Dark Empaths: High empathy paired with dark traits reshapes empathy’s meaning

A latent profile analysis of 991 adults identified four personality groups: Typicals, Empaths, Dark Triad, and Dark Empaths—the latter about 19% of the sample. Dark Empaths score high on empathy yet also high on narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, using empathic insight for both help and manipulation (indirect aggression). This challenges the view that empathy is unambiguously prosocial, supporting a distinction between empathy and compassion, and highlighting that empathy can be selective and exhausting. While findings have been replicated across some populations, researchers caution that Dark Empath is a statistical pattern rather than a fixed category and call for broader cross-cultural validation.