Over the past few years, we’ve learned a great deal about how people use the internet. We know how much time we spend online, what kind of content we consume, and what risks emerge when that use becomes problematic.

But there is one question that remains largely overlooked:

who is behind that behavior?

We like to think that the internet influences us. That it exposes us. That it changes us.

It’s a comforting idea. Because it implies something reassuring: that the problem lies outside of us.

But what if that’s not entirely true?

What if, instead of shaping us, the internet simply provides the perfect stage for us to be who we already are… without filters?

In our recent work, The Dark Side of Desire, we explored one of those uncomfortable areas where psychology stops being abstract and starts becoming unsettling: the consumption of online sexual content, particularly violent material.

Not everyone interacts with the digital environment in the same way. And when it comes to sensitive behaviors, those differences become impossible to ignore.

We started from a simple but uncomfortable premise:

to understand online behavior, it is not enough to examine what people do—we need to understand who they are.

This is where dark personality traits come into play—Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism. Not as extreme labels, but as tendencies that exist, to varying degrees, within normal personality variation.

We were not interested in how much people consume.

We already know that.

We wanted to understand who consumes this type of content,

and what that reveals about them.

Because not everyone arrives at these contents in the same way.

And not everyone stays for the same reasons.

When personality and behavior are examined together, a pattern begins to emerge: not all traits carry the same weight. Some exert a stronger pull.

Among them, two stand out in a particularly uncomfortable way: psychopathy and sadism.

They don’t explain everything.

But they are far from irrelevant.

They function more like a key.

A predisposition.

Something that makes certain types of content not only accessible—but fitting.

At that point, the boundary between what people seek and what ultimately reinforces them begins to blur.

Because the issue is not only what is being watched.

It is what becomes normalized.

It is how repeated exposure can reshape how aggression, intimacy, and power are interpreted.

How the threshold of what feels acceptable quietly shifts over time.

And this is where the most uncomfortable idea emerges:

perhaps this is not simply exposure, but alignment.

A match between who someone is and what they find.

In fact, one of the most relevant insights is the possibility of a bidirectional process. Some individuals may be more drawn to extreme or violent content. At the same time, repeated exposure may contribute to normalizing aggression, reducing empathy, and reinforcing certain behavioral patterns.

For a long time, we have tried to understand online behavior as if it were a technical issue—access, frequency, type of content.

But that is only the surface.

Beneath it lies something harder to address:

the idea that the internet does not affect everyone in the same way because we do not all start from the same place.

Some people stop.

Others move on.

And some find something that fits all too well.

Perhaps that is why the real question is no longer what the internet does to us.

But something far more uncomfortable:

which part of us finds, online, the perfect place to emerge.