Not the Only Flame in Town

Ever wonder why people tend to act like complete dickweeds online? Well, social psychology to the rescue! Sez the New York Times:

Jett Lucas, a 14-year-old friend, tells me the kids in his middle school send one other a steady stream of instant messages through the day. But there’s a problem.

“Kids will say things to each other in their messages that are too embarrassing to say in person,” Jett tells me. “Then when they actually meet up, they are too shy to bring up what they said in the message. It makes things tense.”

Jett’s complaint seems to be part of a larger pattern plaguing the world of virtual communications, a problem recognized since the earliest days of the Internet: flaming, or sending a message that is taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude.

The hallmark of the flame is precisely what Jett lamented: thoughts expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard would be put more diplomatically — or go unmentioned — face to face.

Flaming has a technical name, the “online disinhibition effect,” which psychologists apply to the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace.

And try reading comments to magazine articles or blog posts, or even Amazon.com buyer comments sometime. ("My god! Who could evre posibly like this spoon?! Ths is an insullt to the very concpt of spoon-ness. It makes me so mad Ilm not eve going to profread anythig I typr!") So why are people such assholes?

[T]he 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.

But isn't that what those idiot smileys are for? (Doh! I've just done it myself!)

True, there are those cute, if somewhat lame, emoticons that cleverly arrange punctuation marks to signify an emotion. The e-mail equivalent of a mood ring, they surely lack the neural impact of an actual smile or frown. Without the raised eyebrow that signals irony, say, or the tone of voice that signals delight, the orbitofrontal cortex has little to go on.

By the way, the same basic phenomenon explains why people often behave downright rudely while driving--the notion of anonymity, the enhanced sense of self, and the lack of any real consequences for antisocial driving behavior (so-called "road rage" aside).

In fact, the NYT article goes on to discuss the first recorded case of "Web rage" in, of all places, Britain:

a 47-year-old Londoner was convicted of assault on a man with whom he had traded insults in a chat room. He and a friend tracked down the man and attacked him with a pickax handle and a knife.

I have no doubt the fear-mongering U.S. media will seize on this and manufacture an epidemic of "Web rage" to scare the pants off people, like they do with just about everything else. ("Salad: The Silent Killer!" "Death by Escalator!" "Fresh Air: Dissolving Your Lungs from the Inside!" "Your Own Shadow: The Dark Stranger Who Walks Behind You!" "Be Terrified of Everything! We're the gods! We're the gods!! Bwa-hahahahahaha!!!!)

Sorry, I inadvertently watched a bit of the Today show the other day (at someone else's instigation) and I swear I'm not exaggerating all that much.