How
much do we know about what the Internet is doing to us? I have to
confess, I spend a lot of time there and I have begun to be
self-critical of what I do and where I go. For me, considerable
Internet time is spent “finding things out” that simply catch my
attention, and much like real interactions it sometimes feels as if I
am having a conversation with myself – 'the idle thoughts of an
idle fellow' – if you will, which allows me to meander from one
informational node to another.
Perhaps
I should be quite grateful that I don't as a rule feel the need to
comment exhaustively on the thoughts, rants and emotional detritus
of others. I think this is mostly because the act of comment is a
reactive rather than a proactive event but I do occasionally weigh in
on a forum somewhere. Many political forums, in particular those
associated with, for example, climate change or Israel, seem to fuel strong opinions, disagreement
and occasional episodic trolling. Such behaviour seems to be targeted
at those with fragile minds, whose emotions run fast, but whose
intellect travels more slowly. Recipients seem sometimes to almost
enjoy the online persecution that they receive from a menagerie of trolls using monosyllabic,
piously gentle and sometimes Biblical responses to the vituperative ad hominem
attacks upon them.
Harmless little trolls? |
I
began thinking about what this has to tell us about the personalities
of trolls themselves and what, if anything, an uncensored Internet
should do about them. Recent research, conducted by Erin Buckels of
the University of Manitoba and two colleagues, sought to directly
investigate whether people who engage in trolling are characterised
by personality traits that fall in the so-called Dark Tetrad:
Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others),
narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), psychopathy (the lack of
remorse and empathy), and sadism (pleasure in the suffering of
others).
It
is hard to underplay the results – disturbing as they were. The
study found correlations, sometimes quite significant, between these
traits and trolling behaviour. What’s more, it also found a
relationship between all Dark Tetrad traits (except for narcissism)
and the overall time that an individual spent, per day, commenting on
the Internet. The correlation between sadistic traits was
particularly strong, since the allure of trolling is attractive to
those who buy into the idea that “the more beautiful and pure a
thing (or person) is, the more satisfying it is (they are) to
corrupt.”
A
new psychology seems to be emerging, one in which the type of
behaviour which would normally be considered either gratuitously
offensive or simply illegal if conducted in real life is either
excused, ignored or condoned online. The Net as an organism might be
thought to encourage antisocial behaviour since the consequences of
such actions largely go unpunished, except by exclusion within a small cluster of
offendees, and since the perpetrator is not geographically
constrained to behave himself, he can simply drift into another
cluster and indulge his fantasies there, over and over again.
Psychology
has plenty of data but currently relatively few answers, it would
seem, on the effect that exposure to trolling has on the public perception of controversial issues. Trolls - as real people - push other real people's emotional buttons and it seems to have the effect of hardening pre-existent beliefs thus making people less amenable to reason. I suppose this makes sense, in a way, since people feel first - a knee-jerk reaction, and think later which I think the psychs call 'motivational reasoning'. So, one way or another, the trolls always win.
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