Internet Trolls: Born That Way?

(futuristic tones echo) - All right, it's my favorite time of the day. Time to respond to some Above the Noise comments on YouTube, let's see what the people are talking about. This channel is BS!

You suck. Lame! Good Lord, you're boring, bro?

Ouch. People are mean. (upbeat instrumental music) Is that what they're saying?

If you've ever been on the internet, like, ever, you've probably run into an internet troll and they are the worst, like worse than wet socks. (sad horn honking) Trolls are the people who say crazy, nasty things just to get people all riled up and the internet is their playground where they love to taunt everyone. Like, I'm not the only one trolls come after.

Just ask my friend, Physics Girl. Here's some of the comments she's gotten. - Silly and fake.

I thought all blondies are dumb, but I guess every universal law has an exceptions. I think that they misspelled their insult. - And I'm wondering, who are these mean people?

What makes someone an internet troll? All right, so believe it or not, there are real researchers at big name universities that actually study online trolling behavior. I mean, it's a big deal.

Trolls can disrupt entire online communities, so much so that some news outlets have removed the comment sections from their websites altogether. Trolling can also lead to some serious emotional distress. And some groups like LGBTQ, People of Color, and women seem to get targeted more than others.

For more details, check out these two surveys from the Data & Society Research Institute and the Pew Research Center. It's kind of disturbing, y'all, but as always, links in the description. OK, so in the academic world, there's a variety of different definitions for trolling behavior.

But basically, it's behavior that falls outside of acceptable bounds defined by those, those meaning online, communities. It can include things like personal attacks, flaming, swearing, basically comments meant to stir up trouble, but isn't that cyber bullying? Sometimes, but not always.

Trolling can be different from cyber bullying in that trolls mainly say stuff to get attention and amuse themselves at the expense of online communities, while cyber bullies usually aim to harm a specific person. So to clarify, trolling is not just people getting in disagreements with each other. I mean, it's totally normal to have different opinions than someone else and express that in a respectable manner.

I respectfully disagree with you Lauren. I don't think Sandlot's the greatest movie ever. I think Space Jam's the greatest movie ever.

- All right, cool. - Perfect. You see how easy it is to engage in a civil dialogue?

OK, so what makes someone an actual internet troll? Well, there's been a few studies looking at personality traits of people who troll. One paper title, and I'm not making this up, Trolls Just want to Have Fun, was published in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences.

It found that trolls tended to have personality traits associated with sadism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism, with sadism being the strongest. And to refresh everyone's memory on what these terms mean, sadism is the act of gaining pleasure from hurting others. Psychopathy is a personality disorder exhibiting egotistical traits, persistent antisocial behavior, and lack of empathy and remorse.

Machiavellianism is the personality type of master manipulators, people that manipulate without remorse. And if you think about it, this makes sense since trolls get a kick out of upsetting people. And a brand new paper published in the same journal in December, 2017, showed similar results.

Trolls are more likely to be males with psychopathy and sadism traits. So based on this type of research, it would seem that maybe some trolls are just born that way, but think about it, trolls are all over the internet. It's like you can't go anywhere without running into one.

Surely they can't all be psychopaths and sadists, right? And this is exactly what researchers out of Stanford and Cornell were curious about, so they designed an experiment to see if just anybody could be provoked into trolling. Science!

OK, so check this out. First they put people in either a good mood or a bad mood and to do this they gave them either crazy-hard logic questions and puzzles and told them they were doing a terrible job, or they gave them super easy questions and puzzles and told them they were doing a great job. I'll let you guess which one puts you in a bad mood.

Then they divided the people up and asked them to make comments in a comment section of a mock online news article. The article was either pre-populated with mean trolling contents, or it wasn't. Not surprisingly, troll posts were highest in the bad mood group whose thread already had trolling comments.

And after some fancy statistical analysis the researchers found that negative mood increases the odds of trolling by 89% and the presence of prior troll posts increases the odds by 68%, so this suggests that regular old run-of-the-mill non-sadists can engage in trolling, too, and that trolling might just be contagious. All of this wasn't super surprising to the scientists because, well, there's been other research that shows that bad mood and exposure to antisocial behavior can actually set off antisocial behavior in others. So maybe trolls are born and made.

Now I want you to think about your online behavior. Has there ever been a time where the conditions were just right where you trolled someone? Think really hard about this one.

I think we've all been there, you know, gotten a kick out of intentionally annoying someone. Perhaps there's a little troll in all of us. Anyway, let us know about it in the comments below and please, try to refrain from trolling us.

Might I suggest you take a deep breath, listen to some chill music, maybe treat yourself to something delicious, and then leave us a comment. Thanks for watching and remember, stay above the trolls. (upbeat music) Oh, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, and if you like this video be sure to check out our video on online privacy.

Thanks for watching guys.