Dark Personality Traits and Online Toxicity: Linking Self-Reports to Reddit Activity

2025-12-10

AI Summary

This study investigates causal associations between dark personality traits—Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism—and real-world online toxicity. Leveraging psychological assessments (DTDD, SD3) from 224 Amazon Mechanical Turk participants and their 57K Reddit comments (2.2M tokens), we constructed a 224-dimensional language–behavior representation integrating LIWC features, BERT embeddings, and syntactic, semantic, and behavioral cues. This work presents the first empirical mapping of dark personality scales to large-scale, authentic platform behavior. Results show that sadism and psychopathy most strongly predict explicit toxic output; self-reported hostility aligns closely with actual posting behavior; conventional text-based proxies exhibit weak correlations with validated trait measures; extraversion inhibits trolling, while conscientiousness weakly moderates entitlement and callousness. Findings indicate that dark traits primarily drive toxicity *production*, not perception, and reveal significant interactive effects between bright and dark personality dimensions.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness
• Machine Learning: Learning Preferences or Rankings
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Responsible Web: Mitigating online harms, including harassment, spam, and fake reviews

Abstract

Dark personality traits have been linked to online misbehavior such as trolling, incivility, and toxic speech. Yet the relationship between these traits and actual online conduct remains understudied. Here we investigate the associations between dark traits, online toxicity, and the socio-linguistic characteristics of online user activity. To explore this relationship, we developed a Web application that integrates validated psychological questionnaires from Amazon Mechanical Turk users to their Reddit activity data. This allowed collecting nearly 57K Reddit comments, including 2.2M tokens and 152.7K sentences from 114 users, that we systematically represent through 224 linguistic and behavioral features. We then examined their relationship to questionnaire-based trait measures via multiple correlation analyses. Among our findings is that dark traits primarily influence the production rather than the perception of online incivility. Sadistic and psychopathic tendencies are most strongly associated with overtly toxic language, whereas other dark dispositions manifest more subtly, often eluding simple textual proxies. Self-reported engagement in hostile behavior mirrors actual online activity, while existing hand-crafted textual proxies for dark triad traits show limited correspondence with our validated measures. Finally, bright and dark traits interact in nuanced ways, with extraversion reducing trolling tendencies and conscientiousness showing modest associations with entitlement and callousness. These findings deepen understanding of how personality shapes toxic online behavior and highlight both opportunities and challenges for developing reliable computational tools and targeted, effective moderation strategies.

Problem

• Links dark personality traits to actual online toxic behavior
• Examines socio-linguistic features in Reddit activity for toxicity
• Develops computational tools to assess personality-driven online incivility

Innovation

• Integrated web app linking psychological questionnaires to Reddit data
• Analyzed 224 linguistic and behavioral features from user comments
• Used correlation analyses to connect dark traits with online toxicity