Psychology of Flaming
Photo by Dan K
Was talking to Sanjana about a number of things, including flaming and hate speech online. By chance I saw a very relevant article in the Times today. As I said to Sanjana, “I think part of the problem is anonymity. I don’t tell people to fuck off in real life cause my identity and my place in this culture means something to me. A lot of perfectly sane people are complete sociopaths on the road, when they’re hidden behind a windshield. No one walks like that. I think what we call civility is heavily dependent on facial and non-verbal communications, which simply doesn’t exist on the Internet.”
As the article says,
In a 2004 article in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., suggested that several psychological factors lead to online disinhibition: 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. Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can be either benign — when a shy person feels free to open up online — or toxic, as in flaming.
The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming.
This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track.
Research by Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, finds that this face-to-face guidance system inhibits impulses for actions that would upset the other person or otherwise throw the interaction off. Neurological patients with a damaged orbitofrontal cortex lose the ability to modulate the amygdala, a source of unruly impulses; like small children, they commit mortifying social gaffes like kissing a complete stranger, blithely unaware that they are doing anything untoward.
Socially artful responses emerge largely in the neural chatter between the orbitofrontal cortex and emotional centers like the amygdala that generate impulsivity. But the cortex needs social information — a change in tone of voice, say — to know how to select and channel our impulses. And in e-mail there are no channels for voice, facial expression or other cues from the person who will receive what we say.
As the article mentions our social throttles are designed for face-to-face constant feedback situations. Even voice has a high emotive content. Text, on the other hand has a great flatness of affect. That’s why I prefer SMS, because it’s more shielded and safe in a way. Online commenting lacks everything that leads to flaming – feedback, identity, authority.
Way Out
Towards that end, I’ve been trying to figure out ways to engender civil discussion without excessive comment moderation. Moderation is necessary for large blogs, both for spam and flames, but it’s time consuming and annoying. Plus, especially vituperative flamers will post again and again and again. As the article says, ‘Consider an experiment, reported in 2002 in The Journal of Language and Social Psychology, in which pairs of college students — strangers — were put in separate booths to get to know each other better by exchanging messages in a simulated online chat room. While coming and going into the lab, the students were well behaved. But the experimenter was stunned to see the messages many of the students sent. About 20 percent of the e-mail conversations immediately became outrageously lewd or simply rude.’
What I’d like is to get at least 10 percent to behave with normal politeness. One way is to give commenters more identity. In all cases I’d like to make this as automatic as possible. That can be accomplished through
- Avatars: Avatars are icons to represent people. Gravatar was a system where people choose their own avatar, but it went down for a long time, and people here never really adopted. I just saw a new plugin which generates a cute monster icon for each email. May try that out.
- Location: Another thing is that expats can be extra crazy. I’d say that 99% of the people that tell me to get out of the country are not in the country. There’s a plugin for that. IP to Nation displays little flags based on their IP address. May try that but it’s a pain in the butt to install
Some more radical stuff would be using some Ajax to dynamically moderate the comment, maybe turning the box red and displaying a warning if they kept typing obscene or flagged words. As some sort of feedback. You could count on other people to moderate flamers, but it doesn’t really happen that way.
All in all, I think the way towards civility is attaching some identity, and identity costs to commenting. I don’t think the problem is that flamers are necessarily bad people, I just think that online discourse is outside of the normal social environment that we’re psychologically equipped to deal with. Perhaps understanding the psychology more will lead to some solutions.
Interesting read, Indi.
Just a thought related to your comment moderation needs.
Perhaps you should consider asking people to register a username before commenting here. I know it may seem excessive for a personal blog, but I am sure it’ll go some way in weeding out the idiots. I’d consider using that in tandem with the IP To Nation plugin, and any other tool that will help ‘attach identity’ to some of your readers.
Also, just out of curiosity, do you have a ‘Report Comment’ feature? It’ll encourage some of the more sensible members of your readership to take the responsibility and report posts that cross the line.
irony of speaking to sanjana about civility! and others holding forth about effects of anonymity. i suppose those who break the rules knows all about keeping them too.
I guess you can’t see my facial expressions, but would you really be this rude in public?
Dear Indi,
The Lirneasia blog,which I believe you must have helped set up, has the only implementation of the IP to Nation plugin that I’ve seen on a local blog, and on occasion, has confused some people by displaying an erroneous flag. As for online conversations being outside the normal social environs we are used to, I wonder whether with the increasing use of chatrooms, IM’s, email, blogs, new media et al (including games such as Second Life), we’ll soon encounter a time where the difference between “real” and “virtual” interactions becomes rather blurred. As a researcher, I’m interested in the spill over effects of real world problems into virtual worlds (say in the creation of negotiations support systems and One Text processes, both of which I’ve helped engineer in Sri Lanka and Nepal) and vice versa, such as with the murder of gamers because of in-game disputes over artifacts such as a swords or magic portion.
The identity cost you bring out is, if I understand you correctly, linked to the frequency and qualitative nature of comments on a blogs. Groundviews for instance gets noticeably less comments than Moju did. I don’t have the stats for Moju, but what Groundviews does have is around 40 return visitors (and around 300+ unique visitors) who visit the site daily, which frankly, 2 months after its launch, better than I expected. I also get most of my traffic from outside Kottu – from http://www.infolanka.com/org/srilanka/news.html.
The point I also want to stress is that flamers can, in the rare occasion, change for the better. In the case of a notable and particularly vicious troll on Moju, subsequent to Moju’s closure and some interactions with him over email, we now have a entente cordiale where I’ve recognised and appreciated his ability to write, when he put his mind to it, in a manner that engaged with the topic /post as opposed to diatribes against the author. He now comments rather regularly to Groundviews, and I’m surprised that though his views remain extreme and at times ill-informed, the manner in which he presents them is so markedly different to his tone, language and approach to Moju.
As for Sittingnut, I left a comment on his blog today (http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=13644607&postID=117166429307925673) after reading a few weeks of Groundviews, Sanjana, CPA, InfoShare bashing that captures my thoughts on the matters he raises. Clearly, since this is a voice most of us know from the erstwhile Moju’s heyday, while engagement is often futile, hope springs eternal.
Thanks for the great post.
Sanjana
:-)
[...] names. Indi.ca for example. But he has a price to pay for revealing his identity online. He suffers flaming and very many personal attacks on his family. Though the Oscar for Receiving the Most Personal [...]
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