You’ve heard of psychopaths, you’ve heard of narcissists, but have you heard of “dark empaths”? The dark empath is the latest personality type to pique the collective interest of chronically online types, and guess what? They’re not very nice! So named after a 2021 study, and characterized by “dark traits” combined with empathy, the dark empath is apparently like a narcissist, but harder to spot. They won’t empathize with you, exactly, but rather cognitively recognize how something might make you feel, and use that knowledge to manipulate you. Think: Amy Dunne’s gradual and calculated revenge plot in Gone Girl. Or that colleague who you thought was your friend but was actually a low-key saboteur.
Though dark empathy isn’t a personality disorder, nor is it necessarily an archetype that’s easy to characterize unless you’re a trained psychologist, the term has already proliferated in the online sphere. “3 signs that you or someone you know is a dark empath,” offers one TikTok user. “Could you be a dark empath?” ponders another (“dark empath” currently has around 17.4M related posts on TikTok). Reddit is littered with users asking whether they could, in fact, be a dark empath. Or maybe someone they know—an ex-boyfriend and such. “Dark empaths are psychologically sexy,” wrote one Reddit user. “That’s why they slide under the radar.”
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It can be fun attempting to armchair-diagnose or label people that you’ve come across—especially when you find their behavior baffling or incomprehensible. And if someone’s treated you badly, it can be comforting to create tidy explanations for why that might have occurred. It’s also, let’s be honest, sort of fascinating, the idea that among us there could be people with secretly evil designs, swishing around like Villanelle in Killing Eve. When I was at uni, my favorite pastime was guessing whether someone could be a sociopath. “It’s all in the eyes,” I used to tell friends over pints, describing a sort of vacant look, an internal deadness, based on “general vibe” alone. “Like a snake, but a person. A snake person.”
Realistically, though, I’m not a psychologist, and neither are you (unless you are). And just because someone appears emotionless or has behaved cruelly—or, in the case of dark empaths, manipulatively—that doesn’t mean that they are necessarily one thing or the other. It’s also worth pointing out here that the dark empath (which was coined in one study, mind you) is characterized by a very specific constellation of traits. It’s just not possible to know somebody enough—outside of their interactions with you specifically—to be able to gather the relevant information to say for sure what they are, or why. People can be cruel and they can be kind and they can do weird things to get what they want. Whether that makes them a dark empath isn’t necessarily knowable, even when it feels like it fits.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen the concept of “narcissism” flower and bloom to such a degree that we are now widely comfortable diagnosing people from afar based on what we’ve read online. (You’ve probably heard quite a few people diagnosing that person—you know, the president-elect of the United States?) But again, unless you’re a psychologist who’s closely observed a person over time, you cannot actually tell whether someone has narcissistic personality disorder. Someone may have behaved abhorrently, or they may have an ego that is so outsized that it’s cringe, but are they a narcissist? Again, jury’s out.
Even so, while armchair diagnoses or labels aren’t always useful—or even ethical—I do think that it can be helpful to recognize what we now call “red flags”—certain problematic behaviors that can act as clues as to how a relationship might play out in the future. Someone making you feel like shit? It’s probably best to not spend time with them. Someone making you cry more than they’re making you laugh? Maybe formulate an exit strategy. Notice that maybe you, yourself might have some manipulative traits? It could be worth exploring in therapy. Whether you—or they—are a dark empath is up for debate, but the answer probably isn’t going to be found on an ominously soundtracked TikTok posted by a lifestyle coach. I do still think sociopaths have snake eyes, though.