5. Conclusion
narcissism, psychopathy
REGRESSION
The present study confirms the correlational association between the Dark Tetrad of personality traits but shows that Machiavellianism and narcissism do not predict immediate trolling motivation when we control for participants’ psychopathy and sadism. Moreover, even psychopathy and sadism are only significant predictors for higher quantiles of immediate trolling motivation in our main analysis. In our robustness analysis, only sadism predicted higher quantiles of immediate trolling motivation. Sadism was also notably more important than psychopathy in our robustness dominance analysis. As such, this study highlights that not all facets of the Dark Tetrad are equally predictive of trolling and that the relationship between the dark personality dimensions and trolling behavior is more nuanced than previously assumed. This also emphasizes the need for quantile regression in personality research.For some higher quantiles of immediate trolling motivation, we found that a social exclusion experience reduced the motivation to troll others. This highlights the importance of more experimental studies to enhance our understanding of online trolls.