Psychopaths are most likely to live in these 4 countries, reveals a frightening new study

As it turns out, our personalities, in fact, are formed by the encouragement we grow, 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, according to Lilleholt, Benjamin E. Hilbig, Morten Moshagen and Martina Bader at the University of Copenhagen found that humanans exhibit different levels of dark personality traits depending on their location and concentrating the aversive conditions of society (ASC).

Dark personality traits, or dark triads, are recognized by psychologists such as psychopathy, narcissism and machiavellianism – desire or urgent to exploit others.

Meanwhile, ASC can be defined as social circumstances that occur on a large, collective scale, such as exploitation, fraud, corruption, inequality and violence, among other things.

“It is relatively well known that genetic and socio-ecological factors form the personality of individuals. However, relevant research has not considered it difficult to have considered the characteristics of aversif’s personality,” Ingo Zettler, co-author and point in the study, told Newsweek.

The study, published in 2025, was conducted over a period of 20 years, in which researchers studied global correlations between general living conditions and the percentage of the population possessing dark traits.

The study investigated 183 countries around the world with a total of 1,791,542 participants.

In their exploration of correlation between the dark traits of personality and distant social conditions, the researchers examined the US through the lentils of individual states.

The data gathered your survey, and for the section focused on the study’s US, they used records of socio-economic inequality and poverty, FBI killing levels and the Department of Justice corruption penalties to draw conclusions.

Inside the SH.BA, researchers look at all 50 countries and compiled answers from 144,576 Americans.

“The more unfavorable conditions in a society, the higher the level of the dark personality factor among its citizens,” Zettler summed up. “Aventive personality traits are associated with everyone as aggression, fraud and exploitation – and thus at high social costs. Therefore, even small changes can lead to major changes in how societies work.”

Urban areas of the United States tend to accommodate extremely different economically populations – cities like Los Angeles, New York City and San Francisco – in closing concentration, which can lead to tensions and concerns about life quality and equal access to essential resources, resulting in higher levels of D.

On the other hand, rural areas – like most of Vermont, Utah, Maine and Oregon, all four countries with the lowest probability of producing individuals as a result of living conditions.

“Because you can grow up in a place with a high ASC, you are not necessarily the fate of becoming an immoral, exploitable and focused individual,” wrote today Susan Krauss Whitbourne in psychology. “What suggestions suggest, on the contrary, is that in accordance with adaptive hypothesis, people can get a tendency towards high D levels if this is what they see around them, or if their economic deprivation and difficulties are particularly pronounced.”

“Our findings prove that personality is not only something we were born with, but also formed by the society in which we grew up and live,” Zettler concluded.

“This means that reforms that reduce corruption and inequality not only create better living conditions now now, they can also contribute to mitigating the aversive levels of personality among citizens in the future.”