How to Spot and Stop a Sociopath

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“What just happened?” you’re asking yourself.

You knew the conversation would be tricky because you had to tackle someone about their misbehavior. Maybe it was a colleague who claimed your work idea as their own; maybe it was a new friend who said nasty things behind your back; or maybe it was a romantic partner who was unfaithful. The evidence is incontrovertible—so much so that, had the boot been on the other foot, you would be confessing your error and asking for forgiveness. But that’s not this person’s MO.

No, in the face of clear wrongdoing, they denied everything. Instead of showing contrition, they counterattacked, maybe even accusing you of the very behavior they committed. To top it off, they played the victim and cast you as the real offender. The whole interaction left you upset and confused—even questioning your perception. Is it possible that you got the whole thing backwards?

Congratulations, you have just been mugged by DARVO, an acronym that stands for “Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.” DARVO is a technique we may well encounter in our daily life when dealing with sociopathic personalities. This type of person-to-person psychological warfare is designed to deflect any penalty for misbehavior, and turn it instead into an opportunity to gain power over you. For a well-adjusted, mentally healthy person, to be DARVO’d is a bewildering and unsettling experience. But once you understand how the technique works, you’ll never have to be its victim again.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The sociopaths among us—and how to avoid them]

The acronym was devised in 1997 by the University of Oregon psychologist Jennifer Freyd, who has extensively studied domestic and sexual abuse, and the characteristics of those who often perpetrate it. She observed that when confronted with evidence of their misconduct, abusers typically begin by denying or minimizing culpability (“You’re making a big deal out of nothing”), before accusing the victim of creating the problem (“You regret what happened, and now you’re blaming me”) and then reversing the roles of victim and offender (“You should really be the one apologizing”).

Freyd’s work generally focused on the worst kinds of transgressions, but together with other researchers, she found that DARVO also commonly occurs when some people face criticism for more ordinary misbehavior. Scholars in 2017 asked 138 undergraduate survey respondents to recall an occasion when they’d confronted another person over a clear wrongdoing, which could include instances of personal abuse, social exclusion, or the silent treatment. The researchers found that the victims had experienced some degree of DARVO behavior in the majority of the confrontations reported. The study also discovered that women were almost 25 percent more likely than men to experience the technique, and that DARVO is disturbingly effective at eliciting some measure of self-blame in its victims.

DARVO behavior has some features in common with “gaslighting,” a term that comes from the title of a 1938 British play in which an emotionally abusive husband manipulates his wife to convince her that she’s losing her mind. The practice of deception and coercive control in classic gaslighting has led to a looser popular usage that describes how a perpetrator of harm, when called out for it, plays the victim by claiming that their action has been maliciously misrepresented. You can see how DARVO-like this Don’t believe your lying eyes tactic is.

This ploy is everywhere in politics, media, and the internet—anywhere, in fact, with a considerable population of bad-faith actors. Some scholars argue that we now inhabit a “culture of offense,” a way of turning a claim that some behavior or statement is offensive into, in effect, a right to be offended, which creates a further claim of victimhood. I expect that we can all think of examples of how this culture can be used as a cudgel to disingenuously keep disfavored views and voices out of the public realm.

Researchers have even identified a phenomenon we could call “gaslighting squared”—when gaslighters themselves use an accusation of gaslighting against others. In this form of DARVO, they deny the charge of gaslighting, accuse you of gaslighting them instead, and achieve their victim-offender reversal that way.

What type of person tends to gaslight others most effectively? The answer is the Dark Triad, the estimated 7 percent of the population I’ve written about previously who have above-average levels of three negative personality traits: narcissism (it’s all about me), Machiavellianism (I’m willing to hurt you to get what I want), and psychopathy (I feel no empathy for you and no remorse when I victimize you). (Worried that you might be one? You can take a Dark Triad quiz here.) Researchers in 2021 showed that, in young adults, gaslighting is closely associated with Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Gaslighting is also strongly tied to sadism; in other words, when an abuser’s duplicitousness causes you confusion and misery, they get a kick out of that. Sadism is such a persistent feature of this personality type, in fact, that some scholars regard it as the fourth trait of a Dark Tetrad character.

If you sense that people who repeatedly use DARVO on you are fundamentally off, you may be right: Neurologically, at least, people who belong to the Dark Triad are different from the rest of the population. Observation and analysis have determined that these people have lower brain volume than the general population in areas related to emotional regulation (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the cingulate cortex) and reward (the ventral striatum, the orbitofrontal cortex). This is why “curing” a gaslighter is so hard. Indeed, Dark Triad traits—especially when full-blown psychopathy is involved—are almost impossible to remedy.

[Read: Are you using gaslight correctly?]

But what about the victim of DARVO—the actual victim, not the self-proclaimed reverse one? For someone subjected to the technique, questioning whether the misbehavior really happened, or whether they somehow misjudged the situation, is actually an indicator of their emotional health. The very thing that makes you a decent human, in other words, is what the perpetrator seizes upon to induce doubt and self-blame. Susceptibility to this moral self-questioning is what DARVO aims to exploit. One useful tool to assess any interaction of this type that you may have had is Professor Freyd’s DARVO Experiences Questionnaire.

An obvious course of action, if you believe you have been a DARVO victim, is to avoid the perpetrator in the future. Dark Triads don’t generally change their ways, because they can’t alter the gray matter governing their emotional regulation and reward systems. Further, their psychopathic tendencies make them incapable of remorse: If you’re not sorry for doing something, and it yielded the results you sought, you will go on doing it.

Even better is to be able to identify a DARVO user before establishing a romance, friendship, or work partnership. One way to do this is by observing a person’s internet activity, if you can. People with Dark Triad characteristics have been found to be especially drawn to what clinicians euphemistically call “problematic social-media use.” Someone who’s always getting into online fights, let alone trolling or doxxing, may be inclined toward the DARVO jiu-jitsu. And if you discover that they are gaslighting people online, you can bet they will gaslight you in real life. Beware and cut ties if you can.

Take special care with dating: Dark Triads can present as charming and captivating, because they tend to be more invested in getting you to love them first than they are in establishing the basis of a mutually loving partnership. If you feel you’re being swept off your feet, try to bring a healthy dose of skepticism to bear on this seeming dreamboat. Do your research—some digging into their social-media profiles, in particular: Are they very online? Do they get into a lot of scraps? Are they gaslighting others? If so, move on.

Finally, it should go without saying, but avoid using DARVO yourself. If you were a true Dark Triad, I doubt you’d have bothered reading this column. But gaslighting behavior isn’t a binary phenomenon; it comes in shades. Even a well-balanced person can lapse into some pathological interpersonal habits. If you think you may have indulged in some questionable retaliatory behavior, particularly when you felt criticized and defensive, go back to Freyd’s DARVO quiz above and interrogate your own communications, especially those that involved some conflict.

Most of us have probably been guilty of some version of this at some point. Do you find yourself ever playing the victim after having offended your romantic partner? Do you ever use attack as a way to fend off legitimate questions or accusations? Because the DARVO technique is so effective, you might have subtly adopted some of its features without even realizing. But you can be certain of this: DARVO destroys relationships. Use it persistently, and you might just find yourself gaslighting all the way to a divorce court.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The ultimate antidote to toxic behavior online]

One last point: Many instances in life can involve genuine miscommunication and confusion—a contretemps in which someone’s intent was not to offend or hurt you, or when you were, in fact, thin-skinned. An honest person is open to that possibility, because none of us is perfect.

A dishonest person, however, never admits to having misjudged another person, and will gladly turn defense into offense. So be alert to DARVO, and learn to avoid the perpetrators. But be alert also to your own potential to be a DARVO perpetrator, even in a partial or temporary way. If you can accept criticism from others with grace and humility—and never try to turn the tables by claiming victimhood for yourself at their expense—you will be well defended against gaslighting, yours and theirs.