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

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. However, no validated dark personality dimension significantly predicts text-derived toxicity or linguistic features. In contrast, self-reported experiences of engaging in or being targeted by toxic behavior are robustly reflected in users' language, exhibiting consistent associations with measures of negativity, moral framing, and emotional intensity. Taken together, these findings highlight a gap between stable personality traits and their manifestation in surface-level linguistic signals. While computational features effectively capture behavioral engagement in online incivility, they do not provide reliable proxies for underlying personality constructs within the present framework. 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.