Perhaps while pursuing Reddit, YouTube or Twitter you noticed the trolls; the people seemingly dedicated to down voting, spewing malicious comments, harassing others, or being altogether unpleasant. While we might assume the anonymity of the web has us all behaving more acerbically than we normally would, the desire to be a d*ick with such zeal may actually reveal the online behaviors of a minority of people with
psychological problems--sadists and psychopaths, to be exact. A research paper from three Canadian universities found a direct correlation between participants unsavory online behaviors and participants individual personality traits, such as manipulation, emotional detachment and lack of empathy.
The interesting thing about this study is it shows that behaviors are not just created for and by the internet, but are larger, more innate parts of who we are. Trolls are not created by the anonymous or untraced environs of the internet. Turns out they are just mentally disturbed people enjoying social media like the rest of us. So that's nice.
Washington Post, February 2014
