Devious by Queer Design

Are lesbian, gay, and bisexual people more likely to be narcissists, psychopaths, and Machiavellians?

We haven’t spent much time together here yet, you and me. Still, over these past few weeks, you might have deduced that I’m as gay as a three-dollar bill. I’ve been like this since the uterine days of my fetal youth. Or maybe not. Who the hell can remember with infantile amnesia. But I certainly can’t recall ever having even mildly heterosexual feelings. If I had, that would make me a touch bisexual. I’m just an old-fashioned—to use a fancy technical term—homosexual. According to psychologists Peter Jonason and Severi Luoto, one puzzling question is whether being non-heterosexual has made me and my fellow sexual outliers objectively more or less horrible of a human being (my wording, not theirs) than the rest of the population. I have my hunches, but I’m curious to know how much of a prick I really am.

I don’t mean any of that in a bad way, necessarily. Being a little devious may even be adaptive. Over the past few decades, personality researchers have been trying to get to the bottom of a distinct cluster of aversive social traits known as the “Dark Triad.” These are the (usually) subclinical, individual-difference factors of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Most of us have some darkness in us, even if we score at the low end on these dimensions. But see if you can recognize someone you know—and quite possibly loathe—in the authors’ descriptions of the full-blown varieties:

Narcissistic people have a sense of grandiosity, egotism, and self-orientation; Machiavellian individuals are often manipulative and exploitative, with a ruthless lack of morality; and psychopathic people engage in antisocial behavior, are impulsive, and lack empathy and remorse.

There’s clear and compelling evidence of sex differences on the Dark Triad, with males tending to score higher than females. Twin studies reveal they’re also genetically heritable traits (with the possible exception of Machiavellianism). What isn’t known, Jonason and Luoto point out in a 2021 study in Personality and Individual Differences provocatively titled “The Dark Side of the Rainbow,” is how these traits might feature in non-heterosexuals.

The “gender shift hypothesis” of homosexuality contends that neurocognitive and behavioral patterns of gays and lesbians resemble (or are “shifted” toward) those of the opposite biological sex due to prenatal hormones (i.e., feminizing and masculinizing our developing brain structures, respectively). If so, you might expect gay men’s Dark Triad scores to look more like those of the typical female (i.e., lower than other men), whereas lesbians’ scores should resemble that of heterosexual males (i.e., higher than other women). Bisexuals should fall somewhere in-between.

It’s also a rather dicey empirical question. You can imagine how the faintest suggestion of “science says queers are more objectively evil” might be seized upon by dimwitted online bigots, who wouldn’t know academic nuance if they got hit over the head with it by a psychopath. “We acknowledge,” write the authors, “that researchers may have avoided asking this question [about Dark Triad profiles of sexual minorities] because of fears of the results being misinterpreted as portraying non-heterosexuals in a negative light.” I do think it’s important to tread carefully, but that shouldn’t shut down what is otherwise an intriguing, hypothesis-driven research question. The better gays of our nature aren’t afraid of reality.

In fact, a few studies had tentatively explored the question before, finding preliminary support for the gender shift hypothesis. But Jonason and Luoto’s study was the first multinational investigation, and the first to include bisexual males. Their sample consisted of 4,063 men and women from 42 different countries, with an average age of about 25 years. Ninety percent of the respondents self-identified as heterosexual, 3% homosexual, and 6% bisexual. (The missing percentage point was comprised of people who failed to answer this question or self-identified as “other”; these data weren’t included in the analyses.)

All completed the “Dark Triad Dirty Dozen,” a twelve-item measure with three questions each for narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. The scale was originally developed by Jonason and Greg Webster fifteen years ago, and while it’s a valid and reliable psychometric assessment tool, I should note it’s not without its critics. Some experts prefer the “Short Dark Triad, SD3.” But in any event, if you’d like to see the questions that Jonason and Luoto’s participants answered for their Dirty Dozen test, and maybe even discover something new about your own degree of personal assholery, you can take it for free here.

Now for the results. Drumroll, please. Overall, homosexuals and bisexuals were significantly more Machiavellian than heterosexuals. And bisexuals were more narcissistic and psychopathic than heterosexuals. See important caveats below.

Breaking it down by sex, the gender shift hypothesis was partially (barely) supported, but there were also a few surprises. Let’s look at the women first. Basically, lesbians were no different from straight women (i.e., their scores weren’t “shifted” toward those of the heterosexual men). However, bisexual women scored significantly higher than straight women, on all three traits. “It may be that the psychobehavioral masculinization from heterosexual through bisexual to homosexual is not linear,” the authors write, “at least with the Dark Triad traits. Instead, some psychological traits are in fact more male-typical and more common in bisexual women relative to homosexual women.” (One thing to stress, though, is that bisexual women still scored mostly lower than the average straight male.)

Why this is so Jonason and Luoto could only speculate, but they suspect that the sheer social complexity of playing for both teams could be at the heart of it. “The higher rates of psychopathy among bisexual women relative to homosexual women,” they reason, “may reflect greater intrasexual competition (e.g., rivalry) and stronger mating motives given the bidirectional breadth of bisexual women’s sexual/romantic interests.”

When it came to the men in the study, the only difference that even approached statistical significance was in the domain of Machiavellianism: both gay men and bisexual men scored higher on that dark dimension than their straight male peers. In other words, rather than resembling female-typical scores of Machiavellianism, as we’d expect with the gender shift hypothesis, the non-heterosexual men were effectively maler than male.

Why Machiavellianism, in particular? (An aside, but some historians surmise, contentiously, that Machiavelli himself might not have been entirely heterosexual.) Again, the authors could only guess, but I think they’re onto something:

Because bisexual and homosexual men are subject to greater amounts of discrimination and harsher treatments than heterosexual men are, this may prompt an adaptive response to be duplicitous, deceptive, and disguise themselves (i.e., Machiavellianism). Under this hypothesis, heightened Machiavellianism . . . would not be a pathology but, instead, a pseudopathology that can help men with atypical sexual orientations navigate the dangerous or hostile contexts they sometimes face . . . [as a whole] engaging in Dark Triad approaches to life might help non-heterosexual people stay safe, avoid detection, and get what they want from their lives.

I had a related pet theory years ago, which is that sexual minorities are more likely to develop precocious social cognitive skills. Being in the closet isn’t just a matter of hiding, but also creating the illusion of being straight, and that requires vigilant, almost nonstop monitoring and management of strategic social information: who knows what, who believes what, who’s talking to whom, cues we shouldn’t be leaking, cues we should be leaking, etc. I can tell you that I was doing all of that by third grade, and it was exhausting. Fast-forward to age seventeen, where I have the distinct memory of lying in a tanning bed in a salon in suburban Ohio, strategizing in a blue hum how to pull off the perfect global ruse. Find a complicit lesbian, I told my teenage self, and we’ll both go to our graves with our earth-shattering secret.

That setting alone (in my meager defense, it was 1992 in the Midwest, a time and place where crispy brown skin was all the malignant rage) tells me I probably wasn’t as good an illusionist as I thought. My self-centered plotting was ridiculous and pathetic, and I never did find my sweet lesbian co-conspirator. But those were cutthroat days for people like us. It’s still fraught out there, but the socioecology has eased up for today’s LGB youth, at least in the West. Perhaps the hard-won craftiness of non-heterosexuals will also wane.

I was going to end by publicly sharing my own Dirty Dozen results, but then I thought that wouldn’t be a good look, which is a thought revealing in itself, and now the whole thing is getting a little too meta. Still, if that tanning salon scene doesn’t scream budding narcissist (a tad) and Machiavellian (a sprinkle), I don’t know what does.

I will say—curiously, I find that I can’t not say it, probably because of the traits above—that I’m no psychopath (not one bit).

Jonason, P. K., & Luoto, S. (2021). The dark side of the rainbow: Homosexuals and bisexuals have higher Dark Triad traits than heterosexuals. Personality and Individual Differences, 181, 111040.

Questions? Concerns? Ideas? Email the corresponding author directly: Peter Jonason peterkarl.jonason@unipd.it

Like what you read? Toss a tip in the jar—any amount that makes sense for you—so I can keep overthinking things on your behalf.