Kind of a serious question about the people who regularly send out chain emails

[MiddleFingerMom]

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Can anyone give me a site where I can read about the rationale/psychology/pathology
involved there?
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Until the last few years, it used to be the "Little Johnny is dying of cancer and
his dream is to have this email go around the world" or "If you send this along,
good things/money/success/health/mind-numbing oral pleasures will come your way"
or "The last person who DIDN'T send this along within the first 4 minutes had his
house burn down 10 years later".
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Now, the same format can be seen in rightwing political chain emails... except a
lot of it is "if you love your country, you'll send this along" or "if you want
to be a part of the solution, blahblahblah".
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They all seem at their core to have a purpose of getting people to do something --
ANYTHING -- so the sender can feel like they have purpose???? Control????
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Any resources on this?
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[PassingFair]

1. Purely anecdotal evidence:

Every person I know who sends those things
is religious.

Every. One.

Also, some tend to be religious alcoholics.

[MilesColtrane]

2. Just conjecture from me...

It seems most of them have a great deal of time on their hands, are lonely, and tend toward magical thinking.

Passing the chain letter along is a way of feeling like they are doing something effective to rectify some wrong, while making a connection with someone. (even if that connection is forwarding a pre-fab chain letter)

In other words a lot of those people are frightened retirees who are irrational and afraid of the ways the country is changing around them. (The more active of them could be teabaggers.)

[MiddleFingerMom]

3. I had a chance to do a little online research on this today...

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...but didn't find much other THAN conjecture. Even Snopes was sketchy on motivation
theories.
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Anybody have any ideas on the psychology behind the obsessive chain-email senders?
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The ones I see most often now seem politically motivated by rightwing/fundies driven
by the usual suspects of fear and outrage -- but they also have the same carrot/stick
techniques to get people to submit to their will that the old apolitical chain emails
used to have.
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Anybody?
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[mreilly]

4. I don't know that it merits that much complex analysis

It seems pretty obvious to me... the people who pass along these idiotic emails are mental midgets who believe in quick fixes and easy answers. They're easily-led sheep who believe that a safe little collection of cliches and bumper sticker slogans are all that's needed to right the world. Obviously they're angry and upset that Obama is President (witness the sheer number of anti-Obama lies being debunked at snopes.com on a weekly and monthly basis - these people will truly say ANYTHING no matter how vile and disgusting, because they're too immature to be able to handle the fact that a Democrat is in the White House; same thing we saw from 1993-2001) and rather than actually do anything positive or meaningful to try to promote their agenda it's just easy to forward a bunch of infantile crap. They don't have the courage or tenacity to get out there and say this stuff face-to-face, so they hide behind their keyboards and just try to pass the venom along. Straightforward and nothing I'd even compliment by defining as "psychology." It's hateful whining lynch mob, not much more to say.

[MiddleFingerMom]

5. Oh, that's a big part of it -- but leaving it at that is too one-dimensional...

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as many of the same things could be said about members of the Left -- yet they
don't seem to engage in THESE behaviors.
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To paint them all as pointy-headed ignoramuses (though, of course... MANY of
them seem to be :rofl:) is too easy -- and I think it would be turning a blind
eye to the REASONS behind these chain emails -- much the same as the people
behind and fascinated/convinced by them turn a blind eye to other truths.
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It's far deeper and broader than that... and remember, when it started, it really
had absolutely nothing to do with politics, so to dismiss it as simply a political
phenomenon would be to deny its roots -- deny core similarities -- deny what I
believe is a desire to control, to have ANY sort of effect, a desire to counteract
feelings of impotence and ineffectiveness -- all sorts of factors at play here --
boiling down to individual neuroses and insufficiencies playing out on a mass level.
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I think the role it plays NOW is mostly political (when's the last time you got one
of these about poor Johnny's dying wish to have his email go "around the globe"?),
but it's still the SAME thing in a different outfit. I think the impulse and the
motivations and the causes of these things are rooted in the same things that have
ALWAYS given birth to them.
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But my conjectures are no more than that. This is a HUGE social phenomenon -- and
I'm still wondering if there's any serious research, theorization, or conclusions...
and if not, why the hell not?
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