psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

the light triad scale quantifies

empathy Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position. Definitions of empathy encompass a broad range of social, cog ...

compassion Compassion motivates people to go out of their way to relieve the physical, mental or emotional pains of others and themselves. Compassion is often regarded as being sensitive to the emotional aspects of the suffering of others. When based on n ...

and

altruism Altruism is the moral principle, principle and moral courage, moral practice of concern for the welfare and/or happiness of other human kind, human beings or animals, resulting in a quality of life both material and spirituality, spiritual. It ...

. The idea was first suggested by Laura Johnson in her 2018 masters thesis. Together these are considered as being the light triad. The light triad scale assesses people by their responses to statements like: * I think people are mostly good. * I enjoy listening to people from all walks of life. * When I talk to people, I am rarely thinking about what I want from them. The light triad was inspired by the more established

dark triad The dark triad is a psychological theory of personality, first published by Delroy L. Paulhus and Kevin M. Williams in 2002, that describes three notably offensive, but non-pathological personality types: Machiavellianism, sub-clinical narcissis ...

which assesses negative personality and thoughts. It was expected that the light triad would be highly anticorrelated with the dark triad. That is, a high score on the light triad would correspond to a low score on the dark triad and vice versa. However researchers found that the two were only moderately anticorrelated at −0.48, showing that they are not merely opposites.Scott Barry Kaufman, David Bryce Yaden, Elizabeth Hyde, Eli Tsukayama
"The light vs. dark triad of personality: Contrasting two very different profiles of human nature"
''Frontiers in Psychology'', 12 March 2019.

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Further reading