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Canadian Study Links Trolling to Sadism

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the Is-feeding-them-masochism? dept.

Members kef and einar have written about some recent research:

"A new study from the University of Manitoba has claimed that internet trolls might not be so nice or mentally stable in real life. While previous studies have shown that people with negative character traits are using the internet more frequently for their own amusement, not to socialize, the results seem to link trolling to sadism. Two surveys among amazon's mechanical turk users were conducted which allowed creating a character profile of the participants. Based on the profile, internet behavior could be correlated with different character traits. Trolling appears to be correlated to sadism.

From the study:

... correlations, sometimes quite significant, between these traits and trolling behavior. 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. ... To be sure, only 5.6 percent of survey respondents actually specified that they enjoyed "trolling." By contrast, 41.3 percent of Internet users were "non-commenters," meaning they didn't like engaging online at all. So trolls are, as has often been suspected, a minority of online commenters, and an even smaller minority of overall Internet users.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by TheloniousToady on Tuesday March 04 2014, @09:03PM

    by TheloniousToady (820) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @09:03PM (#11089)

    I've posted enough on these forums to get modded "Troll" quite a few times when IMHO they were grasping for the imaginary "Disagree" mod.

    Same here. Similarly, I've also been modded as "Flamebait" for saying nice things about Windows and/or uncomplimentary things about Linux, both here and at The Other Place.

    Expressing such points of view, for me, has nothing to do with "sadism". It's partly for the basic psychological satisfaction of expressing myself, partly to stimulate the discussion (after all, it isn't much of a discussion if everyone agrees on everything...), and partly to provide a balance to the prevailing orthodoxy - which seems rather out-of-balance on such points. (Isn't there *anything* good that can be said about Windows? - sorry, I'm trolling again...)

    The key point is that none of these motivations has anything to do with deliberately upsetting others; if that happens, it's merely an accidental side-effect - the same way that Galileo and Martin Luther upset people as a side-effect of expressing their points of view - which just happened to be at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 05 2014, @06:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 05 2014, @06:59AM (#11258)

    Similarly, I've also been modded as "Flamebait" for saying nice things about Windows and/or uncomplimentary things about Linux, both here and at The Other Place.

    Well, that proves you're a masochist, doesn't it? ;-)