An ever-growing number of videos, articles, blog posts, podcasts feature DARVO, the manipulative tactic Courage Founder and President Jennifer Freyd first identified in the late 90s. Even the raunchy animated series South Park aired a scene in which a fictional Donald Trump Jr. advises another character to use DARVO - “deny, attack, reverse victim and offender,” as he said - to evade criminal charges.

A quick search for this kind of DARVO content online suggests that people are particularly interested in connecting the concept with narcissism. Recently, popular YouTuber and psychologist DoctorRamani, who enjoys an audience of over 1.3 millions subscribers, released a nearly 15-minute long video detailing how narcissists use DARVO when held accountable. But connections made online between DARVO and narcissism were purely speculative. After all, no data existed to back such claims - until now.

I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Institutional Courage where I, along with Freyd and other Courage-affiliated scholars, do research on DARVO. Recently, we explored the personality traits of people who use DARVO - specifically, we wanted to see if DARVO use was related to a specific cluster of antisocial personality traits ominously referred to as the dark triad. The dark triad, as the name suggests, has three parts: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Narcissism is characterized by a lack of caring for others, grandiosity, and self-serving actions. People who exhibit psychopathy are likely to act impulsively with a disregard for how their actions affect others, while Machiavellianism describes a type of cold and strategic style of manipulation. All three personality traits are underpinned by callous manipulation - getting what you want out of other people, regardless of the cost. 

The dark triad seemed to share a lot in common with DARVO, which similarly seeks to manipulate other people for personal gain. And so Freyd and I surveyed nearly 1,000 people - 601 college students and 335 community members - to test if people who used DARVO were also more likely to have these dark triad traits.

Here’s how we did it: we asked participants in this study to indicate how much DARVO they used on someone else during a time they were confronted over a wrongdoing. These participants then responded to a scale measuring their levels of each of the three dark triad traits - narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. 

What we found helps validate the connections people have drawn between narcissism and DARVO: in both student and community samples, people who were more likely to use DARVO were also more likely to exhibit higher levels of narcissism. Moreover, both samples revealed the more aggressive DARVO users were also more likely to report both higher psychopathy and Machiavellianism. DARVO use, as we found, was associated with the entire dark triad.

This is the first study to identify a link between DARVO and antisocial personality traits, revealing that people who use this manipulative tactic do, in fact, have manipulative and self-serving tendencies.

The more we learn about DARVO and the people who use it, the better equipped we are to identify it and mitigate the harm it causes. We already know that providing even a brief education about DARVO can reduce the negative influence it has on observers who are exposed to perpetrator DARVO. Anticipating that people who have antisocial traits might try to use DARVO (or knowing that DARVO is more likely to come from people who seek to manipulate others) might offer similar protection against it.