A new study published in Behavioral Sciences has found that psychopathy is the strongest predictor of how often people gossip, with Machiavellianism linked to a broader range of gossip motives and everyday sadism tied to malicious gossip aimed at harming others’ reputations. The research, conducted by Adam C. Davis of Canadore College, Tracy Vaillancourt of the University of Ottawa, and Steven Arnocky of Nipissing University, analysed how four dark personality traits relate to both how frequently people gossip and why they do it. The study drew on 516 North American adults from the United States and Canada, with data collected in 2021.
Gossip is defined in psychology as the exchange of evaluative information about an absent third party, encompassing positive, neutral, and negative content. Beyond mere chatter, researchers view gossip as serving social functions such as learning about peers, building friendships, enforcing social norms, and competing for status or romantic partners.
The researchers frame gossip within the Dark Tetrad, a quartet of socially aversive traits that extends the earlier Dark Triad by including everyday sadism. The four traits are narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism, each with distinct patterns of influence on gossip behaviour.
Participants completed three principal self-report instruments: a 28-item Short Dark Tetrad scale to assess the four traits, a 13-item Gossip Frequency Scale defining gossip about absent others, and a 22-item Motives to Gossip Questionnaire capturing four motives—information gathering and validation, social enjoyment, negative influence, and group protection. The researchers ensured data quality with attention checks, noting that the data were collected before the wider availability of AI tools that could compromise online responses.
In initial analyses, age and biological sex were found to relate to the variables: women reported slightly higher gossip frequency than men, while men scored higher on everyday sadism. Younger adults tended to score higher on all four dark traits, overall gossip frequency, and the motives of social enjoyment and negative influence.
Looking at the four dark traits individually, each was positively associated with gossip frequency and with all four motives. Correlations with gossip frequency ranged from 0.43 to 0.66, and the strongest links with any motive were for negative influence, ranging from 0.34 to 0.53.
To disentangle the overlapping influences of the traits, the researchers conducted multiple regression analyses that controlled for the other three dark traits, as well as age and sex. When predicting overall gossip frequency, the combined model explained 52 percent of the variance. All four traits independently predicted higher gossip frequency after accounting for shared overlap, with psychopathy as the strongest predictor, followed by everyday sadism, narcissism, and Machiavellianism.
For the four specific motives, patterns emerged. The information gathering and validation motive was explained by Machiavellianism as the sole positive predictor in that model. Narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism did not show a unique association with gathering information. The social enjoyment motive was predicted by Machiavellianism and narcissism, but not by psychopathy or sadism, suggesting that those high in Machiavellianism or narcissism view gossip as a pleasurable social activity.
The negative influence motive showed the strongest association with psychopathy. Psychopathy was the strongest predictor of gossip aimed at damaging others’ reputations, with everyday sadism and Machiavellianism also contributing. Although narcissism appeared linked to negative influence when examined alone, its association disappeared once psychopathy was included in the model, a phenomenon described by the researchers as suppression—psychopathy diminishing narcissism’s apparent predictive power.
Group protection, the motive to warn or defend one’s social group, was explained mainly by psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Narcissism and sadism did not emerge as significant predictors in this model, and psychopathy contributed unique predictive power beyond that of sadism.
The authors emphasised that Machiavellianism stood out for predicting all four gossip motives, noting it aligns with the trait’s core cynicism and strategic manipulation. “Machiavellianism predicted each of the four gossip motives in our statistical models,” they explained, adding that it makes sense that a wide range of motives would underpin their gossip.
“Among ‘dark’ personality traits, psychopathy was the strongest predictor of gossiping more about a range of topics,” the researchers added, including physical appearance, salaries, school grades, relationships, rivals, and celebrities. They also highlighted that psychopathy was the strongest predictor of the negative influence motive, and it also predicted the group protection motive.
In reporting the statistical strength of these relationships, the researchers noted that the standardized regression coefficient for psychopathy predicting gossip frequency was 0.35, equating to about a quarter of a point higher on the five-point frequency scale for each one-point rise in psychopathy, all else being equal. They also pointed to medium-to-large effects in the analyses, with large effects for psychopathy in predicting both gossip frequency (β = 0.35) and the negative influence motive (β = 0.36), and for Machiavellianism predicting the information gathering and validation motive (β = 0.32).
The researchers stressed that while the findings illuminate meaningful associations between dark personality traits and gossip, gossip itself is not inherently toxic or linked to aversive personalities. They caution that their data reflect a single-time-point snapshot and rely on self-reports, which can be influenced by social desirability or willingness to disclose. They also note that the adapted Gossip Frequency Scale blends positive, negative, and neutral chatter, making it difficult to separate the content of gossip across contexts. They call for future work using naturalistic observation or daily diaries to differentiate positive versus negative gossip, and for more nuanced personality measures to explore how sub-facets of traits like narcissism or psychopathy might shape everyday conversation.
The researchers concluded that a broader, person-centred approach could help identify distinct profiles of gossipers, beyond the current variable-centred analysis. They stated: “In the future, we would like to use a person-centred analysis so that we can examine subgroups of participants based on similar response patterns.”
The study, The Dark Tetrad Traits Differentially Predict Gossip Frequency and Motives, was authored by Adam C. Davis, Tracy Vaillancourt, and Steven Arnocky.
