Author Name: Mr. Tarun Panda Date: 25-03-2026
The Dark Triad of personality—comprising narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy—has emerged as a critical explanatory framework for understanding disruptive, antisocial, and disinformation-related behavior in digital media environments. This paper provides a comprehensive psychometric investigation of Dark Triad trait–social media engagement relationships, synthesizing evidence from 45+ empirical studies and examining the implications for digital journalism, audience profiling, and media ethics. Drawing on Uses and Gratifications Theory, Goffman’s (1959) self-presentation framework, and Crockett’s (2017) moral outrage analysis, the paper demonstrates that narcissism predicts self-promotional content creation, status signaling, and compulsive self-disclosure; psychopathy predicts online trolling, cyberbullying, and disinformation spreading; and Machiavellianism predicts strategic identity manipulation and information weaponization. The Short Dark Triad (SD3; Jones & Paulhus, 2014) and Dirty Dozen (Jonason & Webster, 2010) are evaluated as primary measurement instruments. Emerging evidence links Dark Triad traits to Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) as a mediating variable for problematic social media use, while emotion dysregulation moderates psychopathy’s effects on compulsive platform behavior. The paper advances a Dark Triad Audience Risk Matrix for digital journalism, identifying platform-specific risk profiles associated with different Dark Triad configurations, and proposes ethical guidelines for incorporating dark personality profiling in audience analytics. Critical gaps in the literature include insufficient research on disinformation spreading specifically, absence of longitudinal designs, and lack of cross-cultural validation of Dark Triad measures. The paper contributes a theoretically grounded, practically applicable framework for understanding the psychological architecture of disruptive digital media audiences.
Keywords:Dark Triad; narcissism; psychopathy; Machiavellianism; social media; trolling; audience profiling; digital journalism ethics.
