What is it about email that causes an otherwise civilized person to write and send an offensive, rude or downright mean message to someone else? That is the question that John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., addressed in his 2004 paper published in CyberPsychology & Behavior.
Suler found that several psychological factors lead to disinhibition online: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an e-mail message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure. Suler also noted that disinhibition can be either benign, such as when a shy person feels free to open up online, or toxic, as in flaming.
Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, discovered that face-to-face interactions inhibit impulses for actions that would upset the other person or otherwise spoil the interaction. People who have a damaged orbitofrontal cortex lose their ability to modulate the amygdala, a source of unruly impulses. As a result, they commit mortifying social gaffes such as kissing a complete stranger, unaware that they are doing anything untoward.
Similarly, when we write email while upset, the absence of information on how the other person is responding to us makes the prefrontal circuitry for discretion more likely to fail. Our emotional impulses become disinhibited, so we type a hostile message and hit "send" before a more rational second thought leads us to delete it.
Some people flame others with alarming ease. For example, an experiment published in 2002 in The Journal of Language and Social Psychology reported that pairs of college students -- strangers -- were to get to know each other better by exchanging messages in a simulated online chat room. Initially, the students were well behaved. But things quickly worsened from there. The experimenter was stunned to see that approximately 20 percent of the email conversations quickly became outrageously lewd or simply rude.
Predictably, the online equivalent of road rage has joined the list of Internet dangers. Last October, in what The Times of London described as "Britain's first 'Web rage' attack," a 47-year-old Londoner was convicted of assault on a man with whom he had traded insults in a chat room. He and a friend tracked down the man and attacked him with a pickax handle and a knife.
One proposed solution to flaming is replacing typed messages with video. The assumption is that receiving a message along with its associated emotional nuances might help us dampen the impulse to flame others.
Cited story.
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I don't see what the big 'mystery' about online flame wars is. If my memory serves right, bathroom stalls and markers have both existed for decades. Flame wars aren't really any different from when a guy writes "Mike Penn sux!" and starts an ironic hate conversation between friends, except for the fact that now we have leet-speak and a much bigger writing space.
What the hell kind of post is this? What kind of moron would adtually believe this kind of... Oh. Never mind.
Actually, it's kind of fun! I say break out the grant dollars, and let's have even more fun!
Note that all of these are illusions:
(a) Very few people have the knowledge and conscientiousness to maintain an anonymity that would be effective against someone willing to spend a week trying to find their true identity.
(b) Much of the activity on blogs, mailing lists, and newsgroups is recorded in searchable databases. It has a high potential to remain findable, and linkable to real person, for years. Online activity is anything but invisible.
For the online world, David Brin's Transparent Society , where secrets are nearly impossible to keep, has been reality for at least 20 years.
Despite this, most people - including those like me, who know better - continue to act as if they have privacy online.
To me, this article is fascinating because it begins to explain why people find it difficult to accept that anonymity, invisibility, and privacy are difficult to obtain and easy to lose on the internet.
2004? Dang, those researchers are behind the times! This has been an issue at least since I found the (pre-Internet) 'Net, back in 1985. Back then people were still trying to educate newcomers in "Netiquette", and that especially included the point that E-mail strips away all the "tone of voice" that would modify your words in a face-to-face conversation. That makes it much easier to come across as hostile or mean, even when you were just trying to be ironic or emphatic. That part didn't change much with the transition to Web forums, but I have to admit that people seem much more aware of it these days.
OK I am going to write this and then hit send without giving a second thought and deleting (like I usually do hee hee)...
I think that flaming, road rage and persistently believing in metaphysical things even in the face of "knowing better" via education (such as in a previous blog essay on this blog) is due to frustrated, tired people who feel (and are encouraged by "the man", "society" whatever term you wish) that the events and circumstances of life are outside of their control - and they are reacting to that via anger vented in an anonymous or pseudoanonymous setting. When people are pushed past their limits, tired, in pain, mentally fatigued, frustrated, they tend to react rather than respond. I think these various "rages" and flaming are in this vein.
If you are anonymous, such as when flaming or giving the bird when cut off on the road, (which was what people used to do when I was young - now they jump out of cars and beat each other up or worse) it is much easier to vent your ire, in various forms, and not feel bad about it. In fact, just doing it might even give an angry person a rush making them feel like they actually have power for just a few moments - which is perpetuated when someone else responds in kind...giving them a feeling of validation - satisfaction, even, that they do not get in daily life.
Of course, I do not agree with flaming, rages, etc. But I think frustration and tiredness and unspent anger are at the root of it. Maybe in the "olden days" when we all had to do more physical work to earn our daily bread, our bodies were better able to cope with frustration (my Grandma used to say that was what bread and washboards were for - to get all your frustrations out by kneading and scrubbing). Now we have to smile at cranky bosses, commute for hours to live somewhere we can afford, pay taxes we know are ripping us off, endure destruction of the environment we do not want, and then feel guilty when we get home because we did not shop for healthy food (ate at the fast food restaurant), did not get three bids when we needed the roof fixed (called the fancy ad in the Yellow Pages), are too exhausted to help our 2.5 children with their homework and social problems, and are not politically aware (didn't vote, don't understand the issues...or do vote and do understand the issues and they make us frustrated!) and to top it all off...did we choose the correct one of 100 cellular phone plans or are we getting ripped off? Gee whiz!
Anyway, before I make an actual blog essay out of this, I had better hit send like I promised I would.
Chardyspal
Thanks for a very interesting article.
Flaming strangers is not limited to Internet discourse. I've seen otherwise polite and well-mannered people scream bulge-eyed into the telephone at IT help-desk personnel, telemarketers (okay, they probably deserve it!), and customer service people.
To counteract this behavior myself, I try to picture my mother -- a person I love and respect -- in the role of the stranger at the other end of the discussion, whether its on the phone or over the Internet.
Unfortunately, this technique doesn't work for me under road rage conditions. They've got it coming, anyway!
What's puzzled me lately is the rash of seemingly random flames at the Craigslist Jobs Forum (where I first met Hedwig) lately. There are a couple of posters who are consistently nice to everyone and yet have people stalking them and responding to everything they say by saying "u suck go kil your self". Today, I got flamed for saying that I ate all my garlic knots at lunch.
If they're just venting frustration, it scares me to think of the level of anger these folks must have built up inside of them. I do think that even civilized debates get more heated more quickly on the internet, though.