Adults who still live in the U.S. state where they grew up tend to score slightly higher on psychopathy than those who have moved away, according to new research published in Personality and Individual Differences. Among those who did relocate, people with higher scores on dark personality traits tended to choose somewhat more densely populated states, and those higher in psychopathy chose states with slightly higher homicide rates and inequality. The study suggests that regional differences in personality reflect not just how environments shape people, but also who chooses or has the opportunity to leave home.
Psychologists often study socially aversive personality characteristics through the framework of the Dark Triad. This grouping consists of three distinct but overlapping traits: narcissism, which involves grandiosity and a sense of entitlement; Machiavellianism, characterized by strategic manipulation and deceit; and psychopathy, marked by emotional callousness, low empathy, and impulsivity. People who score high on these traits often struggle to maintain healthy, cooperative relationships, yet their behaviors can sometimes serve short-term personal goals depending on their surroundings.
Understanding how these traits interact with physical and social environments is a growing focus in geographical psychology. For instance, a 2025 study covered by PsyPost found that macro-level conditions during childhood, such as unbalanced ratios of men to women or the prevalence of infectious diseases, predicted adult levels of Dark Triad traits across 48 countries. Beyond being shaped by their childhood surroundings, people also actively choose environments that suit their dispositions. Earlier work in this area, such as a 2018 study of geographical preferences, indicated that individuals high in Dark Triad traits, especially psychopathy, tend to prefer living in dense, crowded cities over rural or suburban areas.
One proposed explanation is that crowded cities and frequent moves supply a steady stream of strangers, which could let manipulative or impulsive people escape the consequences of a bad reputation. In line with this idea, a 2023 study of Chinese and European participants found that people who had moved house more often tended to score higher on psychopathy, and that those who preferred a mobile lifestyle or lived in regions where many residents move away tended to score higher on Dark Triad traits more broadly. However, tracking recent local moves or general attitudes toward mobility is different from examining who actually completes a move to another state.
The new research, led by Dritjon Gruda of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa and Maynooth University, alongside colleague Peter K. Jonason of Vizja University, asked the mirror-image question: what are the personality traits of the people who stay in their childhood state? The authors proposed two reasons why people who remain in their home state might actually score higher on dark traits than those who leave. First, moving to a new state usually requires financial resources, education, job offers, and a willingness to trust strangers and build new social networks. Because antagonistic traits tend to erode social bonds and professional reputations, people with these traits might receive fewer out-of-state opportunities, leaving higher scorers behind in their home states.
Second, the authors noted that certain exploitative behaviors might actually work well within stable, familiar local networks where a person knows the social landscape intimately. Both possibilities suggest that staying in one’s home state over a lifetime, rather than leaving it, could be associated with darker personality traits. To test whether stayers and movers differ in this way, the researchers needed to separate the characteristics of the individuals from the broader cultural or economic characteristics of the states themselves.
The researchers conducted a secondary analysis of survey data originally collected online in December 2022 across 38 U.S. states. After removing responses with implausible completion times, invalid childhood states, coordinates outside the country, or a cluster of suspicious responses submitted within a two-hour window, the final sample included 3,958 American adults. The participants had an average age of about 41, were 55 percent female, and were 80.8 percent White.
Participants reported the state in which they currently lived and the state in which they grew up. The researchers classified the 2,703 respondents still living in their childhood state as “stayers” and the 1,255 living in a different state as “movers.” For those who had moved, the researchers calculated the physical distance between the geographic center of their childhood state and their current location coordinates.
All participants completed the Short Dark Triad questionnaire, a 27-item assessment that measures Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy using a five-point agreement scale. To account for broader socioeconomic factors, the researchers pulled state-level data on median household income and the percentage of residents holding a bachelor’s degree from the 2021 American Community Survey. They also gathered state-level metrics on population density, average temperature, homicide rates, income inequality, life expectancy, and cultural tightness, which refers to how strictly a state’s residents enforce social norms.
The researchers then ran a series of statistical models to compare stayers and movers. In the initial, unadjusted comparisons, stayers scored higher than movers across the board, with small raw differences of 0.04 scale points on narcissism, 0.09 points on Machiavellianism, and 0.09 points on psychopathy (on the 1-to-5 scale, where the overall sample averages were 2.42 for narcissism, 2.89 for Machiavellianism, and 1.95 for psychopathy). The narcissism gap was not statistically reliable even before controls. Consistent with prior literature, men scored higher than women on all three traits, particularly psychopathy, though a person’s sex did not change the relationship between staying in one’s home state and their personality scores.
Because raw differences between states could simply reflect regional age gaps or local economic conditions, the researchers applied progressively stricter statistical controls. They accounted for age, sex, race, state household income, the specific state a person grew up in, their birth year, and the state they currently lived in. In the strictest models, a stayer was compared directly against movers who grew up in the exact same state during the same 10-year birth decade, while also holding the destination state constant.
After applying all of these controls, the differences in narcissism and Machiavellianism shrank and were not statistically significant. The psychopathy gap also shrank, to 0.04 points, once age, sex, race, and state income were added, and in those two models it was not statistically significant. It was larger and statistically reliable in the models that compared people from the same home state and age group, and in the strictest model, which also accounted for current state, stayers scored 0.06 points higher on psychopathy than movers, about 8 percent of a standard deviation.
To illustrate the size of this difference in practical terms, the researchers looked at the top and bottom quarters of psychopathy scorers in a sample where 68 percent of participants overall were stayers. Among participants in the highest quarter for psychopathy, 73.1 percent were stayers who still lived in their childhood state, compared to 64.6 percent of participants in the lowest quarter. In addition, the stayer-mover gap was similar whether movers had gone a short or long distance.
Because the survey lacked data on individual income or education, the researchers ran an indirect test to see if socioeconomic barriers were driving the results. They checked whether the psychopathy gap between stayers and movers was larger in origin states with lower college graduation rates, where leaving might depend more heavily on having a degree. The gap in psychopathy was virtually identical in high-education and low-education states, offering no sign that state-level educational barriers explained the finding; for Machiavellianism, the stayer gap was actually smaller in low-education states, the opposite of what such barriers would predict.
The researchers next examined the 1,255 movers to see what kinds of states attracted people with different personality traits. Overall, movers in the sample tended to leave denser, more expensive, cooler states like California, New York, and Illinois for less dense, cheaper, warmer states like Florida, Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado. However, when comparing movers from the same home state and adjusting for age, sex, and race, individuals with higher scores on any of the three Dark Triad traits relocated to relatively more densely populated states than fellow movers with lower scores.
Specific traits also predicted other features of the destination state. Movers with higher narcissism scores tended to relocate to warmer states, while those higher in psychopathy tended to move to states with higher homicide rates and greater economic inequality. These links, like the one for density, were small, about 0.07 to 0.08 standard deviations for each one-standard-deviation rise in a trait, and destination income, education levels, life expectancy, and cultural tightness were unrelated to any trait. Because personality was measured after people moved, the authors caution that these patterns describe where people ended up rather than why, and cannot rule out that living in a place shaped their scores.
The findings are broadly consistent with research covered by PsyPost in 2025, which found that harsh societal conditions like inequality and violence were linked to darker personality traits across countries and U.S. states. However, that earlier study assessed a general “Dark Factor of Personality” in relation to the conditions people grew up in, whereas the new study tracked the Dark Triad traits, principally psychopathy, in relation to where adults moved.
The authors noted that it makes theoretical sense for psychopathy, rather than narcissism or Machiavellianism, to distinguish stayers from movers. Of the three traits, psychopathy is the most impulsive and the least focused on maintaining a strategic, positive public image. Because interstate moves are typically pulled by opportunities like job transfers, career advancements, or relationship milestones that rely on trust and good reputations, highly psychopathic individuals may simply generate fewer of those opportunities. The authors acknowledge, however, that the evidence for psychopathy being uniquely involved is suggestive rather than established: when the three traits were compared directly, the psychopathy gap was not reliably larger than the gaps for Machiavellianism or narcissism.
The authors argue that differences in what the two studies measured may explain why the new findings appear to run counter to the 2023 study described earlier, which linked mobility to higher Dark Triad scores. In their view, moving house often or holding a restless mindset is a different thing from relocating to another U.S. state. Frequent local moves may reflect a person exhausting their relationships and being pushed out, whereas crossing state lines more often reflects being pulled by job or family opportunities.
Kristopher Brazil, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Carleton University who was not involved in the research, argued that the distinction between local instability and out-of-state relocation helps connect the new findings with earlier psychopathy research. “The study appears to challenge existing work on psychopathy, but, really, it likely extends it,” Brazil told PsyPost. “By virtue of the challenges created in relationships through selfishness, recklessness, and callousness, people who score very high on psychopathy are unlikely to stay in one place or for a group of people for long; so they are in actuality more likely to be ‘movers’ rather than ‘stayers’ in the broadest sense. However, the current study extends this knowledge by showing that those higher in psychopathy seem less likely to move out of the general region or state where they grew up.”
“Moving a lot vs. moving states may have some shared features, but may also have important differences,” Brazil said. “For instance, people move states for prosocial reasons like helping family, committing to seeking a better life, or because of a big job offer. Each of these more ‘prosocial’ or ‘thoughtful’ reasons for moving should be less likely to be motivating or possible for someone high in psychopathy. Thus, those higher in psychopathy may indeed be more likely to stay in-state but tend toward moving around like hell while there.”
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider when interpreting these results. The study relied on a cross-sectional snapshot of online respondents rather than a nationally representative sample tracked over time, so it cannot establish cause and effect. And because the survey asked only for a participant’s childhood state and current state, someone who left for 20 years and recently returned home was counted as a stayer.
Brazil, who called the study “important new data” while being critical of certain areas, also emphasized that the gap between stayers and movers is very subtle. “The difference in average SD3-psychopathy scores between stayers and movers is extremely small,” he said, referring to the Short Dark Triad questionnaire, and noted that both groups averaged close to 2 on the 1-to-5 scale, roughly the “disagree” point, when rating statements about psychopathic tendencies.
“In statistics, we talk about statistical significance and we talk about effect sizes,” Brazil said. “The study shows a statistically significant effect, but the effect size may be so small that its true impact may be negligible—not guaranteed to be negligible, just possible that it might be so. Because the difference is so small, it is also very important not to think of stayers as ‘psychopaths’ and movers as ‘non-psychopaths’, which sound-bite headlines may be prone to doing.”
Martin Obschonka, a professor and head of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation section at the Amsterdam Business School at the University of Amsterdam, who was not involved in the study, likewise described the effects as “interesting but extremely small,” particularly once control variables are taken into account.
“One can doubt this is really about residential mobility as such,” Obschonka told PsyPost. “It seems this is essentially interstate migration rather than residential stability. U.S. states (e.g., compared to regions within European countries) are large. A person could move within a U.S. state many times (e.g., between L.A. and San Francisco) and would still be considered a stayer.”
Nor did the survey collect individual income, personal education levels, or the specific reasons why participants stayed or left. “The finding is sensitive to model specification, and important confounders such as individual education and income are missing,” Obschonka said. “They would be very important for such mobility studies, particularly in the U.S. context.”
Without knowing whether a person stayed home by choice or because they could not afford to leave, researchers cannot separate two competing explanations: whether people with lower psychopathy are selected to leave because they have better opportunities, or whether staying in a familiar local network over time encourages psychopathic tendencies. Future studies that track full residential histories, personal finances, and motives for moving over time will be needed to determine whether these personality differences exist before people pack their bags or develop after they settle down.
“The causal mechanisms are not tested. The study remains speculative,” Obschonka said. “For future research it would be important to include more control variables, to study stayers vs. movers also within U.S. states, and to identify causal mechanisms as well as boundary conditions.”
“Such new research could also examine when exactly people move and how their Dark Triad traits change before and after this migration,” he added. “Personality traits are not perfectly stable and they can change and evolve, often as a result of changes in roles and due to major life transition (which could be linked to migration).”
The study, “There’s no place like home: Stayers are more psychopathic than movers,” was authored by Dritjon Gruda and Peter K. Jonason.
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