Dark Personality Traits and Online Toxicity: Linking Self-Reports to Reddit Activity
Aldo Cerulli, Benedetta Tessa, Giuseppe La Selva, Oronzo Mazzeo, Lorenzo Cima, Lucia Monacis, Stefano Cresci

TL;DR
This study explores how dark personality traits relate to online toxicity by linking psychological questionnaires with Reddit activity, revealing a gap between personality traits and linguistic indicators of incivility.
Contribution
It introduces a novel web application linking validated psychological measures with real-world Reddit activity, and analyzes the relationship between personality traits, self-reported incivility, and linguistic features.
Findings
Dark traits correlate with self-reported incivility
Linguistic features do not significantly predict dark personality traits
Self-reported toxic experiences are reflected in language measures
Abstract
Dark personality traits have long been associated with antisocial and toxic online behaviors, yet their relationship with observable online activity remains unclear. We investigate the association between validated dark personality measures, self-reported experiences of online incivility, and linguistic and behavioral features extracted from real-world user activity. To this end, we developed a Web application that securely links responses to validated psychological questionnaires collected via Amazon Mechanical Turk with participants' Reddit activity. This yielded a dataset of nearly 57K comments (2.2M tokens) from 114 users, represented through a broad set of linguistic and behavioral features. Our analyses reveal a clear distinction between self-reported and observed behavior. Dark personality traits show consistent associations with self-reported engagement in uncivil interactions.…
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