Reply #7: On-line anonymity? [View All]

[bliss_eternal]

Maybe this plays a role as well? :shrug:



Anonymity opens up split personality zone
Faceless communication online or over phone often turns nice people nasty

By Diane Mapes
msnbc.com contributor
updated 5:50 a.m. PT, Wed., Sept. 24, 2008
One minute, they’re nice, normal people. The next, they’re frothing at the mouse.

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“People who’d never say something horrible in real life will do it again and again and again online. It’s like the behavior of crowds, or those mass beatings where no one gets blamed because everyone’s at fault.”
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These days there are a dozen ways to communicate without actually having to look somebody in the eye. As a result, not only have we developed an abrupt, abbreviated way to chat (IMHO), but our technological advances have spawned new psychological terms such as “online disinhibition effect” to explain our tendency to open up — in both good ways and bad — when we’re sitting in front of a screen.

But our split personalities aren’t limited to the Web. They tend to show up whenever no one’s looking.

In a February 2008 study published in the journal Psychological Reports, researchers found that out of four groups of participants, only those in the anonymous group took part in antisocial behavior — in this case defined as violating rules to obtain a reward.

“I definitely believe that anonymity affects the frequency of antisocial behavior among individuals to some extent, even when these individuals have a reasonable sense of morality — so-called ‘ordinary people,’” says study author Tatsuya Nogami of Nagoya University in Japan.

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McIntyre, the billing specialist from Houston, says the online news forums she’s participated in over the years have led her down many a dark and dysfunctional corridor.

“People get sucked in,” she says. “You can be whoever you want, you can put out there whatever you want, and there are no consequences. I even got sucked in and was mean to people. I consider myself better than that, but I did it too, and that bothers me. I guess it’s just the dynamic.”

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Going public
Interestingly enough, some folks are starting to retaliate.

Surreptitious tape recordings of outrageously bad customer behavior have started to pop up on YouTube in all their profanity-laced glory.

In 2004, comedienne Margaret Cho posted dozens of hateful e-mail messages she’d received in response to a monologue on her Web site, along with each sender’s full name and e-mail address. Shamed — and deluged with their own hate mail from Cho’s fans — some posters sent in abject letters of apology.

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excerpted from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26837911/?GT1=43001

I think a lot of the flame wars we see on-line are also part of "mob mentality."