The Dark Five - statistical anomaly or persistent phenomena: An exploratory investigation into the factor structure of the SD4 in multiple samples

Abstract

The existence of a Dark 5 (D5-SD4) within the Short Dark Tetrad Scale (Paulhus et al., 2021) was proposed tentatively by Crawford et al. (2025). However, extensive replication is required to determine if the D5-SD4 factor structure is a persistent phenomenon or a statistical artefact of the single data source used. The present study sought to explore if a D5-SD4, rather than the SD4 dimensional representation would fit the data better in several populations worldwide. In total, 12 samples from 11 different countries, with 7157 participants were analysed. The results of multivariance analysis, alignment optimization procedure and comparative confirmatory factor analysis demonstrate that D5-SD4 constantly exhibits better fit than four-factor model, albeit the differences in indices values vary across the samples. Alignment analysis showed that group means could be meaningfully compared across groups. Future research should investigate the discriminative utility of the new model