When Kindness and Manipulation Coexist: What New Research Says About Gossip, Dark Traits, and Social Control (opens in new tab)

There is an old sentimental error that bad actors reveal themselves through obvious cruelty. They do not. Quite often they arrive agreeable, cooperative, and socially skilled. A recent study in Personality and Individual Differences offers a useful corrective. Its central finding is modest, but unsettling. People high in dark personality traits—particularly psychopathy and vulnerable narcissism—reported greater use of relational aggression: gossip, exclusion, reputation damage, punitive ignor...