Finding the good through the evil: An In-depth Geo-Exploration of the Dark Triad in the Age of Social Media

The rise of social media has allowed personality researchers to develop ways to capture a person's personality, using the Big Five framework, based solely on their social media profile. As fruitful as these efforts have been for commercial and theoretical developments, they do not directly facilitate the interests of communities, societies and governments. Such interests might comprise reducing morally questionable, or downright reprehensible, behaviours, such as violence, crime, corruption, censorship, propaganda and political or ideological extremism. To that effect, the first goal of the proposed research programme is to use social media data to capture a personality profile that is directly related to societal outcomes of interest. Such a personality profile is the trait triage of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism - the so-called Dark Triad (DT). Upon establishing a reliable algorithm for capturing DT scores from a social media profile alone, the second aim of the research programme will be to use this information to create both theoretical and applied impact: establish normative patterns for DT traits over different geographies, identify geographical hotspots where DT-related interventions might be most effective, and study personality-driven migration patterns by testing the person-environment fit hypothesis in the context of DT traits.