Though its benefits may not be immediately obvious, spite isn’t just an aberrant emotion that makes us act with malice: It can be a tool we use to our advantage.
In psychology, the dark triad of personality traits are psychopathy (the inability to experience emotions like remorse, empathy, and be social with others), narcissism (the obsession with one’s self), and Machiavellianism (willingness to be duplicitous and disregard morality to achieve one’s own goals).
In 2014, researchers at Washington State University, led by psychologist David Marcus, had more than 1200 participants take a personality test, in which they were presented with 17 statements like “I would be willing to take a punch if it meant that someone I did not like would receive two punches” and “If my neighbor complained about the appearance of my front yard, I would be tempted to make it look worse just to annoy him or her,” then had to indicate how much they agreed with those statements.
The results, published in Psychological Assessment, showed that high scores in spitefulness correlated highly with psychopathy as well, along with the other two dark triad traits.