Titus Stryker
Ancient Exiles.
Renegade Alliance
200
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Posted - 2014.02.25 03:35:00 -
[1] - Quote
See the article online here
TL;DR = Internet trolls and video game griefers are just as broken in real life as you've always suspected, according to a new psychology paper by Canadian researchers.
Internet trolls and video game griefers are just as broken in real life as you've always suspected, according to a new psychology paper by Canadian researchers. It turns out that the same folks who love to disrupt online conversations for the "lulz" are likely to also exhibit some pretty nasty personality traits in general.
Two online studies led by Erin Buckels of the University of Manitoba established "strong positive associations" between "online commenting frequency, trolling enjoyment, and troll identity, pointing to a common construct underlying the measures," the researchers wrote in an abstract of their paper.
The upshot was that although Internet trolls are a small minority of overall Internet participants, those respondents to the team's surveys who self-identified as enjoying disrupting online communities also scored highly in the "Dark Tetrad" of personality traits, the researchers found.
"[T]rolling correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, using both enjoyment ratings and identity scores," they wrote. Which is to say, the respondents who identified themselves as trolls also indicated that they enjoy making others suffer, lack remorse and empathy, and have no problem with manipulating and lying to people to achieve their ends.
The fourth trait of the Dark Tetrad is narcissism, which was also displayed in buckets by respondents who cited "trolling" as their favorite activity when commenting online, as indicated in the graph at right.
Slate's Chris Mooney, who dissected the study last week, noted that the authors "found that the relationship between sadism and trolling was the strongest, and that indeed, sadists appear to troll because they find it pleasurable."
Indeed, as the abstract notes:
"Of all personality measures, sadism showed the most robust associations with trolling and, importantly, the relationship was specific to trolling behavior. Enjoyment of other online activities, such as chatting and debating, was unrelated to sadism. Thus cyber-trolling appears to be an Internet manifestation of everyday sadism."
The good news is that really dedicated trolls appear to be fairly uncommon in the online world, at least in terms of their numbers if not their output. As Mooney noted, the researchers found that just 58.7 percent of survey respondents who said they used the Internet also indicated that they commented in online forums. Of those, just 5.6 percent said they enjoyed trolling.
Still, the fact that even that small number of people self-identified as trolls is pretty disturbing, when you consider the survey hoops they had to jump through to convince the researchers they were dead serious about how much they loved being despicable jerks on the Internet.
Here are some of the questions asked by Buckels and her colleagues in their Global Assessment of Internet Trolling, or
GAIT survey tool for identifying the truly trollish, as cited by Slate:
- I have sent people to shock websites for the lulz.
- I like to troll people in forums or the comments section of websites.
- I enjoy griefing other players in multiplayer games.
- The more beautiful and pure a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt.
So can anything be done about the troll problem? Short of eliminating commenting and other forms of interactive participation with users, which some websites have done, there really isn't much that can be done, according to Buckels.
"Because the behaviors are intrinsically motivating for sadists, comment moderators will likely have a difficult time curbing trolling with punishments (e.g., banning users)," Slate quoted her as saying. "Ultimately, the allure of trolling may be too strong for sadists, who presumably have limited opportunities to express their sadistic interests in a socially-desirable manner."
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Titus Stryker
Ancient Exiles.
Renegade Alliance
204
|
Posted - 2014.02.25 08:08:00 -
[3] - Quote
Dr PepperPoP wrote:There's a reason I take psychology research papers, especially vague ones like these, with a grain of salt. If there's any hint of 'association' or 'abstract' then the paper itself is inconclusive. It's hard to do research like these, as well. Even if you take a study of a 10000 people, the area in which they live alone would be a factor in there psychology. Trolls also are people who tend to associate socially mainly online, there's going to be bad real life traits as a result - that's going to be a given.
They haven't 'proved' anything, either, but it goes on as if to say all trolls are narcs and enjoy the suffering of others. I believe differently - they're sort of like the gay community. They're simply people with more flare in there speech then others. You'll never see a troll who isn't an attention grabber, but there's also many different types and varieties. But I understand they're only going on with what trolls they worked with and these are the results they got.
Either way - I was glad to read something over then drivel for once. I enjoy psychology discussions very much.
As was I. I don't think this article was necessarily entirely accurate, but I did find it interesting that they associated trolls with sadism. I expected to see some form of narcissism associated with trolling as that seemed obvious but sadism was a bit surprising.
Free Beers wrote:His research went like this
1. Think of way to get paid to play COD
2. Canadian Socialist Government Study FTW!!!!!
3. Play COD
4. Get **** stomped by Mr Zitro's little sister while she calls you a ni**er and fa**it
5. Smoke a bowl while your GA types that **** up
Note: No Canadians were hurt in the making of this post
I have no idea what this means
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