The research sits within the broader field of geographical psychology, which looks at how personality traits interact with physical and social environments. The study builds on decades of interest in the Dark Triad — narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy — a trio used to describe socially aversive traits that can hinder cooperation and long-term relationships, even if they sometimes serve short-term aims.
Researchers note that previous work has shown that environments during childhood can shape Dark Triad traits, and that people with these traits may actively seek out particular kinds of places. For example, prior analyses have linked higher Dark Triad scores with residence in denser urban areas, while other work has connected mobility with higher dark-trait scores in some populations. The new study shifts the lens to the other side of the equation: what are the personality traits of people who stay in their home state?
The project proposes two possible explanations for why stayers might exhibit higher dark-trait scores. First, relocating often requires resources such as money, education, job opportunities and a willingness to trust strangers and build new networks. Antagonistic traits can erode social bonds and reputations, potentially limiting out-of-state opportunities for those high in darkness. Second, certain exploitative behaviours might function within stable, familiar local networks where a person understands the social landscape intimately.
To test these ideas, the authors conducted a secondary analysis of online survey data collected in December 2022 across 38 U.S. states, yielding a final sample of 3,958 American adults. Participants had an average age of about 41, were 55 percent female, and were 80.8 percent White. Respondents reported both their current state of residence and the state in which they grew up; those still living in their childhood state were labelled “stayers” and those in a different state were “movers.”
All participants completed the Short Dark Triad questionnaire, a 27-item measure using a five-point scale. The researchers also incorporated state-level data on median household income, the percentage with a bachelor’s degree, population density, average temperature, homicide rates, income inequality, life expectancy and a measure of cultural tightness, which reflects how strictly social norms are enforced locally.
In the initial, unadjusted comparisons, stayers scored higher than movers across the three traits: 0.04 points on narcissism, 0.09 on Machiavellianism, and 0.09 on psychopathy on the 1-to-5 scale (the overall sample averages were 2.42 for narcissism, 2.89 for Machiavellianism, and 1.95 for psychopathy). The narcissism gap, however, was not statistically reliable in these crude comparisons, and the researchers note that men tended to score higher than women on all three traits, though sex did not alter the staying–moving relationship.
When the team applied progressively stricter controls for age, sex, race, state income, the state in which someone grew up, birth year and current state of residence, the gaps narrowed. In the strictest models, which compared stayers directly with movers who grew up in the exact same state and birth decade while holding destination state constant, the differences in narcissism and Machiavellianism were no longer statistically significant. The psychopathy gap narrowed to 0.04 points in those models and was not statistically significant in two of the three adjusted specifications.
Nonetheless, in the most stringent comparison — stayers versus movers from the same home state and age group, with current state also controlled — stayers scored 0.06 points higher on psychopathy, roughly eight percent of a standard deviation. To give a sense of scale, the study notes that in a sample where 68 percent were stayers, the top quarter of psychopathy scorers included 73.1 percent who were stayers, compared with 64.6 percent in the bottom quarter. The distance moved did not materially alter this gap.
The researchers performed a series of indirect tests to assess whether regional socioeconomic barriers might drive the results. They found the psychopathy gap between stayers and movers was virtually identical in states with high and low college-education rates. For Machiavellianism, the gap was even smaller in lower-education states, contrary to what one might predict if leaving was strongly education-dependent.
Turning to where movers ended up, the analysis showed that movers generally left denser, more expensive, cooler states (think California, New York and Illinois) for less dense, cheaper, warmer states (such as Florida, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado). Within the same home state, higher scores on any of the Dark Triad traits predicted relocation to relatively denser states. Movers with higher narcissism tended to move to warmer states, while those higher in psychopathy tended to move to states with higher homicide rates and greater inequality. The effect sizes were small, about 0.07 to 0.08 standard deviations per one-standard-deviation rise in a trait, and destination income, education, life expectancy and cultural tightness were not related to trait scores.
The authors emphasise that the patterns describe where people ended up rather than why they moved, since personality was measured after relocation. They caution that the findings cannot rule out the possibility that living in a place shapes scores, rather than the other way around.
The study aligns with earlier research suggesting harsh societal conditions like inequality and violence are associated with darker personality traits across countries and states, though that prior work looked at a broader Dark Factor of Personality rather than the three discrete traits tracked here. The current paper, by contrast, focuses on the Dark Triad and interstate movement.
Kristopher Brazil, an assistant professor at Carleton University who was not involved in the study, cautioned that the stayers versus movers distinction may connect with earlier psychopathy work. “The study appears to challenge existing work on psychopathy, but, really, it likely extends it,” he said. “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.”
Brazil also stressed that moving a lot and moving across states may share features but are not the same thing. “Moving a lot vs. moving states may have some shared features, but may also have important differences,” he 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.”
Martin Obschonka, a professor at the Amsterdam Business School who was not involved in the research, described the observed effects as “interesting but extremely small” once controls were in place. He cautioned that the results may reflect interstate migration rather than residential stability, noting the size of the United States means a move within a state could still leave a person categorised as a stayer.
Obschonka also pointed to gaps in the data, including missing information on individual income and education, and argued that causal conclusions require more comprehensive histories of residential moves and motives. “The finding is sensitive to model specification, and important confounders such as individual education and income are missing,” he said. “They would be very important for such mobility studies, particularly in the U.S. context.”
He added that future work should track full residential histories and motives to determine whether personality differences precede moves or arise after moving, and to identify boundary conditions for the observed associations. “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.”
As for the broader takeaway, the authors acknowledge that the effect is subtle. “The difference in average SD3-psychopathy scores between stayers and movers is extremely small,” Brazil noted, emphasising that the average scores for both groups hovered near 2 on the 1-to-5 scale and cautioned against drawing sensational conclusions about why people stay or move.
In sum, the paper titled There’s no place like home: Stayers are more psychopathic than movers, authored by Dritjon Gruda and Peter K. Jonason, presents a nuanced view of how personality and geography intersect in the United States. While stayers appear marginally more psychopathic than movers in some models, the authors stress that the effect is small and that further research is needed to untangle causality and underlying mechanisms.
