Studying the Dark Triad of Personality through Twitter Behavior

Abstract

Research into the darker traits of human nature is growing in interest especially in the context of increased social media usage. This allows users to express themselves to a wider online audience. We study the extent to which the standard model of dark personality -- the dark triad -- consisting of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism, is related to observable Twitter behavior such as platform usage, posted text and profile image choice. Our results show that we can map various behaviors to psychological theory and study new aspects related to social media usage. Finally, we build a machine learning algorithm that predicts the dark triad of personality in out-of-sample users with reliable accuracy.