Emailed Threats Less Crazy Than Snail Mail

SoyChemist writes "Psychologists at the University of Nebraska have read 300 threatening letters and 99 angry emails to members of Congress. They concluded that the authors of the electronic messages show less signs of serious mental illness, but they are more profane and disorganized. The report was published in the September issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences."

Comments

My armchair analysis

[kebes]

First, to clarify the summary, psychologists were not reading letters to congress (like a bedtime story for politicians), they were analyzing letters that had been sent to members of congress.

The results were that postal threats were more extreme than email threats. This is hardly surprising. The barrier to writing a snail mail letter is higher, so this inherently selects for the more passionate people (whether truly concerned about an issue, or incredibly angry, or truly dangerously threatening). Writing an email is so easy that just about anyone will do it if they are slightly bothered by something. As such, I would expect email to, statistically, have fewer of the "fringe cases" of people who are being truly mentally ill, and more "normal people" just venting (in a profane and disorganized way, apparently).

I do wonder a bit about the sample size, mind you. I would have thought that there would be far more emails than postal letters sent to members of congress (and far more 'threatening' ones, too), but instead they analyzed more conventional letters than email. I wonder if this is a result of the relative frequency of the two types of threats, or if the researchers had some other reason to focus on postal mail.

Re:My armchair analysis

[dgatwood]

As you noted, emails lend themselves to rapid sending. However, I think it is more than just a case of how much you have to want to send the message involved. I think it is also partially the failure of email to have a way of retracting the message after cooler heads have prevailed.

With email, you don't have five minutes to rethink the letter while you're licking the envelope. Similarly, you don't have to spend as much time composing an email. (I'm assuming most of the snail mail messages are written by hand and not on a typewriter, which tends to lend itself to thinking through what you're going to write ahead of time since you can't just cut and paste pieces around later.) Finally, you don't have 16 hours from the night you wrote the email until the mailman picks it up in the early afternoon to realize that "Oh, crap; I just advocated killing [insert member of government here]," and go grab the letter and rewrite it.

Therefore, the people who send threats by postal mail tend to be people who really want to send a threat and have thought through exactly what they are going to say and really mean to be threatening. Similarly, most of the people sending email are just pissed off about something and threw together an angry, threatening email that didn't come out right due to the medium and its spontaneous nature. Is it any surprise, then, that the threatening email messages are disorganized and are mostly written by sane people, while the postal mail messages have been better thought out and are mostly written by actual loonies?

We desperately need a way to retract email after it is sent up until somebody reads it. We also need mail clients to universally allow a "send with delay" feature that delays transmission for a few minutes to give you a while to think about what you just sent.

Easier to trace.

[iknownuttin]

The results were that postal threats were more extreme than email threats.

Snail mail is much much harder to trace than email. Therefore, the most extreme nutjobs are smarter: they realize that it's easier to be anonymous with snail mail than email.

We all know here that tracing an IP and then bullying an ISP for an identity is quite easy and becoming easier everyday.

What abot age of the sender?

[Phat_Tony]

There have been a lot of comments to the effect that it takes more effort to send a letter than an email, so there's a selection process that means only the more die-hard loonies actually bother to get letters in the mail. I agree with this, but I think there's another selection process in place that also makes the mail more scary: age.

Of the people I've known who rant on with horrifying opinions from within their own delusional, disconnected world, there's a sharp tendency that the more loony ones were older. Not always, but there's a trend that way. I don't know if it's due to too many years of witnessing and magnifying perceived falsehoods, early onset dementia, a build-up of heavy metals in their systems, or what causes their buildup of paranoid ramblings to burst forth, but I think there's a strong age factor at work here, and that the snail mails are much more likely to come from older, and therefore more hard-core lunatics than the email, which more often originates from young lunatics-in-training who are not yet as comfortable and confident in their insanity.