Elite Players or Psychopaths? The Relationship between High-Performing Athletes and the Dark Triad of Personality: A Literature Review

Abstract

Successful businesspeople and politicians seem to have a high tendency in the Dark Triad of personality. Since achieved individuals often share similar personality traits while striving in a similar environment (prospering at others' expense), high-performing athletes are most likely to have similar characteristics. Through the examination on kinds of literature that are relative to the topic of the relationship between high-performing athletes and the Dark Triad of personality, homogeneous results were found across studies: the better the performance an athlete has, the more he/she would score in both overall and subsets of the Dark Triad scale. Potential drawbacks of such phenomena, such as doping and cheating, were also presented by literature, which should be paid attention to in future research.