Internet Trolls Really Are Psychos
Roger Dooley
i Oct 6, 2014, 06:02am 30,020 views
If you've ever managed an online community, a blog, or a brand's Facebook page, you have encountered the dreaded "troll." These community members can be provocative and rude, and are known for creating posts for the sole purpose of agitating their fellow members. Trolls add inflammatory comments not because they hope to inform or convince others, but because they know they'll spark an avalanche of negativity. Left unchecked, trolls can destroy communities. Helpful members tire of the conflict and eventually leave. Trolls present a challenge to community managers not just because of their toxic behavior, but because they don't always overtly break community rules. Many people make comments that prove to be inflammatory, often unintentionally. Trollish behavior is evident only after a pattern of such comments emerges.
Conventional wisdom says that the anonymity of the Internet lets people behave in ways they never would in real life, or online if their identity was known. But, if you think that means that trolls are normally nice people who only act out in their online persona, think again. New research shows that internet trolls are, in real life, narcissists, psychopaths, and sadists.
The paper's title, Trolls Just Want To Have Fun, is amusing, but the findings are anything but funny. Canadian researchers surveyed more than a thousand internet users about their commenting behavior. They then administered a personality test designed to measure, among other things, what's known as the Dark Tetrad. That's a measure of negative traits: sadism, psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism.
The correlation between these negative traits and trollish behavior was striking. No other kind of community participation showed such a relationship.
The research validates what most community managers have always believed: trolls are awful people in real life, too.
These results may not be of much use in curbing trolls online, but it does suggest that trying to stop the behavior by gentle coaching is doomed to fail most of the time. That, too, won't surprise experienced community operators. In my years of community building, I've seen a few trolls that actually tried to mend their ways but inevitably reverted to their old ways.
Since trolls actually derive pleasure from the suffering of others, engaging with them at all can be counter-productive. Instead, follow the simple maxim of experienced community leaders: "Don't feed the trolls."
Roger Dooley is the author of Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing (Wiley, 2011). Find Roger on Twitter as @rogerdooley and at his website, Neuromarketing.
