Shedding a light on authenticity in high dark trait individuals: A morally grey territory?

Pursuing personal goals above communally shared interests is incompatible with socially sanctioned norms yet represents the hallmark of high levels of dark traits (DT; narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy). One yet unaddressed question is how this conflict affects subjective authenticity, traditionally defined as a natural tendency to perceive and present oneself as genuine rather than contrived. In this theoretical paper, we propose a novel perspective on the nature of the true self, recasting Kernis and Goldman's process-oriented framework of authenticity (2006) to accommodate high DT individuals' particular authenticity paths. We review how self-concept perceptions may affect high DT individuals' interaction with their environment, leading to a more agentic or communal external orientation, affecting their behaviours and social relations. Acknowledging antisocial tendencies can aid in recognising situational factors that trigger the expression or the concealment of this “dark true self”. Machiavellianism is related to internal self-orientation challenges (e.g. low awareness), whereas narcissism supports a more functional internal self-orientation. By bringing together previously disjointed lines of research on authenticity and self-presentation, along with situational contingencies, we aim to elucidate the cause of disfluencies in one's self-system and potentially initiate pioneering research in characterising the dark correlates of the true self.