In 2021, a team at Nottingham Trent University surveyed almost 1,000 people in the UK and found something that broke the standard textbook on dangerous personalities. About 19 percent of the sample scored high on the so-called dark triad — psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism — and also scored above average on empathy. The two were supposed to be mutually exclusive. They weren’t. The research, led by associate professor Nadja Heym, gave this group a name: dark empaths.
The mechanism that makes them possible — and dangerous — is a split inside the word “empathy” itself.
Empathy is two systems, not one
For decades, psychology treated empathy as a single trait: you either had it or you didn’t, and the people who lacked it were the ones to watch. The Heym study used a sharper instrument. It measured two distinct kinds.
Cognitive empathy is the ability to read another person — to model what they are feeling, predict their reactions, take their perspective. It is a thinking skill. Chess players have it. Negotiators have it. Good interviewers have it.
Affective empathy is the part that actually hurts. It is the involuntary catch in the chest when someone else cries, the flinch when you watch a stranger stub their toe. It is what stops most people from being cruel, because cruelty produces an echo inside the person inflicting it.
The two systems sit in different neural circuits. You can have one without the other. And the Nottingham Trent finding was that the dangerous personalities don’t lack empathy across the board — they tend to keep the cognitive half running while the affective half stays quiet.
What the 2021 study actually found
Heym’s team assessed participants on statements measuring manipulative attitudes, regret-based threat behaviors, and secretiveness. Those scores were cross-referenced against measures of both empathy types and a scale of indirect aggression — making someone feel guilty, excluding them socially, malicious jokes at their expense.
Four groups fell out of the data. A typical group with average traits, about 34 percent. An empath group, low on dark traits and high on empathy, about 33 percent. A traditional dark triad group, high on dark traits and low on empathy, around 13 percent. And the dark empaths — high on dark traits, but above average on both kinds of empathy — at about 19 to 20 percent.
Both dark groups reported more aggression than the rest. The traditional dark triad edged ahead on that measure in the original 2021 sample. But in follow-up work Heym presented at scientific conferences, with nearly 800 American participants, the dark empaths’ aggression levels came in close to par with the dark triad — while their drive, goal-orientation, and responsiveness to reward ran significantly higher.
Heym described them as go-getters. The label the field has started using is more pointed: successful psychopaths. And that combination — the harm levels of the dark triad with the social fluency of an empath — is what makes the split inside empathy more than a taxonomic curiosity.
Why this combination is harder to spot than a narcissist
A textbook narcissist gives themselves away. The boasting, the cold edge in a conversation that should be warm, the way attention has to keep returning to them — these signals tend to surface within a few interactions. People notice. Friends warn each other.
A dark empath rarely produces that surface signal. They read a room with the precision of a good clinician. They know what you want to hear, which compliment will land, when to ask the soft follow-up question that signals validation. What would normally make them stop short of using that information against you is muted.
The result is a person who appears warm, perceptive, often the most understanding presence in the room, while operating on a calculation the room cannot see. Heym told BBC Science Focus that people around dark empaths are often left with only a vague feeling that something isn’t quite right.
The neuroscience underneath the split
That vague feeling has a physical basis. A 2013 fMRI study of incarcerated individuals with psychopathy, published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, asked participants to imagine another person in pain. The expected empathic response — activation in the anterior insula, anterior midcingulate cortex, and inferior frontal gyrus — was reduced compared with controls. The machinery for sharing pain was running quietly. The machinery for recognising it was largely intact.
Other work, summarised in a Psychology Today review of empathy deficits, narcissism, and neurodivergence, points to differences in the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex — regions that handle the emotional weight assigned to other people’s distress. Gray matter abnormalities have been documented in narcissistic personality disorder.
Crucially, a separate line of research on narcissists found that when participants were explicitly asked to take the perspective of someone describing trauma, their heart rates rose in line with real empathic response. They could feel it. They just didn’t, by default. The capacity exists. The choice is to keep it offline. That last point matters: the split isn’t a hardware failure, it’s a setting — which is why the behaviour can be sustained for years without giving way to a breakdown.
What it looks like in everyday life
That setting produces a fairly specific behavioural fingerprint.
They understand you too well, too quickly — like being known after a single coffee. That speed is the read, not the bond. They use guilt as a regular instrument: knowing what hurts you is the prerequisite for choosing to press there. Their humour carries a cruel edge — Heym’s questionnaire specifically captured malicious jokes at others’ expense, and the dark empath group registered there alongside the dark triad.
They also damage your other relationships. Master manipulators with high social fluency tend to reshape the network around them, quietly, through information control and selective alliance-building. Machiavellianism, Heym notes, is the hardest of the dark traits to identify precisely because it operates through rumour and access rather than overt confrontation.
And you feel different when they’re not around. A persistent low-grade dread that lifts in their absence is one of the more reliable signals — closer to a body’s verdict than a mind’s. People who are genuinely attuned to social safety often register relational threat at the nervous-system level long before they can articulate it.
The case of Heather
Heather, a 53-year-old who told her story to The i Paper, was married to her husband for 12 years. In public he was magnetic — the kind of person who seemed to know every waiter, every owner, every other diner in a restaurant. He worked at a senior level in education. He talked fluently about emotional intelligence with her children from a previous marriage.
In private he stonewalled her for days at a time. He once moved out of the house for six weeks without explanation or contact. She later learned about pornography addiction and affairs. In a conversation about his ex-girlfriends, he blamed every one of them for their breakups, and the silence she sat in afterwards was the realisation that she wasn’t special — she was the next in a series.
It wasn’t until after the separation in July 2023, talking to a friend with a background in neuropsychology, that she heard the term. She described him as someone who spoke about empathy but showed no genuine emotional connection, treating others instrumentally rather than with care. The cognitive read was flawless. The affective response was absent. Twelve years of marriage is what the social camouflage can sustain when only one half of the system is running.
If you’re curious to go deeper into this phenomenon, there’s a really thoughtful video by Psychology Says that explores the dark empath concept and why this particular combination of traits can be so difficult to detect in real-world interactions.
Why the successful ones are the most dangerous
A traditional psychopath with high drive tends to flame out. Impulsiveness, aggression, lack of moral brake — the failure mode is public, scandalous, and usually fast. People complain. Frauds get uncovered. Bullies get reported.
Dark empaths don’t generate that kind of obvious wreckage. They regulate the surface behaviour. They know when to apologise convincingly, when to send the thoughtful text, when to perform warmth in the meeting that matters. The destruction tends to be slower, more intimate, and harder to point at — a marriage that erodes over a decade, a workplace where talented people keep quietly leaving, a friend group that thins without anyone quite naming why.
Heym’s commentary in The Conversation emphasises that dark empaths are more likely than traditional dark triad individuals to end up in positions of power — CEOs, politicians, senior managers — because the social camouflage holds up under scrutiny. The dangerous ones aren’t the loud ones. They’re the ones whose performance of decency survives the long term.
The introspective edge
One detail from the 2021 study cuts against the easy villain reading. The dark empaths in Heym’s sample reported the harshest self-judgement of any group. They knew what they were capable of. They knew the shape of their own behaviour. And — this is the part that tends to unsettle people who study them — they were largely okay with it.
That introspective awareness is itself a function of cognitive empathy turned inward. You can model yourself the same way you model others. You can see the manipulation clearly and choose to continue. The affective brake that would convert that knowledge into shame, and shame into change, is the part that stays dim.
What to do with the finding
The practical value of the cognitive-affective split is that it gives people a vocabulary for an experience that previously had none. If you grew up being told that bad people are obviously cold, and you encountered someone who was visibly warm and somehow left you smaller every time, the categories didn’t fit. Heym’s framework explains why: warmth that is purely cognitive looks identical to warmth that is affective, until you stop reacting the way the reader expects.
The follow-up signal is behavioural consistency over time. Cognitive empathy is a performance, and performances drift when the audience changes — when you’re tired, when stakes are low, when you stop being useful. Affective empathy doesn’t drift in the same way, because it isn’t being maintained by attention. It’s just on.
This is why splitting empathy into two systems matters beyond academic taxonomy. As long as empathy was treated as a single dial — present or absent — the warm, perceptive person who hurt you didn’t compute, and the only available explanation was that you must have misread them.
The 2021 Nottingham Trent paper has been cited hundreds of times since publication, and Heym’s American replication suggests the four-group structure isn’t a UK artefact. Roughly one in five people carries this profile. Most of them are not Ted Bundy. They are the boss whose praise lands strangely, the partner whose apologies sound rehearsed, the friend who knows your wound too precisely.
The reason they are hard to spot is the same reason they are dangerous: the half of empathy that lets them see you is wide awake, and the half that would stop them from using what they see has been turned down to a whisper. Once you can name those as two separate things, the person finally computes — and so does what they did.
