Psychopaths are most likely to live in these 4 states, a frightening new study reveals
As it turns out, our personalities are, in fact, shaped by the environments we grow up in, and Nevada, New York, South Dakota, and Texas contain the highest percentages of those in possession of “dark personality traits.”A recent study conducted by Ingo Zettler, Lau Lilleholt, Benjamin E.Hilbig, Morten Moshagen, and Martina Bader at the University of Copenhagen found that humans display different levels of dark personality traits depending on their location and the concentration of aversive societal conditions (ASC) that place possesses.
Dark personality traits, or the dark triad, are recognized by psychologists as psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism — the desire or urge to exploit others.Meanwhile, ASC can be defined as societal circumstances that occur on a large, collective scale, such as exploitation, fraud, corruption, inequality, and violence, among others.
“It is relatively well known that both genetic and socio-ecological factors shape individuals’ personality.However, respective research has hardly considered ethically or socially aversive personality characteristics,” Ingo Zettler, co-author and point-person on the study, told Newsweek.
The study, published in 2025, took place across a period of 20 years, in which researchers studied global correlations between general living conditions and the percentage of the population that possesses dark traits.The study probed 183 countries across the world with a total of 1,791,542 participants.In their exploration of the correlation between dark personality traits and aversive social conditions, the researchers examined the U.S.
through the lens of individual states.Data was gathered via survey, and for the U.S.-focused portion of the study, used Census data on socioeconomic disparity and poverty, FBI homicide rates, and Justice Department corruption sentences to draw conclusions.
Within the U.S., researchers looked into all 50 states and compiled responses from 144,576 Americans.“T...