Take 516 North American adults, hand them a validated gossip-frequency scale and a separate measure sorting why they talk about people into four motives, then cross both against the Dark Tetrad — psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism, sadism. That’s the design behind The Dark Tetrad Traits Differentially Predict Gossip Frequency and Motives, published in Behavioral Sciences by Adam C. Davis, Tracy Vaillancourt, and Steven Arnocky, and covered Oct. 18, 2026 by PsyPost. The sample ran 18 to 61 years old, averaging 38. Psychopathy came out the strongest predictor of gossiping in general, and the strongest predictor of gossip aimed at wrecking someone’s reputation for no better reason than wanting to. Machiavellianism told a different story — it was the only one of the four traits that positively predicted every single motive the researchers measured, including gathering information and warning friends about someone untrustworthy. Thomas Aquinas drew close to that exact line roughly 750 years earlier. In the Summa Theologica, Question 73 on detraction, he separated backbiting done out of plain malice from disclosing someone’s faults for what he called a “necessary good” — correction, protection, the service of justice. Two different acts that look identical from across the room, doing two different kinds of damage.

The Quick Verdict

Question	What we found
What was studied?	Whether the four Dark Tetrad traits predict how often people gossip, and which of four distinct motives drive it
Who ran it?	Adam C. Davis, Tracy Vaillancourt, Steven Arnocky
Where and when?	Behavioral Sciences, DOI 10.3390/bs16091556; covered Oct. 18, 2026 by PsyPost
Sample	516 North American adults (U.S. and Canada), ages 18-61, average age 38
Core finding	Psychopathy was the strongest predictor of gossip frequency and of malicious, reputation-damaging gossip
Machiavellianism’s role	The only trait that positively predicted every gossip motive studied, including information-gathering/validation and warning friends about untrustworthy people
What Aquinas already argued	In Summa Theologica II-II Q.73, “Of Detraction,” malice-driven backbiting is a distinct sin from disclosing a fault for a defensible, protective purpose

The Quick Version

A 2026 study of 516 adults found that psychopathy predicts gossiping often and gossiping to hurt someone, while Machiavellianism predicts gossiping strategically — to gather information, fit in, or protect people you’re loyal to. Aquinas split the same behavior the same way in the thirteenth century: backbiting meant to blacken someone’s name is a sin, but revealing a fault for a defensible purpose isn’t the same act wearing a disguise. It’s a different act.

What the Study Actually Found

Most gossip research starts from the assumption that gossip is one thing with one social function — bonding, mostly, with a reputational edge. Davis, Vaillancourt, and Arnocky started somewhere narrower: does gossiping a lot track with the same personality traits as gossiping maliciously, or are frequency and motive carrying different information about who someone is?

They split motive into four categories. Information gathering and validation means talking about peers to find out news and check whether others share your opinions. Social enjoyment is gossip purely for entertainment. Group protection means warning friends about someone untrustworthy. Negative influence means gossiping specifically to damage a target’s reputation. Four motives, measured separately, then regressed against psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and sadism, controlling for age and sex.

Psychopathy won the frequency contest outright — the strongest predictor of how often someone gossips, followed in descending order by sadism, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. All four traits predicted higher gossip frequency even after accounting for how much they overlap, which is a real finding on its own: gossiping a lot isn’t one dark trait’s signature, it’s something all four produce at different strengths. Psychopathy’s dominance sharpened further on the negative-influence motive, where it was again strongest — unsurprising for a trait defined by low empathy and comfort with causing harm that needs no strategic payoff to justify it.

Machiavellianism ran the opposite pattern. It positively predicted all four motives — the only trait to do that — and it alone predicted information-gathering and validation, explaining about 14% of that motive’s variance. It also showed up, alongside psychopathy, as a predictor of group protection; narcissism and sadism showed no unique link to warning friends about anyone. As Davis put it, “Machiavellianism predicted each of the four gossip motives in our statistical models” — manipulators gossip for whatever purpose the situation rewards, cooperative or antisocial, because the goal is the advantage, not the harm. Narcissism joined Machiavellianism in predicting social enjoyment, contributing nothing unique to protection or information-gathering. Psychopathy needed the least explanation: it predicted frequency and malice and comparatively little else.

The researchers are upfront about what this doesn’t establish. The design is cross-sectional, so none of this shows personality causing gossip rather than correlating with it. It relies on self-report, and as the authors note, “people do not always have accurate insight into how often they talk about others.” And the frequency measure itself lumps “positive, negative, and neutral chatter” into a single score — which means the headline number for “how much someone gossips” can’t, on its own, tell you whether that gossip was cruel or harmless. The motive measures are where that distinction actually lives.

What Did Aquinas Mean by Detraction?

Detraction, in Aquinas’s Summa Theologica II-II, Q.73, is the sin of speaking ill of someone absent specifically in order to blacken their good name — distinct from reviling (which insults someone to their face) because it works in secret and targets reputation rather than honor. Aquinas is explicit that revealing a hidden fault is not detraction when done “in order that he may mend,” or to serve public justice, or for any other “necessary good.” The sin lives in the intent, not in the mere fact of talking about someone.

That intent-first framing is doing real work in the text, not just softening the rule. Question 73, Article 2 lays out four ways a person’s reputation gets damaged by speech — lying about them, exaggerating a real fault, exposing a true fault that was unknown, or recasting a good deed as having a bad motive — and then draws the line that matters: if someone’s name takes a hit as a side effect of words aimed at some other legitimate purpose, “with attention to the due circumstances,” that’s not backbiting, formally speaking. Aquinas even addresses the audience’s role, noting that someone who listens to detraction without resistance “becomes a participator in his sin” — especially if they’re enjoying it because they already dislike the person being discussed. He saw gossip’s damage as distributed across speaker and listener alike, three-quarters of a millennium before anyone built a Likert scale to measure “social enjoyment” as a motive.

Why Does the Same Act of Talking About Someone Split Into Two Sins?

1. Malice doesn’t need a reason, which is exactly what makes it hard to deter. Aquinas treats backbiting-for-its-own-sake as the purer case of the sin because there’s no competing goal to weigh it against. Psychopathy’s link to negative-influence gossip matches that structure: the strongest predictor of gossip meant purely to hurt someone is the trait defined by low empathy, not by any particular thing it’s trying to achieve.
2. Purpose-driven disclosure answers to something outside itself, which is what lets Aquinas excuse it. His “necessary good” category works because the disclosure serves a goal bigger than the speaker’s feelings about the target. Machiavellian gossip is purpose-driven in a parallel way: it serves the gossiper’s goals, sometimes prosocial, sometimes not, but never gossip for gossip’s sake.
3. Information-gathering gossip is strategic without being protective, which is where the parallel gets interesting rather than clean. Checking whether your opinions match everyone else’s isn’t aimed at defending anyone from harm — it’s social positioning. Aquinas’s framework has a clean slot for disclosure that protects and one that harms, but status-management gossip sits in neither.
4. Frequency and motive are separate measurements for a reason Aquinas would recognize instantly. He never treated “how much someone talks about others” as the morally relevant number — the number that mattered was why. The 2026 data landed on the identical separation by building two scales instead of one.

Why the Study and the Philosophy Rhyme

The honest version of this isn’t “a medieval friar predicted a 2026 personality study.” It’s narrower, and it holds up better for being narrower: Aquinas’s specific claim was that talking about someone’s faults isn’t wrong by default — it’s wrong when the point of saying it is to damage them, and not wrong when the point is some legitimate good the disclosure serves. Davis, Vaillancourt, and Arnocky weren’t testing moral theology. They were testing whether gossip’s personality predictors differ by motive. But the trait that predicted malice-for-its-own-sake and the trait that predicted gossip-in-service-of-a-goal turned out to be different traits entirely, which is a statistical echo of exactly the distinction Aquinas insisted on centuries before anyone had a word for Machiavellianism.

It connects to La Rochefoucauld’s argument that most of what passes for virtue is self-interest wearing a disguise — a 2026 study there found strategic kindness toward rivals tracked Machiavellianism specifically, the same trait doing the strategic work here. A trait built for manipulation doesn’t always look manipulative from the outside; it’s responsive to whatever the situation rewards, including looking kind or looking protective. This site has covered Aquinas before, on gratitude as a habitus built through repetition rather than a feeling that arrives — a different question, but the same instinct for refusing to let a single surface behavior stand in for the reality underneath it.

It also sits close to the research on empathy and in-group favoritism covered here through Mozi — psychopathy’s link to malicious gossip and that study’s link between hierarchy preference and less gray matter in an empathy-related brain region both describe what happens when the usual brake on reputational harm isn’t there to begin with. And the ghosting study covered through Socrates rhymes from an adjacent angle: both are about people misjudging the moral stakes of their own ordinary communication, whether that’s underestimating how much silence hurts or not distinguishing a cruel reason to talk from a protective one.

The Gap Aquinas Didn’t See Coming

Here’s where the comparison is more interesting than a clean match.

Aquinas’s framework is built for a single, discrete act, examined by an individual conscience asking what this particular disclosure was for. The Dark Tetrad framework measures something else: a stable trait, correlated statistically with a pattern of behavior across many separate acts of gossip, none individually inspected for intent. A Machiavellian high-scorer who gossips for information nine times and malice once isn’t sorted the way a confessor would sort those ten conversations one at a time. The study answers “what kind of person does this on average” — a different question than Aquinas’s “was this particular act excusable.”

The information-gathering motive is also a harder fit for Aquinas’s categories than protection or malice are. His “necessary good” exception assumes the disclosure serves someone besides the speaker — correction, protection, justice. Checking whether your opinions match the group’s protects or corrects no one; it’s self-interested status management, which is also clearly not malicious in his sense. That it’s the motive Machiavellianism predicts most distinctively, and the one explaining the smallest share of variance of the four, suggests a real, somewhat orphaned category of gossip — strategic but self-serving rather than protective — that neither the thirteenth-century vocabulary nor the modern four-motive model quite names.

Sadism complicates things further. It was the second-strongest predictor of sheer gossip frequency, behind only psychopathy, yet showed no unique link to negative influence or group protection. Gossip driven by pleasure in the activity itself, independent of malice-with-a-target or any strategic goal, doesn’t map onto either side of Aquinas’s split — a loose end his two-part distinction wasn’t built to catch.

What This Study Doesn’t Show

Be precise about the size of this. The framing invites more confidence than the data earns.

Self-Report, About a Behavior People Misjudge

The researchers note that people don’t always have accurate insight into how often they talk about others. Self-reported frequency and motive are reports of self-perception, not observed behavior — a gap that matters most for traits, like psychopathy, already linked to distorted self-assessment elsewhere.

Cross-Sectional and Correlational

All measures were collected at one time point from the same people. The study shows these traits and these gossip patterns travel together. It doesn’t show that more of a trait causes a change in gossip behavior, or rule out a third variable, like status insecurity, producing both.

One Frequency Score, Three Kinds of Talk

The gossip-frequency measure combines positive, negative, and neutral chatter into a single number. A high score doesn’t tell you, by itself, whether someone is gossiping kindly or cruelly — that distinction only shows up in the separate motive measures.

A North American Convenience Sample

516 adults from the U.S. and Canada, recruited online, isn’t a population-representative sample of either country, and the authors make no claim that these links generalize to cultures with different norms around reputation or group loyalty.

What Actually Follows From This

1. “They gossip a lot” and “they gossip to hurt people” are different claims, and this study is a specific, measured reason to stop treating them as the same accusation. Frequency and malice came from different predictors; so should your judgment of the person doing the talking.
2. Strategic gossip isn’t automatically either innocent or sinister — the same Machiavellian engine runs “warn a friend about someone untrustworthy” and “gather intel to fit in.” Aquinas’s “necessary good” test — does this disclosure serve something beyond the speaker’s own interest — still does useful sorting work here, even on a motive his framework doesn’t name cleanly.
3. If you’re trying to evaluate your own gossip habits rather than someone else’s, ask what Aquinas asked: who does this serve, if it serves anyone besides me? That question won’t settle every case, including the strategic-but-self-interested ones this study surfaces as a genuine gray area. But it’s a sharper diagnostic than “how often do I do this,” which the data says is measuring something else entirely.

Aquinas never met a person who could gossip to 516 strangers’ worth of acquaintances through a feed, and Davis, Vaillancourt, and Arnocky never set out to adjudicate thirteenth-century moral theology. But a four-motive gossip questionnaire and a question on detraction written for confessors turn out to be sorting the same raw material along close to the same seam: not whether someone talked about another person, but what the talking was actually for.

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This post discusses a 2026 study published in Behavioral Sciences (Davis, Vaillancourt & Arnocky, DOI: 10.3390/bs16091556), reported by PsyPost, and Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, Secunda Secundae, Question 73. The study is correlational, based on a single cross-sectional sample of 516 North American adults, and relies on self-reported gossip frequency and motives rather than observed behavior.