4. Discussion
Machiavellianism, aggressive behaviors, narcissism, psychopathy, aggression, aggressive behavior, dark personality traits, humor
REGRESSION
In this pre-registered study, we investigated trolling behavior and its association with the Dark Tetrad and humor styles. We found support for our first hypothesis (H1: The Dark Tetrad is positively associated with global trolling behavior): Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism showed significant positive correlations with global trolling behavior. Moreover, we found support for our second hypothesis (H2: Aggressive humor is positively associated with trolling behavior) and also observed a positive correlation between global trolling behavior and self-defeating humor. In contrast to our expectations (H3: Participants who are socially excluded show increased immediate trolling motivation compared to people who are socially included), we found no effect of social exclusion experience on immediate trolling motivation. Consequently, we could also only partly accept our fourth hypothesis (H4: Social exclusion and Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and/or sadism can predict immediate trolling motivation), as psychopathy and sadism but not Machiavellianism nor narcissism were significant predictors of immediate trolling motivation for the higher quantiles of immediate trolling motivation. Moreover, the findings concerning psychopathy should be considered with caution since sadism was the only significant predictor in our robustness quantile regression. Though the effect of social exclusion was generally non-significant, we found significant and negative effects for the 0.75 and 0.85 quantiles of immediate trolling motivation. We will now discuss these findings in the context of current research.First, our results validate the correlational association between trolling and dark personality traits in the German-speaking context. However, our correlations were only in the small to moderate range, which somewhat contrasts with prior research in which trolling-personality correlations of up to Second, and in contrast to our predictions, experiencing social exclusion did not (always) lead to stronger immediate motivation to troll others. Indeed, social exclusion was a significant predictor of immediate trolling motivation for the 0.75 and the 0.85 immediate trolling motivation quantile, with being excluded appearing to Another explanation for our generally non-significant results for social exclusion, as well as the two observed negative effects of social exclusion on trolling motivation, may be due to one exclusion experience not leading to immediate aggression: Short-term social exclusion generally appears to lead to behaviors meant to ameliorate the situation so long as control can be regained [Finally, it is important to note that our assessment of trolling motivation was not person-specific; in other words, we did not ask if participants wanted to troll the people who had just excluded them. Cook and colleagues (2018) [Third, this study showed that psychopathy and sadism predict immediate trolling motivation, whereas other dark personality facets did not. Moreover, in our robustness analysis, only sadism predicted immediate trolling motivation. These findings are not completely surprising, as other multiple regression analyses also do not find that each of the Dark Tetrad facets explains a significant amount of variation in trolling behavior. For example, in one study [These patterns may be due to the stronger association between sadism and psychopathy with aggressive behaviors, but it may also be due to the often one-dimensional assessment of the Dark Triad facets [The concept of the Dark Tetrad has received further criticism: Some researchers suggest that narcissism and Machiavellianism are features of psychopathy and that, thus, the Dark Triad does not explain variance beyond psychopathy [As such, several potential reasons for our findings arise: (a) Psychopathy and sadism are stronger predictors of aggressive behavior, (b) we did not assess the multidimensionality of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, (c) effects of narcissism and Machiavellianism may already be explained by including psychopathy due to an overlap in definitions, and (d) psychopathy and sadism appear to have stronger associations with katagelasticism than narcissism and Machiavellianism. Finally, sadism may outperform psychopathy in our robustness analysis, since people with high sadistic tendencies feel greater aggressive pleasure which may motivate people to behave aggressively [Fourth, our quantile regression showed that even psychopathy and sadism have no explanatory power for the lower quantiles of immediate trolling motivation. However, for higher quantiles of immediate trolling motivation (i.e., people who were in the higher percentiles of immediate trolling motivation), psychopathy and sadism become stronger predictors. This finding highlights the importance of quantile regression in personality research and suggests that even psychopathy and sadism may not be suitable predictors for no or minimal trolling behavior.Lastly, this study found significant associations between trolling and aggressive as well as self-defeating humor, confirming the recent findings of Navarro-Carrillo and colleagues (2021). The positive relationship between aggressive humor and trolling behavior is in line with prior research showing links between aggressive humor and at least some dark personality traits [The association between trolling and self-defeating humor might appear less intuitive. Despite this surface-level contradiction, there are potential explanations for this finding: Aggressive humor has been shown to correlate with self-defeating humor. In Martin and colleagues’ (2003) [