Overall, strong positive associations emerged among online commenting frequency, trolling enjoyment, and troll identity, pointing to a common construct underlying the measures. Both studies revealed similar patterns of relations between trolling and the Dark Tetrad of personality: trolling correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, using both enjoyment ratings and identity scores. Of all personality measures, sadism showed the most robust associations with trolling and, importantly, the relationship was specific to trolling behavior. Enjoyment of other online activities, such as chatting and debating, was unrelated to sadism. Thus cyber-trolling appears to be an Internet manifestation of everyday sadism...
General discussion
The present research was the first to examine comprehensive personality profiles of Internet trolls. Across two studies and two measures of trolling, the personality projections of trolls emerged in Quadrant II of the Interpersonal Circumplex (Wiggins, 1995), that is, High Agency and Low Communion (Jones & Paulhus, 2012). In other words, they displayed high levels of the Dark Tetrad traits and a BFI profile consistent with those traits. It was sadism, however, that had the most robust