It is not that I do not trust Psychology Today, but that psychology is a messy subject. The articles in Psychology Today can perhaps give some insight into what is being studied in the field, but omits a vast number of details and nuances that are necessary to interpret study results.
Reliability and validity are notoriously hard to pin down in psychology, and there is no stable model of mind or personality that all people share. In practically every study of psychology, one must critically consider not only the reliability and validity of each and every operational definition, but also be highly skeptical of every measurement and also of the statistical techniques applied to those measurements. We know so much about the physical science compared to so little about psychology because people are "messy" and unique.
Every person has intimate experience with their own mind, and therefore many people consider psychology to be accessible. Unfortunately, this is not true. People do a very poor job of understanding the true nature of themselves, especially with regards to how their minds operate. The hazard with pop psychology is that it encourages people to make judgements on others -- judgements that are not necessarily warranted -- and sometimes leads people to take actions that are not in their or others' best interests.
As an example in the Psychology Today article, the author wrote, "In their recently published paper, Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities, the authors suggest that Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy might be beneficial for obtaining resources." While Ok et al. collected interesting data, performed some interesting analyses, and generally contributed to the scholarly dialog on dark triad personality traits, I would not characterize the paper as "being a nasty person is good for getting resources." Such a statement completely ignores how dark triad personality traits can also contribute to poor outcomes in life.
Even worse, the original paper did not address anything at all about risk analysis for donating to people requesting resources. Yet, the Psychology Today article concludes with "Today, those with dark triad traits might find that the best way to extract rewards is by making a public spectacle of their victimhood and virtue." Is that advice for dark triad people? Is that a warning for altruistic people? Is is a statement about the Internet? Is it a recommendation against donating to people who claim to urgently need help? My point is that the Psychology Today article took a messy subject, left it messy, and suggests the reader walks away more knowledgable.
With the hard sciences it is much easier to home in on the differences between academic papers and what the popular press writes about them. For the soft sciences, it is much more important be critical of the topic of discussion.