Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, that Snap thingy with all the filters (the dog ear pictures need to stop) – everywhere you turn, trolls will follow.

Why? What drives people to hurl insults at total strangers online, to actively try and cause some form of emotional harm?

These are questions researchers in Australia set out to unravel, and that study revealed some pretty interesting findings.

Researchers in Victoria tested 415 men and women for a range of personality traits, as well as for “online behaviour that indicated a propensity to troll”, and we’ll dive in via Quartz:

The researchers were looking for particular traits including social skills, psychopathy, sadism, and two types of empathy: affective and cognitive. Having high cognitive empathy simply means they can understand others’ emotions. Having high affective empathy means a person can experience, internalize [sic], and respond to those emotions. The “trolls” in the study scored higher than average on two traits: psychopathy and cognitive empathy.

So even though “trolls” exhibit one kind of empathy, coupling it with psychopathy ultimately makes them nasty, the researchers suggested. Psychopathy, which includes a lack of care for others’ feelings, was measured using a scale where participants were asked to agree or disagree with a set of statements such as, “payback needs to be quick and nasty.”

Odd that trolls can reconcile the cognitive empathy with the desire to inflict hurt online, but that is the very trait that often makes them effective at finding the right buttons to push.

“Results indicate that when high on trait psychopathy, trolls employ an empathic strategy of predicting and recognising the emotional suffering of their victims, while abstaining from the experience of these negative emotions,” the researchers wrote. They added that because psychopathy is associated with thrill-seeking and impulsivity, it’s possible that “creating mayhem online is a central motivator to troll.” They also found that trolls were likely to be high in sadism—the will to hurt others—and were more likely to be male.

Can’t say that comes as much of a surprise, right?

The study itself can’t offer a definite answer on how to curb online trolling and harassment, but it does offer further insight that could be useful going forward.

Sadly, though, trolls are gonna troll.

[source:quartz]