2.4. Analysis
narcissism, psychopathy
REGRESSION
Before the analysis, people were excluded when they indicated that they had not taken the questionnaire seriously (participants were asked directly if they had taken the questionnaire seriously), were already familiar with Cyberball or were unable to see the ball-tossing program, and when they were below the age of 18. Additionally, because some answers were randomly missing due to the questionnaire software, we excluded cases listwise for missing data. Finally, because only one person indicated their gender as “other than male or female,” this participant was also excluded from further analysis. This was necessary since no reliable inferences can be drawn from a sample of only one person.In our pre-registration, we planned to use means of the measures for the analyses. However, after investigating the item loadings of our measures using confirmatory factor analysis (see We preregistered an ordinary least square (OLS) multiple regression analysis to test H4 which aimed to predict immediate trolling motivation using social exclusion (yes/no) and the Dark Tetrad (Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism). Additionally, age and gender were added as control variables, as those variables have been shown to explain trolling behavior in the past [Unlike OLS regression, quantile regression relies on quantiles of the outcome variable which results in several coefficients for a single covariate [Finally, we decided to conduct a dominance analysis that was not pre-registered. We based our decision on criticism of the use of multivariate statistics in Dark Tetrad research [We used the R-packages “lavaan” [