Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.

We all have stories of meeting people who appeared wonderful at first but turned out to be just awful. Perhaps it was a charming suitor, or a charismatic colleague, or a fascinating new friend. They attracted you on initial impression, but before long, you started to notice behaviors that gave you pause. Maybe it was a little shading of the truth here and there, or a bit too much vanity and selfishness. Perhaps they constantly played the victim, or took credit for other people’s work.

Or maybe your disillusionment with the person was not gradual, but through a dramatic—and dramatically unpleasant—episode. All it may take is a minor disagreement, and suddenly, you get screamed at, threatened with retaliation, or reported to HR. This kind of encounter leaves you, understandably, baffled, hurt, and confused.

Very likely, this person was a “Dark Triad” personality. The term was coined by the psychologists Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams in 2002 for people with three salient personality characteristics: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and a measurable level of psychopathy. These people confuse and hurt you, because they act in a way that doesn’t seem to make sense. As one scholar aptly described the ones whose behavior shades more obviously into psychopathy, these are “social predators who charm, manipulate, and ruthlessly plow their way through life, leaving a broad trail of broken hearts, shattered expectations, and empty wallets.”

[Arthur C. Brooks: Eight ways to banish misery]

But at least these people are rare, right? Wrong. Dark Triads counted for about one in 14 people in an international population sample, a proportion that means all of us will meet them on a regular basis in love, in work, in politics, and—most obviously—on social media. For the sake of our happiness, well-being, and wallets, we need to understand them, learn how to identify them, and steer clear of them whenever we can—so that we can find better companions instead.

Narcissism is the egotistical admiration of oneself. Machiavellianism is a duplicitous interpersonal style and disregard for morality. These characteristics are bad enough, but the element of psychopathy adds in an absence of empathy and remorse to complete the Dark Triad: It’s all about me, I am willing to hurt you for my gain, and I don’t care how you feel.

Sometimes, a person like this will display a fourth trait to make a Dark Tetrad: sadism, or the enjoyment of others’ suffering. Some scholars have argued, in effect, that all triad types are really tetrads, because narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy are all expressions of a governing tendency toward sadism. But whether such personalities enjoy their predation or not is beside the point; with three traits or four, they make life miserable for the rest of us.

[George T. Conway III: Unfit for office]

The psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, who has studied Dark Triads for many years, notes that the type’s characteristics exist on a continuum, and that everyone exhibits some degree of the personality. (In an earlier column, I noted that psychological characteristics act as dials, not as switches.) But based on what Kaufman believes to be a threshold of Dark Triad traits, above which they become dominant in a personality, he and a team of researchers found that such people constituted about 7 percent of their international population sample.

Popular perception commonly regards Dark Triads as evil geniuses. No doubt some are, but psychopathy especially tends to be associated with below-average intelligence, and, according to estimates, men within the prison population meet its criteria at disproportionately high rates. In partial contrast with that finding, prevalence of the Dark Triad rises with educational attainment up to a bachelor’s degree (but then falls away among those with advanced degrees). Men are more likely to display parts of the Dark Triad, and the traits are found less as people age.

As far as the workplace is concerned, scholars have found that narcissists tend toward artistic, creative, and social careers; researchers also saw that Machiavellians, in particular, avoid careers that involve caring for others. Look out for Dark Triads, in other words, in professions that involve human contact, performance, and applause, but little concerned attention to other people. An obvious example might be politics; another would be show business. But the type can manifest in many careers and professions. At work, such individuals tend to exaggerate their own worth, show a distrustful attitude toward colleagues, act impulsively and irresponsibly, break rules, and lie.

If working with a Dark Triad is miserable, falling in love with one is worse. Confident and outgoing, they can be extremely attractive, especially to women. They show a strong preference for short-term relationships, and if they find themselves in a relationship, they tend to be unfaithful. And when a breakup inevitably comes, it can be very ugly: Dark Triads are known for “cost escalation” (they will make you pay), manipulation, and open confrontation.

[Read: Dear therapist: My boyfriend’s mother is narcissistic and mean]

Dark Triads involved in politics create a lot of damage, because narcissists are motivated by self-aggrandizement over public service, and psychopaths are drawn to extreme positions in a radicalized society. So watch out for Dark Triad personalities on the fringes of political and social causes (of either the right-wing or left-wing variety).

Not surprisingly, these personalities are ever-present on social media, which research has shown to be a Dark Triad paradise. They commonly exhibit “social media disorder,” which involves excessive use of internet platforms, and a review of the literature has shown that “trolls”—anonymous users who are abusive and like to whip up hatred and controversy—also tend toward Dark Triad traits.

You may be allowed a measure of schadenfreude—without being accused of sadism—to learn that Dark Triads are usually not particularly successful in life. They are not, in general, capable leaders; they don’t have close friends; they report lower-than-average life satisfaction. If you are worrying about whether you qualify, then, for your own happiness’s sake, seek help. Well-designed Dark Triad tests can guide that decision.

More useful for the other 93 percent of us is advice on how to identify and avoid Dark Triads. The traits to look for are self-importance, a sense of entitlement, vanity, a victim mentality, a tendency to bend the truth or even openly lie, manipulativeness, grandiosity, a lack of remorse, and an absence of empathy. Probe for these characteristics particularly when on first dates and in job interviews. You might even want to take that test imaginatively on behalf of someone you suspect may have Triad traits and see what result you get.

Of course, you can’t avoid all social contact for fear of coming across a Dark Triad. We each need romance, friends, and colleagues in life, so simply shunning other people is not a very compelling or realistic strategy. So rather than spend time dodging Dark Triads, look for their opposite. Happily, Kaufman and a team of psychologists profiled this type for us as well, which they call the Light Triad.

[Tom Nichols: A large portion of the electorate chose the sociopath]

The characteristics of a Light Triad include faith in humanity (trusting in people’s fundamental goodness), humanism (believing in the dignity and worth of each person), and a Kantian adherence to the idea of universal moral law (in this context, refusing to objectify or instrumentalize others). Compared with the 7 percent that are dark, Kaufman finds that fully 50 percent of his international population sample qualify as Light Triads, and that the average person has more light than dark personality traits.

Look for these three characteristics in people you might date, work with, or befriend. One way to test for this is simply to see how you feel around a particular person. Do they inspire you to be a better, more loving person? This is a phenomenon called moral elevation, by which mere proximity to moral beauty makes you feel moved, uplifted, and optimistic. Some researchers even report such physiological sensations in subjects as a feeling of warmth in the chest. A case of the warm fuzzies can be a telltale sign that you’re in the presence of a Light Triad.

To this point, I’ve focused on how Dark Triads negatively affect people, how each of us can spot them and avoid them, and how we can seek out Light Triads instead. But we should also consider the ways we contribute to social incentives: How we choose to reward people—with our dollars, our votes, our clicks—can affect society as a whole. People commonly ask why such areas of life as politics and social media are dominated by so many toxic, polarizing people. The answer is not some big technological mystery; we reward these people and give them greater prominence.

No one person can single-handedly fix this problem any more than they can clean up the environment. We try to do our little part by recycling, disposing of our trash properly, and conserving resources as well as we can. We can extend this ethical hygiene to the culture at large—by withholding our attention, time, support, and resources from the Dark Triads in public life who coarsen our society and threaten the commonweal.

The weekend of September 30 marked an ominous turning point in international support for Ukraine—not just in Washington, D.C., but in two of the beleaguered country’s once-staunch supporters in Eastern Europe.

On the 30th, the now former U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made an eleventh-hour budget deal to avoid a government shutdown, conditional on zeroing out U.S. support for Ukraine. The same day, halfway around the world, voters in Slovakia handed a major electoral victory to the party of the corrupt, pro-Russian conspiracy theorist Robert Fico, who campaigned on the rousing slogan “Not a single round”—meaning, no more ammunition from Slovakia for Ukraine.

[Tom Nichols: Why the GOP extremists oppose Ukraine]

Slovakia, though small, was one of the first NATO countries to provide armed assistance to Ukraine and has been a bulwark of logistical support. And yet, as the European Commission’s digital-affairs czar explained at a press conference in late September, “Slovakia has been chosen [by Russia] as the country where there is fertile soil for success of the Russian pro-Kremlin, pro-war narratives.” Fico—known for resigning as prime minister in disgrace in 2018, after the assassination of a journalist who was investigating his associates—has repeatedly blamed Ukraine for Russia’s full-scale invasion, parroting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda about “Ukrainian Nazis and fascists.” The weekend’s vote was deeply divided: Fico’s party won just 23 percent. But Slovakia’s president has tapped him to lead the country’s coalition government, which will likely seek to divest from Ukraine and push Slovakia into Putin’s waiting embrace.

Across Slovakia’s northern border, Poland, led by the right-wing Law and Justice party, has been Ukraine’s most important, strategically placed backer in the European Union these past 18 months. The government pledged its support to Ukraine in high-minded terms last year. But this year has been defined instead by populist electioneering, in which the ruling party has made fear of migrants a central theme. Middle Eastern refugees are the primary targets of this campaign, but Polish solidarity with Ukraine, too, has been dying a slow death, and preexisting xenophobia and historical memory of past ethnic violence have made ready fodder for Law and Justice propaganda.

In a radio interview this past summer, Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński called the Ukrainian killings of Poles during World War II “even worse than the German genocides.” Local officials from the ruling party have published anti-Ukrainian screeds on their social-media accounts, and the far-right Confederation, with which Law and Justice sometimes cooperates, has openly called for sending Ukrainians back to Ukraine. But perhaps most troubling is the across-the-board ebbing of grassroots solidarity with Ukrainians as anti-migrant rhetoric grows in electoral appeal.

That Poland’s xenophobia is gathering momentum and, with it, an ever-expanding circle of targets is one of the messages of The Green Border, a new film by Agnieszka Holland that has been critically acclaimed but publicly condemned by Poland’s president and a host of government ministers. On its surface, the film is about the Polish mistreatment of Syrian refugees crossing over from Belarus in 2021, but the director explained in a September interview that she understands Ukrainians to be part of the same story: “From the beginning I knew that, as soon as helping Ukraine ceased to pay off for this government, it would start playing a different game. I do not believe that they are guided by humanitarian or Christian considerations. This is the most cynical politics there is. It ends and begins with electoral efficacy.”

A pair of influential Polish sociologists noted a year ago that Polish support for Ukraine did not mean Polish support for Ukrainians: In other words, a pro-Ukrainian foreign policy could go hand in hand with anti-Ukrainian feeling at home, and carry an expiration date to boot. We are now arriving at this expiration date. In July, Poland led a regional coalition of EU member states seeking an indefinite embargo on Ukrainian grain; most of the neighbors have since negotiated separate deals with Ukraine, but Law and Justice has stubbornly held out, nominally to protect the interests of grain-producing Polish farmers who fear Ukrainian competition. In his September speech before the United Nations, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called out neighboring states for making a show of solidarity while essentially playing into Moscow’s hands. Law and Justice government ministers hit back; their social-media accounts exploded with tirades against perceived Ukrainian ingratitude.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Western aid to Ukraine is still not enough]

Law and Justice will likely win reelection, but even if it doesn’t, the rift between Poland and Ukraine is deepening—and the trend for Ukraine is worrying. Stalwarts on whom the embattled country has relied for the past year and a half seem to be falling away. Zelensky’s travels to the UN, the United States, and Canada were meant to shore up flagging transatlantic support for Ukraine after the lackluster summer counteroffensive. But little went as planned. In the Canadian Parliament, Zelensky unwittingly became part of a standing ovation for a 98-year-old Ukrainian-born Canadian invited as a guest of the House speaker. The man was later unmasked as a former Waffen SS fighter—terrible optics for Zelensky, given Putin’s persistent attempts to tarnish Ukraine as a Nazi successor. In the U.S. Congress, Zelensky met with McCarthy and Mitch McConnell mere weeks before McCarthy caved to the House Republicans demanding an end to U.S. aid for Ukraine.

Support for Ukraine is drying up both in the country’s own backyard and across the Atlantic, at a time when Kyiv still desperately needs the world’s backing. Whether the initiative now comes from anti-migrant Poland, pro-Putin Slovakia, or perhaps the EU’s long-standing Eastern European laboratory of illiberalism—Viktor Orbán’s Hungary—matters less than the bottom line: Ukraine’s days of international solidarity are numbered.