Trolls and haters piss me off sometimes, but I’ve had no threats on my life on the blogosphere. Blogger Kathy Sierra, as many of you’ve read about by now, hasn’t been so lucky; despite the fact that she runs a very benign blog, she started getting comments like “fuck off you boring slut… i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob.”
This set off a lot of conversations about comment rules, blogger codes of conduct, etc. Dave Pollard of How to Save the World, for one, steps back to wonder “why people hate others to the point they are driven to commit anti-social acts in the first place.” He suggests that these acts happen because “we are emotional creatures under enormous modern stress and prone to groupthink,” and concludes: “I don’t think there’s anything we can do, other than what we’re already doing” — namely self-management.
Hmmm… That conclusion made me feel a little sad — I’d like to be able to DO something to discourage scary anti-social stuff. Luckily, I ran across Michael Bywater‘s review of Philip Zimbardo’s book, The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil, which is now on my reading list.
Per the review, Zimbaro points to 2 major theories of social behavior — “situational” and “dispositional”:
Dispositional thinking says, crudely, that character will out. Situational thinking says that we are more influenced by the conditions in which we find ourselves – a model that, Zimbardo suggests, can equally apply to acts of heroism. And just as the situational oversees the dispositional, so systemic factors influence situations. A bad system produces bad situations in which people act badly without even necessarily knowing why.
For example, dispositional thinking would explain what went down Abu Ghraib by saying a few sick individuals messed up. Situational thinking would argue that the environment created at Abu Ghraib itself was toxic, the situation itself turning otherwise normal people into monsters.
Yet while social psychology has shown that situational thinking plays a big role in human actions, “time and again, authoritarian systems and those who run them have rejected the findings.”
Well, I run this authoritarian system called green LA girl, and I’m wondering if there’s is a way I can work to create a better web environment that keeps normal people — normal…. We all know some of the constraints — anonymity means name-calling without consequences for some, but it also means the courage to be a whistleblower for others…. If you feel green LA girl’s slowly turning you into an evil moster :P or more realistically, have some technical suggestions as to how I can use the tools of the web to encourage a constructive environment, lemme know –
Update, 4/9/07: The NY Times writes about the effort to come up with a code of conduct of sorts for bloggers. As of now, I’m skeptical.
Keep an eye out for Roy F Baumeister’s Evil as well. Baumeister is another one of the great living psychological researchers and he does a pretty good job of summarizing the actual research into evil behavior as opposed to a lot of preceding work which was more lit crit than psychology.
Comment by don hosek — April 5, 2007 @ 3:50 pm
Hi Siel
Do not worry about angry bloggers: I worked in 5 countries, know strong Self Defense, speak to many people from diplomats to business folks to street dudes and the percentage of angry people is getting…lower. First of all, because, for the huge majority they haven’t got the bottle or skills to be against someone that can handle him/herself on the net and beyond…Also, because;
1) people avoid them and they are put on the side
2) some others take care of them publicly on the medias and they disappear (especially since 2005/06)
3) many people now go on cool sites that do not allow angry people and they block them (from zaadz to urth.tv and then some…)
If you want to stop angry bloggers to contact you, it is easy, put on your site something like:
This is a 21st century positive progressive site and angry bloggers are not welcome here as we only deal with constructive and in demand positive material. All dark or angry comment shall be ignored as it is the wish now of a growing number of internet surfers as noted since 2005.
See Ya
Pascal
Comment by Pascal — April 5, 2007 @ 9:04 pm
One of the most overlooked causes of antisocial behavior is SOCIOPATHY. You can hit your head against a wall a million times struggling to understand certain acts of hate or violence, but until you read about this disorder, you will NEVER come to a conclusion. Read this book and it will explain a lot of seemingly random insanity to you: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout, PhD, Harvard. People who are sociopathic do not have a logical reason for their evil, meanness, violence, troublemaking or criminality.
Comment by vic — April 6, 2007 @ 7:46 am