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

TL;DR

The paper probes how dark personality traits relate to online toxicity by linking validated psychometric assessments with large-scale Reddit activity via a bespoke Web app. It combines 224 linguistic/behavioral features (toxic language, LIWC, emotion, moral framing, irony, and text-derived trait estimates) with confirmatory and exploratory analyses to assess production versus perception of incivility and the validity of hand-crafted text proxies. Findings indicate dark traits, especially sadism and psychopathy, align more with the production of toxic content than its perception, while hand-crafted proxies poorly approximate validated measures and bright-dark trait interactions are nuanced but often fragile under correction. The work highlights opportunities and challenges for developing reliable computational tools for moderation and underscores the need for larger, cross-platform datasets and richer, theory-informed feature sets.

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.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Overview of our approach for linking answers to a validated psychological questionnaire with online activity data.
• Figure 2: Distribution of self-reported trait and trolling behavior scores. Each vertical axis represents one of the measured dimensions, and each line shows a participant’s scores across all traits and trolling behavior. The white circle and triangle on an axis respectively display the mean and the threshold for the corresponding dimension. Dimensions are ordered from left to right by decreasing mean score. Figure \ref{['fig:results-dist-all']} shows all participants, while the remaining ones highlight subsets of participants exhibiting certain dimensions.
• Figure 3: Distribution of the combinations of dimensions exhibited by participants in our study. Dimensions and their combinations are shown from top to bottom and from left to right in decreasing order of frequency.
• Figure 4: Distribution of the combinations of platforms used, in addition to Reddit, by participants in our study. Platforms and their combinations are shown from top to bottom and from left to right in decreasing order of frequency. Only combinations with 2+ occurrences are shown.
• Figure 5: Spearman rank correlation coefficients between dimension scores and social media habits (y axis), and nuanced toxicity features (x axis). Cell colors indicate the strength and direction of the correlations. Cell texts report correlation coefficients and their statistical significance. SM01--SM05 correspond to the questions from the Social Media Use section of the questionnaire. Asterisks denote statistical significance of the correlations: *: $p < 0.1$, **: $p < 0.05$, ***: $p < 0.01$.