Highlights
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Trolling is an online antisocial behaviour with negative psychological outcomes.
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Current study predicted trolling perpetration from gender and personality.
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Trolls more likely to be male with high levels of trait psychopathy and sadism
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Trolls have lower affective empathy, and psychopathy moderates cognitive empathy.
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Results have implications for establishing education and prevention programs.
Abstract
Online trolling is of particular concern due to the harmful negative outcomes its victims experience. The current study sought to explore and extend the personality profile of Internet trolls. After gender was controlled for, psychopathy, sadism, and empathy (affective empathy, cognitive empathy, and social skills) were examined for their predictive utility of trolling behaviour. A sample of 415 participants (36% men, 63% women, 1% other) with a mean age of 23.37 years (SD = 7.19) completed an online questionnaire. Results showed that men were more likely than women to engage in trolling, and higher levels of trait psychopathy and sadism predicted trolling behaviour. Lower levels of affective empathy predicted perpetration of trolling, and trait psychopathy moderated the association between cognitive empathy and trolling. Results indicate that when high on trait psychopathy, trolls employ an empathic strategy of predicting and recognising the emotional suffering of their victims, while abstaining from the experience of these negative emotions. Thus, trolls appear to be master manipulators of both cyber-settings and their victims’ emotions.
Did @LouiseMensch participate in the study?
“If I see another 45-year-old white woman from Williamsburg saying ‘black lives matter,’ I’m going to punch you in the mouth” — Leslie Jones
I had a troll who messed with me and my conservative friends for years. We were commenters on the local newspaper’s electronic version of the paper and formed our own web forum. The troll actually became a member of our web forum to disrupt it and he posted porn and he was banned, but he kept on lurking (he was coming in from an ISP in Virginia in the DC area). On the newspaper commenting, he probably had a dozen accounts and would launch sock puppet attacks on me and the other conservatives who would post, often using information that he gleaned from our web forum. We had a social gathering once and the troll used the information about it on our web forum to post on the newspaper commenting, characterizing it as a Klan meeting and posting the pub where we were having it, including the date and time. We ignored him on the newspaper commenting even though he was spreading lies about us because it’s best not to feed the trolls, but that didn’t stop him from going after us.
A couple of friends finally had enough of the troll and hired a private investigator to find out who he was as exposing a trolls real identity will usually shut them up. It turned out that the guy lived in Northern Virginia, but was originally from where my friends and I live. He was on disability and his wife had a pretty good government job, so he had nothing to do all day but troll and disrupt. He was a true nutcase that fixated on conservatives and particularly on conservatives who posted to my local newspaper and our conservative web forum. After he was exposed, he went away, but we know who he is and where he lives.
I wonder whether the trolls answered honestly - or if they were trolling the researchers.
If this question is an example of the kinds of questions these "researchers" were asking, then I wonder how accurate the answers to any of the questions in the survey were.
Do you agree with the statement because *you* would enjoy hurting others? Or do you agree because you have seen people who enjoy hurting others? Does the statement refer to all people, most people, some people, or a few people? What does it really mean?
Results showed that men were more likely than women to engage in trolling, and higher levels of trait psychopathy and sadism predicted trolling behaviour.
I wonder if the survey included any questions on the influence of money on trolling behavior. One could argue that underlying sociopathic tendencies would make it more likely for people to become trolls when offered money from Soros/the DNC/etc. to troll, but that isn't necessarily the case.
Stay off social media. I can’t say that enough. Don’t plaster one’s personal information on the web.
If you’re on a public website like FR, chose one like FR that has good moderators.
I find many websites also have emergency contact links on Facebook and other social media. In that case I keep my own, secret, non personal profile to such sites, with no links back to any true names or addresses.
REMEMBER:
“Champagne don’t drive me crazy
Cocaine don’t make me lazy
Ain’t nobody’s business but my own
Candy is dandy and liquor is quicker
You can drink all the liquor down at Costa Rica
Ain’t nobody’s business but your own, but my own”
Traditional.... Taj Mahal
“Shanika Gunaratna “
I think I had one of those surgically removed from my posterior aperture a while back.
If you think about it, the lame stream media are trolling Donald Trump.
We have a sociopathic sadistic troll on this site. Nobody pays him; he just likes to cause pain. How many members has he driven away over the years? Or, more pertinently, how many donations has he prevented?
I wonder if the author,Shanika Gunaratna, will have to change her email, etc, now?
They are miserable inside and so they feel better by making others feel miserable
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1074278/posts
Punk the prez? - Moby’s anti-Bush tricks
New York Daily News ^ | 2/09/04 | Rush & Molloy
One of Sen. John Kerry’s celebrity supporters is ready to pull out all the stops to get him elected. Republicans are shrieking over a suggestion by rocker Moby that Democrats spread gossip about President Bush on the Internet. “No one’s talking about how to keep the other side home on Election Day,” Moby tells us. “It’s a lot easier than you think and it doesn’t cost that much. This election can be won by 200,000 votes.”
Moby suggests that it’s possible to seed doubt among Bush’s far-right supporters on the Web.
“You target his natural constituencies,” says the Grammy-nominated techno-wizard. “For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you’re an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion.
“Then you go to an anti-immigration Web site chat room and ask, ‘What’s all this about George Bush proposing amnesty for illegal aliens?’”
Moby didn’t claim that he believed the abortion story.
Last month, Bush did propose reforms to immigration policy. But he insisted, “I oppose amnesty, placing undocumented workers on the automatic path to citizenship [because it] perpetuates illegal immigration.”
Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson likened Moby’s proposal to “dirty campaign tactics we’re already seeing from John Kerry.”
“His campaign was willing to use these kinds of voter suppression tactics against members of his own party in Iowa and New Hampshire,” Iverson says. “John Kerry is a hypocrite. He pledged to run a clean campaign. Then he uses the lowest form of gutter politics to impugn his opponents, Democratic and Republican. It’s unfortunate but this is probably just the beginning of the kind of tactics we’re going to be seeing from John Kerry in the months to come...”
See: the Federalist papers. 😀