Manipulative people use both kindness and gossip as separate tools to control their social circles

People who manipulate social circles through gossip or exclusion are largely driven by dark personality traits, and possessing positive traits generally fails to stop this behavior. Researchers found that while acting kindly toward others can slightly reduce the likelihood of engaging in social sabotage, it does not erase the influence of underlying malevolence. The findings were recently published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

Relational aggression involves intentionally harming someone’s relationships or social standing instead of using physical violence. Examples include spreading malicious rumors, giving the silent treatment, or organizing a group to purposely exclude a specific person. Because it is subtle, individuals seeking to avoid open conflict often prefer it over direct confrontation. This dynamic frequently plays out in adult environments like workplaces, community groups, and extended friend circles.

Victims of this type of aggression frequently face serious mental health consequences. Being targeted can lead to increased depression, hopelessness, and extreme loneliness. The individuals who dish out this aggression also experience difficulties. Perpetrators frequently report their own struggles with anxiety, risky habits, and trouble managing their emotions.

To understand what drives people to use these behavioral tactics, lead researcher Brittany Patafio from Deakin University in Australia and her colleagues examined the balance between dark and light personality traits. They wanted to know if having a positive worldview might protect someone from acting aggressively in their social life. This theoretical avenue remains relatively underexplored in behavioral science.

Psychologists group malevolent traits into a cluster known as the dark triad. This includes psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. Narcissism is generally split into grandiose and vulnerable categories. Grandiose narcissists have an inflated sense of superiority and entitlement, while vulnerable narcissists are deeply insecure, introverted, and highly sensitive to criticism.

People high in Machiavellianism focus on manipulating others for personal gain while trying to maintain a favorable public reputation. They view interpersonal exchanges as strategic games to be won. Psychopathy is characterized by a tendency to act in antisocial ways without feeling remorse or empathy for victims, alongside a lack of general impulse control. Previous research indicates that people exhibiting these dark traits frequently engage in social sabotage.

On the other end of the psychological spectrum, researchers study a light triad of benevolent traits. These include faith in humanity, humanism, and Kantianism. Having faith in humanity means believing that people are fundamentally good at their core. Humanism involves valuing the dignity and natural worth of other individuals.

Kantianism, named after the philosopher Immanuel Kant, indicates a preference for treating people as independent individuals with their own lives, rather than using them purely as tools to get what you want. Along with these personality components, the researchers considered general prosocial behavior. This category encompasses daily actions intended to promote the welfare of others, like sharing resources, helping neighbors, and cooperating on tasks.

Theoretical models of aggression suggest that individuals often act out because they misinterpret social cues. For example, if a peer makes an ambiguous comment during a meeting, an aggressive person might interpret it as a deliberate insult and decide to retaliate. This chain of cognitive events involves encoding cues, interpreting them, and selecting a response based on internal rules.

Patafio and her team proposed that people equipped with light personality traits might experience this cognitive sequence differently. They theorized that benevolent individuals might not interpret ambiguous situations as threatening in the first place. This innate perception would make them less likely to feel a defensive need to use social manipulation.

To test these ideas, the research team recruited slightly more than two thousand adults living in Australia. The participants ranged in age from eighteen to eighty-two, and about two-thirds of the group identified as women. To capture a wide range of social experiences, the team gathered volunteers through university networks and paid advertisements on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.

Each participant completed a detailed online survey. The questionnaire asked them to rate how accurately different statements described their own habits and beliefs. To measure relational aggression, participants responded to prompts asking if they spread rumors just to be mean or purposely ignored people to punish them.

Other survey sections assessed their dark and light personality traits. Participants rated their agreement with statements like preferring honesty over charm to measure their Kantianism. They also answered questions about their general kindness, such as whether they regularly offer assistance to peers in need.

The data revealed that personality traits explained more than a third of the differences in how often people used social sabotage. Dark personality traits accounted for the vast majority of this effect. All the malevolent traits positively predicted engagement in aggressive behavior.

Psychopathy and vulnerable narcissism emerged as the strongest statistical predictors. The researchers suspect that people who readily act out without guilt use gossip to gain social control. Similarly, highly sensitive vulnerable narcissists might use subtle exclusion as a covert way to defend themselves against perceived rejections. Grandiose narcissism also predicted social aggression, but to a much lesser extent.

On the benevolent side, the results challenged the researchers’ initial expectations. The team anticipated that all the light traits would negatively predict aggression, meaning that higher benevolence would equate to less sabotage. The actual data showed that believing people are fundamentally good or seeing the inherent worth of others had no statistical bearing on aggressive habits.

Only Kantianism and general prosocial actions reliably indicated lower levels of social aggression. The researchers noted an important distinction between simple thoughts and concrete actions. Merely thinking highly of humanity does not stop a person from spreading rumors. Actively trying to help people or strictly adhering to moral rules about how individuals should be treated does seem to keep aggressive behaviors in check.

The team also explored how dark traits compromise the benefits of helpful behavior. Sometimes individuals perform kind acts for entirely selfish reasons, like trying to earn a promotion or projecting a flawless image to peers. The authors found that people who scored high on malevolent traits continued to engage in high levels of relational aggression even if they reported high levels of prosocial behavior.

For these highly manipulative individuals, acting kindly does not replace acting aggressively. Instead, helping and harming both serve as separate tools in their social repertoire. They might cooperate when it suits their needs and sabotage their peers when that seems more advantageous. For people with extremely low levels of dark traits, helping behaviors appeared to genuinely substitute for aggressive tactics.

The study has a few notable limitations to consider. Because the researchers gathered the data at a single point in time, the results cannot prove that possessing certain traits directly causes a person to act aggressively in the future. They can only map out the strong associations between existing mindsets and ongoing behaviors.

The research team also relied entirely on self-reported surveys for their data. When people are asked to catalog their own antisocial choices, they sometimes misrepresent themselves to appear more socially acceptable. Despite the survey being entirely anonymous, some participants might have felt uncomfortable agreeing with statements about manipulating their friends.

The Australian adults in this specific sample reported exceptionally low baseline levels of social aggression and high levels of benevolent traits. The researchers pointed out that a group displaying higher baseline hostility might yield slightly different psychological patterns.

Patafio and her colleagues suggest that future studies should track individuals over several years. Tracking traits and behaviors over long stretches of time would help scientists identify which beliefs emerge first in young adults. This would clarify the developmental pathways that either amplify or limit covert hostility. Ultimately, understanding how dark traits drive these behaviors could aid in the creation of better educational programs aimed at stopping interpersonal abuse before it permanently damages communities.

These distinct psychological findings open new avenues for understanding social behavior. The study, “Dark and light personalities: A utilitarian perspective on their impact on relational aggression,” was authored by Brittany Patafio, David Skvarc, Richelle Mayshak, Travis Harries, Ashlee Curtis, Michelle Benstead, Alexa Hayley, Dominic G. McNeil, Hannah Bereznicki, and Shannon Hyder.