Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and the people who lean hardest on AI

A study published in BMC Psychology in June by Kağan Kırcaburun of Düzce University found that narcissism is the strongest predictor of problematic generative AI use among 677 adult users, with vertical individualism and intolerance of uncertainty mediating the relationship. The research links Dark Tetrad personality traits—narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism—to compulsive engagement with AI chatbots, suggesting that individuals high in narcissism are drawn to AI that reflects and flatters without argument.

In 1914, Sigmund Freud borrowed a figure from Ovid and handed psychology one of its most durable terms. In his essay On Narcissism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On Narcissism , the myth of Narcissus, the youth who fell in love with his own reflection and wasted away in front of it, became a way of describing a self that turns its love inward. The word outlived the theory that carried it. It hardened into diagnosis, entering the psychiatric manuals as narcissistic personality disorder by 1980 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/understanding-narcissism/202310/a-brief-history-of-narcissistic-personality-disorder , and then loosened again into everyday speech, where it now stands in for anyone we find insufferably self-regarding. Modern personality psychology treats narcissism more coolly, as one dimension along which everyone varies, grouped with three equally unflattering others, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism, under the label the Dark Tetrad. What Freud could not have foreseen is the interlocutor these traits would eventually find. A century after he named the condition, the self that loves its own reflection has been given a machine that reflects, flatters, and answers on command, and never once argues back. A growing body of research suggests this is not a neutral development, and that some personalities are drawn into it further than others. Personality psychologists, following the work of Delroy Paulhus and colleagues, treat these four not as diagnoses but as continuous dimensions, present in trace amounts across the general population and measured by degree rather than category. Narcissism brings grandiosity and a hunger for admiration; Machiavellianism a cool, instrumental view of other people; psychopathy low empathy paired with impulsivity; and sadism the disposition to take gratification in another’s discomfort. The question a study can put to them is empirical, and slightly strange: does standing higher on any of these dimensions predict how a person uses a chatbot? In a study published in BMC Psychology https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40359-026-05012-4 in June, Kağan Kırcaburun, of Düzce University in Turkey, tested how these traits relate to what the literature terms problematic generative AI use, a pattern modelled on established behavioural-addiction frameworks in which engagement becomes compulsive and begins to impair everyday functioning. Drawing on 677 adult users recruited through Prolific, with a mean age of about 40 and an even split by sex, he estimated a path model connecting the dark traits to problematic use. Narcissism was the most consistent predictor, showing both direct and indirect associations; sadism produced small but significant total effects; psychopathy behaved less predictably, its direction differing between men and women. The paper’s more substantive contribution lies in its mediators, the variables through which a trait exerts its influence. Kırcaburun modelled two constructs as serial pathways between personality and problematic use. The first, vertical individualism, is a value orientation, in the tradition of Harry Triandis’s cross-cultural work https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232467455 Triandis HC and Gelfand MJ Converging measurement of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism J Pers Soc Psychol , that couples a focus on the autonomous self with a concern for status and standing above others. The second, intolerance of uncertainty, is a dispositional tendency, now widely treated as a transdiagnostic “fundamental fear” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27067453/ , to experience ambiguity and not-knowing as distressing and to be resolved at once. Across the full sample and within each sex, those two variables were the most stable correlates of problematic use. Among the women, the association between narcissism and problematic use ran entirely through vertical individualism; among the men, individualism and intolerance of uncertainty carried it in part. The traits, on this reading, act less directly than through the values and the affective intolerances that express them, which is a more interesting and more testable claim than the blunt assertion that difficult people misuse chatbots. The appropriate caution here is considerable, and the author is candid about it. The design is cross-sectional, so the mediational language describes covariance structure rather than an established causal sequence; longitudinal or experimental data would be needed to license claims about mechanism over time. All measures are self-report, which raises the familiar problem of common-method variance. Measurement invariance across sex was not fully supported, which is precisely why the sex-differentiated findings warrant restraint. And the base rates of genuinely problematic use in the sample were low, a reminder that this is a study of subclinical variation, not of a clinical population. Why the machine fits so well? Of the two mechanisms, the fear of not knowing is the one that tells us the most, because it matches what a chatbot does so precisely. An anxious mind wants certainty, and a chatbot is, above all, a certainty machine. This is where Kırcaburun’s findings meet a separate argument from the psychiatrists Ashleigh Golden and Elias Aboujaoude, who describe how ordinary chatbots can quietly deepen the loops behind obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety. The pull here is not the one we usually blame for our screens. It is not the little hit of pleasure that keeps us scrolling, it is relief. You feel anxious, you ask the machine, it reassures you, the worry eases, and so you learn to ask again. Each time, the asking becomes a little more automatic. The trouble is what that relief quietly takes away. Anxiety usually fades on its own if you can stay with it long enough to see that the thing you feared does not actually happen. This is how people get better, and it is much of what therapy trains them to do. A machine that answers at once, warmly, and always on your side removes the very uncertainty you needed to sit with, and so the fear never gets the chance to lose its grip. A friend would eventually run out of patience, so would a parent. One patient in Golden and Aboujaoude’s case files describes asking the chatbot the things they would once have asked a parent a hundred times a day. People tire, change the subject, and finally say enough, and that friction, irritating as it is, quietly caps how far the worry can run. The machine sets no such limit, it will keep answering all night. Put the two studies side by side and a simple picture appears. The technology does not so much hand us new problems as feed the ones we already have. If you crave admiration, it gives you an audience that never gets bored of you. If you cannot stand not knowing, it gives you an instant, confident answer. If you would rather skip the effort of other people, it gives you company with none of the demands. In each case it offers exactly what you were reaching for, and that is precisely how a small habit hardens into a large one. The reason this matters is the sheer number of people now involved. ChatGPT alone had around 800 million https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/06/sam-altman-says-chatgpt-has-hit-800m-weekly-active-users/ weekly users by late 2025. Close to half of young Europeans https://thenextweb.com/news/young-europeans-ai-chatbots-emotional-support-cause say they have used a chatbot to talk about something personal, and half of parents already worry https://thenextweb.com/news/half-of-parents-worried-kids-hooked-on-ai their children lean on it too much. The strongest evidence so far comes from a four-week experiment the MIT Media Lab https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/how-ai-and-human-behaviors-shape-psychosocial-effects-of-chatbot-use-a-longitudinal-controlled-study/ ran with OpenAI, following nearly a thousand people. The heaviest users ended up lonelier, more emotionally reliant on the machine, and spending less time with real people, and the effect fell hardest on those who were already lonely or already prone to leaning on it when they began. The differences were small, and this was a study group rather than the world at large, but they point the same way the personality research does. None of this means AI is quietly wrecking our minds. The evidence so far, built on single snapshots, short stretches of time, and people describing themselves, can show that certain personalities lean harder on these machines. It cannot show what the machines do to those personalities over months and years, and that is the harder, and more important, question. A mirror and a feedback loop are not the same thing. We know that narcissism and heavy AI use travel together now. What we do not know is if a chatbot that flatters without limit, agrees without friction, and reflects the self back all day long leaves a person roughly as it found them, or slowly turns the dial up. Can AI make a narcissist more narcissistic, amplifying the very trait it feeds? The research cannot say yet, but Narcissus was not undone by his reflection, he was undone by how long he was allowed to look at it, and nothing we have built has ever let us look longer. Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.