The role of dark triad personality traits and consumer decision-making styles between social media addiction and consumer engagement

There are many scientific studies in the international arena on the dark triad of personality traits. However, it is very remarkable that such an important subject has been dealt with in a limited way in terms of consumer behavior. This research has two main objectives. The first goal of the research is to determine how social media addicted consumers with dark personality traits will shape their purchasing decision-making styles through active consumer engagement in the online environment through the dimensions of high quality, brand, fashion and hedonistic conscious consumers. The second goal of the research is to propose a model about which of the four dimensions of consumer decision-making styles of consumers with dark personality focus more on. At the same time, identifying the dark personality traits of consumers is important in terms of directing marketing, brand, media and advertising activities. In this research, a pilot study was first conducted with 150 participants. The main fieldwork was carried out with 771 participants for the result of the pilot study. Within the scope of the main fieldwork, four different structural equation models were examined. These four structural models were tested and the models were compared. In the findings, it has been determined that social media addicted narcissists have a positive and significant effect on quality conscious, brand conscious, fashion conscious and hedonistic conscious focus. It was determined that social media addicted machiavellians only had a negative effect on high quality conscious. No statistically significant effect was found on any of the four dimensions of consumer decision-making styles of social media addicted psychopaths. At the same time, it was found that the dimensions of quality conscious, brand conscious, fashion conscious and hedonistic conscious consumer had a positive effect on active consumer engagement.