The link between dark personality traits and online toxicity is more nuanced than expected

A new study found that individuals with more pronounced dark personality traits tend to report more engagement in uncivil online interactions. However, analysis of their actual Reddit comments did not confirm this association—dark personality traits were not associated with any of the toxicity or linguistic features of their comments. The paper was published in Computers in Human Behavior.

Online social platforms have transformed how people communicate, exchange information, and build communities. However, they have also created new opportunities for harmful behavior. Toxic and hateful speech is particularly concerning because hostile online interactions can result in psychological harm, and, in some cases, offline violence. Research increasingly suggests that such behavior is shaped not only by the design of online platforms or specific situations, but also by individual personality differences.

Particular attention has been given to the so-called Dark Tetrad: Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism. These traits have been associated with behaviors such as trolling, cyberbullying, manipulation, hostility, and the production or endorsement of toxic content. For example, people with stronger sadistic tendencies may enjoy provoking or upsetting others, while psychopathic traits have been linked to more impulsive and hostile online interactions.

Because personality also influences how people communicate, researchers have become interested in whether psychological characteristics might be reflected in the language people use online. This has contributed to the development of computational approaches that attempt to infer personality traits from digital behavior and linguistic patterns.

Study author Aldo Cerulli and his colleagues explored the relationship between dark personality traits and the textual content people post online. More specifically, they wanted to see whether dark personality traits can be reliably inferred from textual materials on social media.

Study participants were 114 U.S. individuals recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing platform. After enrolling in the study, participants provided information the researchers needed to link them to their Reddit accounts. For this, the study authors developed a dedicated web application that interfaces directly with Reddit’s Application Programming Interface (API), allowing for the secure, automated collection of participant data.

The study authors used this link to collect participants’ Reddit comments. In total, this included 152,741 sentences that comprised 56,892 comments. The mean number of comments per participant was 499. By analyzing these texts, the study authors derived estimates of participants’ online toxicity, psycholinguistic characteristics, emotional expressions, contextual emotions, moral foundations, use of irony, and text-derived dark personality traits. Aside from this, study participants completed questionnaire assessments of dark personality traits (the Dark Side of Humanity Scale), cyberbullying and trolling (the Cyberbully/Troll Deviancy Scale), and six items regarding their social media use habits.

Results showed no significant associations between the self-reported dark personality traits and estimates of those traits derived computationally from participants’ text responses. Individuals whose self-reported trolling behaviors and dark personality traits, particularly Successful Psychopathy—a calculated, manipulative style combining psychopathy and Machiavellianism—were more pronounced tended to report using uncivil comments and content on social media more often. However, dark personality traits did not predict actual toxicity expressed in participants’ Reddit comments.

Unlike personality traits, participants’ own descriptions of their online behavior were associated with their actual Reddit behavior. More specifically, participants who said they often produced toxic content actually tended to have more toxic Reddit comments. Furthermore, people who reported being targets of toxicity also tended to produce more toxic comments, suggesting a form of perpetrator-victim reciprocity where exposure to hostility increases the likelihood of responding in kind.

“Our results underscore the importance of grounding computational approaches in validated psychological measures and point to the need for richer, context-aware representations to better understand the relationship between personality and online behavior,” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to scientific knowledge about the associations between personality traits and online behavior. However, it should be noted that the study was conducted on a relatively small sample of participants and focused on Reddit comments only. Results of studies on larger samples, exploring wider sources of online behavior, and using different approaches to text analysis might differ. Additionally, the validity of estimates of psychological characteristics derived from features of text comments is unclear.

The paper, “Dark personality traits and online toxicity: Linking self-reports to Reddit activity,” was authored by Aldo Cerulli, Benedetta Tessa, Giuseppe La Selva, Oronzo Mazzeo, Lorenzo Cima, Lucia Monacis, and Stefano Cresci.