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Why Are We So Rude Online?
kodiaktau writes "An article in the WSJ discusses why internet users are more rude online than they are in person. The story discusses some of the possible reasons. For example, a study found that browsing Facebook tends to lower people's self control. An MIT professor says people posting on the internet have lowered inhibitions because there is no formal social interaction. Another theory is that communicating through a phone or other device feels like communicating with a 'toy,' which dehumanizes the conversation. Of course, a rude conversation has never happened on Slashdot in the last 15 years."
Oh, but this is simple. People are rude when, well... Well let me tell you a story of my friend called Dave.
Dave was an ordinary boy with wild imagination. He was popular with the guys for several reasons, but the fact that he and his mother let us play GoldenEye on his Nintendo64 wasn't easy to ignore. All of us guys used to gather at his house and play a few rounds of the great multiplayer experience that only the original GoldenEye gave.
I noticed that people tented to get angry during the game. They would verbally attack other players and even punch them a bit. Dave didn't - he actually seemed quite an non-aggressive fella. What was the secret to Dave's non-aggressive and non-rude behavior? Because his mother made him these wonderful home cooked pizzas. He wasn't angry because he ate well!
...you insensitive clod!
Leave it to the WSJ to be 15+ years behind the times in figuring this out.
Why, it's the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory that explains it
Like what?
Anonymity has always caused assholishness. People were assholes in cars before being assholes online.
I had a guy here wish me to be in hospital after a traffic accident in the cycling thread.
If one met someone like that IRL, one would generally back away, call them a fucking psycho or, perhaps if one was so-inclined and felt suitably threatened, punch the guy in the face. Usually 1 and or 2 though.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
...is that my computer screen doesn't punch me in the face when I talk about the sweet, though slightly twisted and, depending on your geolocation, illegal relationship I had with your mother...
She was great, by the way.
I'm not sure that explains it all. My girlfriend and I both hate our phone conversations but love our in-person conversations, and we certainly know each other. There's something about communicating with a device that ruins a lot of the non-verbal stuff we take for granted.
For similar reasons, I often find myself about to post my views on something and then hesitate: "Does the internet really need to hear my opinion on this? Is it worth the emotional backlash if my thoughts set off a troll?" More often than not recently I've answered "No". And before anyone leaps out and cries "But you shouldn't be so emotionally invested in what you post!" I'll assure you that it's impossible to express a considered opinion and not invest some part of yourself in it. Everyone should be able to state their point of view without being wished bodily harm as the parent was.
I like how the Hackaday forum has cleaned up its act by permabanning trolls and flamers and holding people more accountable. Yes, it's whackamole with fake accounts but if trolls don't get any traction in your forum eventually they go away. Trolls are a lot like schoolyard bullies and have similar motivations. By removing the enabling mechanism (anonimity) or removing the payoff mechanism (flame response), I expect such bad behaviour can be diminished.
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The question is not "why do some people act like fucktards online?". Deep down, fucktards is exactly what those people are. They just hide it better in real life.
The reason is very simple, if somewhat disheartening. Take a look at some of the literature on human behavior, particularly the studies on the "banality of evil" (texbook scenarios are the Milgram Experiment and the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment).
The sad truth pointed out by both of those studies is that approximately 60% of us -- all of us, even those of us who claim to be, and act like, normal ethical people in polite society -- will commit acts of cruelty upon another human being, even to the point of delivering potentially lethal electrical shocks to someone obviously in distress, if the social sanctions against it are removed.And those were both cases in which the victims had voices and (in the latter case) faces by which the perpetrators could witness the suffering they were causing.
In short, the majority of people will be cruel, spiteful bullies if they believe they can get away with it. For me, a good example is (oddly) watching how people treat pigeons (??): they're harmless, no more dirty than, say, hoboes, and live around us. But they are negatively viewed as carriers of disease ("rats of the skies" is such a cliché, and what's so bad about rats, anyway?), and most people wouldn't think twice about trying to scare them and threaten to cause them harm. It seems a bit melodramatic, but I often wonder why a person would want to be mean to some random harmless animal. I think, sadly, that it's because most people like being mean, and just need a venue to get away with it.
The Pinochet regime in Chile figured this out pretty quickly: you don't need to make people commit acts of cruelty against their will. All you have to do is provide a venue for cruelty without consequences, and the people will come out of the woodwork of their own accord. And Facebook/YouTube/your local news station's comments section are just such venues.
I doubt that. Social networks which don't warrant anonymity (e.g. Facebook) prove to have the same rude audience as totally anonymous sites. My hypothesis is that it's
a) the larger audience. Especially male persons seem to be more aggressive if the audience is larger (yes, there are extensive studies about that, if needed I might be able to google up a citation). People who are totally nice and gentle in 1-1 situations become total jerks if many people are watching. The Internet is as an audience second only to the Super Bowl and the Soccer World Championship.
b) the decoupled reaction of the audience. Face to face the reaction starts while you are still acting, and you start to adapt while not even finishing your sentence. A lot of overreaching rudeness is thus dampened before it can be acted out. In not fully real time conversations as chats, the reaction already comes late, and via email, on message boards and profile based social sites, it can be hours until the reaction is there. Until then your own rudeness rules supreme because no social control can be exercised on you.
So no, anonymity is not the problem. Size of audience and delayed social control is.
And it haven't stopped me from being a jerk.
But, also, there is the effect of childhood bullying. I think that most people who post regularly on Slashdot are aware of this: academic children are more likely to be bullied owing to the general social attitudes of the English speaking world. And that means that when they grow up they have quite a lot of suppressed anger aimed at the stupid people who bullied them. This could be one reason why "jock" attitudes expressed on /. tend to produce such strong negative responses; the other, of course, is that in the real world far too often fools are allowed to persist in their folly and nobody stops them. Blake said that "if the fool persists in his folly he will become wise", but actually it's more likely to be "he will cause immense trouble for other people". On line, it is easier to call a dickhead a dickhead.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
If one met someone like that IRL, one would generally back away, call them a fucking psycho or, perhaps if one was so-inclined and felt suitably threatened, punch the guy in the face. Usually 1 and or 2 though.
Physical proximity is not the opposite of anonymity. What I think is going on here is consequences. If there are painful consequences for rude behavior, even if nobody knows who you are, then there's disincentive to be rude.
First, most people are rude in general. We put a mask of politeness on top of it when in public for fear of "causing a scene" (or picking on the wrong person who *isn't* afraid of causing a scene back).
I find it amazing how many people will let, say, someone push in front of a queue. In some, perfectly civil, countries it's positively mandatory to fight with your fellow man to be the next person served. In others, you can jump in front of a queue of 50 and barely be tutted at, for fear of "causing a scene", even if you're not some huge bruiser.
But inside our heads, we're all thinking "Arsehole" when that happens, even if not with that exact word. Some people will expose that internal thought to the outside world, most won't.
On the Internet, the same reason you can have more in-depth conversations about controversial topics, tell people you've never met things about you that you haven't told your own friends, and air views just to cause a nuisance because you find it funny: Anonymity, or at least pseudo-anonymity, let's you not worry about causing a scene. The worst you'll get is some online reaction that you can block, ignore or just not visit that site again.
I've done it myself. Aired my views on a topic which doesn't have a definitive answer, been shouted down, not bothered to read the other people's rants and opinions or just not bothered to read that thread ever again.
Everyone is being rude all day long - calling their boss, the person in the other car, the person on the other end of the phone, or any number of other people names in the privacy of their head. Sometimes they let it slip because it's consequence-less or they don't care about the consequences. And on the Internet, the consequences are generally SEVERELY limited so it's easier to say what you think without rationalising too much and having to stop insulting people.
Everyone, in the privacy of their head, has thought "You're a dickhead" about someone they know or have met. The Internet just lets you air that without anyone ever knowing that it's YOU saying it (if you've half a brain about not putting your personal information on the net).
I wouldn't focus too much on the machine part of the equation.
Anonymity along with the internet bringing different cultures together creates a situation were people can get annoyed and frustrated combined with a degree of safety that allows them to become jerks with little to no repercussions.
In my travels, I have always found things people do different enough to annoy me mildly, sometime even a lot. The other people do not know it annoys me, they are used to it because it is normal for them. When we are face to face, we think more about hurting someone's feelings or the fact that they might punch us in the nose or something. When we are isolated by technology, we don't have to think about those things. But mostly, you will find other people's behavior to normally be different and that difference can be or can cause the rudeness on the interweb tubes thingy..
Well, this writes itself. People in cars are just so crazy as opposed to when you see them face to face.
Because 99% of the people online are stupid.
Actually, 99% of people in real life are stupid as well. Maybe I am just intolerant of idiots and being surround by them.
Not you, of course.
Thanks
The other one is seeing that others get away with it and feeling entitled to do the same. That's not limited to the internet, though.
Try it yourself. Get a sign that says "no littering" and put it somewhere where people would probably drop a thing or two if there was no such sign. You will notice that people do actually heed the sign. Now throw some garbage under the sign and watch the pile grow.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
1. Be rude online
2. ???
3. Profit
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*bow*
You win one internet, sir. But you have to put in your own tubes.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That online forums, blogs, etc. tend to attract that percentage of the population online that is capable of behaving like this. I bet if you met a lot of the people who behave rudely online, their "offline" personas are simply a change of degree from how they behave online. I think it's far more likely that the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is not only true, but that fuckwads aren't really normal, decent people in their daily lives and they tend to pool together online.
See Jeremy Clarkson of Top Rear.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Like texting "You know your shit!" versus "You know you're shit!"??
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
They don't want to trick or guild-trip you, they want to see themselves being polite and convincing.
So the small talk is addressed to themselves, not you.
Knowing this will not soften your hate. Sorry !
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Not so much a meme but definitely a much earlier study into this phenomena.
I'd rather be doing a beowulf cluster of Natalie Portmans.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
The common answer to this question is that anonymity online makes us vicious, in the same way in vino veritas is said when some drunk person accidentally blurts out what they're truly thinking.
However, I think it's a combination of factors:
1. You see only the words and the ideas, not the person;
2. There is no social context, like being in line at a bakery;
3. There is little chance of seeing that person again if you don't want to, or of getting the crap pounded out of you;
4. People are very frustrated and angry in general.
If you are in real life, you're interacting with people in a community and you might want to see them again. However, in cities, people behave just about as viciously as they do online, with a slight modification to avoid starting actual physical confrontations.
It's the little things: cutting in line, being snide, bullying people out of the way with your SUV, littering, yapping on cell phones at counters.
Online, you're in a world made only of words and ideas. This encourages you to blurt out what you're really thinking, which is generally disliking most people who aren't doing things your way. There's wisdom in this in that if you've been in the world for awhile, your way evolved because it makes sense. You cast aside all the other behaviors and your way is the aggregate of what's left.
The biggest crypto-factor here however is that people in this society are frustrated. We are meat, with a for sale price on our heads, and we must constantly keep making ourselves available to a callous world in order to bring in the cash. It turns people into whores, makes them hate themselves, and makes them hate the competition, which is everyone else.
I've lived across the world in first-world nations and third-world nations, and while the first-world nations are good on everything else, the degree of self-hatred and resentment here makes me long for the jungle.
Yesterday I had someone posting some defamatory stuff on a Facebook page that I set up for an app that I develop/distribute. I tried posting a reasonable, level-headed comment in response and got an even harsher reply from him. After a laughably small amount of detective work I managed to get the guy's phone number so I called him to ask him to explain himself. There was an amazing change in attitude when he realised he was speaking to the same guy he'd been bad-mouthing online just a few minutes earlier.
There's something about communicating with a device that ruins a lot of the non-verbal stuff we take for granted.
You can't look at her tits when you're talking to her on the phone.
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