaquin Phoenix playing The Joker; primary psychopathy is the more cool and collected form of psychopathy played by Christian Bale in American Psycho.

Historically, there has been considerable clinical work—especially in the tradition of Otto Kernberg—viewing narcissism and borderline personality on a spectrum, with narcissism generally being more psychologically developed than borderline. The term borderline originally referred to the boundary between neurosis and psychosis. A psychologist might see a patient they believed to be neurotic, but after some time in therapy evidence of more delusional or immature psychological functioning would emerge—not enough to classify as psychosis, but enough to be “on the borderline.”

Today, when I talk to experts on borderline personality disorder (I am not one), the most common model I hear is that borderline involves challenges in emotion or affect regulation, especially self-regulation of emotions involving relational abandonment. (Although self/identity organization is also important). So, there’s vulnerability and instability in individuals with borderline personality, but it’s not psychosis—it’s about the dynamics of emotions and the self.

Since Josh and I published the first paper on the Vulnerable Dark Triad about 15 years ago, a decent body of research has developed—enough for a meta-analysis or “study of studies.” The good news, at least for my ego, is that simple our model held together quantitatively. In a 2024 meta-analysis by Blasco-Belled and colleagues published in Personality and Individual Differences, all three traits intercorrelated:

vulnerable narcissism and borderline personality: r = .56

vulnerable narcissism and secondary psychopathy: r = .44

secondary psychopathy and borderline personality: r = .49

These are moderate-to-strong correlations that support the idea of a shared psychological core among the traits, but also important differences. (Data from Bonfa-Araujo & Schermer, 2024, made into a figure with AI).

But just like the original Dark Triad, the Vulnerable Dark Triad doesn’t exist in nature as some archetypal model of the human condition. There are certainly other traits that contain both high antagonism and high neuroticism or vulnerability. So, as with the Dark Triad, I think the Vulnerable Dark Triad is a useful model for thinking about how combinations of traits can share core features that have important personal and interpersonal implications. It also helps explain why traits like narcissism, psychopathy, and borderline personality often “swim together” in the world and, at the clinical level, are often diagnosed in overlapping ways.

My sense is that the Vulnerable Dark Triad also gets somewhat gendered—women are more likely to be labeled with borderline features, while men are more often labeled narcissistic or psychopathic—but it’s important to recognize that these are psychological cousins. They are related constructs and predict related outcomes. Furthermore, some of the new clinical criteria in the ICD-11 don’t seem to have the same issues with gender differences.

It's not the size of the dog ~ @MarkTwainQuote

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight,

It is unpleasant to be around people who are selfish, mean, and cynical, especially when they take advantage of you. When these personality traits reach extremes, they can become manifest in a personality disorder, creating a lifelong pattern of maladaptive behavior and strained relationships with others. The psychiatric diagnosis of personality disorders in the DSM-5-TR classifies personality disorders into distinct categories, but the so-called “alternative model” of personality disorders instead relies on a set of continuous rating criteria on the seven traits of attention-seeking, callousness, deceitfulness, grandiosity, hostility, manipulativeness, and suspiciousness.

According to University of Koblenz-Landau’s David Scholz and colleagues (2022), it's possible that all of these traits reflect the quality of “antagonism,” or being "at odds" with everyone else. Traditionally seen as low "agreeableness," the German authors suggest that antagonism in the pathological sense is much more than just being a "not-nice" person. Their model proposes a 4-part approach to understanding the psychological makeup of a person whose high levels of antagonism make them ideal candidates for a personality disorder diagnosis.

Unpacking Antagonism’s A’s, B’s, C’s and D’s

Antagonism’s four parts, as the German authors suggest, fit into an A-B-C-D, which they elaborate on as follows:

A: Affect

People low on agreeableness as defined in the Five-Factor Model of personality tend to have little empathy or concern for other people. However, their inner feelings may not translate into actions. They might sneer internally but keep their disdain for others to themselves.

B: Behavior

Things get more interesting when you add the "B" or behavior to the equation. Now, this disdainful person turns that cold-heartedness into actions that can ruin someone else's life. The highly antagonistic person, in seeking to manipulate and destroy others, uses any and all tools at their disposal, from lying even to physical harm.

C: Cognition

The German team next proposes that pathologically antagonistic people have a distorted view of humanity built on a foundation of suspiciousness and paranoia, a perspective that falls into the category of "social" cognition, or ways to think about other people. They might even look at your attempts to help them solve a problem as just a way for you to show how much smarter you are.

D. Dark

In testing their theoretical model of antagonism, Scholz et al. transform "D", or the "dark" personality trait, into a quality that may supersede A, B, and C. Perhaps all of those seven personality disorder traits are just manifestations of D, they suggest, which itself is a more inclusive factor than even all of the other three put together. As the authors propose, "D is conceptualized as the underlying disposition from which all aversive traits arise as specific, flavored manifestations."

Testing the New Approach to Antagonism

After laying out their theoretical model, the German research team then went on to test its fit to the data based on questionnaires of each of its components that they administered to a sample of 3,400 adults ranging from 18 to 74 tested two times, about one month apart. Scores on measures of A, B, C, and D were used to predict those seven DSM-based personality traits to see which combination of measures would have the greatest statistical weight.

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Here are sample items from each of the seven scales used in the prediction formula:

Callousness- “I don’t care about other people’s problems.”

Hostility- “I have a very short temper.”

Manipulativeness- “Sweet-talking others helps me get what I want.”

Deceitfulness- “I’ll stretch the truth if it’s to my advantage.”

Attention seeking- “I like to draw attention to myself.”

Grandiosity- “I’m better than almost everyone else.”

Suspiciousness- “Plenty of people are out to get me.”

Turning to the findings, the study's predictions were upheld. Scores at the first test on the separate measures of A, B, C, predicted the seven DSM-5-TR traits, but D alone went above and beyond these individual components in the statistical modeling equation. As the authors concluded, antagonistic people aren't just low on agreeableness, they have their own unique blend of affect, behavior, and cognition along with high levels of pure aversiveness. Indeed, it was D itself that “offered the most balanced representation of the seven antagonistic traits under scrutiny” (p. 966).

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The Take-Home Message

As you were reading through the description of the seven DSM-5-TR traits, perhaps you thought about the qualities of someone you know who would come out high on each one. Even if you’re lucky enough not to have a person like this in your life, you can surely think of a fictional character or a notorious criminal highlighted in a reality show or docudrama that fits the bill. In so doing, it may be hard for you to separate the person’s affect from their actions or even their distorted view of the world. Indeed, the German findings suggest this holistic interpretation is warranted.

Some of these distinctions from the study itself may seem overly nuanced to you and best reserved for personality psychologists or clinicians. However, the value in understanding pathological antagonism as a multifaceted component is that it can give you greater ammunition the next time you’re trying to avoid being drawn in by a pathologically antagonistic person. Be on the watch not only for the short fuse of high hostility, but also the bending of the truth (deceitfulness) and lack of trust (suspiciousness) that are just as dangerous.