Malicious mouths? The Dark Triad and motivations for gossip

There are several reasons for why people may be motivated to engage in gossip, such as group protection, status enhancement, and social bonding. In an on-line study (N = 372), we investigated how individual differences affect gossiping behaviour by examining the relationship between the Dark Triad (i.e., primary and secondary psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism) and motivations to gossip. Cor-relational analyses indicated that psychopathy and narcissism had a positive relationship with social enjoyment, group protection, and negative influence gossip, whereas Machiavellianism was positively correlated with only negative influence gossip. When we controlled for shared variance between the Dark Triad traits, secondary psychopathy emerged as a positive predictor of group protection gossip. The findings are discussed within an evolutionary framework, along with directions for future research. Gossiping (i.e., talking about absent third parties; Foster, 2004) is an interesting, although in many ways paradoxical social phenomenon , characterised by a constellation of positive and negative features. From an ultimate perspective, gossip is thought to have evolved as a tool for controlling free-riders (Dunbar, 2004). According to this idea, gossip is a prosocial act that can be used for gathering and distributing reputational information about others in order to distribute the information to group members (Feinberg, Willer, Stellar, & Keltner, 2012), and is an accepted form of behaviour when framed as an instrument for group protection (Beersma & Van Kleef, 2012). However, gossip can also take the form of malicious , false information used in bullying, isolating, and ostracising others (McAndrew, 2014). This kind of gossip may enhance one's status within the group (McAndrew, Bell, & Garcia, 2007), although if too explicit, it can lead to perceptions of low status of the gos-siper (Farley, 2011). Gossip may also serve as a tool for social bond-have been found to gossip for the purpose of providing satisfaction and amusement (Beersma & Van Kleef, 2012). Despite the obvious importance of gossip in social interactions, there has been very little psychological research on gossip (Foster, 2004), and even fewer studies investigating how individual differences may affect the motivations to gossip (although see Watson, 2011). The Dark Triad (i.e., narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychop-athy) is a constellation of personality traits, characterised by callousness and the tendency to manipulate others to one's own benefit (Jones & Figueredo, 2013). Individuals high in narcissism are vain, seek for admiration, and view themselves superior to oth