People who manipulate their social world through gossip and exclusion are primarily driven by dark personality traits, and even having positive traits typically does nothing to stop this behavior. The researchers found that while acting kindly towards others can slightly reduce the likelihood of engaging in social sabotage, it does not eliminate the underlying effects of malevolence. The results of this study were recently published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
Relational aggression involves intentionally hurting someone’s relationships or social status instead of using physical violence. Examples include spreading malicious rumors, giving the silent treatment, and organizing groups to deliberately exclude certain people. Because this is a sensitive issue, people who try to avoid open conflict often prefer confrontation to direct confrontation. This dynamic often occurs in adult settings such as workplaces, community groups, and friend circles.
Victims of this type of attack often face serious mental health consequences. Being targeted can increase feelings of depression, hopelessness, and extreme loneliness. Those who exhibit this aggression also experience difficulties. Perpetrators frequently report struggles with anxiety, dangerous habits, and difficulty regulating their emotions.
To understand what drives people to use these behavioral tactics, lead researcher Brittany Patafio of Australia’s Deakin University and her colleagues looked at the balance of dark and bright personality traits. They wanted to know whether having a positive worldview could protect someone from aggressive behavior in social life. This theoretical approach is still relatively unexplored in the behavioral sciences.
Psychologists group malicious traits into clusters known as the Dark Triad. This includes psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. Narcissism is generally divided into grandiose and vulnerable categories. Grandiose narcissists have an exaggerated sense of superiority and entitlement, while vulnerable narcissists are highly insecure, introverted, and highly sensitive to criticism.
People with strong Machiavellian tendencies focus on manipulating others for personal gain while trying to maintain a positive public reputation. They view interpersonal interactions as strategic games that must be won. Psychopathy is characterized by a general lack of impulse control, as well as a tendency to act in an antisocial manner, without feeling remorse or empathy for the victim. Previous research has shown that people who exhibit these dark traits frequently engage in socially disruptive activities.
At the other end of the psychological spectrum, researchers are studying the mild triad of benevolent traits. These include faith in humanity, humanism, and Kantianism. Believing in humanity means believing that people are inherently good. Humanism involves respecting the dignity and natural worth of other individuals.
Kantianism, named after the philosopher Immanuel Kant, refers to a preference for treating people as independent individuals with their own lives, rather than using them purely as tools to get what they want. In addition to these personality factors, researchers considered general prosocial behavior. This category includes everyday actions aimed at promoting the welfare of others, such as sharing resources, assisting neighbors, and cooperating on tasks.
Theoretical models of aggression suggest that individuals often misinterpret and act on social cues. For example, if a colleague makes an ambiguous comment during a meeting, an aggressive person may interpret it as a deliberate insult and decide to retaliate. This sequence of cognitive events involves encoding the cue, interpreting it, and selecting a response based on internal rules.
Patafio and her team proposed that people with mild personality traits may experience this cognitive sequence differently. They theorized that benevolent people may not interpret ambiguous situations as threatening in the first place. This innate awareness will make you less likely to feel the need to defend yourself using social manipulation.
To test these ideas, the research team recruited just over 2,000 adults living in Australia. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 82 years old, and approximately two-thirds of the group were women. To document a wide range of social experiences, the team recruited volunteers through university networks and placed paid ads on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.
Each participant completed a detailed online survey. In the survey, people were asked to rate how accurately various statements expressed their habits and beliefs. To measure interpersonal aggression, participants answered questions about whether they spread rumors just to be mean or whether they intentionally ignored people to punish them.
Other survey sections assessed their dark and light personality traits. Participants rated their agreement with statements such as preferring sincerity over attractiveness when measuring Kantianism. They also answered questions about general kindness, such as whether they regularly offer help to peers in need.
The data revealed that personality traits explain more than a third of the difference in how often people engage in socially sabotaging behavior. Dark personality traits accounted for most of this effect. All malicious traits positively predicted engagement in aggressive behavior.
Psychopathy and vulnerable narcissism emerged as the strongest statistical predictors. Researchers believe that people who act quickly and without guilt may use gossip to gain social control. Similarly, highly sensitive and vulnerable narcissists may use subtle exclusion as a covert way to protect themselves from rejection. Grandiose narcissism also predicted social aggression, but to a much lesser degree.
On the positive side, the results were contrary to the researchers’ initial expectations. The researchers expected that all mild traits would negatively predict aggression, meaning that higher benevolence would mean less sabotage. Actual data shows that believing that people are fundamentally good or recognizing the intrinsic worth of others has no statistical relationship to aggressive habits.
Only Kantianism and general prosocial behavior reliably showed lower levels of social aggression. The researchers noted that there is an important difference between simple thoughts and concrete actions. Just being humane doesn’t stop people from spreading rumors. Actively trying to help people and strictly adhering to moral rules about how individuals should be treated seem to suppress aggressive behavior.
The researchers also investigated how dark traits undermine the benefits of helpful behaviors. Some people perform acts of kindness for purely selfish reasons, such as trying to get a promotion or projecting a perfect image to their co-workers. The authors found that people who scored high on malicious traits continued to engage in high levels of relational aggression, even if they reported high levels of prosocial behavior.
For these highly manipulative people, acting kindly is no substitute for acting aggressively. Instead, helping and hurting both function as separate tools in the social repertoire. They may cooperate when it suits their needs and sabotage their allies when it seems to them to be advantageous. For people with very low levels of dark traits, helping behavior seemed to be a real substitute for aggressive tactics.
This study has some notable limitations that should be considered. Because the researchers collected data at a single point in time, their results cannot prove that having a particular trait directly causes aggressive behavior in the future. They can only plan strong connections between existing thinking and ongoing actions.
The research team also relied entirely on self-report surveys for their data. When people are asked to list their own antisocial choices, they may misrepresent themselves in order to appear more socially acceptable. Even though the survey was completely anonymous, some participants may have felt uncomfortable agreeing to statements that would manipulate their friends.
Australian adults in this particular sample reported exceptionally low baseline levels of social aggression and high benevolent traits. The researchers noted that groups exhibiting higher baseline hostility may produce slightly different psychological patterns.
Patafio and colleagues suggest that future studies should follow individuals over several years. Tracking traits and behaviors over time could help scientists identify which beliefs emerge first in young people. This reveals developmental pathways that amplify or limit covert hostility. Ultimately, understanding how dark personalities cause these behaviors may help create better educational programs aimed at stopping interpersonal abuse before it causes permanent damage to communities.
These distinct psychological findings open new avenues for understanding social behavior. The study, “Dark and Light Personalities: A Utilitarian Perspective on Influences on Relational Aggression,” was authored by Brittany Patafio, David Skvirk, Richelle Meyshak, Travis Harries, Ashley Curtis, Michelle Benstead, Alexa Haley, Dominic G. McNeil, Hannah Bereznicki, and Shannon Heider.
