Psychopathy is the strongest predictor of frequent and malicious gossip among dark personality traits

People with higher levels of socially aversive personality traits tend to gossip more often than others, though their underlying reasons for talking behind someone’s back vary depending on their specific personality profile. A new study published in Behavioral Sciences indicates that while psychopathy is the strongest predictor of how frequently a person gossips, Machiavellianism is uniquely associated with using gossip across a wide variety of social goals, from gathering information to protecting friends. The research also provides evidence that everyday sadism has its own distinct link to malicious gossip aimed at hurting others’ reputations.

In everyday conversation, gossip is often dismissed as trivial or mean-spirited chatter. In psychology, however, gossip is defined more broadly as the exchange of evaluative information, whether positive, neutral, or negative, about an absent third party. From an evolutionary perspective, talking about others is thought to serve important social functions, allowing people to learn about their community, build friendships, enforce social rules, and compete for status or romantic partners.

One widely used framework, which this study adopted, sorts the reasons people gossip into four motives. People may gossip for information gathering and validation, which involves finding out news about peers and checking if others share the same opinions about someone. They may also gossip simply for social enjoyment and entertainment, for group protection to warn friends about untrustworthy individuals, or for negative influence to intentionally damage a target’s reputation.

Because gossip can be used as a covert weapon to manipulate social standing, psychologists have examined how it relates to the Dark Triad of personality. The Dark Triad is a cluster of three distinct but overlapping socially aversive traits: narcissism, which involves grandiosity, entitlement, and a need for admiration; Machiavellianism, characterized by cynicism and strategic manipulation; and psychopathy, marked by callousness, impulsivity, and antisocial behavior.

Early investigations into these traits and gossip produced mixed results. For instance, a 2015 study of British adults found that all three Dark Triad traits were linked to gossiping to negatively influence others, while none were tied to gathering or validating information. In contrast, a 2019 study of German adults indicated that narcissism and Machiavellianism did predict information-related gossip motives, whereas psychopathy did not predict any specific reason for gossiping once the overlap among the three traits was accounted for.

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In addition to these conflicting findings about why people with dark personalities gossip, prior work had not tested whether these traits actually predict how often people engage in gossip overall. Previous studies also omitted a fourth trait known as everyday sadism, which describes a tendency to derive pleasure from the suffering or humiliation of others in daily life. Researchers later added everyday sadism to the original three traits to form what is known as the Dark Tetrad, and a 2020 psychometric study produced a short questionnaire that measures all four traits together.

To clarify the ambiguous findings in past work and examine the role of everyday sadism, study authors Adam C. Davis, a professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Canadore College, Tracy Vaillancourt, a professor of counseling psychology in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa, and Steven Arnocky, a professor in the Department of Psychology at Nipissing University who leads the Human Evolution Laboratory, designed a study examining how all four Dark Tetrad traits relate to both gossip frequency and gossip motives. Drawing on evolutionary theories of competition, the authors anticipated that individuals scoring higher on these four traits would gossip more frequently and would be more motivated to gossip both for fun and to harm others’ reputations, with differing patterns expected for the other two motives.

“To our knowledge, no researchers had investigated the links between gossip frequency (i.e., how often people tend to gossip) with ‘dark’ (i.e., sinister) personality traits,” Davis, Vaillancourt, and Arnocky told PsyPost. “We were motivated to explore these associations, specifically regarding a model of dark traits called the Dark Tetrad, which includes narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism.”

“Some had looked at the relations between some dark traits (e.g., psychopathy) with the motives for gossiping (i.e., why people gossip),” the researchers added. “But the work was limited and the findings were inconsistent. We wanted to build on this research to study a larger model of dark traits and to help clarify mixed results.”

The researchers recruited a final sample of 516 North American adults from the United States and Canada using Amazon Mechanical Turk. The participants ranged in age from 18 to 61 years old, with an average age of about 38, and just over half of the sample (53.1 percent) were women. Most participants identified as White (80.6 percent), and about a third held an undergraduate degree.

Participants completed an online survey containing three primary self-report questionnaires. To assess the Dark Tetrad, the researchers used the 28-item Short Dark Tetrad scale, which asks participants to rate their agreement with statements measuring narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism on a five-point scale. To ensure data quality, the survey included five attention-check questions, and the data were collected in 2021 before the widespread availability of artificial intelligence chatbots that can compromise online survey responses.

To measure gossip frequency, the authors provided participants with a standardized definition explaining that gossip involves sharing positive, negative, or neutral information about an absent person, either in person or digitally. Participants then completed a 13-item Gossip Frequency Scale, rating how often they talked about absent others across topics like work achievements, physical appearance, romantic relationships, rivals, and celebrities on a scale from 1 (never) to 5 (always). Participants also completed the 22-item Motives to Gossip Questionnaire, rating their agreement on a seven-point scale with four distinct reasons for gossiping: information gathering and validation, social enjoyment, negative influence, and group protection.

Before testing their main hypotheses, the researchers examined how age and biological sex related to the variables. On the five-point gossip frequency scale, women reported a slightly higher average score (2.61) than men (2.41), whereas men scored higher on everyday sadism (2.79) than women (2.33). Age was negatively associated with all four Dark Tetrad traits, overall gossip frequency, and the motives of social enjoyment and negative influence, meaning younger adults tended to score higher on these measures than older adults.

In initial correlation analyses looking at each trait individually, every Dark Tetrad trait was positively associated with gossip frequency and with all four gossip motives. Correlation coefficients (r) range from -1 to 1, with higher positive numbers indicating a stronger link between two variables. The traits’ correlations with gossip frequency ranged from 0.43 to 0.66, and their strongest links with any motive were for negative influence, ranging from 0.34 to 0.53.

Because the four dark personality traits overlap considerably with one another, the researchers next conducted a series of multiple regression analyses. This statistical technique allowed them to isolate the unique contribution of each individual trait while controlling for the influence of the other three traits, as well as age and biological sex. Exploratory tests also indicated that biological sex did not alter the relationships between the dark traits and gossip frequency or motives.

When predicting how often people gossip overall, age, sex, and the four dark traits together accounted for 52 percent of the variation in gossip frequency scores. Even after accounting for shared overlap among the traits, narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism each independently predicted higher gossip frequency. Psychopathy emerged as the strongest predictor of frequent gossiping, followed by sadism, narcissism, and Machiavellianism.

The researchers then ran separate models for each of the four gossip motives, revealing distinct motivational patterns across the traits. For the information gathering and validation motive, the overall model explained 14 percent of the variance, and Machiavellianism was the only trait to emerge as a positive predictor. Narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism did not show a statistically significant unique association with using gossip to gather or verify social information. This pattern differs from both earlier studies: the 2015 British study had found no Dark Triad links to this motive, and the 2019 German study had linked narcissism, along with Machiavellianism, to information-related motives.

For the social enjoyment motive, the model accounted for 16 percent of the variance. Both Machiavellianism and narcissism positively predicted gossiping for entertainment and fun, whereas psychopathy and sadism did not. This suggests that individuals with elevated Machiavellianism or narcissism tend to view talking about absent peers as a pleasurable, stimulating social activity.

When examining the negative influence motive, the model explained 34 percent of the variance in scores. Psychopathy was the strongest predictor of gossiping to damage someone’s reputation, followed by everyday sadism and Machiavellianism. This contrasts with the 2019 German study, in which psychopathy did not uniquely predict any gossip motive once its overlap with the other traits was accounted for. The finding aligns with research covered by PsyPost earlier this year, which similarly found that psychopathy was linked to more indirect aggression, a category that includes spreading rumors, though that study measured aggressive behavior among college-aged women rather than motives for gossip.

Although narcissism was linked to the negative influence motive when examined on its own, that link disappeared once psychopathy was added to the analysis. Follow-up tests indicated that psychopathy was statistically absorbing narcissism’s apparent contribution, a pattern known as suppression. As a result, it is hard to tell whether narcissism plays its own role in malicious gossip or whether its apparent link reflects the callous, antisocial tendencies it shares with psychopathy.

“Contrary to our hypothesis, narcissism did not predict the negative influence gossip motive in our regression model,” the researchers told PsyPost. “This seemed surprising given the nature of this dark personality trait and that it correlated positively with the negative influence motive. We conducted follow-up analyses and found that psychopathy was suppressing narcissism in our regression model; meaning that psychopathy was reducing the predictive power of narcissism and ‘downplaying’ its contribution.”

For the fourth motive, group protection, the model explained 16 percent of the variance. Only psychopathy and Machiavellianism positively predicted gossiping to warn or protect one’s social group, while narcissism and sadism did not. Earlier studies had linked narcissism to this motive; in the new study, its association fell just short of statistical significance. The researchers also tested whether sadism was statistically redundant with psychopathy in predicting group protection, and found that psychopathy contributed unique predictive power beyond sadism.

The finding that psychopathy and Machiavellianism predicted group protection may seem counterintuitive, given that both traits are associated with selfishness and low empathy. The authors suggest that people higher in psychopathy may still protect close allies, particularly within antisocial groups such as gangs, where protecting members and maintaining dominance can be advantageous. Similarly, manipulative individuals high in Machiavellianism may alternate between cooperative and aggressive tactics, protecting group members strategically for as long as those alliances remain useful to their own goals.

“Machiavellianism predicted each of the four gossip motives in our statistical models,” the authors explained. “It was the only dark characteristic to predict the information and validation motive, which makes sense given how cynicism (i.e., interpersonal distrust) is core to this personality trait. Machiavellians are expected to be manipulative and strategic; using both prosocial (e.g., cooperation) and antisocial (e.g., bullying) behavior depending on what will benefit them in each situation to gain power and status. So, it does make sense that a wider range of motives would underpin their gossip.”

“Among ‘dark’ (i.e., sinister) personality traits, psychopathy was the strongest predictor of gossiping more about a range of topics, including physical appearance, salaries and school grades, romantic relationships, friends, rivals, and celebrities (e.g., actors),” the researchers said. “It was also the strongest predictor of the negative influence gossip motive, which involves malicious gossip intended to hurt the reputations of others. Psychopathy also predicted the group protection gossip motive, describing gossip intended to defend and guard group members from the rule-breaking and exploitive actions of others.”

Standardized regression coefficients (β) measure the unique strength of each predictor after accounting for the others. Psychopathy’s coefficient of 0.35 for gossip frequency, for example, corresponded to roughly a quarter-point higher gossip score on the five-point scale for each one-point increase in psychopathy, holding the other traits, age, and sex constant.

The researchers also commented on the size of these effects. “In the regression analyses, where the shared overlap between the Dark Tetrad traits were statistically controlled for, medium-to-large effects were also found,” they noted. “In particular, large effects were found for psychopathy in predicting gossip frequency (β = 0.35) and the negative influence motive (β = 0.36), as well as for Machiavellianism predicting the information gathering and validation motive (β = 0.32). These results point to the practical significance of the findings, that are unlikely to be due to chance.”

As with all research, there are some caveats to consider when interpreting these findings. Beyond the statistical results, the researchers emphasized that everyday gossip is not inherently toxic or restricted to people with aversive personalities.

“There is a negative stereotype when it comes to gossip; people assume it is always malicious and that ‘gossipers’ are bad people,” the researchers explained. “The reality is that gossiping is a very common way that people communicate with each other, and most of our daily gossip is positive or neutral. With that said, some people gossip more than others, particularly when it comes to defamatory (negative) gossip. So, it is important to examine to what extent dark personality variables relate to different aspects of gossip (e.g., frequency, motives, etc.).”

Methodologically, the data were collected at a single point in time, so the study shows which traits tend to go along with more gossip, not whether the traits cause it. The study also relied entirely on self-report questionnaires, and people do not always have accurate insight into how often they talk about others. Some participants might underreport their behavior to avoid the social stigma of being labeled a gossip, though individuals high in callous traits like psychopathy and sadism may be less bothered by how they are perceived. That difference in candor could also make people high in these traits more willing to admit to gossiping, strengthening the apparent links.

The newly adapted Gossip Frequency Scale also combined positive, negative, and neutral chatter across many topics into a single score. Because of this design, the frequency measure cannot distinguish whether people high in dark traits are mostly sharing harmless news about celebrities or spreading cruel rumors about coworkers. Future studies could use naturalistic observation, daily diaries, or specific workplace scenarios to separate positive and negative gossip across different social settings.

Additionally, the Short Dark Tetrad questionnaire measures each personality trait as a single broad dimension, even though traits like narcissism and psychopathy contain multiple sub-facets, such as grandiose versus vulnerable narcissism. Future research could use more detailed personality inventories and track participants over time to better understand how specific facets of dark personalities shape everyday conversations.

“In the future, we would like to examine a wider range of gossip motives in connection with the Dark Tetrad personality traits,” the authors said. “More recently, researchers have proposed venting emotions and relationship-building gossip motives. It is unclear how narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism might relate to these motives.”

While the current study analyzed how separate personality traits relate to gossip across the whole sample, the team also hopes to identify distinct profiles of gossipers. “In the current study we also used a variable-centered analytic approach,” the researchers noted. “In the future, we would like to use a person-centered analysis so that we can examine subgroups of participants based on similar response patterns.”

The study, “The Dark Tetrad Traits Differentially Predict Gossip Frequency and Motives,” was authored by Adam C. Davis, Tracy Vaillancourt, and Steven Arnocky.