Polite in Person, Furious in the Comments (The Online Disinhibition Effect)

Picture your gentlest coworker, the one who says sorry to a chair when she bumps into it. Now picture her past midnight, typing 300 furious words under a stranger's lasagna recipe. Here's the online disinhibition effect: the 6 forces psychologist John Suler said loosen people up online, what experiments found about real names, eye contact and bad moods, and Suler's surprising answer to which version is the real her. Chapters 0:00 The polite coworker, past midnight 0:47 The online disinhibition effect 1:39 1. Dissociative anonymity 1:59 2. Invisibility 2:15 3. Asynchronicity 2:36 4. Solipsistic introjection 2:55 5. Dissociative imagination 3:09 6. Minimized status and authority 3:42 Do real names fix it? 4:36 The missing eye contact 5:22 Anyone can become a troll 6:33 Which one is the real her? 6:55 Put a face back in the picture Sources (including the one where real names didn't help) Suler, 2004, "The Online Disinhibition Effect", CyberPsychology & Behavior: https://doi.org/10.1089/1094931041291295 Rost, Stahel & Frey, 2016, "Digital Social Norm Enforcement: Online Firestorms in Social Media", PLOS ONE: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.... University of Zurich, 2016, "Trolls often waive their anonymity online", UZH News: https://news.uzh.ch/en/articles/2016/... Lapidot-Lefler & Barak, 2012, "Effects of anonymity, invisibility, and lack of eye-contact on toxic online disinhibition", Computers in Human Behavior: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2011.10... Cheng et al., 2017, "Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions", Proceedings of CSCW 2017: https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998213 (preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.01119) The coworker, the lasagna thread and the skits are made up; the studies are real. Doodle Psych is for education and curiosity, not professional advice. #onlinedisinhibition #commentsection #psychology