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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."
Opening and using an e-mail account requires some amount of sanity, but very little social skills.
do you insists on being such a bunch of pigshit-eating donkey wanking bastards? oh look - ponies!
Oh come on, the explanation is simple. You've got to be crazy to write a message to someone with postal mail. Welcome to the 21st century people, we have e-mail now!
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If someone would take it's two minutes in order to check out the article, then it would be quickly realised that the _abstract_ of the actual paper is more detailed than the whole article linked in the summary and it is also free of the stupid sensationalization.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
You suck.
Love,
The Associate
Someone hates these cans.
Many really crazy people can't hold down a job. Can they really afford internet fees?
The truly paranoid probably don't trust computers.
The functional-but-unstable ones probably heard that snail-mail and faxes are taken more seriously than email. That was true back in the late '90s. I don't know if it's still true now.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Yes. The article is typical blogodreck, and links to a blog.
The research itself has serious problems. These weren't samples from incoming mail. They were samples from Capitol Police files, which means they'd already been considered potential threats by at least three people.
Consider what happens to incoming e-mail at a congressional office. First, it's spam-filtered automatically, so any bulk threat e-mailed to every member of Congress probably was dumped at the filters. Then some junior person reads it and sorts it. (The people who do that job for the White House are unpaid interns.) The basic sort is "opinion", which is just tallied; "casework", constituents of that Congressman who want some specific help; "office matters", something that the office staff actually needs to deal with, and "threats". The threats may get a quick look by a more senior staffer, who decides whether they need to go to the Capitol Police. Then, at the Capitol Police end, someone has to decide if it's worth opening a case file for the letter.
So a study based on Capitol Police files reflects what gets through the automatic and manual filtering. The study may say more about staff thinking than the incoming content.
The same could be said for mailing a letter. I suspect the cause may lean more towards simplicity and availability.
To sit down, find an envelope, and actually put 35 cents on the thing requires more forethought and commitment than firing off an email. It also takes at least several minutes to do, so there will be a bit more composition of thought than in an email.
Email can be a much more heat of the moment thing, as evidenced frequently by this forum. I guarantee that if replying to this thread, or even this forum required me to mail an envelope it would not have happened.
Not to mention that if you're sending a threat it would be best to do it in a way that cannot be so easily traced back to you.
Dropping off a letter in a different city is an easier method than anon proxies for most people.
Have you seen death threats by snail mail? They usually use cut out magazine letters otherwise they're written in BLOOD.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
That's what HTML e-mail and the Ransom font are for.
And it's obvious: the glue on envelopes causes mental illness.
Excuse me, I have to put on an eyepatch and commandeer a freighter now. I'm trying to slow down global warming.
Avast!